Just moments ago... barely half an incense stick ago!
Yu Xiaogang had still been pounding the table, arguing vehemently before Xue Ye and Ning Fengzhi:
"Longcang is ruled by Soul Beasts that eat raw flesh and drink blood! Without divine protection, they're nothing but a heap of loose sand! Without a divine inheritance, they could never withstand the foundations of sects built over ten thousand years!"
"A reversal! This is the perfect chance the Heavenly Dao has given us to turn the tables from the brink of defeat!!"
Those ringing, self-important "Grandmaster theories"
now became one vicious slap after another, raining down mercilessly on Yu Xiaogang's face!
Beside him, Ning Fengzhi, master of the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect, stood frozen.
Within just a few breaths, the fervent hope on his face had turned ashen. He stared fixedly at the utterly distraught Yu Xiaogang before him.
His chest heaved violently, and he forced a mouthful of blood back down!
Remembering how he had stroked his beard before all the civil and military officials and praised him with, "Grandmaster is truly a genius without equal. Whoever gains Grandmaster gains the world"...
Ning Fengzhi felt scorching shame shoot from the soles of his feet, up his spine, straight to the crown of his head!
Whoever gains Grandmaster gains the world?
Gains the world, my fucking ass!
Having swallowed this damned Gangzi's nonsense, the Heaven Dou Empire and the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect might not even know what killed them!
How was this "whoever gains Grandmaster gains the world"?
This was clearly-"whoever gains Gangzi, see you in the underworld"!!
Crash!!
A sharp shattering sound suddenly tore through the courtyard's deathly silence!
Xue Ye hurled his teacup against the stone steps. Porcelain shards flew everywhere, and scalding tea splashed straight across Yu Xiaogang's face!
This ruler of Heaven Dou, who normally took such care to maintain his imperial bearing,
now wore an iron-dark expression, his hand trembling violently against the Dragon Throne.
He, too, stared fixedly at the collapsed Gangzi. The respect and reliance that had once filled his gaze
had now turned entirely into towering fury and utter disgust that even the waters of all four seas could never wash away:
"Yu Xiaogang!!"
Xue Ye forced the name through gritted teeth, then suddenly raised his voice until it cracked:
"Is this the... 'city-state without a god to oversee it, nothing but a heap of loose sand' you guaranteed with your hand pounding your chest?!"
"Is this the... 'fat meat on the chopping board, waiting for the sects to butcher it' you swore it was?!"
Pointing at the Heaven-Splitting Mad Dragon Halberd on the Sky Screen, which seemed capable of cleaving the entire Douluo Plane in two, Xue Ye trembled all over with rage:
"They defend their home with the Mystic Yellow Mother Artifact, which ignores level-one-hundred divine power, and slaughter their enemies with a super divine weapon that can chop God Kings to pieces!"
"You call that fat meat on a chopping board?!"
"According to your theory, if Heaven Dou's million armored cavalry charged over there, they probably couldn't even scrape a chip off their stele! One backhand swing of that halberd would dig up our ancestral graves!!"
Thud!
The shouting made Yu Xiaogang shudder violently. His shriveled, purple lips hung open, his gaze unfocused.
Inside and outside the great hall, every guard and high official kept their heads lowered, silent as cicadas in winter.
Only the towering, chilling phantoms of the two Super Divine Artifacts on the Sky Screen remained, becoming two invisible palms that slapped this "theoretical Grandmaster's" dignity and pride to pieces!
The words became law, without the slightest warning!
High above the nine heavens, the churning vortex of chaos did not even leave mortals a moment to pray or repent.
A plane-wide divine intent, colder and vaster than the power that had stripped Bo Saixi of her divinity, carrying absolute crushing force against ignorant fools,
became rolling thunder of chaos and suddenly bore down upon Sea God Island without warning!
The entire ocean froze in place, its raging waves falling still in an instant!
An icy voice from heaven, formed from the Great Dao's tribulation light and blotting out the sky and sun,
crashed down from the depths of the inverted execution ground, driving straight into the depths of Ma Hongjun's sea of consciousness and those of every living being on Sea God Island:
[Let reckless speakers be chastened!] [Mortal Ma Hongjun, ignorant of mind, has roared defiance against heaven and insulted the plane.] [The "divinity" of his impure phoenix bloodline shall be stripped immediately. Heavenly fire shall turn upon him, burning his meridians and scorching his soul, to set the record straight!]
Riiip!
A pure-white bolt of karmic tribulation lightning pierced down without warning from the Bronze Execution Ground in the nine heavens, striking viciously toward the space between Ma Hongjun's brows!
The tribulation lightning entered his body without an earth-shaking explosion. Instead, an ear-piercing noise rang out, like a red-hot branding iron plunged into cold oil.
Ma Hongjun's eye sockets nearly burst, and two black-red trails of blood seeped from the corners of his eyes.
The impure evil fire within him, which he had relied on an immortal herb to forcibly purify, now became towering karmic flames that turned against him!
Fire raced along his marrow and meridians, burning furiously from the inside out.
"Screee!!"
An agonized cry, shrill and wretched beyond measure, suddenly tore from the Martial Soul phantom forced into manifestation behind Ma Hongjun!
In the air, the Evil Fire Phoenix that had once spread its wings amid blazing crimson light now let out a dying wail.
Pure-white tribulation lightning followed the Martial Soul's connection and savagely strangled it!
Every magnificent fiery feather swiftly blackened, carbonized, and withered in the lightning and flames;
its once proud, majestic phoenix crest snapped apart inch by inch as the Heavenly Dao stripped it away!
Under the stunned gazes of Titled Douluos and emperors across the world,
that "phoenix," revered by Shrek as one of the greatest divine birds of the age,
had every last drop of its foundation forcibly drained by the Heavenly Dao's laws within just three breaths,
degenerating and shrinking all the way... until it finally revealed itself as a bloated, ugly barnyard chicken with mottled feathers!
Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!
Six piercingly crisp explosions rang out in succession on the Sea God Steps like funeral bells!
Two yellow, two purple, two black!
The six Soul Rings Ma Hongjun had cultivated for years and taken such pride in crumbled inch by inch from bottom to top as the lightning and fire followed the vine to its roots!
The shattered Soul Rings became specks of light filling the sky, and his dantian burst into nothingness in an instant;
the surging soul power within him poured out wildly like floodwater through an opened sluice, churning his meridians, bones, and internal organs into a puddle of bloody pulp!
Bang!
The plucked barnyard-chicken Martial Soul in midair gave a desperate, muffled burst, then disintegrated into a cloud of gray-white ashes that scattered on the wind.
His Martial Soul... utterly annihilated!
His soul power... reduced entirely to zero!
This barnyard-chicken phoenix, normally so arrogant and domineering, could not even let out a complete scream
before he collapsed twitching among the broken stones like a heap of rotten flesh, utterly reduced to a cripple with severed meridians and a ruined soul!
Beside Ma Hongjun, the collapse of Shrek's members was nothing less than hell on earth.
"Bleurgh!!"
Dai Mubai lay limp beside a broken stone pillar, both hands clawing desperately at his throat as he vomited uncontrollably.
The golden hair he had taken such pride in was already matted into tangled weeds. The backlash made his meridians bulge like snakes beneath his skin as his entire body convulsed.
He stared vacantly at the lingering might of the bronze execution shackles in the heavens, his mind descending completely into madness:
"The God Trial... hahaha! The God Trial!"
With his hair hanging loose, Dai Mubai burst into crazed laughter, endless anguish threaded through every sound:
"I took lightning strikes and crushing pressure here like a fucking animal! I thought becoming a god's favored one meant I could trample Dai Weisi and the entire Star Luo Imperial Family beneath my feet!"
"But what are we, really? Us so-called monsters... what the hell are we?!"
Not far away, Ning Rongrong's Nine Treasure Glazed Tile Pagoda had already lost all its radiance.
She curled up on the ground, her delicate, fair cheeks covered in filthy blood.
As she listened to the Sky Screen's verdict that Sea God Island was "beneath rank, no better than the roadside rabble,"
she remembered the fervent look in her father Ning Fengzhi's eyes when he had poured the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect's entire resources into supporting this voyage.
"The sect... it's all ruined..."
Ning Rongrong sobbed in despair, tears washing through the bloodstains on her face:
"Dad staked the entire future of the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect on me and Third Brother... we thought we'd latched onto a god's leg..."
"But in their eyes, the Sea God doesn't even qualify for a seat at the table... we've become a joke... every sect in the world is laughing at us!!"
Beside her, Oscar's hands were charred black and peeling as he held half a cold sausage in his trembling grip,
his lips bitten to bloody shreds. He said nothing; only tears slid silently from the corners of his eyes.
Zhu Zhuqing huddled in the shadows, shaking so badly that she had completely lost even her instinct for Martial Soul Possession.
Yet the Sky Screen's display of the Super Divine Artifacts had been only the first slap delivered to the world's arrogant and ignorant;
the true thunder of the Heavenly Dao Will had only just bared its savage fangs at those who challenged it!
Rumble!
Before the world could calm its pounding hearts after the shock of the two Super Divine Artifacts, the space law of the entire Douluo Plane began to wail violently without warning!
Above the nine heavens, the purple-gold divine river that had surged like a waterfall at the center froze completely.
Then it collapsed with a thunderous crash and reformed into an ancient Bronze Execution Ground suspended upside down atop the vast reaches of the void!
In that instant, whether on the ancient snowfields of the bitterly cold Far North, on Spirit Hall's Papal Mountain, in Heaven Dou Imperial City, or in the Star Luo Throne Hall,
or even on the Sun Moon Continent beyond the ocean and among the Deep-Sea Behemoths tens of thousands of feet below the surface... hundreds of millions of living beings throughout the Douluo Plane!
They felt their souls suddenly sink, their knees weakening as they were forced, all at once, to raise their heads toward the heavens!
The void tore open like a painted scroll, revealing a deep celestial chasm stretching a thousand miles.
An execution instrument tens of thousands of feet tall, formed entirely from the plane's will, slowly descended from the storm of chaos!
It was an ancient set of Heaven and Earth Execution Shackles spanning the cosmos!
Its entire surface bore the color of chaos, with tens of thousands of divine chains coiled around it, burning with crimson-gold tribulation flames;
and suspended upside down at the very top of the Heaven and Earth Execution Shackles hung the Heaven-Cleaving Great Axe, thousands of feet long, its edge streaming with the tribulation light of judgment!
The great axe had no sharpened edge, yet it radiated a chilling murderous intent capable of cutting even Deities in half at the waist!
Before Spirit Hall's Worship Hall, Qian Daoliu's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
The Angel Holy Sword in his hand trembled violently. Beneath the pressure of this execution instrument, he was as insignificant as an ant or a speck of dust;
before the Papal Hall, Bibi Dong's scepter sank deep into the flagstones, her beautiful eyes filled with disbelief.
This was no projection! It was an instrument of law and punishment condensed by the Heavenly Dao! It was going to carry out an execution from afar! Whose lifeline was it going to sever?!
Before anyone could react, the hundreds of millions of lightning talismans on the Heaven and Earth Execution Shackles suddenly blazed!
Clatter!
Thousands of Karmic Law Chains, each as thick as a mountain, pierced the void, crossed ocean storms spanning tens of millions of miles, and plunged with unerring precision into the very heart of Sea God Island's earth vein!
Before you continue