The Ninth Layer.
Before him stretched a vast, boundless expanse of dark red dunes.
The sky was an eerie purplish black, with countless meteor fragments suspended in midair.
Broken weapons bristled thickly across the dunes.
Enormous skeletons lay half-buried in the yellow sand.
Boom!
Boom!
Heavy footsteps sounded from the far end of the dunes.
Each step made the entire world tremble.
Lu Zhen looked up.
On the horizon, a colossal figure resembling a demon god slowly approached.
He was immense, fully a hundred feet tall.
Heavy, dark purple crystal armor covered his body. Two massive blades the size of door panels dragged across the sand, carving twin furrows.
Whenever the surrounding sand and broken blades came within a thousand feet of him, terrifying fluctuations of laws ground them to dust.
"Thirty-six thousand years." The demon-god-like figure stopped. Two scarlet ghost flames lit beneath his dark purple visor, and his voice dripped with cruelty. "At last, I smell the stench of Xia dogs again."
He was Tuoba Kuang, a ferocious vanguard general who had served under the Heavenly Wolf Demon Kingdom's Greedy Wolf Army!
During the battle of Falling Star Plain, he had led eight hundred demon cavalry in the first assault. His methods were utterly brutal; wherever he passed, not even chickens or dogs survived.
Granted, in that war of national annihilation, where mighty figures of the Fourth Realm, Fifth Realm, and even Sixth Realm routinely clashed, his half-step Nu River Realm cultivation had made him no more than a mid-ranking officer.
But to the ordinary soldiers of Great Xia, he remained a butcher whose very name struck terror into their hearts.
Later, amid the chaotic fighting, he had been caught in the Martial Hall's outer formations and captured alive, then imprisoned at the bottom of the Asura Tower.