Blood Qi Explodes, Blinding Immortal Eyes; the Butcher Carries the Elder into the Yin River

Within Black Mud City's inner city, shattered stones filled the sky.

The white jade statue's base had completely collapsed.

The City Lord crawled out of the heaps of broken jade and mud on all fours.

The purple-gold crown atop his head had long since shattered to dust. His graying hair clung to his face, his Daoist robe had been torn open in more than a dozen places, and great swathes of black blood covered his chest.

A grand Core Formation cultivator, the lofty lord of an immortal city in East Mystic Province, had been reduced to the utmost misery.

"Rebellion! Utter rebellion!"

The City Lord wiped the blood and grime from his face, unleashing an incomparably distorted roar from his throat.

Before the countless elite sect cultivators who had rushed over, he had been punched into the ruins by a mortal foot soldier with no cultivation whatsoever.

That humiliation stripped away every shred of the cultivator's dignity he had accumulated over centuries, then ground it beneath his feet.

He had just raised a hand to form a seal and strike back.

At the center of the ruins.

The commander's grotesquely swollen body suddenly froze in midair.

The twelve layers of pure yang blood qi Lu Chen had struck from afar, together with the violent origin essence drained from the city-protecting formation.

At this moment, those two tyrannical forces had completely exceeded the limit a mortal furnace vessel could endure.

The metallic hardened layers of keratin across the commander's body began to crack over vast areas.

The fissures ran deep, piercing through flesh and reaching straight into the marrow.

Terrifying red radiance, painfully dazzling and wildly unstable, surged madly from those cracks.

There was not the slightest trace of pain on the commander's utterly distorted face—only extreme contortion.

The blood beneath his skin was directly steamed dry by the heat.

Boom!

A muffled blast that shattered the bluestone paving across the entire inner city erupted.

The commander's incomplete body underwent the most thorough explosion of blood qi and disintegration of flesh in midair.

An immeasurable mass of ultimate blood qi, mixed with the origin essence of an immortal formation, detonated directly above the ruins.

Within a hundred-zhang radius, an enormous blood-red mushroom cloud soared into the sky.

Violent power swept outward.

All remaining heaven and earth spiritual qi around the formation-eye ruins was instantly crushed clean away by that blood-qi storm.

For several miles in every direction, the area became an utterly violent zone devoid of spiritual energy.

The moment any cultivator's true essence seeped into it, it would be shredded into nothingness on the spot.

Just as the City Lord steadied himself, more than a hundred Azure Firmament Sword Sect cultivators riding flying swords arrived in the air behind him.

These high-level cultivators had no idea what had happened.

Out of habit, they all released their divine senses at once, intending to inspect the outcome at the center of the explosion.

The City Lord likewise extended his vast Core Formation divine sense.

The instant their divine senses touched that rolling blood-red storm.

A sudden change erupted.

The ultimate blood qi mixed within the storm carried the purest will of destruction as it surged directly back along their divine senses.

It was a raging fire burning straight into the depths of their souls.

"AAARGH!"

Waves upon waves of shrill screams erupted in midair.

The arriving cultivators could not control the flying swords beneath their feet. Dozens clutched their heads desperately with both hands, blood spraying wildly from their eye sockets as they tumbled from the sky one after another.

The City Lord also let out a muffled groan. He abruptly covered his eyes, two glaring trails of bloody tears seeping from their corners.

His head felt as though it were splitting apart.

The entire area around the ruins had completely become an absolute divine-sense blind zone, one that even great Core Formation cultivators could not peer into.

These immortals, who ordinarily relied entirely on divine sense to control everything, had all lost their ability to perceive at this moment, becoming blind in every sense of the word.

They could only stumble about at the edges, unable even to tell east from west or north from south.

The extreme chaos and divine-sense blockade formed the most perfect natural barrier.

Deep beneath Black Mud City.

Within the underground Yin River, long used to dump an immortal city's waste pills and dispose of the corpses of mining slaves.

The foul, reeking water rose directly above the waist.

Fourth Li carried Zhang Elder on his back as he struggled forward through this pitch-black underground river.

The water was chilling enough to pierce the bone.

The current was full of rotten scraps of flesh and pungent medicinal dregs.

Swarms of poisonous water maggots caught the scent of living blood and gathered frenziedly around him.

Dense clusters of poisonous maggots clamped down hard on Fourth Li's calves.

Their sharp mouthparts sliced through his skin and burrowed into his flesh.

The veins on Fourth Li's forehead bulged violently as sweat poured down his body.

He clenched his back teeth so tightly that blood seeped from his gums, yet he did not utter a single groan of pain.

Zhang Elder's body temperature was fading bit by bit, his body growing ever stiffer.

Fourth Li's hands supporting the old man dug into his flesh.

"Elder, don't fall asleep."

"Those bastards are blind. They can't catch up. I'll get you out."

He drew a deep breath of the stinking air, dragging his legs covered in poisonous maggots forward, leaving a bloody print with every step.

Aboveground.

At the very center of the spiritless storm.

The black fragmentary stele, having lost its mortal host body, floated silently in midair.

The dark-red desolate patterns across its surface throbbed madly, emitting an ear-piercing hum filled with extreme shrillness and greed.

The fragmentary stele was still trying to devour the remaining origin essence nearby.

Though blinded, the City Lord located the fragmentary stele by sound.

"A mere broken stone dares to turn the heavens upside down!"

The City Lord roared, forcibly condensing more than a dozen thick chains of azure true essence in his hands.

The chains whistled through the air and wrapped directly around the fragmentary stele overhead.

The instant the true essence touched the black stone's surface.

The frenzied desolate blood remaining within the fragmentary stele struck back directly.

Sizzle!

The Core Formation true essence did not even last a breath before the desolate blood vaporized it into nothingness.

The tyrannical backlash followed the connection of true essence and crashed violently into the City Lord's chest.

The City Lord opened his mouth wide and spat out two mouthfuls of thick natal Core Formation blood essence.

His aura instantly withered.

He no longer dared to be careless. With a backhand motion, he pulled an ancient formation disk carved with the phantom images of the four divine beasts from his storage ring.

"Four Symbols Spirit-Sealing Formation Disk, suppress it for me!"

The City Lord smeared his natal blood essence across the formation disk and sent it forth regardless of the cost.

The formation disk rapidly expanded in midair, casting down four heavy pillars of light in different colors that locked tightly onto the four corners of the black fragmentary stele.

The two forces collided and ground violently against one another in midair, erupting with deafening noise.

Only after the time it took to burn half an incense stick.

Did the desolate patterns on the fragmentary stele's surface gradually dim.

The City Lord collapsed fully into the mud, gasping heavily as he finally severed the fragmentary stele's violent backlash.

That intense tremor directly spread to Immortal-Breaking Mountain, hundreds of miles away.

In the sky, the pale-blue Heaven-Locking Array covering Immortal-Breaking Mountain had initially only shown cracks.

As the formation eye exploded and the spiritual vein was completely severed, the array's light curtain finally suffered total collapse.

Massive cracks spread wildly across the curtain of light.

Great chunks of formation fragments began falling away, dissolving into the night sky.

Song Que stood in a patch of rotten mud deep within Immortal-Breaking Mountain, staring up at the sky.

His heart sank straight to the bottom.

The Azure Firmament Sword Sect inner disciples around him had now completely fallen into panic.

"The formation has broken!"

"Spiritual qi is leaking away! Heaven and earth spiritual qi is pouring back out!"

The disciples discovered that the means by which the formation had continuously replenished their spiritual power had been completely cut off.

The flying swords in their hands slowly lost their luster.

The true essence in their dantians diminished with every fraction they used.

The terror of losing their source of power plunged these normally self-important disciples of the immortal sect into extreme panic.

Song Que's hand gripping his sword hilt trembled.

The mission had failed, the city-protecting formation had been broken, and even the mountain search had become a joke.

If he returned to the sect like this, the inner sect elders would absolutely strip his tendons and skin him, then throw him into the Demon-Locking Pagoda.

"Shut up!"

Song Que's face twisted savagely. He yanked out his sword and let out a hysterical roar.

"Whoever dares take half a step back, I'll split him alive right now!"

He grabbed a large handful of talismans glimmering with eerie red light from his storage pouch and threw them directly to the disciples around him.

"Activate the lifespan talismans!"

"Burn your life force and forcibly gather qi!"

"Before the remaining spiritual qi in the formation completely disperses, dig that Blood Demon out for me!"

His face crazed, Song Que took the lead in slapping a talisman onto his chest.

More than a dozen strands of his hair turned white in an instant, but his depleted true essence surged briefly.

At the deepest part of Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

At the narrow entrance to a shadowy cave.

Lu Chen stood before the City-Suppressing Mother Stele, which weighed thirty thousand jin.

Wisps of white smoke rose from his muscular, knotted right arm, which had struck the very center of the mother stele.

Several gashes had been torn across the surface of his rough knuckles by the rebounding force.

Ultimate blood qi churned through the wounds, forcibly healing the tears in the blink of an eye.

Lu Chen slowly withdrew his scorching iron fist from the mother stele.

The dull echoes of his earth-shaking punch still lingered along the surrounding rock walls.

A-Nan sat on a stone inside, her head tilted as she quietly listened to the sounds outside.

Lu Chen turned around.

His tall, brawny body blocked the very front of the narrow passage.

His gaze passed over the mother stele and fixed directly on the dark valley of rolling miasma beyond the cave.

Under his control, the pure yang blood qi of the twelfth layer of Iron Cloth Shirt was no longer suppressed, slowly beginning to pour outward.

The wild heat wave directly forced the rolling miasma back dozens of zhang.

Without a single needless word, the segment of Black-Iron Chain around Lu Chen's wrist gave a dull clatter as he coldly waited for those lackeys of the immortal sects to come and seek their deaths.