A mountain range over a thousand kilometers long, covered in crimson trees, collapsed across a span of several hundred kilometers under Li Daoyi's impact, stirring up billowing clouds of dust.

"Cough, cough!Damn it, it really is a demon race, they're so devious." Li Daoyi wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth. His expression grew serious as he stared up at the demon king cloaked in dark demonic qi high above. He realized he had let his guard down. Or rather, he had slammed headfirst into a wall of steel this time.

With his peak level 9 cultivation, mastery over two types of Innate Thunderbolts, and early progress in condensing a high-level lightning law, he should have been more than capable of suppressing a beginning-stage mythical demon king. He could have confronted a middle-stage one head-on.

However, what he hadn't expected was that this demon king, who had turned and fled at the first sign of battle, was so powerful. Even a late-stage mythical king probably wouldn't have been his match.

That was what left Li Daoyi speechless. Back then, seeing the demon king acting so evasively, he had assumed the opponent was weak and decisively broke away from the army to give chase. He had planned to counter-slay the demon king and shake the entire Federation.

Then nothing went to plan. After chasing it for tens of thousands of kilometers, the demon king, unable to shake off Li Daoyi in his lightning-form, abruptly turned and attacked. In just a few moves, the demon king shattered his Innate Thunderbolts and severely injured him.

High above, the three-headed, eight-armed demon king looked down with cold eyes and said, "A mere transcendent human dares challenge me? You overestimate yourself. Since you have a death wish, I shall grant it."

Whoosh!

Li Daoyi shot up from the smoke as a streak of lightning and sneered, "With my speed, you think you can kill me? You're dreaming."

Still, even as he spat out the retort, he was already preparing to flee. He knew he couldn't win; it was better to leave this demon king to someone else. Just then, a figure wielding a halberd appeared silently above the two of them. An oppressive force followed as it descended from the heavens.

Boom!

From the azure sky, a black and gold halberd light ten thousand meters long plummeted straight down, gray sequence chains of the Law of Death spiraling around it. A dreadful death aura spread across the heavens and earth.

Roar!

Under that overwhelming will, Demon King Harks realized it could neither flee nor dodge. All three heads howled toward the sky. Flames of searing black fire surged from its body. The surrounding demonic qi boiled violently as its eight arms churned the air. A pair of colossal demon claws burst upward, wrapped in purple markings. They resembled a fiend from the deepest abyss, and the power they unleashed caused the world itself to tremble.

That power had no place in the material world. It was evil, boundless, soaked in utter darkness and corruption. Then—

Boom!

The abyssal demon claws shattered in an instant under the halberd light formed by the Vacuum Annihilation. The law-bound world surrounding Harks followed closely, then its true form exploded. After crushing Harks, the halberd light continued falling without pause and slammed into the earth.

Boom!

The ground shattered across hundreds of kilometers. Magma and shattered rock blasted skyward. The destructive shockwave leveled peaks, snapped trees, and swept across thousands of kilometers.

At the center of the blast, Harks, its true form in ruins, let out a final, despairing scream. A translucent halberd light pierced straight through it and nailed it to the ground. The Law of Death it contained continued to wear away at its life force. The death power was so overwhelming that it spread across hundreds of kilometers, turning the area into a death-saturated forbidden zone.

While Chen Chu casually crushed and suppressed a demon king with a single blow, far away, a collapsed peak exploded. Blown off course by the shockwave, Li Daoyi shot back into the sky.

He transformed into a bolt of lightning and appeared before Chen Chu, eyes filled with admiration. "You've gotten ridiculously strong. Killing demon kings now feels like slaughtering chickens for you."

"Not bad. Still alive, aren't you?" Chen Chu said with a faint smile.

Li Daoyi shrugged. "Nothing serious. Just had my True Lightning Prison Form destroyed and took a hit to my foundation. I'll recover with some time."

"In the battlefields of a War of Civilizations, don't go after enemies that clearly exceed your limits. Slip up just once and you're dead," Chen Chu reminded him.

It was only because Chen Chu had noticed the disturbance from tens of thousands of kilometers away and specifically flown over that Li Daoyi was still breathing. Otherwise, even if he hadn't died, he would have been stripped of a layer of skin.

Though truth be told, this guy really did have terrible luck. He ended up seriously injured in every major battle. Hearing this, Li Daoyi gave an awkward laugh, looking somewhat embarrassed.

In truth, he had always acted with caution. That much had been evident back during the mission to protect Yan Ruoyi. He disliked taking risks. However, after witnessing Chen Chu repeatedly defy expectations by slaying enemies a major realm higher than himself, Li Daoyi, a fellow so-called peerless genius, couldn't help but be affected.

He had started to feel that perhaps those stronger enemies weren't so terrifying after all, and became tempted to slay one just to prove himself. As a result, he kept charging into the wrong fights and ended up gravely injured each time. There were only tears left when he thought about it.

While the two were speaking, the energy of heaven and earth suddenly began to tremble. Not far away, a Blood Moon slowly emerged, then abruptly fell and vanished. Witnessing this, Chen Chu and Li Daoyi exchanged a look, nodded solemnly, and turned into streaks of light, vanishing in separate directions.

The geography of the human territory was rather unique. It was surrounded on all sides by forbidden zones, forming a shape like a gourd. The Sky Battlefield and Abyssal Battlefield, where the humans had once also clashed with the Purgatory empires, lay at the upper portion of the gourd. Beyond the frontlines controlled by the Purgatory empires was a far broader region.

This area spanned over a million kilometers wide and reached over two million kilometers deep, enclosed on both flanks by forbidden zones riddled with space-time rifts and forming the belly of the gourd.

The entrance facing the Purgatory empires was over four hundred thousand kilometers wide and served as the bottom of the gourd. Traveling another three million kilometers outward would bring one to the territories of the Purgatory empires.

Now, this circular stretch of land, occupied by the Purgatory empires for decades, had erupted in all-out warfare. Blinding flashes of nuclear-level explosions continuously lit up the skies and the ground.

All demon kings, great demon kings, and legions retreating under the aid of demonic arrays were fleeing madly toward the entrance to the Purgatory territories. With powerful human alliance cultivators pursuing them from behind, the battlefront was being stretched ever farther.

High above, over two thousand kilometers in the air, Qingqiu Tianyao, standing a thousand meters tall with eight flowing white fox tails, radiated a sharp, white glow as he fought a great demon king in a frenzy.

"Qingqiu Tianyao, have you gone mad?" roared Barus. The three-headed, eight-armed demon was clad entirely in purple armor, with eighteen demon horns crowning its main head. It swept its eight arms outward, stirring space and gathering the power of a dark world that crashed down from above.

Boom!

Qingqiu Tianyao—briefly fused with a colossal beast and wielding heavenly-king-level might—shuddered and plunged toward the ground in a streak of white light under the force, collapsing a mountain as he landed. Amid the violent explosion, a long howl echoed. "Barus, you're not getting away today. Stay here!"

Whoosh!

The smoke below scattered. Though slightly weakened in aura, Qingqiu Tianyao soared back into the sky and lunged again toward the fleeing Barus. Watching him burn his origin and ignore the cost just to keep him tied down, Barus's eyes filled with killing intent. "Since you're so eager to die, I will grant your wish."

Barus knew it couldn't afford to be delayed by this human king. If it stayed too long, reinforcements would arrive, and by then, even escape would be impossible.

"Die!" Barus let out a savage roar as its aura surged nearly tenfold. Blazing purple demonic light burst from it, and it expanded rapidly as it entered its bloodline's awakened state. In an instant, endless purple radiance painted the sky, forming what looked like flowing light bands.

As a beginning-stage great demon king who commanded the Assassination Division of two empires, Barus's true strength was formidable. Now awakened, its aura became utterly terrifying.

Boom!

Wielding a purple battle spear, Barus shifted slightly, and the world shook. Its mighty strike shattered space and unleashed a world-ending tide of destruction that swept toward Qingqiu Tianyao.

Qingqiu Tianyao took a deep breath, his expression solemn. "Eight Tails, it's time to give everything."

Boom!

The eight fox tails behind him erupted in dazzling light, fanning out like a peacock's tail. Their tips pierced into the void, and in the blink of an eye, a colossal white fox shadow, ten thousand meters tall, appeared. The very moment that phantom fox, now with nine tails, manifested, a powerful aura no weaker than Barus' descended.

"The celestial fox descends in chaos. Kill!"

Boom!

A radiant purple-white light exploded in the sky like a micro-world being torn apart. The unleashed force threw the laws of heaven and earth into disarray, and winds screamed in every direction.

Amid the wild storm of shockwaves, a razor-sharp white realm took shape around Qingqiu Tianyao. It collided violently with the purple-black domain surrounding Barus. Behind Qingqiu Tianyao, nine white fox tails surrounded his form. One of them was slowly transitioning from illusion to reality, its aura vast and mighty.

Seeing this, Barus's eyes turned icy. Qingqiu Tianyao was trying to use the pressure of this battle to break through the boundary between life and death and step into the realm of great demon kings. This kind of attempt to break through in the midst of battle was essentially courting death. Only a fool would give him the chance to succeed.

Barus was no such fool. Behind it, aside from the two arms holding its purple battle spear, six demonic arms emerged, each wielding either a crescent-shaped bone plate or a black spike.

In an instant, a surge of dangerous aura engulfed Qingqiu Tianyao.

"Eight Tails, if you don't give it your all now, then when?" Qingqiu Tianyao's long hair flared wildly as his essence, spirit, and qi merged with all of his strength. At that moment, he reached an unprecedented peak. Deep within, a bloodline power erupted, something akin to, but not quite the same as that of a colossal beast.

Boom!

The void collapsed, and long white tails, each stretching thousands to tens of thousands of meters, thrust forth from the void. They looked like sharp gleaming blades, or enormous serpentine pythons.

These tails, suspended between reality and illusion, pierced through the heavens and earth. In the blink of an eye, they drowned Barus, forming a massive sphere that compressed and crushed inward.

At the same time, the enormous phantom of the Nine-Tailed Celestial Fox reappeared. It let out a soundless roar and pounced toward Qingqiu Tianyao, who stood beneath it with his tails whipping through the air.

In that instant, Qingqiu Tianyao's aura surged again. The fox tails bursting from the void thrashed like monstrous pythons and released a strangulation force that tore space apart.

Just then, however, the white fox tails ahead of him exploded. Endless purple light flooded the heavens and earth, penetrating everything. Within that purple radiance, the crescent bone plates emerged, black demonic runes glowing atop them. The world seemed to freeze within their pale glow, as four black spikes shot silently through the void.

Poof! Poof! Poof!

Qingqiu Tianyao's four limbs were pierced by the spikes and nailed in midair. At the same time, a purple battle spear tore through everything and shot straight through his chest.

Boom!

Qingqiu Tianyao, heavily wounded, coughed up blood and plummeted to the ground like a falling meteor. When he struck, the land cracked apart and the sky trembled.

At the center of the crumbling terrain, lava flowed beneath him. His limbs had been pierced by demonic weapons, and his chest bore a gaping hole. Yet Qingqiu Tianyao stood weakly and smiled with wild delight.

He had succeeded.

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