Jiang Qiulan fell partway through the air before finally managing to steady herself.
White mist had already begun spilling violently off her body — the telltale sign of a path infant collapsing.
Her eyes were calm, though a faint haze of disorientation lingered within them.
She forced herself upright, until the only thing left in her sight was the cloaked figure hanging in the air.
Cold light flared bright across her palm, and she made to charge forward once more.
Just then, a hand closed around the back of her collar.
“Go sit this one out.”
A familiar, indifferent voice sounded by her ear. Before Jiang Qiulan could even turn to look, she’d been tossed lightly away, down through the air.
Through her blurring vision, alongside Lady Qinghua’s figure, there now hung another, slighter silhouette — also clad in black, the whole of him wrapped in a thick wreath of red cloud.
The sky changed color.
The dark crimson demon clouds were swallowed whole in an instant before the surging scarlet that rolled in to meet them.
The young man stood with both feet planted on a sea of blood-soaked, malevolent cloud, a gold-traced black sheath at his waist, his blood-stained black robes billowing — every bit a vengeful god of slaughter.
In that instant, the entire city seemed to freeze in place.
Countless martial warriors watched, helpless, as their last hope was tossed casually aside, without so much as a chance to resist.
The hand Jiang Yuanhua had clenched around his sword’s hilt suddenly went slack.
He stared, dumbstruck, at the distant figure.
He should still be off intercepting the Howling Moon Demon King — it had only just been a little while since he himself had arrived…
Noticing the blood soaking Shen Yi’s robes, his pupils contracted sharply, and an unbelievable thought suddenly took shape in his mind.
At the gate of the Li residence, everyone, the Ancestor included, stood frozen and numb. One savage demon had already been enough to chill them to the bone — and now, somehow, here was a second.
Just then, the eldest young master of the household let out a bellow at the gate, sounding for all the world like a fool. “It’s Commander Shen! That demon is Commander Shen!”
Li Mujin froze for a moment, baffled, unable to tell at first whether the shout had come from excitement or sheer terror.
“…”
Lady Qinghua turned her gaze to the striking young man.
For a moment, she couldn’t tell friend from foe.
If he were an enemy, how was she to explain demon power filling the sky like this?
And if he were a friend… that red glow rising beneath his skin was unmistakably a sign exclusive to the Mixed Origin realm. And that flat, indifferent look he’d turned on her — why did it set her so on edge, leaving her with the unsettling sense she’d been seen straight through?
And of course, there was one more thing Lady Qinghua simply couldn’t make sense of.
Why, of all places, would her son have chosen somewhere like this as the territory for his new kingship — a single Martial Immortal, two Mixed Origin cultivators, and this was nothing more than some out-of-the-way backwater province.
Sensing the sheer overwhelming presence before her, a thread of hesitation rose, for the first time, in the depths of Lady Qinghua’s heart.
Just then, under her watching eyes—
—a set of floating bronze armor abruptly materialized around Shen Yi, encircling his entire body, every bit the picture of imposing majesty.
Bloodshot threads spread abruptly through Lady Qinghua’s eyes.
If the Red Cloud hadn’t seemed especially unusual — plenty of demon kings kept similar treasures on hand — this armor was another matter entirely. She herself had traded for it, personally, from another demon king.
“…”
Shen Yi glanced over at the broken parasol and snapped hilt floating beside her.
He had never had the chance to show off his own arsenal to someone before.
With that thought, he casually called out a bronze mirror as well. The mirror swelled with the wind, soon hanging in the sky like a great sun.
“Hah…”
Lady Qinghua closed her eyes, her flawless, ageless beauty dimming with something like despair, a trail of tears tracing down the corner of her eye.
This was her own vanity mirror — it had kept her company through countless days and nights, once. Now it was turned back on her, and a faint light fell down from it.
If she didn’t kill this wretch, the hatred lodged in her heart would never be put to rest, not for all eternity!
“I’ll—”
Shen Yi seized her elegant coil of hair and drove a vicious knee straight into her cheek!
Closing your eyes mid-fight — did she think this was some opera the two of them were putting on together?
The Lady’s jaw shattered instantly under the blow — backed not only by the full force of his Heaven-Devouring path infant, but also by the Mixed-Origin-tempered body forged from the fused Immortal-Demon Nine Transformations, all nine immortal-demon spirits roaring unrestrained!
Since this called for close-quarters fighting, the bronze mirror only used its faint light to slow Lady Qinghua’s movements, withholding its blazing pillar of light.
Meridian-Severing Dragon Capture!
Shen Yi’s fists carried the force to topple mountains; his legs lashed out like a fiend dragon’s whipping tail.
In an instant, blow after blow struck the major meridians across Lady Qinghua’s body.
Before the agony could even fade, a numbing weakness spread through her entire body, and combined with the bronze mirror treasure’s restraint, she knew exactly how she ought to block — and yet her movements remained, every single time, a fraction too slow.
“Meridian-Severing Dragon Capture?”
Jiang Yuanhua, sword in hand, had thought to seize the chance for a sneak attack on the demon — but the instant he made his move, a casual glance from the young man stopped him cold.
He stared on, stunned, a strange sense of familiarity rising in him.
As the very creator of this technique, he had never once imagined it could work against a demon king… a body that formidable should never have had its meridians sealed by something as ordinary as a strike.
This could only mean that the power packed into Shen Yi’s seemingly careless punches was something he himself could not begin to comprehend.
And right now, that very force was being unleashed onto Lady Qinghua’s body in full, brutal measure.
“Wait a moment!”
Lady Qinghua bit down, fury clenched in her jaw — and the next instant, that even row of white teeth was smashed apart by a single punch.
Knee strikes pounded into her stomach without pause, as though meaning to shake every organ in her body to pieces.
The two of them fought their way clear from the city’s east side to its west.
Lady Qinghua was battered all the way along like a torn sack of grain.
Beneath Shen Yi’s dark crimson-stained black robes, his body seemed to hold an inexhaustible well of force, one that no amount of use could ever drain dry.
The instant his path infant showed the faintest sign of weakening, he simply burned through a year’s worth of banked demon lifespan and digested another drop of demon blood.
“Gulp.”
The Li clan’s Ancestor swallowed hard. If the earlier battle between the General and his disciple against the demon had been the kind he couldn’t have intervened in even if he’d tried, then the scene playing out in the sky now was one he was genuinely afraid to even approach — afraid that the young man’s punches, however casually thrown, might shatter him with nothing more than their stray windblast.
This demon really could take a beating…
“WAIT A MOMENT!!”
Lady Qinghua finally let loose a furious roar, her black cloak falling away, the clothes across her body tearing apart, and her true, massive demon form burst into view all at once.
It was a yellow ox with short horns, bright crimson patterns running across its hide, red mist coiling around all four hooves.
Roughly thirty zhang in length, unmistakably a bull — and yet its mouth was packed full of jagged fangs.
The terrifying force in this young man combined a Mixed Origin Grandmaster’s overwhelming cultivation with a body savage enough to rival any demon’s, and it left her no choice but to take an enormous risk — revealing her true demon form, conspicuous as it was, just to stand a chance against him.
“…”
Shen Yi casually scooped up the fallen cloak and tucked it into his storage treasure. A hoof came stamping down with crushing weight; he caught it on his forearm, and beneath that vast, smashing force, the bronze armguard there was blasted clean off — and at last, even his Nine-Transformations-fortified body had its defenses broken through.
The hoof crushed the flesh on his arm to ruin, exposing the blood-red path infant beneath.
Shen Yi didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow. The peacock-bright crimson glow swept over the wound at once, and before the bull demon had even drawn its hoof back, the injury had already healed over good as new.
In the patterns across her hide, he caught a familiar taste.
That was the taste of demon blood.
Forging demon bone, casting a body of demonic blood… so that was what it meant.
Shen Yi seized the bull demon by the narrow joint of its leg, his whole body surging with force in an instant, swung the massive creature in a full horizontal arc, and hurled it up into the sky.
The sheer horror of the sight left everyone watching shaken, scalps prickling.
The next instant, they saw the young man’s figure turn into a streak of light and shoot after it.
With Deep Abyss as his blade, he drove clean through the bull demon’s hide with a single wet thrust, plunging into its body, then tore a mass of its innards out through its own spine.
All that was left across the whole of Qingzhou City was the bull demon’s wretched, agonized howl.
“AAAAAH!!”
(End of Chapter)