Cries of terror rang in the Han Family's ancestral home.
Formations were active, with shields shining all around from the barrage the jaguar left behind.
As soon as the Han patriarch returned, he made all the family members hide and brought out the clan's formations to protect themselves.
The Han ancestors that were in closed cultivation also came out to fight, but the jaguar was too strong for them, so they had to hide behind the formations and use that to fight.
The jaguar tried fighting against the formations for quite a while, but he couldn't do it at all. Even if he could, it would take him a long time to break through them and arrive inside.
So, the jaguar left.
The Han family patriarch was happy and relieved that the beast left. But then, a day later, they were under attack again.
This time, the jaguar wasn't alone.
The Han family patriarch looked in the sky in absolute awe as nearly 50 different Saint beasts flew high in the sun.
Every kind of beast was here and ready to fight. After hearing what had happened to their young lord, they were more than willing to destroy all the humans in the empire.
But, the Jaguar stopped them. He remembered the faces of those who were there in the Demon Realm, so he was only planning to hurt them.
The jaguar spoke out loud. "Give up that man, and your home will remain untouched."
When the ancestors saw the 50 different beasts, they were too scared to do anything else.
However, the Han family patriarch had no plan of dying. So, no matter what the ancestors wanted, he wasn't going to leave. As the head of the family, he was going to make the decision here.
And so he made the decision to fight the beasts, and that was the last decision he ever made.
The 50 beasts tore apart the formations and entered the Han ancestral home.
The jaguar and the puma arrived in front of the whole family who were watching in terror and tore the old man's body in two.
They told the people what the punishment was for, and once they confirmed that he was dead, they moved on to the other one.
Next, they arrived at the Jin ancestral home, and they were prepared for battle as well.
But when they saw the 50 different Saint foundation and Saint core realm beast arrive, the ancestors gave up immediately and sent the Jin family patriarch outside their formations.
The beasts tore him up like they had been hungry for his flesh for ages.
The Broken Ravine sect's sect master came out to fight on his own, and the Jaguar took him on alone.
While everyone watched, the jaguar beat the man despite his sword Aura. Once he was done, he moved on.
Slowly, the knowledge that the beasts had been going around killing people became more and more public, and the humans started to fear.
Many cried to the Emperor for help, but no help came. What did come was a group of Lightsworns that went to every single city to maintain peace and order, along with a single message from the Emperor.
The beasts had full permission from the Emperor to do what they wanted as well as a promise that no unrelated parties would be hurt.
The terror didn't fade away any better, but the cries did quiet down.
Where ever the beasts went, the Saint realm cultivators die. Even when the Saints, like Zhou Tianqiu, knew that others were coming for him, and ran to the edge of the continent, the beasts still found him and killed him.
In fact, the Glory's Edge sect was so terrified of getting attacked, that they poisoned their sect master and killed her to appease the beasts' anger.
While that worked, it also left them vulnerable to attacks by parties that had always hated them.
The 8 families and 4 sects that were said to be the greatest of the western continent, were now greatly lacking in power after so many saints died.
The power vacuum that was created there gave opportunities for lower sects and clans to rise up to power immediately.
However, the beasts didn't care what happened to the empire. Once they were done killing everyone that was involved in trying to capture Alex and Pearl, they returned back to the Beast Realm.
Only the Jaguar stayed with Helen, partly for her protection, but also to wait for his young lord to return.
He was sure if Alex came back, this was the first place he would come back to.
However, even after waiting for years, Alex wouldn't come back. In the end, he was forced to return back to the realm while taking Helen with him for her own protection.
* * * * * *
Many days prior.
Alex saw the two saints run up to him through the hallway even as the teleportation aura grab him, and then he didn't.
He had been teleported to a room that wasn't dissimilar to the one he had just been in, but there were some obvious differences that helped him know that he was teleported.
Before even checking his surrounding properly, however, Alex ran away from the ground where the runes were and moved to the corner of the room, ready to employ his Earth Devouring technique in case the saints somehow managed to come here too.
He huddled up and waited to feel the fluctuation of space in the air, but nothing happened.
It took a few minutes for the fear in his heart to fade away and the logical side of his brain took over.
"They can't come here. The script needed the medallion's authority," Alex said to himself.
Once he understood that he was safe, he took a few deep breaths in relief.
He walked over to the runes, and carefully checked it to make sure he could teleport back using it.
Once he found out that he could, he backed away as he didn't want to teleport right away.
Since the jaguar was still constrained by the formation, Alex didn't know how long it would take for him to come and help fight off these saints. That was if he could even destroy the formation.
'Let's rest for now,' Alex thought and went to the side to sit down. He finally saw the area around him with a little more attention.
The room was cold. Very cold. Of course, Alex didn't feel cold at all, but it was easy to tell that it was.
He looked towards the hallway and saw that it was entirely frozen with ice. He wanted to see what was outside, but his spiritual sense was very low at the moment.
'Cultivate first,' he thought to himself. 'I need my Qi ready.'
So, he closed his eyes and started cultivating slowly. Time passed and an entire day went by.
Alex finally opened his eyes, fully healed, but not back to his peak. He wondered how long he would have to wait before he could return, but since there were still 8 more days to go, he decided to go out and see where he was.
Alex arrived in the hallway and looked at the giant wall of frozen ice. He wanted to see how far it went on for and sent out his spiritual sense.
However, for some reason, his spiritual sense couldn't pierce the ice wall at all.
"What? Is there a script running? Or a formation?" Alex wondered. How was there ice here that he couldn't send his spiritual sense through?
'Ice… am I…?' Alex's eyes went wide as hope flared in his heart. He wasn't sure, but he was confident he knew where he was.
He was in the Icy hell, and if his senses were correct, he was still inside some sort of secret realm.
He punched the ice really hard, and all he ended up doing was hurting his own hand.
"Ow! What the hell?" he looked back at the ice. "How is it this strong… and weird?"
Alex was surprised at the properties of the ice. Was it actually not ice by any chance.
'How do I get out?' he thought for a moment and decided to do something.
A sun appeared behind him, a large ball of fire and yang Qi in one place. Then, he used his Dao of Heat Conduction to transfer heat from the sun onto the ice in front of him.
At first, Alex assumed that it wouldn't work, given how weird this ice was, but once he heated it enough, the ice slowly melted.
Alex touched a bit of the liquid that flowed and checked it.
"What the hell? This is water. How is this ice so weirdly strong then?" Alex thought. Without anyone to answer him, he kept pouring the heat from the sun onto the ice.
As the ice melted, Alex slowly walked forward in the dripping hole he had carved in the frozen hallway.
As he walked forward, he saw a small light in the distance. There was an opening there.
Alex kept on melting the ice and walking through it.
Given how hard the ice was to melt, traversing the few hundred meters of ice took him an annoyingly long time.
After nearly 4 hours, Alex was finally at the edge of the hallway where he finally melted the final layer of ice and walked outside.
The sun went out, and Alex strode forward. It was night time and the silver moon hung high in the sky, shining its light on 6 different peaks from what Alex could see.
6 frozen peaks… just like the map.
"I… I did it."
