"Ah!"
Amid agonized screams, the entire expanse of heaven and earth centered on the flying boat was swallowed by flames and blinding light.
Wu Lu, Wu Chengzhou, and Star-Moon Fairy felt as though their entire bodies had been set ablaze.
Wu Lu, a protector from the Wu family who was little different from a rogue cultivator, was reduced to ash the instant the flames and scorching heat swept over him, despite his fourth-realm cultivation.
He never put up any meaningful struggle.
Of the remaining two, Wu Chengzhou was a favored son of heaven whom the Wu family considered "Unparalleled and Peerless" and had bestowed with a lifesaving talisman, while Star-Moon Fairy had fifth-realm true essence and a protective spell, allowing her to barely raise a shield of light, but...
It only prolonged their lives for an instant.
In what would likely be the blink of an eye, they would be burned to ashes just like Wu Lu and the others.
"No!"
Yet just as they sank completely into boundless despair...
The flames abruptly lost much of their power.
Through the suddenly dimmed radiance of the flames, they seemed, in their daze, to glimpse a black hole.
Countless rays bright enough to illuminate the night, shock waves capable of crushing fine gold, and raging flames that ignited the void became like a cataclysm of destruction subdued by a god before that black hole and the towering figure clad in Dark-Gold Armor within it. All were swallowed and extinguished by that darkness. Great Devouring Art!
That sixth-realm bandit cultivator himself knew that, with his supreme protective art, Li Xian would at most lose a chunk of flesh to his desperate final counterattack. Completely killing him with an attack whose energy was so dispersed would not be easy.
Burning jade and common stone