In the starry sky, a dazzling sword-path world spanning ten thousand li appeared. Hundreds of millions of pure-gold rays shone upon a severed finger. Faint, ringing sword cries sounded as the rays clashed with the finger again and again.
At times, the severed finger tried to leave the battlefield, only to be caught by the endless, metal-like sunlight and dragged back into the sword-path world.
Under that terrifying assault, layer after layer of flesh peeled from the finger, exposing its meridians. The sunlight's Sword Qi shredded those too, until only three stark-white finger bones remained, gleaming with crystalline, undying light.
Yet even that undying light began to dim beneath the endless, metal-like sunlight.
Crack!
A fissure appeared in the white bone, exposing the golden-red marrow within—the marrow of a Void Refining body.
Whoosh!
The severed finger, now nothing but bone, erupted with a blood-red radiance like mountains collapsing and seas surging. It punched a gap through the pure-gold sword-path world and escaped through it by a hair's breadth before the gap could close, returning to the blood-robed elder's body.
"Damn it!"
"He's even stronger than an ordinary Dao Child of a Dao Integration sect..."
The blood-robed elder roared in bitter fury.
His whole body had gone pale—the pallor of someone who had lost too much blood. His hair was turning from withered yellow to gray-white, and far too much of his life force had drained away.
The phantom world of Blood Lake and corpses around him kept collapsing inward, rapidly shrinking from seven thousand kilometers to barely over a thousand. The power of heaven and earth's order he could command had fallen sharply.
"Senior,"
"Take another look at this sword strike."
Jiang Ding raised a hand and pointed lightly into the distance.
Boom!
The dazzling, pure-gold sword-path world rose like