The Cloudscattering Longfist at full Perfection.

Driven by five open apertures at the Threshold Realm, the breath of heaven and earth coated Shen Yi’s fists — and every strike landed like it was trying to shake the Yellow King’s flesh and organs completely apart.

“Come on then! That’s more like it!”

The Yellow King bared its teeth. As its body slowly contracted, the crimson death-energy swelled to fill the gap — blooming outward until it covered a radius of more than thirty feet.

Nothing within that range escaped the corrosion.

This was exactly why it hadn’t used the technique immediately. Once the red fog settled, everything living inside it died. Only a practitioner who had crossed into genuine transcendence could use the breath of heaven and earth to hold it off — and even then, only for a time.

In that kind of contest, the only question was whose reserves ran deeper.

The moment Shen Yi had drawn his blade, the Yellow King had read his cultivation level. Surprised, yes — but it didn’t believe for a moment that someone this new to transcendence could have built deeper reserves than a century of its own accumulated essence.

Then Shen Yi threw his fortieth punch, and the force behind it hadn’t diminished at all.

His breathing was steady. The white mist clinging to him looked thin — always just on the verge of being eaten through by the red — yet it kept rising, replenishing, constant.

The Yellow King’s pupils contracted. Something uncertain entered its expression for the first time.

It had miscalculated something.

“You—”

A fist broke through the golden fur like puncturing an empty balloon.

Beneath all those layered folds of skin, the flesh inside had been consumed down to nothing. What remained was a hollow sack stretched over bones.

“Spare me!” The Yellow King’s voice cracked into something that had never been in it before — genuine fear.

Shen Yi pulled his hand free from the ruin of its organs without hurry, found the hilt again, worked the blade loose from where the bones had clamped around it, and brought it down in one clean stroke.

【Greater Demon slain — Dog Demon, early Threshold Realm. Total Lifespan: 575 years. Remaining: 180 years. Absorbed.】

The crimson fog lost its center. It began to drift, thinning, unraveling.

The villagers crouched in the distance — and for the first time, something moved behind their clouded eyes. A barely visible anxiety, watching and waiting.

Then the young man stepped out of the fading red.

His fingers — long, steady — slid the blade home. His hair was loose around his face. The composure was still there, but tiredness had settled into it, and his breathing had lost the perfect evenness it had carried coming in. His back was straight regardless.

Behind him, the towering body — now nothing but a hide stretched over a skeleton — toppled like a felled tree.

On the dirt path between Baiyun County and Liuli Temple village.

Chen Ji had his hand wrapped around the old donkey’s neck and was doing his best not to lose his mind.

Clerk Liu wasn’t a senior official in any formal sense — but one word from the man, and every last constable in the criminal division had fallen into line without question.

Chen Ji had rushed home to settle his sister, then decided to come anyway. Alone.

He watched the donkey amble along without a care in the world, smacked it once across the flank in frustration, and swung himself off. He pushed into a movement technique — still not quite second nature — and covered the remaining ground on foot.

Before long, the smell hit him.

Chen Ji’s face went still. His hand moved on instinct to his scabbard. Something in his gut had already guessed, and his legs had developed a faint, involuntary tremor.

His heart clenched with dread. A vision assembled itself unbidden — bodies, blood, the worst version of what could be waiting.

He set his jaw and ran.

“…”

A few moments later: cook smoke rising above the rooftops.

Two villagers crossed the paddy path ahead. They noticed him, looked over, and after a pause, managed something approximating a smile — stiff and unpracticed, as if the expression hadn’t been used in a while.

Chen Ji’s instinct was to smile back. His mouth wouldn’t cooperate.

He stared at what the two men were carrying between them: a thick, fur-covered leg, the hair matted with dried blood. Dead for a while, by the look of it.

“The constable said we could have what we wanted,” one of the villagers said, swallowing. “Put the rest on the cart for him.”

Chen Ji went completely quiet.

The constable. Which constable. The only one in Baiyun County with any business being out here right now.

But what had actually happened?

He couldn’t make it add up. He nodded to the two men and kept moving.

The familiar silhouette appeared ahead of him.

Not the brutal aftermath he’d been bracing for.

Shen Yi was sitting on the edge of a paddy embankment, a cluster of half-grown children crowded around him, carefully touching his saber with the reverence of people handling something sacred.

A few dozen villagers were wading through the churned-up mud, pulling demon bodies free — the same focused energy one might bring to a harvest, occasional bursts of satisfaction when an arm or a leg came up intact.

Blood and quiet contentment, side by side, occupying the same scene. The combination was profoundly strange.

Chen Ji didn’t entirely know how he’d crossed the distance to Shen Yi’s side.

“The demons,” he heard himself say, distantly. “Where are they?”

Shen Yi looked up with mild surprise, as if he hadn’t expected Chen Ji to show. “Dealt with.”

Chen Ji felt a strange sense of recognition.

That was exactly what Shen Yi had said about the ape demons.

He raised one shaking finger toward the nearby stretch of ground saturated dark red, and fought back the wave of nausea riding the stench. “You call this… dealt with?”

This was the western outskirts. A step beyond that tree line was the Yellow King’s territory.

Shen Yi was standing here in the middle of a field of slaughtered demons. That left exactly two possibilities: either the Yellow King had abandoned its territory — or it was part of the field.

The second option defied imagination. But compared to the first, which was simply absurd, Chen Ji could only keep repeating it to himself until it started feeling real.

Two, three days ago, this man had been a thorough and practiced villain.

And then, in what felt like no time at all, he’d swept away the Yellow King and its entire lineage.

When it came to patience — to playing a role, enduring, waiting for the right moment — Chen Ji had to admit: he was not even in the same conversation.

“Come help load the bodies. Time to head back.”

A willing pair of hands had arrived — no sense wasting them.

Shen Yi extended his palm. The children wiped the fingerprints off his scabbard on their own clothes with solemn care, then placed it back in his hand. They grinned up at him, gap-toothed. “Safe travels, sir.”

He re-sheathed the saber and got to his feet, closing the panel as he rose.

【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 672 years】

Twelve prime Dog Demons, plus the Yellow King’s contribution of a hundred and eighty years. What Shen Yi was sitting on now was substantial enough to be almost unsettling.

And there was one additional thing he’d found unexpectedly.

When his punches had finally broken through the Yellow King’s organs, he’d felt something that didn’t belong — a lump roughly the size of an egg, buried among the wreckage. Far tougher than any of the surrounding tissue. Under the force of those strikes, it had kept pulsing as if alive, resisting.

More importantly: it carried the same quality of energy that Shen Yi had been craving since the moment he first crossed into the Threshold Realm.

He’d pulled it free and wrapped it in a piece of rough cloth.

This was his first real battle against a genuine Greater Demon.

The sentient Dog Demons — they could live a century or two, and their bodies were formidable — but in substance, they weren’t so different from people. Stronger, crueler, but operating on similar principles.

The Yellow King was something else.

That crimson death-energy was effectively a death sentence for soldiers and constables. Touch it and die. Arrows fired from a distance would struggle to penetrate the layers of fat and hide. To inflict meaningful damage, you’d need a heavy siege crossbow at minimum.

And that was before accounting for the fact that despite its size, the creature covered thirty feet in two or three steps.

A being that was essentially an unsolvable problem for ordinary people.

And it had only been at the early stage of the Threshold Realm.

(End of Chapter)