Four Seasons Cycle.
When that sword light surged from the tip of the blade, it was like a seed buried in snow. Then, as it rose, it rapidly expanded into a towering tree formed from the power of the four seasons.
The great tree's roots plunged into the earth, stretching toward every node of the Blood River God-Slaying Array.
Its branches and leaves spread toward the sky...
Layer by layer, they intercepted, devoured, and transformed the crimson torrents converging on the Demon Empress.
Finally, after the great tree completed a single cycle, all its radiance receded.
Only a pure, colorless stillness remained.
That stillness spread like a curtain from one end of the heavens to the other, covering, swallowing, and erasing the entire expanse of crimson.
The Blood River God-Slaying Array shattered!
The roots embedded in the earth snapped all at once. The severed crimson torrents lost their point of convergence and scattered like a swarm of snakes with their heads cut off, dissipating and evaporating in the air until they returned to nothingness.
The Demon Empress abruptly faltered within that stillness.
Her aura, which had just climbed beyond peak quasi-god but had yet to fully reach godhood, plummeted in that instant like a punctured balloon.
Her lips parted. Within her dark-purple eyes surged the utterly undisguised bewilderment and resentment of someone cast down from the summit.
But the next moment, defiance surfaced in the Demon Empress's eyes.
When she rose from the ground, her aura had lost the hollow instability of its forcibly elevated state, replaced by a more primal, more violent power.
Dark-purple light welled up from beneath her skin, swelling her frame. Her robe tore into strips that hung from her body, exposing patches of scales roiling with a dark sheen.
Her pupils narrowed into vertical slits,