Nobody had expected Shen Yi to move first.

Both hands closed on Erhei. The dark luminescence along the blade faded quickly, replaced by something deeper — a black that seemed to swallow the light around it.

The first full-force strike since crossing into Jade Liquid Perfection.

The Devouring Wolf Demon-Slayer, refined to its ultimate expression, bolstered by a cultivation level it had never had before — the edge it showed was something entirely new.

Clang—

The blade came down hard. None of the vast, world-filling presence the sword qi had carried. No sound to speak of. Just the purest form of sharp.

The caiman’s anger had put it on guard already, but for a bladework technique like this, there was nothing to raise its vigilance against.

Until the dark blade drew close — a cold sensation shot from the soles of its feet to the crown of its skull. Alarm crossed its face. It planted one foot and drove a scale-covered elbow into the blade’s path.

Flesh against steel.

Crack. Crack.

Not the sound of cutting. Not the ring of metal on metal.

The scales along the caiman’s arm stood up all at once, each one curving into a small blade-like ridge.

Erhei didn’t reach skin. Instead it scraped across the surface and took a layer of scales with it.

Using that fraction of a second, the caiman twisted. Its wide robe flared, and from beneath it, a thick, powerful tail swung out — cast like something forged from steel, aimed at the young man’s arm.

A prepared killing stroke, hidden until the moment to use it.

Shen Yi’s eyes cooled. The bladework at Perfection opened and closed freely.

He cut again before the breath had finished.

At the last instant, the steel-hard tail went soft.

The brute force had been misdirection — it never intended to test itself against the blade. The tail simply wound around Shen Yi’s arm.

Then the scales stood up.

Rip.

Three killing opportunities concealed in a single turn.

The silk sleeve tore. A few dark patches appeared.

The caiman’s expression was not pleased.

What covered it was scales steeped in a thousand years of qi — they looked like ordinary scales but had long since been refined into a comprehensive defensive and offensive armor. They were among the most precious things it possessed.

And in a single exchange, that strange dark blade had taken several dozen of them. The loss was considerable.

Skin and flesh? Not remotely comparable.

Fury blazed in the caiman’s eyes. It drove its force outward, intending to shred the arm in its grip entirely while it had the chance.

Then it noticed Shen Yi’s palm had opened.

Five fingers closed around the tail.

“You dare test your strength against mine?”

The caiman registered the intention and felt two things at once — amusement, and the specific outrage of being challenged.

If practitioners could match demons in raw physical confrontation, nobody would bother developing techniques.

The thought hadn’t finished—

Its entire field of vision inverted.

Shen Yi, gripping the crocodilian tail, simply lifted the demon into the air and threw it.

Without any particular effort.

Bang.

The caiman tumbled, rough claws raking furrows into the stone ground.

It shook its flat head. Both protruding eyes were briefly unfocused.

Then something seemed to occur to it. Its head came up. Its whole face filled with excitement.

It had assumed the young man had absorbed only a trace of the flood dragon’s bloodline by accident. But — this — this absorption was complete.

“Raaahh!“

Both eyes went red. It crouched and roared.

The excited, piercing sound carried — and drew the attention of the other side of the field.

In the moment Shen Yi had moved—

The two dozen golden-eagle Commanders threw their chains simultaneously, catching the Elder of Fury Sword in the mesh.

The Demon Suppression Formation wasn’t purely a martial technique. Beyond the forms involved, the chains’ material was the real mechanism — they impeded the flow of qi to a significant degree.

Provided you could get them on.

The formation’s anchor position — the spot Zhao Kanglin should have occupied — was filled by Hong Lei.

The coordination was poor. Calling it each person fighting their own battle wouldn’t have been entirely wrong.

The Outer Division Commanders were in a similar position — not naturally suited to joint combat to begin with, and these were people pulled temporarily from different units, who had been working together for a handful of days and didn’t fully know what the person beside them was capable of.

Under these conditions, the Threshold Realm Commanders couldn’t get close enough to contribute. They were more likely to make things worse.

With those factors in play, the elder with his five-foot sword moved through them like something large entering somewhere small.

Hong Lei’s foundations ran deep — he didn’t know how to work with the formation, but he understood which parts of it the elder was wary of, and used that slim advantage to barely hold on.

The elder was clearly operating through a secret technique — burning life force, temporarily restoring peak power, a peak that hadn’t even been fully achieved — and his qi was visibly weakening with each passing moment.

Three more incense sticks worth of time, and the problem would solve itself.

The question was how many more people would die in that interval.

And the more pressing question: behind him, Shen Yi was dealing with a Jade Liquid Perfection demon. However strong he was — for how long?

The silver-haired elder swung his sword at intervals, each arc releasing dense sword qi. Hong Lei could avoid it. The golden-eagle Commanders holding chains couldn’t, and Hong Lei couldn’t afford to watch the formation collapse, so he had no choice but to absorb it.

Countless poisoned projectiles streaked toward the elder.

He didn’t dodge. He let them sink in and brushed them off.

Lethal toxins held no terror for a man already dying. They were less interesting than the caiman’s roar.

The elder looked back.

The demon’s blue-white robe had been torn to pieces — clearly the impact had roused something in it — and its footsteps were making the ground faintly tremble.

Across from it, Shen Yi had slowly lowered Erhei.

“Mm?”

Something puzzled moved through the elder’s clouded eyes.

The young man’s qi was steady and deep — nowhere near exhausted. Why put the blade away?

Then Shen Yi answered with movement instead of words.

He raised his palm.

In the still night air, points of crimson appeared — strange, wrong-looking, the killing intent spreading outward until the space around them looked like something had been set alight from beneath.

The elder’s grip tightened on the long sword. The stillness he’d cultivated over three centuries shifted, just slightly.

He had seen something like this before. It was a technique the Qingzhou General had used constantly in her youth — called the Four Harmonies True Astral Force, and it had built her name across all of Qingzhou.

One of five ultimate techniques, each one said to overwhelm any opponent at the same cultivation level.

But even the General in her prime — her astral force had never been this dense. Hadn’t carried this bone-cold killing edge. Certainly hadn’t had this crimson, demonic wrongness running through it.

He found it difficult to imagine what it would feel like to stand beneath that rain of blood-corruption astral force.

“Aoooh!“

The storm came down — every thread finding its mark on the caiman’s body with complete precision.

A thousand-year demon from the Yangchun River was being driven backward by the impacts, the vivid flame of corruption eating through the armor it prized most, covering it almost instantly.

Only a sound remained on the field that put a tremor through every chest present.

Then the young man, who had been standing with his arms lowered, turned and looked over here.

And raised his palm again.

“…”

The Elder of Fury Sword looked up at the points of crimson gathering above his own head. Waiting.

The cloudiness in his eyes deepened.

His hand gave out. The five-foot sword touched the ground with a clean, single ring.

It wasn’t fear. It was just that nothing had any purpose anymore.

Under that astral force, the three incense sticks’ worth of time he’d spent days working and bleeding to secure—

had become slightly redundant.

(End of Chapter)