"Tap, tap tap—!"
The monotonous, measured tapping of the white bone cane, which seemed to fall between the beats of every heart, sounded once more through the ruins of the utterly leveled Huangpu River waterfront.
Amid the churning Yellow Springs death qi and shattered spatial rifts, Yang Yuan's hunched phantom, dressed in black mourning clothes, took shape again without a scratch.
His dead-fish eyes remained murky. The flesh of his face, stitched together from thousands upon thousands of vicious ghost faces, wore a rigid smile of utter lifelessness.
Once, ten times, thirty times.
Whether it was Red-Rumped Yama's karmic-fire Golden Cudgel, the Black Sky Lord's rule chains, or Thousand-Head Yama's corrosive waterfall of poison, no matter how many pieces of pulp they crushed him into or how many wisps of smoke they burned him into, he always stood back up in the same spot the next instant.
"What the fuck... is this accursed thing?!"
In midair, Red-Rumped Yama's enormous dark-red body heaved violently. For the first time, the lofty arrogance faded from his scarlet slit pupils, replaced by shock and agitation as though he had seen a ghost.
As one of the Netherworld's exalted Ten Halls of Yama, he had slaughtered countless beings, yet he had never encountered anything so utterly unreasonable.
"He has no soul core, no blood vitality—not even anything you could call a life!" Red-Rumped Yama roared through gritted teeth. "What we smashed just now wasn't a physical body at all. It was a cloud of air!"
"No, not air."
The Black Sky Lord hovered beneath the crescent moon, his cloudy lone eye fixed on Yang Yuan below. The terror in its depths gradually turned into profound wariness.
This King of Hell, the longest-lived and most calculating in the Netherworld, seemed to have unearthed a buried, terrifying