The lingering force of the descending azure blade energy crushed every sound of battle for miles around Duanmu Manor into deathly silence.
On the ruins of the side gate, Li Xiang stood stunned.
He was not the only one.
Zhang Yunqing stopped swinging his saber at a White Lotus Sect Demonkin. The edge hung in midair, less than three inches from the man's throat.
The Nine Heavens Divine Thunder poised at Lin Xuanshu's fingertips silently dissipated.
Guo Kai, Zhang Qilan, Chu Tian—everyone stopped what they were doing and looked toward the moonlit mountaintop behind the manor.
Even the Duanmu Death Soldiers and White Lotus Demonkin, who had been fighting desperately with bloodshot eyes, froze where they stood.
Before these two true mountains, the instinct to survive overpowered every murderous impulse.
No one dared move.
Everyone knew that life and death in this stretch of heaven and earth no longer rested in the hands of ants like them.
Li Xiang looked toward the figure in dark blue on the summit.
That slash had stirred no surging astral energy, wrought no change in the heavens. Just a streak of azure blade light, pure to the utmost, had cleaved the blood clouds that had hovered over Duanmu Manor all night and plowed a bottomless fissure through the earth.
So this is the World's Number One Grandmaster...
Li Xiang murmured inwardly.
Previously, outside Yiling City, when he had used [Qi Observation] to peer into the phantom of Lord Guan, he had thought it merely an extraordinary Feng Shui formation fashioned from inanimate objects.
Yet what Guan Yue displayed as he carried that same Green Dragon Crescent Blade was unmistakably the same vast, righteous will that subdued mountains and rivers, faintly resonating with the Feng Shui formation.
"Grandfather..."
Guo Kai's voice came from beside him.