Death Demon Cavern, Cliffside Cave Abode on the lowest level.
Night deepened, and the entire underground Demon Domain sank into boundless darkness.
The pitch-black demonic energy that churned year-round seemed suppressed by an invisible force and quietly subsided. Even the usual fighting among prisoners and howls of monsters fell utterly silent.
Inside the dwelling, layer upon layer of restrictions securely shut out the dangers outside.
Shiheng sat upright on a stone couch, his aura withdrawn. Everything he had accumulated through forty years of arduous cultivation lay hidden deep within his body and Divine Soul. He looked unremarkable, but his normal combat strength had long since reached the absolute limit of a Six-Star Fiend.
Ryder and Linor had already withdrawn to a side chamber, quietly contemplating their future paths of cultivation.
The entire dwelling was peaceful and still, the only sanctuary within this cage of despair.
Shiheng's eyes were lightly closed, his mind turned inward as he silently honed his Death Law, which had already reached its limit.
After forty years lying low in the Demonic Grotto, he had developed his Death Law to the forty-second level, only eight levels away from breaking his shackles and becoming a Highgod. His Death Law was far ahead, while his Life Law was above the nineteenth level but short of the twentieth-not even at the Midgod level-and severely dragged down his strength.
But the Demonic Grotto was filled with death energy, and its Life Law was incomplete, almost entirely buried beneath death energy and difficult to perceive. Without an extraordinary treasure to aid him, no amount of arduous cultivation and refinement could budge that final barrier.
Just then, without any warning, a vast, boundless, invisible pressure gently enveloped the whole of Broken Cliff Valley.
That pressure was neither brutal nor murderous, yet carried the