The angry winds couldn't stop Thunder Drake, though. The best that they could do was slow him down. But this was enough to save the Sun King.
Thunder Drake saw that he couldn't catch up to the Sun King, so he gave up on his pursuit and returned to the domain. The Sun King learned of this development from the world spirit, but he didn't stop running.
The Sun King ran all the way to the other side of the world, where the South Pole was. The South Pole is the safest place in this world, as there was a barrier there meant to protect the remnants of the Vulcan race once the Sun King died and a Snow King ascended.
The barrier protecting the South Pole has a tolerance limit of 100C, so nothing in the world could destroy it, including the Sovereign. There used to be such a powerful barrier around the North Pole, but it has been removed in light of recent events.
The Sun King hid himself in this remote corner of the world and refused to leave. He also didn't allow anyone to meet him, especially the gem people.
He didn't trust the gem people before. Now that he was in a vulnerable state, he had more reasons to be suspicious of everyone.
Meanwhile, the war was proceeding badly in his absence. Without the Sun King there to stop Thunder Drake, the nascent soul patriarch could go wild.
Not that Thunder Drake needed to do much. The disease ravaging the Vulcan race was already doing most of the work.
The debilitating effect of the biological weapon didn't end on the battlefield. Since the disease didn't kill its victims quickly, most of the infected were able to retreat and return alive. So, many of the infected carried the disease back with them.
When the host has become saturated or when the seeds growing within them have reached a critical level, the tumors and cysts will begin to explode. Most of the tumors explode at once, which leads to the death of the host and the eruption of many red, fluffy dandelions into the wind.
So the infected had become seed beds for the next generation of the disease. The red fluffy dandelions that they produce contain pollen that can survive for a long time without a host, so a single infected person can infect hundreds of thousands of others in the right conditions.
It just so happened that the right conditions for spreading an airborne infection were available in the war-torn Aries. The tight spaces in the army camps and the large number of people congregating to fight for their world made it easy for the infectious pollen to find new hosts.
The disease spread like wildfire in a dry forest. This was ironic because the Vulcan people were the ones being burned when they are usually the ones who do the burning.
The disease had a 100% casualty rate. However, the disease won't wipe out the Vulcan race because it degrades over many generations.
According to Lady Evergreen, a single instance of the disease can only live for a maximum of four generations before it becomes incapable of infecting more hosts. So if they need to kill more Vulcans with the disease, they will have to release fresh ones once in a while.
But the Vulcans don't know this, and they didn't know that the invaders didn't plan to kill all of them. What they knew was that anyone who went to the battlefield to fight got infected with a strange disease and died within days. To them, this was hell on earth.
The spread of the disease was a nightmare that broke the will of the Vulcans to fight. They stopped banding together and stopped trying to stop the advancement of the mobile fortresses.
In the past, the mobile fortresses had to fight off the defenders every day. But now, they could advance in peace.
Of course, this was relative peace. The world was still angry at them and was constantly using everything available to destroy them.
Unfortunately for the world spirit of Aries, nothing it could do was enough to destroy the mobile fortresses. It could only watch helplessly as more of its territory was encroached and devoured.
A significant change occurred when the domain finally spread enough to cover 10% of Aries. This change occurred in the domain of the Ethera tree and in the world spirit of Aries.
For the domain of the Ethera tree, it became strong enough to elevate someone to the fourth step. The person who was chosen to be elevated was Taka.
Take is the leader of the old nobles. She wasn't the one who contacted the world of Ethera for help. The person who had died had died before the Blood Skull army arrived. But she was the one who came to welcome them, and she has been supporting them ever since.
When some old nobles thought that what the Blood Skull army was doing with the domain was too much and left, either to give up fighting or to join the new nobles and rebels in resisting the Blood Skull army, she was among the few people who continued to support the Blood Skull army.
Her steadfast support of the Blood Skull army was mainly because she hated the gem people and the Sun King for killing her mother a lot. Her hatred was such that she was willing to do things that were frowned upon in order to get her revenge.
She was also tempted by the benefits that the Blood Skull army had promised her. Mana in the domain had already been helpful in raising her strength. So she was willing to stay with the Blood Skull army until the bitter end, if need be.
It was for this support and dedication that Sword Flash decided that she was the best person to use the single slot of assistance of the domain on.
This way, no matter the outcome of this campaign, she would at least have gotten the same thing that the Sun King got for betraying his realm and inviting the gem people into Aries.