"Want to try?"
The purple-robed elder chuckled softly and gave the chain in his hand a slight shake.
Clatter-
The air along the entire riverbank instantly tightened like a bowstring drawn to its limit.
The gray-robed elder raised his bone staff. The dark red crystal at its tip pulsed with a thump, sending rings of blood-red ripples through the surrounding space.
Both struck at once.
The chain swept through the air, cutting off Qi Wu's escape routes on either side.
The bone staff struck the ground, and a blood-red spell formation burst from beneath him, climbing like a living creature to swallow him whole.
Two against one.
Their coordination was exceptionally practiced.
Had this been Qi Wu a few hours earlier, he would indeed have needed to pick their attack apart carefully.
But now...
He merely lifted his eyelids.
"That's it?"
He raised his foot and took a step forward.
As that step landed...
Malevolent Shrine unfolded.
There was no expanding light, no complicated activation.
The world seemed to have been "switched directly into another mode."
The riverbank vanished.
The Demons vanished.
The chain vanished.
The blood formation vanished as well.
Only a pure-white "processing space" remained.
For the first time, the purple-robed elder's expression changed.
"A domain overwrite?!"
He was just about to retreat.
But his body had already stopped obeying him.
It felt as though his bones had been dismantled into their most fundamental structural units, which began shifting out of alignment.
The gray-robed elder reacted a moment faster, violently driving his bone staff into the ground.
"Blood Domain: Reverse Devouring!"
The blood-red spell formation surged, attempting to contaminate the domain in turn.
The next second...
Qi Wu snapped his fingers softly.
"Dismantle."
Click.
It sounded like a stove being switched off in a kitchen.
The blood domain