The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 648

Ling Xue spun in the white void, sword already drawn, the blade humming faintly in her grip.

She had survived a dozen ambushes across the provinces: night raids, bandit poison attacks, and deadly traps in the mountain passes.

She knew the scent of traps and ambushes the way other women knew silk. But this was different.

This mist wasn’t natural. It pressed against her face like wet wool, thick enough to swallow the glow of the nearest lantern.

She couldn’t see her own hand when she raised it. Couldn’t see the soldier whose shoulder brushed hers a heartbeat ago.

Around her, the camp had become a slaughterhouse of sound. Steel clashed. Men screamed. Boots churned the damp grass. Every shout sounded two paces away, yet no one appeared.

“Form on me!” she roared. Her voice died inside the fog, muffled and small. She lunged toward the nearest cry, blade slicing empty air. A body slammed into her from the side—armor against armor. She smelled sweat and fear and the sour tang of spilled wine. Friend or enemy? She didn’t know. Her sword arm froze mid-strike.

“Identify!” she snarled.

A voice answered, raw and young. “Sergeant Hu, Third Company—”

A wet thud cut him off. Something heavy dropped beside her. She heard the sergeant gasp once, then nothing.

Ling Xue’s stomach twisted. These were her men. Her Blade Clan soldiers. Trained from childhood, loyal to the bone. And now they were dying in the dark because she couldn’t see who to kill.

“Hold your strikes!” she bellowed, voice cracking with command. “Ask before you swing! Name and company—now!”

The order spread in ragged echoes. Soldiers began calling out in the blindness.

“Gao! Third Company!”

“Wang! First Spear!”

“Identify! Identify!”

For a few precious seconds the chaos eased. Blades hesitated. Men bumped shoulders and barked their names like passwords.

Ling Xue allowed herself one tight breath. Good. They still listened. They still fought as one.

Then the voices changed.

From somewhere outside the press of bodies came new shouts—harsh, mocking, laced with pure contempt.

“Die, Liu Dai swine! You pig-blooded cowards!”

“Puyang Blade Clan dogs! Your mothers suck cock for dog meat and beg like gutter whores!”

“Puyang Blade trash! I’m gonna fuck all of you worthless bastards to death and piss on your corpses!”

The words slammed through the mist like thrown knives. They sounded close. Too close. As if the speakers stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her own men.

A soldier to her left screamed in rage. Steel rang. Someone gurgled.

Another voice—her own sergeant—roared, “You bastard!”

Everything erupted into chaos again.

Ling Xue’s blood turned to ice. No. They were turning on each other.

She slashed forward blindly. “Stop! It’s a trick—stop!”

Too late. The camp exploded into real fighting. Men who had trained together for years now hacked at shadows that wore the same armor. Blades met blades in frantic clashes.

Someone crashed into her back; she pivoted and nearly ran her sword through a man who gasped his name a split second before she struck. Her heart hammered so hard she tasted copper.

She couldn’t see. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think past the roar in her skull. This wasn’t war. This was madness.

High on the ridgeline, hidden among the pines, Elder Wu of the Wudang sect knelt inside the completed formation.

His palms pressed flat against the damp earth. The array thrummed beneath him like a living heart—six interlocking rings of glowing runes, fed by the qi of one thousand senior disciples.

The mist wasn’t fog. It was a living veil, dense enough to blind mortal eyes and scatter even Core Formation senses. It drank sound, twisted direction, and turned the entire meadow into a single, suffocating trap.

“Formation stable,” he murmured into the small jade comms disc at his collar. “Drones have clear line.”

In the sky above the camp, six thousand camouflaged drones hovered in perfect grid formation, ten meters up, invisible against the night.

Their onboard systems—Mother Ai’s gift—cut through the mist as if it were glass. Heat signatures.

Heart-rate spikes. Even the faint electromagnetic signature of drawn steel. GPS locked every target. No guesswork. No mercy.

The first wave launched in eerie silence.

Needles hissed downward—slender carbon-fiber darts tipped with the fast-acting sedative Mother Ai had refined from local herbs and modern chemistry. They struck necks, wrists, the soft gaps between armor plates.

Soldiers dropped without a cry. Bodies twitched once, twice, then went limp. Drones descended like silent ghosts, mechanical arms scooping the fallen soldiers upward into the dark.

One by one they vanished. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. The machines moved with cold, mechanical patience—lifting soldiers, weapons, and supply crates alike—spiriting them deep into the Wudang Sect’s hidden realm.

Inside the mist, the soldiers never saw them coming.

A Blade Clan lieutenant felt a prick at the base of his skull. He slapped at it, thinking it was a mosquito. His knees buckled. A drone caught him before he hit the ground and rose smoothly into the white nothing.

Nearby, a veteran corporal heard the taunting voices again—“Die, Liu Dai pig!”—and swung wildly at the man beside him.

Their blades locked. They grappled, cursing, until a needle took the corporal in the throat.

His opponent barely had time to blink before another dart slammed into him. The drone silently lifted both bodies at once. Meanwhile, its speaker blared without pause: “Die, all you Liu Dai whores!”

The drones flooded the battlefield with their voices, speakers echoing the taunts from every direction, making the soldiers feel completely surrounded by a sea of invisible enemies.

Four thousand ordinary soldiers vanished in the first fifteen minutes.

But the cultivators were another matter.

One gray-robed elder from the Puyang inner circle felt the shift in the air—the faint displacement of a drone ten meters overhead. His hand snapped up. Fingers blurred. A burst of qi slammed the incoming needle aside with a metallic ping. He spun toward the sound, sword already drawn, eyes narrowed against the mist.

“I sense you,” he growled.

Another elder leaped in beside him, followed by three more. Their qi erupted in unison—brilliant, sharp, and heavy with the aura of Foundation Establishment. The five of them formed a tight defensive circle, backs pressed together, blades thrust outward like the spokes of a deadly wheel.

When the next wave of darts came, they knocked them down mid-flight, the needles sparking harmlessly against invisible shields of energy.

“Spread out!” the first elder barked, voice strained. “Find the source of those darts! Something’s lurking in the silence, launching hidden weapons. Stay alert and be careful!”

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