Ke the Thirteenth stood on the collapsed summit, staring hard at the Dao Palace overhead.

The new story of the great hall had taken full shape at last, and a sea of blood rolled up out of it, straight into the clouds.

The eighth layer of Return-to-Void!

Once it had made certain there were only these three great demons, Master had never once thought of running again.

It turned its gaze down the mountain.

The turtle-kin Third Uncle's head went flying sideways; the headless corpse knelt swaying, and as the blood sprayed out it toppled at last, with a thud, beneath that black shirt with its fluttering hem.

Wu Jun came down with a crash, steadied itself, and picked up the long saber from the ground in passing.

First it made a respectful salute to the young man, and only then turned its chill gaze on the two figures left in the sky, brushing the broken stone from its chest.

It was certainly short on experience, and one against three it had been played with like a toy.

But one on one, not a single one of these three old turtles was worth a look.

“Gulp.”

Great generals of the turtle army though they were, the two aged gold-veined turtle demons that remained felt their hearts drumming all the same.

By all ordinary reckoning, a demon matching the twelfth layer of Return-to-Void could all but snuff out a mere eighth-layer cultivator with a flick of the finger.

Only a true prodigy — an existence such as Su Yushang — with a Dao Palace of the highest quality and a deep mastery of numinous methods, had any possibility of killing across a gap in realms.

Even the most ordinary gift of numinous breath had the effect of swelling a technique's power enormously.

With something rarer, the immortal qi of the Azure Luan, or even the Primordial Purple Qi, a single strand was enough to crush an ordinary cultivator of the same realm and leave him in despair.

And this Dao Palace before them, with demon qi raging through it, had only…