Iron Fist Blows Apart Foundation Establishment Old Dog, Western Wasteland Ancestral Bone Glows Blood-Red

A deafening roar rumbled from deep in Lu Chen's throat.

The thick tendons in his neck bulged one after another. The muscles in both arms swelled in hard blocks, their toughness shooting straight to the limit a mortal body could bear. Formation sword-qi had flayed the backs of his hands into a bloody mess, and scorching blood dripped wildly through his fingers.

Those two palms were locked dead in the crack of the Azurewood Sword-Qi Barrier.

His ten fingers clamped down on the spiritual qi nodes.

Then, with extreme brute force, he savagely tore outward.

"Crack!"

A crisp, ear-piercing shattering sound exploded through the air.

The invincible immortal sword formation was brutally ripped apart on the spot by that utterly unreasonable monstrous strength. Fragments of azure light flew everywhere and scattered across the ground.

Chen Yuanshan, hovering in midair, nearly had his eyes pop out.

This Foundation Establishment Realm retainer of Black Mud City, who had lived for more than a century, wore utter terror on his aged face as he was driven into a corner. Even in his dreams, he had never imagined that over a hundred years of arduous cultivation would be as brittle as paper before pure brute force. His pride and joy, a grand protective formation, could not even stop a brute without a dantian.

The lofty dignity of an immortal cultivator, together with the shattered formation, was ground utterly into dust beneath hands stained with mortal blood.

Chen Yuanshan's lips trembled.

Before the words of surrender could roll from his throat—

Lu Chen had no intention of giving him the chance to spout nonsense.

His right arm jerked back. The century-old Black-Iron Chain coiled around his forearm instantly went taut.

He threw a punch.

With an incomparably shrill sonic boom, that massive iron fist pierced the remaining curtain of light without obstruction and drove straight into Chen Yuanshan's dantian qi sea.

"Pfft!"

His flesh was pierced through on the spot. The dull impact echoed far through the forest.

The dantian of a Foundation Establishment cultivator had been punched into a huge bloody hole by ultimate brute force. Chen Yuanshan's true essence, cultivated over a century, completely lost control within his body and turned into steel blades stabbing wildly in every direction.

The agony was so extreme that Chen Yuanshan could not even scream.

Then—

Chen Yuanshan's abdomen exploded outright. The lower half of his body became a large cloud of foul blood mist. His mangled upper body lost all support and fell heavily into the mud slick with filthy blood with a splat. He died worse than a stray dog.

Fifteen zhang away.

The few remaining Black-Iron heavy-armored cavalrymen had long since been frightened weak in the knees.

Blood rain smeared their vision. Through the crimson mist, they saw Black Mud City's strongest Foundation Establishment retainer have the lower half of his body blown apart by that devil's single punch.

These elite martial cultivators, who usually swaggered about like tyrants, broke down on the spot.

Their horse-chopping sabers were thrown all over the ground, yet no one dared bend down to pick them up. Everyone spun around and fled in a scrambling panic, not even bothering to mount their Ironclad Rhinos, wailing like ghosts and howling like wolves as they desperately raced toward the outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain. Their heavy black-iron armor knocked against the mud, making utterly bedraggled clattering sounds.

Lu Chen stood in the mud.

He watched their fleeing backs.

He did not move to pursue and kill them.

It was absolutely not because mercy had risen in his heart and he was unwilling to pull out the weeds by the roots. In this desolate wilderness, letting those survivors escape would surely bring even crazier retaliation from the immortal sects.

It was because he could not chase them.

The backlash from using twelve layers of ultimate qi and blood to withstand the killing sword aura of the Foundation Establishment Realm erupted violently at that moment.

The thick tendons throughout his limbs and bones spasmed uncontrollably. The pain of the convulsions shot through the gaps in his bones straight toward his skull. Countless tiny beads of blood burst one after another from the surface of his iron-gray skin.

The scorching blood had barely seeped out before his extreme body heat evaporated it, turning it into rolling clouds of burning white mist.

To avoid straining muscles that were on the verge of snapping, Lu Chen could only nail his feet firmly in place.

Once those fleeing soldiers had vanished completely from sight—

The forest fell silent again.

The mangled remains that had belonged to Chen Yuanshan gave off an intensely thick stench of blood. The flesh and blood of a Foundation Establishment Realm cultivator contained pure spiritual qi, making it the deadliest bait in the darkness.

More than a dozen pairs of scarlet beast eyes lit up in the nearby bushes.

Countless low-level demon beasts followed the scent over.

Amid wave after wave of scalp-numbing tearing and chewing, that lofty immortal elder ultimately became sustenance to fill the bellies of deep-mountain beasts. The laws of the jungle had never cared about an immortal cultivator's status.

At the same time, tens of thousands of miles away.

At the edge of Western Wasteland Province.

The environment here was harsh to the extreme. Black winds that could flay a layer of skin from a person blew all year round.

Deep within this hidden valley where even birds would not shit—

Stood an altar built from the piled white bones of countless enormous beasts.

No one knew how many years this Desolate Scion Altar had existed. The bones at its base had long weathered black, carrying an ancient desolation that would never fade.

At the altar's highest point, a dried ancient ancestral bone, a thousand years old, was enshrined by itself. Its surface was covered in holes left by wind and frost.

Suddenly.

Without any warning, a tiny, exceedingly faint blood-red glow lit up on the surface of the originally gray and withered ancestral bone.

That incomparably pure pulse of ultimate qi and blood spread outward little by little along the white bone. Though faint, it carried a wild violence that seemed capable of tearing heaven and earth apart.

Below the altar.

An elderly Desolate Scion priest with a blind left eye was kneeling on both knees in prayer.

Sensing the anomaly overhead, the old priest suddenly raised his head.

An utterly disbelieving light burst from his remaining eye. His shriveled lips trembled violently, and for a long while, he could not force out a complete word.

The old priest shook all over with excitement.

He slammed his upper body down toward the ground, smashing his wrinkled forehead heavily against the hard stone. Even the rock was marked with blood.

"...The bloodline has not been severed."

With wildly suppressed fervor in his hoarse voice, his entire chest resonated. "The ancestors have not knelt!"

On the outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain, halfway up the mountain.

The City-Guarding Stele weighing thirty thousand jin, which blocked the mouth of the cave, lay quietly pressed into the mud.

The ground around it was littered with the severed limbs and blood left behind by the dead.

As if it had sensed the nourishment of blood, the coarse rock patterns on the surface of that heavy black broken stele faintly heated up.

An extremely faint tremor came from within the stele. The surrounding soil shook loose a few times along with it.

Deep inside the cave.

A-Nan, whose jade bones had begun to emerge, slowly lifted her heavy eyelids at that moment.

The little blind girl opened her eyes. Her unfocused pupils were veiled in a murky gray-white film. After tossing and turning for half the night, the gray-black impurities of exhaustion on her skin had long been blown clean by the draft running through the cave. The skin revealed beneath had an unhealthy pallor.

The cold wind outside poured in through the gap beside the stele, yet it could not disperse the immensely warm vitality radiating from her body.

A-Nan could not see.

But bolstered by the evolution of her constitution, her senses had undergone an incomparably terrifying transformation.

Without the slightest hesitation, her little head turned precisely halfway around, facing straight toward the half-foot-wide crack outside the cave.

Outside.

Once the spasms had eased a little, Lu Chen dragged his bloody, brawny body back toward the cave step by step.

The moment he neared the stele—

His exceptionally sharp hearing caught the faint rustling of A-Nan getting up.

Lu Chen paused.

The violent Sha Qi around him, enough to frighten low-level demon beasts out of their wits, vanished cleanly in the blink of an eye. He slowed down, making his footsteps on the gravel as light as possible. Even though the wounds on his chest were still seeping blood, he stubbornly did not let out a single groan.

Through the half-foot-wide crack, Lu Chen turned sideways and squeezed into the cave.

A-Nan sat on a hard rock.

Her two little hands fumbled around her, accurately grabbing the rag doll with one ear missing and hugging it tightly against her chest.

"Lu Chen."

The little blind girl's soft, childish voice rang through the dim cave, every word clearly articulated.

"I'm here." Lu Chen stopped walking.

A-Nan rubbed her little face against the cloth doll.

"The people outside wearing iron clothes feel so cold."

She had sensed the bone-piercing killing intent outside, all of it directed at Lu Chen. Though she could not see, the sharp malice of those immortal cultivators stood out glaringly to her transformed senses.

A-Nan raised one hand again and touched her burning forehead.

"A-Nan feels so hot." The little blind girl's voice was soft and weak. "I'm so hungry."

Lu Chen walked into the shadow where light entered through the crack in the cave, not daring to come too close.

He was afraid the smell of blood on him and his split-open wounds would frighten her. Although A-Nan could not see, he did not want to bring the slaughterhouse outside into this tiny world.

He lowered his head and looked at his hands caked in blood and grime, then rubbed them hard twice against his tattered pant legs.

A not particularly handsome smile tugged across his rough, ironlike face.

Lu Chen spoke.

His voice had returned to its usual calm rasp, without the faintest trace of the savagery from when he had just torn apart an immortal elder outside.

"A-Nan, don't be afraid."

Lu Chen bent down and pulled over the wolf pelt beside her, covering her properly again. His movements were so gentle, as if he feared breaking her.

"I'll find you something to eat right away."