Useless. Useless!!
The White Deer screamed inwardly. That cursed woman had said one incense stick, and she’d meant exactly that.
Worthless Junior Demon King. Calling itself a king with this level of ability.
It had been dissatisfied for some time — passed over by the Howling Moon — and had reached out to this rising outsider, hoping that when the Junior Demon King truly claimed a throne, there might be an honored founding position in it.
Right now the White Deer wanted to strangle that stupid bull with its own hands.
“…”
Watching the young man release the bowstring, it slammed a hoof down and unleashed its divine ability.
White mist erupted outward in every direction, blanketing a hundred li in an instant.
The Solar-Splitting Bow sent another brilliant white arc through it — and then vanished without a trace.
Shen Yi found himself enveloped in white mist. He didn’t panic.
Both eyes swept the surroundings with their new sharp clarity, cutting straight through the fog.
What he saw made him faintly puzzled.
The dark Xitai Mountain had become something like an immortal’s paradise. White jade paving underfoot. Golden-branched peach trees. Cranes drifting through cloud. Pleasant celestial music drifted past, and the fragrance of heavenly wine filled the air.
It had the quality of something designed to dull alertness — to quietly loosen the mind’s grip on what had been happening before, to make a person forget.
A bathing pool of white rounded stones steamed gently, and within it, shapes moved as if celestial maidens were at play.
“An illusion realm?”
Shen Yi considered briefly, put away the bow, and drew Erhei.
A core-nurturing demon lord having something like this as a survival tool was reasonable enough.
Red mist rose in his eyes. The violent, killing quality of the emotion dispersed whatever faint haze had tried to settle. The Heavenly Demon external pill’s savage demon force surged through every limb.
He observed calmly.
If this was an illusion, there was a follow-up move waiting. His job was to catch that opening and land the decisive blow.
As if confirming the thought — the steaming pool erupted with a splash and a tinkling laugh.
Three shapes in sheer gauze stepped out of the water.
Shen Yi’s expression went immediately peculiar.
A white deer was waving a pink length of gauze, holding a demon core in the other hand, fluttering its eyelashes at him with practiced coyness.
Behind it: a massive bull demon, gauze stretched taut across densely muscled shoulders, and a gaunt old dog demon — both wearing expressions of demure bashfulness, each half-hiding a demon core near the chest.
“That’s not—”
The coldness that came into Shen Yi’s eyes was very calm. He tightened his grip on the scabbard with quiet deliberateness.
He’d anticipated that a demon might try some variation of this approach.
But wasn’t this going a bit far.
In the fog — the actual White Deer was staring with eyes about to crack open.
This divine ability could draw out the deepest desire in any person’s heart. Young men — there was always something there, and even the most upright of them carried some lingering image in the depths. That was why it had chosen the celestial pond.
Fine. Even accepting the absolute worst case — the young man had no reaction at all, the illusion did nothing, that was survivable.
What the White Deer could not begin to comprehend was how it had ended up in the pool itself.
“YOU HAVE A LOT OF NERVE—”
The white mist covered a hundred li. With the divine bow in his hands, directly escaping was genuinely difficult. The original plan: catch the young man in his trance, land a hit during the distraction — kill or seriously wound, either was enough to escape before Jiang Qiulan could arrive.
Now — fury overriding everything — it simply charged.
It feared the Solar-Splitting Bow. It did not actually fear this person.
Whatever its limitations, the White Deer was a core-nurturing demon lord.
The great antlers surged in size as they came, two steep peaks crashing down toward the young man’s head.
Not the earthshaking impact that should have followed.
The vast antlers hadn’t reached the ground. A slight figure stood below them, dark robes whipping, one hand extended — palm up — meeting the descent. Two enormous forces cancelled against each other in the space of that palm.
The antlers pressed downward like a glacier, moving with agonizing slowness.
By any reasonable measure — the force on both sides was roughly equivalent. Any difference was marginal.
A mortal body against a demon’s frame?
The White Deer gritted through the disbelief, fury rising — and drove five parts more force into the downward press.
Shen Yi hadn’t expected the fifth transformation’s body to simply crush a genuine core-nurturing demon lord — his right hand brought the blade up with cyan light blazing across it.
Cut from below.
An invisible wave roughly ten zhang wide — seeming slow, actually instant — spread outward like a released bowstring.
Across the magnificent antler crown, a thin line appeared. Then a low crack, and roughly a third of one antler tilted sideways and slid toward the ground.
The White Deer jerked its head up, not yet finished grieving the antler, had barely returned to normal size when it saw Shen Yi coming with the blade already descending.
The blade was covered in layers.
Savage demon force. A cutting cyan cold. And — the White Deer caught it with a twitch — a thread of virulent poison.
One foreleg slammed down hard. The young man didn’t dodge — took the full stomp with his shoulder, let the bone collapse, and cut through that opening straight into the White Deer’s back.
“Trading injury for injury?”
The force of a core-nurturing demon lord was something that despaired Qingzhou’s practitioners. The young man’s shoulder sank completely. But with the cyan light’s support, the blade drove into the White Deer’s flesh.
Exactly as expected.
The moment the cold steel entered the body — the White Deer felt the poison surging through muscle and bone, a sizzling burn and rot working inward simultaneously. The color left its face.
Then it looked at Shen Yi — and the force of a single stomp that could destroy most Condensate Realm practitioners had only shattered bone.
A flash of red.
Under the red light’s warmth, Shen Yi shook his shoulder out, and the damage restored itself before the eye could follow.
Then he came back in.
Three passes in the air. Three devastating gashes opened across the White Deer’s body. The poison had eaten through the flesh entirely, green fluid now running toward bone and organs.
It raised its head to look — and found every wound on the young man had already been healed by the red light.
“You’re nothing but poison and tricks. You don’t even cultivate proper martial techniques, do you?”
The White Deer was starting to get genuinely rattled.
Its confidence in escaping from Jiang Qiulan came from knowing exactly what she did and didn’t have. That woman never wasted time on unnecessary things — no movement art, no concealment method, none of it. Since the Condensate Realm she had cultivated one thing only: the Mysterious Ice Seven-Kill Sword Intent, to feed the inner core.
Every part of her had been built for one purpose: breaking through to the Mixed Origin Grandmaster level.
But this young man was clearly weaker than itself — and still had endless methods layered on top of each other, a devastating bow, and speed that outpaced even a demon lord renowned for velocity.
Infuriating didn’t begin to cover it.
“…”
As if the White Deer’s words had reminded him of something, Shen Yi gave a quiet nod.
He raised his left hand, sword-seal finger vertical before the chest — practiced now, unhurried.
The Heavenly Demon external pill gave a sharp shudder. The demon force inside erupted outward.
A sword intent condensed before him, solidified to near-physical density — crimson, suffused with killing qi. The yin-yang fish pattern rotated slowly across the blade.
(End of Chapter)