The instant his words fell, Nie Zhao moved.
He did not draw his blade. He merely took a step forward.
With that single step, he crossed a thousand miles and appeared in the air above the center of the arena.
At the same time, Liu Zheng moved.
He, too, took a step forward and faced Nie Zhao across a hundred miles of empty space.
The auras of two Third Heaven Quasi-Saints began to rise.
At first, they rose like two wisps of smoke, curling gently upward.
But in the blink of an eye, their auras surged wildly, like two ancient volcanoes on the verge of eruption.
Boom!!!
Dazzling blade light shot skyward around Nie Zhao.
It was no ordinary blade light, but the Dao of the Blade he had forged from his own laws.
Pale gold and incomparably sharp, it pierced the clouds as though it meant to split the heavens open.
Where it passed, black fissures silently opened in the void. They were wounds in space and time carved by his blade intent, and they refused to heal.
At the same time, pitch-black demonic energy erupted around Liu Zheng.
Dark as ink and deep as an abyss, it was thousands upon thousands of times denser than the demon cloud the Myriad Demon Army had gathered earlier.
The demonic energy soared into the sky and became a black pillar of light that joined heaven and earth. Within it, countless ferocious dragon phantoms could be faintly seen coiling and roaring, each radiating pressure powerful enough to crush a universe.
One gold, one black—the two auras collided above the arena.
Rumble!!!
The void shuddered violently, and countless spatial rifts spread in every direction like a spiderweb.
But the moment the rifts reached the edge of the arena, faint starlight radiating from it