A Core Formation Old Dog Is Nothing! One Punch from Afar Will Smash You to Pieces

Above Black Mud City's inner city, the night sky was forcibly torn apart by an incomparably violent force.

Amid the backward-pouring torrential rain, a pure-gold flaming flying sword radiating dazzling light cleaved through the rain curtain and descended with a thunderous crash.

Upon the flying sword stood the Black Mud City Lord, a Core Formation cultivator, with his hands clasped behind his back.

He looked down upon the ruins of the formation's core below, once a symbol of the immortal sect's majesty, now reduced to a massive pit of rotting mud and blood. Before the white jade statue of the Immortal Sect Sword Venerable, built at the cost of countless spirit stones, shattered corpses lay strewn in every direction.

And the guard commander who should have been escorting the human pillars was now covered from head to toe in savage, hardened growths. A sinister black fragment of a stele was embedded in his chest, and he was opening his bloody maw to frantically devour the formation masters' severed limbs like a wild beast.

"Trash! Every last one of you is a useless bunch of rice buckets!" The city lord flew into a rage, his voice carrying the terrifying power of the Core Formation realm as it rolled through the skies above Black Mud City.

The guards below were frightened out of their wits. They fell to their knees in the mud in droves, slamming their heads against the bluestone pavement.

"Spare us, City Lord! That monster suddenly went mad! The commander, he... he was possessed by an evil demon!"

"The commander?" The city lord sneered, his eyes filled with the disdain of one born above others. "He could not even guard a mere city-protecting formation core, and a piece of worthless stone backlashed him into a mutated mortal piece of trash. What use is there in keeping him?"

The city lord wasted no more words and rapidly formed seals before his chest with both hands.

The top-grade golden sword beneath his feet let out a piercing sword cry. The remaining spiritual energy between heaven and earth was forcibly drawn in, instantly condensing in midair into a terrifying golden sword aura thirty meters long, capable of splitting mountains and severing rivers.

"Trash, die for me!"

The thirty-meter sword aura locked onto the commander's aura, then came crashing down upon him with the overwhelming power of the Core Formation realm.

At the same time, in a deep valley of Immortal-Breaking Mountain hundreds of miles away.

Lu Chen sat cross-legged at the edge of a massive boulder. Within the dim, narrow cave, the thirty-thousand-jin City-Suppressing Mother Stele used to block the entrance stood quietly.

Suddenly, Lu Chen's eyelid twitched sharply.

He abruptly raised his head, his gaze boring straight ahead.

Across the surface of the thirty-thousand-jin Mother Stele before him, the originally dim and dormant black rock layer lit up without warning, line after line of dark-red desolate patterns appearing. As though they had come alive, the patterns flashed and slithered wildly across the stone.

Through the Mother Stele as a medium, a deepest-level resonance originating from the same source of extreme-path blood and qi ignored the barrier of space and crashed directly into Lu Chen's mind.

He sensed it clearly.

In Black Mud City hundreds of miles away, an aloof and fiercely exclusionary Core Formation law of the immortal path was ruthlessly strangling an extreme-path power that was weak, yet shared the same origin as the blood and qi within his body.

Beside him, A-Nan, wrapped in Netherwind Wolf hide, tilted her little face slightly.

Though she could not see, her purified extreme-path perception was extraordinarily keen. The little girl stretched out her hand and pointed toward the cave entrance, her voice soft and sweet yet tense.

"Lu Chen, the big rock is angry. Far away, a great fire is burning it."

"Those old dogs from the immortal sect have stretched their hands too far." Lu Chen exhaled a breath of scorching turbid air.

Lu Chen had never been the type to sit around and wait for death.

He strode before the thirty-thousand-jin Mother Stele, every joint in his body crackling in a rapid series of firecracker-like pops.

The extreme-path blood and qi of the twelfth layer of Iron Cloth Shirt erupted in full force. Dark-golden patterns frantically crawled beneath his flesh, and his entire body resembled a red-hot iron tower.

"This brute strength I have cultivated is not yours to discipline, you bunch of immortal cultivators!"

Lu Chen planted his stance, his waist and hips moving as one, then fiercely stomped his right foot backward. The rock beneath him shattered and sank.

His right arm swung out.

With a terrifying boom that pierced the clouds and split the rocks, Lu Chen's all-out heavy punch slammed viciously into the very center of the thirty-thousand-jin Mother Stele!

"Boom!"

Violent pure-yang blood and qi surged along his fist and smashed without reservation into the Mother Stele's interior. That overwhelmingly tyrannical brute force, carrying Lu Chen's unyielding extreme-path will, followed the desolate-blood resonance that ignored the void and was forcibly poured across the distance into the fragmentary stele in Black Mud City!

Back at the Black Mud City ruins.

The thirty-meter sword aura slashed down overhead, the pressure of the Core Formation realm making the surrounding space extraordinarily viscous.

The commander's grotesquely swollen body began to crack and bleed across great patches of its outer flesh under that immortal pressure. His bones gave mournful groans, unable to bear the strain.

He was just about to collapse completely beneath this destructive strike.

At that very instant.

The black fragmentary stele in the commander's chest suddenly burst with an incomparably dazzling dark-red radiance!

The light pierced directly through layers of rain curtains. The tyrannical reinforcement Lu Chen had delivered across the distance, mixed with the Mother Stele's violent will, crashed into the fragmentary stele's interior.

The commander's body swelled another full size, and magma-like heat flowed through his bulging veins.

Seeing this, the city lord in midair was filled with disdain.

He was exceedingly arrogant and careless, believing that killing a mutated mortal was no different from crushing an ant. With his hands behind his back, only the thinnest layer of pale cyan protective true light surfaced around him. He had not used his full power at all.

"You still dare struggle?" the city lord scoffed.

A deafening roar burst from the commander's throat.

Drawing directly upon the vast origin power drained dry from the great formation, along with the violent will transmitted by the Mother Stele, he stomped hard with both feet.

A huge crater was crushed into the ruined ground.

The commander completely ignored the thirty-meter sword aura slashing toward him.

"Splat!" The sword aura cut open his shoulder and severed the shoulder bone, blood spraying wildly.

Yet he did not so much as furrow his brow. Facing the sharp blade head-on, he crashed fiercely toward the city lord in midair!

The extreme eruption of extreme-path blood and qi brought the most brutal backlash upon this untempered mortal body.

The commander threw out his right fist in midair.

The instant he punched, the muscles and bones of his entire right arm were carbonized inch by inch under the terrifying temperature of his blood and qi and the violent impact of energy, turning directly into ash that filled the sky!

But that incomplete heavy punch, gathered from the spiritual energy of Black Mud City's great formation and extreme-path will, had already been thrown solidly forward.

"Boom!"

The heavy punch slammed viciously against the flimsy protective aura the city lord had hastily raised.

The city lord's expression changed drastically. At last, he sensed the terror of this brute force.

"Impudence!"

It was useless. The sheer brute force smashed that layer of cyan true light to pieces.

The city lord's chest caved in. He vomited blood in great mouthfuls, his entire body shooting backward like a cannonball.

The rain curtain along his path was blasted into a long vacuum passage.

The city lord's body crashed heavily into the towering white jade statue of the Immortal Sect Sword Venerable behind the ruins.

"Rumble!"

The enormous white jade statue snapped in half at the waist and shattered into pieces. The city lord was buried beneath countless fragments, his fate unknown.

Just one instant before the city lord and the commander clashed in midair and the destructive shockwave erupted.

On the chaotic ground below.

Taking advantage of everyone's attention being fixed on the sky, Fourth Li grabbed a butcher knife and swiftly cut through the coarse hemp rope binding the wooden cart.

"Elder, go!" Fourth Li gritted his teeth and hauled the lower-body-paralyzed Zhang Elder onto his broad back.

The shockwave exploded in the sky.

A devastating blast surged toward them.

The small piece of black stone skin Zhang Elder clutched tightly in his twisted, deformed hand sensed the upheaval of same-origin blood and qi in midair.

The stone skin instinctively rippled with a faint dark-red blood glow.

The blood glow spread open behind the two men's backs, forcibly offsetting most of the deadly concussion for these two mortals.

Borrowing the powerful thrust of the shockwave, Fourth Li and the old farmer on his back were hurled away, crashing heavily into a large pit at the edge of the ruins used to store spirit-attracting materials.

The material pile was filled with dried spiritwood and sulfur powder.

Fourth Li was smashed bloody and battered. His left arm was nearly dislocated, with bone fragments jutting outward.

He heard the air-rending sounds of large numbers of Azure Firmament Sword Sect cultivators flying over on their swords in the distance.

Enduring the agonizing pain, Fourth Li clenched his right hand tightly into a fist and viciously crushed the fire striker he had kept hidden in his palm.

Sparks fell onto the sulfur powder.

"Boom!" Fire erupted instantly.

The soaring flames ignited the entire pile of spirit-attracting materials, and the blazing inferno immediately blocked the outside cultivators' sight and senses.

Fourth Li gritted his teeth, carrying Zhang Elder as he rolled down along the edge of the material pile, tumbling directly into the entrance of an underground dark river used year-round to drain filthy water and discard the corpses of mining slaves.

Falling into the foul, blackened underground dark river, Fourth Li's pain made his vision go dark.

Outside, the towering fire crackled and popped. He thrashed desperately in the stinking water, holding up the old farmer on his back. The old farmer had fainted, his shriveled chin resting on Fourth Li's shoulder, yet his palm still clutched that piece of same-origin stone skin tightly.