This punch was slow, and light.
So slow that the vicious grin had not yet faded from Li Mo's face; so light that it seemed like nothing more than a casual wave of the hand.
There was no roar of wind and thunder, no howl of force.
Even the signature pale golden glow around Lu Shaoyou's fist had been restrained to the utmost, almost impossible to detect.
"Is that all?"
Li Mo froze for a moment, then burst into even more disdainful laughter.
"Lu Shaoyou, were you scared stupid? You're not even using a weapon—you want to scratch my itch with that limp fist?"
Within the forbidden grounds, Xue Yugang also frowned. "What is he trying to do? Has he given up resisting?"
Only Xue Yutang, in the blood pool, had a trace of inexplicable unease flash through his crazed eyes.
However, in the next instant.
The laughter stopped abruptly.
Time seemed to have had its pause button pressed at that very moment.
There was no earthshaking explosion, no world-destroying blaze of light.
Everything happened in utter silence.
The enormous blood-red demonic shadow hovering above Blood Saber Peak, linked to the essence blood and souls of thirty-six Innate experts and the mountain's earth veins, had its wild roar frozen upon its face.
Then, fine cracks began to spread—not across its surface, but from within, from its core, without any warning.
Crack... crack-crack...
The crisp sounds of shattering were especially piercing in the deathly still air.
The Blood Shadow Array, indestructible enough to withstand Lu Shaoyou's staff strike carrying twelvefold Dragon-Elephant Power, was like porcelain smashed from the inside. In an instant, it collapsed completely, turning into blood-colored motes of light that scattered into the wind.
But that was only the beginning.
The true horror descended upon Blood Saber Peak.
Starting from the mountain gate, an invisible, terrifying shockwave raced along the earth veins and spread madly into the depths of the mountain.
Wherever it passed, hard stone, century-old trees, imposing buildings... everything material was utterly broken down, disintegrated, and annihilated at its most fundamental structural level by an invisible and bizarre force!
Boom—rumble—!
The delayed thunderous roar finally shook heaven and earth.
Before the utterly horrified, ghost-struck gazes of Li Mo, Xue Yutang, and Xue Yugang—
The mountain gate of the Blood Saber Sect, which had dominated Azure Province for centuries—Blood Saber Peak.
Its towering gate, steep cliffs, and sprawling palaces... nearly half the mountaintop collapsed and disintegrated before their eyes like a castle piled from sand, silently becoming dust that filled the sky!
Dust soared into the heavens, blotting out the clouds and sun!
The thirty-five Blood Shadow Guards serving as the array's nodes did not even have time to cry out before they turned to dust along with the collapsing mountain.
Slaughter Value +5000! Slaughter Value +5000!
A string of system notifications crazily flooded across Lu Shaoyou's mind.
The dust gradually dispersed.
What had once been the entrance to Blood Saber Peak had now become an enormous, smooth fault line.
Lu Shaoyou withdrew his fist and stood quietly at the edge of the fault, his robes snapping in the wind like a god or devil.
At the far end of the collapsed area opposite him, a lone figure knelt there, trembling as if sieved by chaff.
It was Li Mo.
When Lu Shaoyou unleashed the Dragon-Elephant Mountain Collapse Strike, he had precisely controlled its range and deliberately spared Li Mo's life.
"No... impossible... this can't be possible..."
Li Mo muttered in a daze. He could neither comprehend nor accept what had happened before his eyes.
One punch.
Just one punch.
The impregnable Blood Shadow Array.
Had broken.
Even Blood Saber Peak had collapsed.
Everything he had been so proud of, his final hope for revenge, was as fragile as a joke before that punch.
Fear, like an endless tide, drowned his reason and washed away the final dam in his heart, the one supported by hatred.
He raised his head and watched Lu Shaoyou slowly approach. That figure expanded endlessly in his pupils, like a Death God walking out of hell.
His instinct to survive made him howl desperately.
"Don't kill me! Don't kill me! I was wrong! I was really wrong!"
He crawled backward on hands and feet, tears and snot streaming down his face in utter misery.
"Please, spare me! I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"
Yet Lu Shaoyou's steps did not pause in the slightest before his pleas.
Just as Li Mo sank completely into despair and believed himself doomed beyond doubt.
He suddenly realized that the fear in his heart was slowly fading.
He looked at his own neither-human-nor-ghost appearance, then at the half-collapsed mountain.
Feeling the strength draining from his body, an unprecedented exhaustion and weariness surged into his heart.
He suddenly stopped crawling.
He came to a halt, raised his head, and looked at Lu Shaoyou with an expression of release. In a hoarse voice, he said, "Kill me."
"Give me a quick death."
He did not want to keep living in this ugly state.
At this moment, death instead became a lavish release.
"A quick death?"
Lu Shaoyou stopped in front of him.
He looked down at Li Mo, and suddenly smiled.
There was not a trace of warmth in that smile, only endless coldness and mockery.
"You want a quick death?"
His father Lu Dahai's honest, simple figure flashed through his mind.
The dying wails of the Lu Family Village villagers seemed to echo in his ears once more.
The desperate, hollow eyes of those girls who had been violated to death by the bandits of Black Wind Village, their corpses hung from the rafters, clearly appeared before him.
"Did they... want to live?"
"Did the more than three hundred people of my Lu Family Village want to live?"
"Did you give them a quick death?"
Lu Shaoyou's voice was terrifyingly calm, but every word was like a heavy hammer striking Li Mo's heart.
Li Mo's face instantly turned pale as paper.
"No... I..."
He wanted to argue, but he could not utter a single word.
Lu Shaoyou slowly raised his right hand. His fingers were long, and pale golden Dragon-Elephant true qi condensed at his fingertips into strands of blades thin as cicada wings and incomparably sharp.
"My father was hacked to death by a rain of blades."
"The women in the village suffered every humiliation before they died."
"So..."
The smile on Lu Shaoyou's face grew ever colder.
"You should experience it properly too."
As his words fell, he swept his five fingers through the air.
Screech, screech, screech—!
Countless faint sounds of tearing through the air rang out.
Li Mo did not even feel pain at first. He only saw fine sprays of blood bursting from his body one after another.
His clothes were instantly sliced into strips.
Then came his skin, his muscles, his fascia...
Under the torture of countless razor-sharp blades formed from Dragon-Elephant true qi, the flesh on his body was stripped away piece by piece, thread by thread, with precise care.
Yet every vital point was skillfully avoided, keeping him fully conscious to experience this ultimate agony.
"Aah—!"
A shriek so miserable it no longer sounded human finally erupted from Li Mo's throat, echoing across the devastated wilderness.
He wanted to pass out, only to find that his mind had never been clearer.
He wanted to die, yet lacked even the strength to bite through his tongue.
He could only watch helplessly as he was scraped alive, blade after blade, into a blood-drenched skeleton.
No one knew how long passed before the screams gradually weakened.
Only a pale skeleton remained, kneeling there alone.
Lu Shaoyou slowly stepped forward and looked at the skull still bearing pain and despair.
He stretched out his right hand, curled his fingers into a claw, and gently pressed it against the crown of that skull.
"The vengeance of Lu Family Village has been avenged."
Crack!
A crisp sound rang out.
The skull shattered in response.
All sound stopped abruptly.
Before you continue