The Immortal-Slaying Sword Formation rose, and heaven and earth changed color.
The sky that had previously been stained blood-red was the red of fresh blood.
But the world beneath the formation's shroud was a different kind of red.
A pure red, without the slightest impurity—the red that symbolized slaughter.
The air no longer moved, completely solidifying into something gelatinous.
All sound had been drained away. Whether it was the howling wind or the thunderous collapse of distant mountains, everything vanished into Nihility in an instant.
The killing intent became tangible, like billions of invisible steel needles piercing skin from every direction and drilling into bone marrow.
The five Angels' movements stalled.
They were creations born from instinct and combat logic, but they were still living beings in the end.
And living beings instinctively feared anything that could kill them—
Danger. Fatal. Flee—
The Fifth Angel, Ramiel, was the first to react. Its enormous gemstone-like cube abandoned its lock on Zhang Qi, turned, and raised its core power to the limit.
A cross-shaped beam several times thicker than before tore through the frozen air and blasted toward the pillar of sword-energy light reaching into the heavens in the east.
It tried to use the purest energy to forcibly open a breach within this domain of certain death.
Yet when that beam, powerful enough to melt mountains, entered within a hundred meters of the gate of light, its speed began to visibly slow.
It was as though it had plunged into a transparent medium of infinite density. The particles at the beam's front stretched and warped, while the originally dazzling white energy light was forcibly pulled across the spectrum, shifting toward the red of decay.
In the end, the destructive beam was completely annihilated just ten meters from the gate of light,