The voice wasn't loud, but the moment it fell, an echo immediately followed. Tan Shuchang's words thus layered over one another, like ceaseless waves rolling across the sea.
And as those sound waves rose, despite it being the hour when the rising sun climbed into the sky, an inexplicable gloom descended.
A faint darkness intertwined with the nearby mountaintops, forests, and even the clouds at the horizon, until even the wind blowing through carried a trace of gray.
"What devilish art is this?" Zhao Huaiji was startled. He had cultivated for nearly a century and had traveled through more than half of the Jia Five Realm in his early years. He had even made a trip to the Netherworld to retrieve an ancestor's soul. By any measure, he could be called widely experienced, yet he had never seen or heard of such a transformative devilish art.
Even the Demon Sect master's Black Shadow Immortal-Saving Manual had merely produced countless black shadows, while its true body remained human.
Yet the brat before him had completely lost his human form.
"Hmph! Nothing but a crooked and heretical trick!"
But Zhao Huaiji immediately revealed a look of disdain, for he had absolute confidence in the sword in his hand.
He raised his sword upright.
"Sword, arise!"
At once, Sword Force surged outward like raging waves, as though a mountain had descended. The surrounding land immediately cracked apart, while trees splintered and collapsed across the ground.
The gray wind was scattered as well.
Sword Force was another all-purpose method available to sword cultivators besides Sword Qi. It could save people, kill people, and even evolve into sword formations.
At this moment, as the Sword Force Zhao Huaiji had cultivated for decades spread out, the area seemed to bare its edge. A blinding radiance pierced