"Boom!"
The vast grassland had been utterly silent, its murderous dangers hidden beneath the stillness. Then, with a thunderous crash, countless blades of grass and clods of earth shot skyward from a sunken patch of ground below.
The lush green turf vanished, replaced by a crater hundreds of yards across. As Li Yan swiftly dodged aside, his expression filled with startled uncertainty, he saw an enormous white sphere of light and two figures shoot into the sky.
They separated and hovered in three different positions. The enormous white sphere flew farther away from the two figures, putting several hundred yards between them, while the other two hovered facing each other, only a few dozen yards apart.
Both cultivators looked like young men of twenty-four or twenty-five. One wore purple robes, his features handsome and refined.
With one hand half-raised, he supported a golden tower about seven inches tall, which flashed ceaselessly with golden light. Rings of golden radiance spread from it, twisting the surrounding void beyond recognition.
Amid those ripples of distorted space, even the Purple-Robed Youth holding the tower blurred and warped repeatedly. Had he not restrained its power, this entire patch of heaven and earth might have been torn into a realm of spatial turbulence!
The other was a youth in long yellow robes, equally striking in appearance. A faint yellow glow flowed over his skin. In one hand, he pinched a paper talisman covered in ancient red seal-script characters; in the other, he carried a melon-headed hammer.
The hammerhead was oval, roughly the size of an infant's head, but its handle was exceptionally long. It looked as though a green melon had been stuck onto the end of half a spear, making for a rather peculiar shape.
Once the Yellow-Robed Youth planted his feet in the void,