Faced with so many black-shirted figures.

The nine water demons turned as though by instinct into their vast original shapes, each savage and dreadful face different from the rest — and every one of them wearing the same wariness!

Behavior of that sort certainly did not conform to the Seventh Dragon Grandson's order to seal the auras in.

After all, what they faced was no more than one Return-to-Void cultivator, and there was no need whatever to make a display like this.

“……” Watching earlier through the sword formation, across the far reach of water and land, Su Hongxiu had not seen so clearly.

Only now, come to the place herself, did she discover of a sudden that Shen Yi's realm was no more than the eighth layer of Return-to-Void.

Across a full four layers of realm, the man had killed that Crimson-Eyed Mysterious Phoenix a moment ago with his own hands.

She turned her eyes to look.

Above the empty ocean the nine water demons were all of them staring warily at nothing at all, as though they had seen something dreadful.

Heavenly Reckoning Forty-Nine?

As the Heaven-Sword Sect's Dao-son, Su Hongxiu had heard something of this numinous method.

But to wrap nine demons whose cultivation far outstripped his own into that method at the same time called for a very high attainment in Heavenly Reckoning Forty-Nine itself, quite apart from the considerable drain.

From this showing alone it could be reasoned out.

Shen Yi's attainment in the method had likely gone past Great Accomplishment already, and stood very near that state of Perfection.

So this was what it meant to carry the whole fortune of the Nanyang treasured site in one body.

A full hundred thousand years, and at last a cultivator of the human kind had opened the sect-guarding formation.

The man's coming into the world was very possibly the expression of the Nanyang treasured site's own remaining will — or even, perhaps, something that Dao-merging colossus had left behind?

That was the only explanation Su Hongxiu could think of.

RAAH—

In an instant the wild cry…