As Pef arrived in low orbit above the Saint continent, the moon behind him was engulfed in flames, like a small second sun in the sky.

From space, the Saint continent was also engulfed in flame and smoke and death, and only a few thousands qi signatures remained in a corner, and ten times more non cultivators, in deep underground shelters. The Monarchy was gone, with a tiny corner of the Lacrimosa perimeter barely resisting.

The rest of the continent was a pulsing mass of writhing worms, and dead bodies. Animals, beasts, people...everything had been devoured and converted into more worms.

A dozen of such worms were assaulting the Continental Canal fortifications, somehow having reached Monarch rank and resisting everything the defenders threw at them.

Billions of smaller worms were supporting the assault, and getting incinerated, crushed or frozen, but the advance continued meter by meter.

Pef accelerated and arrived at the Carthage second fort just as it was being overwhelmed. A swipe of his hand and millions of worms became icicles and shattered. The Monarch worm leading the assault paused for a fraction, and was hit by a sunlance fired by an exhausted Lia. It wasn't enough to kill it, so Pef sent his neo knife into his wife's hand.

A second strike, this time condensing sword qi and her own solar domain flashed with bright golden light, evaporating one third of the worm.

The new Saint didn't wait, and flew along the canal, flash freezing the nearby worms, and reaching the next fort and then the next. In one hour, the perimeter was relieved, and all the assaulting worms destroyed, or in the messengers cases, contained in a block of Saint ranked ice.

Pef did a quick inventory of his family, noting who was missing, and who was supposed to be missing.

He stopped beside Yuan and Xie, who had been fighting side by side and were rather worn and tired. "Where is everyone else?" the new Sword Saint asked with a worried tone.

"I've sent Qin to Etna, til she heals. Lin is guarding her. And the rest...sorry, husband." the Fire Monarch replied in a cold tone, holding a fistful of wedding rings in her palm.

Pef dropped on the stone battlements, his mind going blank. Names and faces played in his mind, while grief and anger nearly overwhelmed him.

'Jian, Mengue, Lucia, Pela, Erin, Lara... and Si. Chief Quing and Zhong are also deceased. I will remember them for you, Aspirant.' the glove said in an impassioned voice, while plucking certain memories from the user's mind, and paving the way for the legion method to heal and strengthen him.

'They were Sovereigns! Except Si, with her new Sky rank. How could they all be dead?' Pef muttered in disbelief.

'Loses are quite low, per total. Much better than 99 percent. Containment and extermination for now, Aspirant. The plague hasn't spread far, yet. I suggest you erect ice walls along the continent's shores and incinerate the rest. This can even be seen as a tactical victory, if you upgrade your surviving wives to Monarch rank.' the glove added while compiling loses and population numbers on the planet.

Cellia arrived next to Pef a second later and looked around with calm eyes. "Not as bad as I feared. Still need to channel an ice age and expel all the infected at the moon, but we'll be finished in a year at most. The worst is over."

The Ice Saint began straining her domain, lifting a huge water wave from the sea and curving it above the city, creating a solid ice barrier. By the time she had completed her work, Pef had cooked some meals for the Guardians and his wives, and Lia returned as well.

The oracle handed the Legion knife to Xie, holding it easily by the blade. "Took me 6 kills, sister. Go finish the job." the new Monarch explained with a strange voice, while pointing at the 10-meter Monarch worm frozen solid just outside the ice barrier.

The knife flew from the wife's hand, and drove in an orbit around Xie, then stabbed itself in her left palm. Pef looked up from his stove with sad eyes, then looked away without saying anything. It was then that the other wife emerged, or tried to, eyes flashing silver then constricting in pain and vanishing.

Lia nodded to herself and sat down to rest, her predictions coming true indeed, and yet countered so easily by a more powerful oracle.

"Well then. This is for our sisters!" Xie proclaimed, drawing the knife with her right hand and holding it up. It was spotless of blood and her left hand had no wound. The knife could choose what to injure or sever, and Xie was a loyal recruit. The other soul wasn't. It was that simple.

She then sped through the ice barrier, glowing white for a second, then began slicing at the worm with methodical strikes. The ice reformed in her wake, while Cellia was gathering bodies and piling them up inside her rings.

It took a few days to clean up the perimeter of dead worms or people, and by the time the job was finished, Xie returned as a Monarch as well. She wasn't as practiced as Lia, but she was loved and that counted for something. Killing the Monarch ranked worms just pushed Xie over the peak, since she had 10 meridians open after all.

Xie lacked the Green and Vermilion meridians, just like Lia, Qin, Lin and Mia. Only Yuan, Aria and Blossom had digested that dangerous pill, beside Pef and Cellia. When Xie returned with her own Monarch rank, Pef had recovered a bit, his eyes no longer glazed and distant.

"What do we do now, husband?" Xie asked sitting at the table and pouring herself some wine, while the knife flew into the glove on its own.

The Saint husband watched her white aura for a second, then sighed in regret. "Now, we contain and eradicate the plague. And after that, we rebuild and grow. This is the Saint continent, and I don't see that many Saints." Pef answered with a piercing voice, reverberating in a strange way, making the ice barrier glow with his words.

Cellia turned to stare at the young Saint for a second, before gulping her wine and heading west along the beach, and raising a hundred-meter ice wall in her wake.

Pef nodded and headed eastward, doing the same, at half the speed Cellia was progressing.

It didn't matter anyway. He had all the time in the world now.

A month later, the continent was completely encased in ice, and the Fire Saint arrived to help with incineration, beside Pef and Yuan who were kinda slow at erasing all life from an entire continent.

Lin returned with Qin as well, and they began adding their Sovereign powers as well, to speed up the decontamination, just like Lia with her solar beams.

The continent took years to burn, but no more divine messengers approached, after the first was caught by Pef and then ripped apart to fuel more divine Grey pellets. Pef and Cellia scoured the Tian Mountains for more pockets of worms or plague spores, finding caverns full of them, which they froze and stored,

In a decade, the continent was declared clean, and the shelters were open for the few survivors to emerge. The world that awaited them was different now, as the lands had been infested, frozen and then burned, and everything would have to be rebuilt from scratch.

Still, Aria and Blossom had also returned after a few years, and taken deep under the oceans to hunt Monarchs and advance.

With Aria and Blossom, the Monarchy had 5 Monarchs after 5 years, and 8 of them after a decade, once Qin and Mia and Lin trained and practiced a few more years.

After 20 years, a number of changes occurred all over the world, as Hestia underwent her Awakening, and then became a Monarch fire disciple, living in the Xi Patriarchy. Emperors Remi and Wu remained there as well, to lead their own province.

But now, those from the Patriarchy who wanted to emigrate, and try out their luck in the Pef Monarchy could, and would board a Monarch ranked ship to be ferried 30 thousand kilometers to the land of the free. Slowly, the area around Lacrimosa City was populated again, with immigrants and new born people, reaching a million 'saints' in these two decades.

Ventu became a Sovereign, once his wife Hestia revealed her more loving side, and Madam Shen became an Empress, under the training and tutelage of the Patriarch.

Old Deng still wouldn't die, and was happily beating up the new generation of Xi younglings, under the guise of teaching them the sword. A dozen Xi Majors, children of the Tyrants, were promoted to Emperor rank and were being trained to defend their own provinces.

Technology progressed as well, with the invention of the microscope and telescope, then magnets and a dozen new metals. A thousand new inventions and a million smiths began an industrial revolution on Lacrima, while schools kept producing more and more literate people.

And while the Red and Blue continents were focusing mostly on material progress, and harsh education, on Green Gea and the Monarchy things went more towards genetics and life altering methods, trying to increase fertility and the qi regulating genes for the regular people.

Aria and Blossom pioneered the research in this domain, aided by helpful advice from Pef and Xie. They had a bonus with their wood qi, which at Monarch rank allowed them to shape plant life to some degree. Nothing like a druid in communion with Gaia could do, but also not trapped in a mystic relation of life draining and changing things without understanding.

It was the beginning of a scientific method, with charts and experiments. Lots of failures and dead plants, but once in a while a success appeared, a better fruit or medicinal plant.

Monarch Lia focused on researching gravity and light, using her oracle skill to glean more useful information from every experiment, while Lin kept trying to build more efficient magi tech engines and ships.

Also, the first children, Rose and Hero became Emperors in their own rank, and had to watch over a dozen new siblings, of which Lily and Paragon were also gifted with qi powers. Pef did some searching for more pill ingredients, opening their meridians and easing their cultivation, but mostly had them read books and learn.

And Pef...well, he did like he always did, cultivating his wives and meditating for hours in his sauna, although he didn't feel much from it now. Once a month, he flew to the moon, and blasted away, sparring with Cellia and trying to obtain more insight. It worked, but very slowly.

"If you want to ascend from here, my young apprentice, you can't simply gather and refine qi. Not that it doesn't work, but it takes very long. Artus has me meditate on the nature of ice, but you're not that patient, are you?" the Ice Saint asked him as they arrived to the Xi palace for some food and wine.

"No, I am not. Not in a hurry, but wasting millions of years is foolishness. Look, my Saint storage ring is only 1000 cubic meters. Yours, have 3000 cubic meters. That's all you've gained, wasting this much time. I just need to practice my divine dao. Three of them, to establish a foundation." Pef said in a low voice, sitting back to drink his chilled wine, while his water clone was busy cooking for them.

"Three dao? Wait, liquid, solid, vapor! I can train three dao as well, and complete my insight into the nature of water..." Cellia realized with a start, and vanished as hyper speed.

Pef sighed and sent a qi pulse to Mia, as she was pregnant again and always hungry. No point wasting all this food.