High in the air.
The hundred-zhang golden mountain pressed down hard against Sun Yu's palms.
Golden light and dark red Asura Gang Qi clashed in a frenzied grind, letting out shrill blasts.
The muscles in Sun Yu's arms had swollen to their limit. Beneath his pale skin, Dark Gold Tendons bulged one by one, like venomous snakes coiled around his arms.
His ten fingers had sunk deep into the solidified golden light at the foot of the mountain.
His fingertips dug into the very center of the four blood-red seal-script characters: "By the Mandate of Heaven."
"The Imperial Court's rules."
Sun Yu tipped his head back. The Dark Red Demonic Ring in his eyes spun madly, and a wildly arrogant, savage grin split his lips.
"Can't hold me down!"
The moment the words left his mouth,
the newly formed pale-gold Divine Sea in his dantian boiled over, churning up storm-tossed waves.
The Great Perfection Sword Marrow erupted deep within his bones, its thunderous chorus shattering the clouds.
Sun Yu's ten fingers clamped onto the cracks at the foot of the golden mountain.
His arms pulled outward.
He tore with all his might!
"Riiip!!!"
A terrifying boom rang out, like a bolt of cloth a thousand zhang long being torn apart.
Below, Xiao Tiannan watched in utter despair.
The hundred-zhang golden mountain, which had gathered the Earth Vein and fortune of the entire Great Wind Snow State,
was ripped open by Sun Yu's bare hands, starting from the base and splitting right through the middle of the four characters "By the Mandate of Heaven," leaving a colossal fissure dozens of zhang deep!
"Crack! Crack! Crack!"
The fissure raced upward.
The formation runes and fortune nexus inside the golden mountain snapped one by one beneath the savage pull of Extreme Dao Monster Force.
"Break for me!"
Sun Yu roared.
His waist and abdomen heaved with a second burst of strength, unleashing the full foundation of his Asura Undying Body without reservation.
"RUMBLE!!!"
The hundred-zhang golden mountain
split in two down the middle!
The two shattered halves lost all balance in midair and exploded with a thunderous crash!
A rain of golden fortune, mixed with raging spatial turbulence, swept wildly in every direction.
At the very center of the explosion,
a palm-sized bronze official seal, covered in cracks, lost all its disguise and fell helplessly downward.
Sun Yu reached out with his left hand.
He seized the Prefecture City seal, the symbol of the Imperial Court's highest authority.
His fingers closed.
"Crack."
The seal was crushed on the spot into a lump of bronze scrap, devoid of the slightest trace of spiritual energy.
The magical treasure was destroyed.
Down among the ruins,
"Pff!"
The instant the official seal was destroyed, the backlash struck as expected.
Xiao Tiannan, now little more than skin and bones, threw his head back and spat out a blood column that shot a zhang into the air.
Mixed into the blood were fragments of his shattered Lifebound Soul and pieces of his organs.
The last trace of vitality drained from him completely.
His body crumpled like a heap of mud, slamming into the dusty black stone rubble.
Xiao Tiannan's limbs twitched as he stared fixedly at the golden rain drifting through the air.
It was broken.
The Imperial Court's Prefecture City seal had been crushed with bare hands.
Three hundred years of rule, the foundations of the three great clans, and he himself, a Prefecture Lord in the early Divine Sea Realm—
it was all over.
"Thud."
A heavy impact sounded as Sun Yu dropped from the sky, landing steadily on the ruins.
He casually tossed the crushed seal's scraps beside Xiao Tiannan's face.
Stepping over corpses strewn everywhere,
he walked up to Xiao Tiannan, one step at a time.
He looked down at the highest ruler of the Great Wind Snow State.
Xiao Tiannan's chest heaved violently. More air left his lungs than entered.
Looking at Sun Yu's face, untouched by a drop of blood and cold as ice, Xiao Tiannan's eyes filled with frenzied hatred.
"You... you're done for..."
A hoarse curse, like air leaking through a broken pipe, rasped from Xiao Tiannan's throat.
"You destroyed the official seal... killed an imperial official... That's treason! A crime that warrants the extermination of your entire clan!"
"The Imperial Court's envoys... the Martial Marquis of Shenzhou... will come for you..."
"You could flee to the ends of the earth... they'll still skin you alive and tear out your tendons... I'll wait for you... in the underworld..."
Sun Yu listened quietly until he was done.
Not a flicker of emotion crossed his face.
"The Imperial Court?"
Sun Yu's voice was flat.
He raised his right foot and held it above Xiao Tiannan's dantian.
"I'll be waiting for them."
His foot came down.
"Bang!"
Xiao Tiannan's dantian and Qi Sea burst beneath the stomp.
The early Divine Sea Realm's true essence spilled away like air from a punctured ball, dissolving into the world in an instant.
Xiao Tiannan's body arched violently, his eyes bulging from the agony.
Sun Yu didn't pause.
He lifted his right foot and shifted it half a chi forward,
holding it over Xiao Tiannan's gaunt, aged face.
"As for the rules,"
Sun Yu said, looking into Xiao Tiannan's despairing eyes,
"here, I am the rules."
His foot came down.
"Squelch!"
The skull shattered, brains bursting out.
Prefecture Lord Xiao Tiannan's head was crushed into a bloody mess mixed with mud.
His corpse twitched twice, then died for good.
The wind died down.
The black stone plaza at the edge of the Cold Dragon Blood Abyss had become a land of the dead.
Sun Yu withdrew his right foot.
He turned and walked across mountains of corpses and shattered magical treasures.
The three sect masters who had stood as the three pillars of power.
The lofty Prefecture Lord.
Along with more than a dozen Aristocratic Clan Ancestors at the Blood Washing Realm Peak.
They had all been wiped out.
Sun Yu surveyed the four directions.
The Dark Red Demonic Ring in his deep-set eyes slowly revolved.
Ten li away,
on a bare stone peak,
several scouts tasked with relaying intelligence for the Prefecture City's outlying forces lay behind the rocks, holding up their telescopes. They trembled as they stared at the man in the middle of the ruins.
When Sun Yu's gaze swept toward them,
all it took was a single look.
"Crack!"
The lenses of the scouts' telescope shattered on the spot.
Glass fragments pierced one scout's eyes, but he didn't dare even raise a hand to cover them.
He bit down hard on the back of his hand, forcing the scream back down his throat.
"Down! All of you, down!"
The lead scout's face was deathly pale. He slammed his forehead against the hard rock.
The scouts behind him snapped out of it and prostrated themselves in unison.
And it wasn't just them.
Within a hundred li, every spy from every faction who had used secret arts or magical treasures to watch this place
smashed the treasure in their hands the moment Sun Yu surveyed the four directions.
They all knelt with their foreheads pressed to the dirt, not daring to so much as draw a deep breath.
No one dared look directly at his might.
Even less did anyone dare entertain a thought of revenge.
Absolute physical strength and absolute violence had smashed every hierarchy and law that had ruled the Great Wind Snow State for three hundred years.
From this moment on,
the Great Wind Snow State had no more three great sects, no more Prefecture City authority.
There was only one Extreme Dao Tyrant, standing atop everyone's heads.
Sun Yu turned his gaze away.
He bent down and searched through the ruins for a while.
He tore the high-grade Storage Bags from Xiao Tiannan and the other two,
then hung them from his waist.
Afterward,
true essence surged beneath Sun Yu's feet.
He shot into the sky, becoming a streak of cold white light that ripped through the clouds and vanished into the boundless horizon.
All that remained was a field of mangled corpses that no one dared collect.
Three days later,
ten million li from the Great Wind Snow State,
at the heart of the Great Yan Dynasty,
in Shenzhou, the Imperial Capital,
stood a towering pagoda made entirely from ten-thousand-year-old warm jade, its peak piercing the clouds.
This was the Imperial Observatory,
the absolute Forbidden Land that controlled the fortune and lifelines of the Great Yan Dynasty's ninety-nine states.
On the pagoda's highest floor,
ninety-nine enormous dragon-patterned jade tablets were set into the surrounding walls.
Each tablet represented one of the Great Yan Dynasty's states.
At the center of each jade tablet floated the phantom image of a Prefecture City seal.
In the middle of the hall, two Imperial Observatory officials dressed in purple robes sat meditating with their eyes closed.
Suddenly,
"Crack!"
An exceptionally crisp sound of shattering rang out without warning in the empty hall.
The two purple-robed officials snapped their eyes open, their gazes flashing like lightning as they swept across the surrounding walls.
In the northwest corner,
the dragon-patterned jade tablet representing the Great Wind Snow State
had split down the middle, a massive crack cleaving it in two.
Then,
the phantom Prefecture City seal at the center of the tablet—the symbol of the Imperial Court's fortune—flickered violently twice before collapsing with a roar!
The dragon patterns on the tablet rapidly dimmed, turning a lifeless ashen gray.
"The Prefecture City seal of Great Wind Snow State... shattered?!"
A purple-robed official sprang to his feet, disbelief filling his eyes.
"The official seal is connected to the Earth Vein and linked to the Prefect's soul. If the seal shatters, it means Xiao Tiannan is dead, and someone forcibly severed the Earth Vein of Great Wind Snow State!"
Another official's face darkened to the extreme.
"Who in that backwater like Great Wind Snow State has the power to do this? Who has the gall?!"
"Treason! This is an open challenge to imperial authority!"
The heavy wooden doors of the great hall slowly swung open under an invisible force.
A middle-aged man in a black robe embroidered with golden python patterns strode into the hall, his expression stern.
He carried no weapons.
But as he entered, the air in the hall instantly grew unbearably heavy.
A terrifying aura, transcending the Divine Sea and connecting with heaven and earth, emanated from him.
"Greetings, Martial Marquis!"
The two purple-robed officials immediately bowed, their manner exceedingly respectful.
The Martial Marquis of Shenzhou was the Great Yan Dynasty's core force, tasked specifically with suppressing rebellions throughout the realm.
With his hands clasped behind his back, the Martial Marquis walked up to the shattered jade tablet of Great Wind Snow State.
He extended a long finger and lightly brushed it across a crack in the tablet.
A trace of barely perceptible lingering aura clung to his fingertip.
The Martial Marquis closed his eyes and sensed the aura.
A moment later, he suddenly opened his eyes.
A flicker of surprise and icy murderous intent flashed in them.
"No trace of a magical treasure. No remnants of a great formation."
The Martial Marquis's voice rang through the hall like metal striking stone.
"Pure physical strength. Someone smashed the Earth Vein seal to pieces with brute force."
The two purple-robed officials exchanged glances, both seeing the horror in the other's eyes.
Smashed an official seal apart with bare hands?
How was that possible?!
"By my command."
The Martial Marquis withdrew his hand and instantly crushed the trace of aura on his fingertip.
"Mobilize the Heavenly Punishment Guard. Seal off every route out of Great Wind Snow State."
He turned around, his black python robe snapping in the surging True Qi.
"I will go to Great Wind Snow State myself."
"I want to see what stray dog crawled out of the woodwork, daring to sharpen its teeth on the Imperial Court's seal."
Before you continue