"What a miserable sight! The mighty Bone King Deity was strung up and beaten!"
"Strung up? It was pinned down and beaten!"
"I'd say it was tied up and beaten!"
"It snapped, it snapped... look, that rib snapped!"
"The strangling power of those vines is terrifying..."
"H-how did they get in through there? Such a disgrace, Elder Gong, such a disgrace!"
Watching the battle from afar, everyone alternated between elation, terror, and embarrassment so acute they could hardly bear to look.
In all fairness, the clash between the wood-ghost dharma form and the Bone King Deity was hardly pleasing to the eye. It could even be called ugly.
The two sides were not exchanging spells from a distance like normal cultivators, deploying wondrous divine abilities and countering each other with ease. Instead, they fought like street thugs, tangling together and tripping each other to the ground in a vicious brawl.
Yet this approach proved highly effective. Gong Chi had already roughly identified his opponent's weaknesses, so he began by crippling its mobility, then used the growing power of Wood Dao vines to keep stuffing his branches into its skeleton.
Once enormous vines had grown inside, they coiled like ropes and tightened relentlessly, strangling its bones until they snapped.
At the joints, the vines wound around and filled every gap, leaving no room for movement.
By now, the Bone King Deity could not move so much as an inch. The vines filling its joints were crushed again and again, only to grow back tougher. Some roots even forced its armor apart, stripping away that heavy defensive treasure.
Thus, the skeleton hidden within was dragged out and ground against the earth once more.
Cultivators of both the orthodox and unorthodox paths watched, dumbstruck.
The three Unorthodox Path Core Formation cultivators inside the