The Yellow Dragon Abyss sword swallowed the mysterious man whole in an instant.
Heaven and earth shook together.
Every living thing bowed its head.
And when the golden dragon had run its course and come back, there was a red dragon pearl about the size of a ping-pong ball sitting in Yue Yang’s hand.
Had the Yellow Dragon Abyss refined the mysterious man down in a single move, the way it had once refined Southwest Divine Sovereign Shafeng? Was this red dragon pearl what his divine power had turned into?
Yue Yang was startled and delighted at once. Then he looked up, and found the mysterious man still hanging in the air, not dead in the slightest.
What he had instead was a transparent hole punched through him where his heart should have been.
The heart itself was gone.
Which meant, possibly, that the red dragon pearl in Yue Yang’s hand was the man’s heart.
“I have had enough of you little worms! In that case — let me show you what my real strength looks like.” The mysterious man roared it out in fury, in a voice like a thunderclap, and the space all around him burst apart under the anger and gathered into a tornado spinning itself into a frenzy. If Duoduo’s Life Law hadn’t been holding the field, a void-shattering storm like that would have ground heaven and earth to powder already.
Bone spikes pushed out through the mysterious man’s cloak.
It tore apart on the spot.
Into a few strips of rag.
His body kept swelling with nothing to stop it, and fast, until he was an enormous monster a hundred meters tall, its face vicious and horrible, sharp horns and spines growing out all over it like a thornbush.
Scales came up through the skin, black as ink in places and dark red as blood in others. The forelimbs curved like hooks, and the claws on them — hard and sharp — ran ten meters long. Muscle piled on muscle across him, until the beast-formed mysterious man looked exactly like one of the ancient monsters that tore the world apart and ate it.
And when it opened a mouth full of teeth and roared at the sky, even Duoduo, who had not changed expression once, drew her brows together.
The mysterious man had gone fully into beast form, and his eyes were blood red.
But it was plain enough that his reason was still there.
Only his strength had gone up a hundred times over.
“Has this thing fused with a war beast?” Shuanghan asked Zhaoxi urgently — but Zhaoxi, holding the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror, shook his head. He could not see through to the truth of it either.
“It ought to be a sealed state he had all along. Some of the strong in the Heavenly Realm like to compress the power they’ve comprehended and seal it away, keeping it for a battle or for a breakthrough. When they open that compressed seal, they call it a first form, or a second form. What we’re looking at now should be a seal coming open — him going into a first form, the beast form.” God-Slayer’s knowledge in this area wasn’t deep, and he wasn’t sure the explanation was right.
“And if there’s more than beast form? If there’s a second form as well — how are we supposed to fight what comes after?” Shuanghan finished saying it and shivered at his own words.
The beast-formed mysterious man was a hundred times what he had been.
If there was a second form as well.
And it came unsealed.
Who on this field would be a match for him? No wonder the man was still this insufferable after taking one wound after another and having his heart dug out of him.
Yue Yang wanted to put another sword into the beast, but the Yellow Dragon Abyss was briefly overdrawn. So he set the innate sword-qi aside and gathered the Chaos Source of yin and yang instead. Sky and ground split as though cut with a knife into two polar worlds — one half a fire world burning like a branding-iron hell, the other a white snow world frozen for a thousand li at close to absolute zero. Lines of purple lightning came off the collision of ice and fire, running through the air like snakes and crackling as they went. Under Yue Yang’s will he bent one arm round for a bow, dark ice for the shaft, fierce flame for the fletching, purple thunder fused into the arrow itself. He gathered the endless source power of that ice-and-fire world between his two arms and took aim at the beast.
The arrow broke the air open.
The beast-formed mysterious man pointed a claw, and eighteen shields of condensed divine power came up in front of him.
An arrow made of Chaos Source went through all eighteen without slowing, disregarded the obstruction entirely, and nailed itself into the beast-formed mysterious man’s left eye. Yue Yang, who assumed it had landed, was already winding up to punch the air in celebration — and then saw a thread of mockery in the beast’s bloodthirsty eyes.
The source-force arrow nailed into the beast-formed mysterious man’s left eye.
It had done nothing at all.
An arrow that could go through anything in existence could not get through the beast-formed mysterious man’s eyelid.
His defense had been monstrous enough already. Apart from the Wheel of Apocalypse taking off the end of a finger, the Taotie Blade and every other divine weapon Yue Yang owned had done nothing to him — and now, with the first form unsealed and the beast shape on him, it was past believing. The Chaos Source arrow was no weaker than the black stone and the destroying light that had taken his eye and opened his ribs a few minutes ago. The result was nothing like it. Chaos Source plus both poles of yin and yang, and the arrow could not pin itself into the man’s skin.
Damn it.
Defense like this was a bug. It was more absurd than the level-868 steel plating in Heroes of Might and Magic.
Yue Yang had a strong urge to call customer support and file a complaint about the Heavenly God Company spawning bosses wrong. How does a level-ninety-plus boss end up wandering around a level-seventy map? Is the whole studio torturing players on purpose?
God-Slayer and the others had given up hope.
The man had been close to invincible before this. Now, beast-formed, everything about him had gone up a hundredfold and attacks did nothing. What was the point of fighting?
“Tsk.“
Xiao Wenli, who had been coldly gathering divine power and waiting for her moment, struck out in anger.
The thousand-meter golden serpent-demon image behind her raised two serpent-demon blades that harvest the souls of all things, and brought them down to annihilate everything under them.
The beast had just taken Yue Yang’s Chaos Source arrow without effort, and was busy enjoying his opponents’ despair. He never expected killing intent from behind. Before he could turn, the golden serpent-demon image cut him into three pieces with two strokes.
Only the middle — head and spine — was left hanging in the air.
Both shoulders, the chest and belly, and the thighs below the pelvis had all been sheared off and separated.
The beast’s eyes showed pure disbelief, and he was opening his mouth to say something when the golden serpent-demon image swatted him flat into the ground the way you would swat a fly.
Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and God-Slayer all had their eyes bulging, and their jaws hit the floor. How was that possible? The gap was too wide to make sense of. The thing had taken Yue Titan’s full-strength arrow without a scratch, and the little serpent-demon’s divine image had one-shot it?
This little serpent-demon looked considerably fiercer than the flower fairy did.
At least when it came to actually killing something.
Yue Yang was staring too. When exactly had Xiao Wenli gotten this formidable? He hadn’t known a thing about it, which was — which was frankly humiliating.
Xiao Wenli looked back over her shoulder at Yue Yang and gave him a sweet little smile, as well-behaved as she had ever looked, with nothing in her face of whatever it was that had just swatted a beast-formed god into the dirt. Yue Yang rubbed his eyes, seriously wondering whether he’d been seeing straight.
BOOM.
The beast, one-shot where he stood, melted and vanished.
Out of the huge, cloven body rose a black smoke thick enough to look solid, twisting like a snake as it climbed.
In under ten seconds the second form had finished gathering. No real body to it any more. Demonized from end to end, changing at will, forming at will. This was the mysterious man’s second form after unsealing: the demon form.
“I am such an idiot.” Shuanghan slapped himself hard across the face. Say a good thing and it never comes true; say a bad one and it does.
The mysterious man really did have a second form.
And the mysterious man in that second form was another ten times what he had been.
The demon-formed man’s strength was frankly off the charts now. Shuanghan felt that a Divine Sovereign like himself wouldn’t need to fight the man at all — one light breath from him and Shuanghan would be dead. Set beside that, he really was a pitiful ant.
The golden serpent-demon image swung its blades down hard. The demon-formed mysterious man, who was now a thousand meters tall himself, either blocked with a hand or turned to smoke, cutting where he liked and striking where he liked. Not only had he shaken off the humiliation of being one-shot a moment before — he was pushing the attack, forcing the golden serpent-demon image back one step at a time with nothing it could do about it. The demon-formed man laughed out loud, wild with it. “You pitiful ants, enjoying yourselves for a moment — how could you understand divine might I’ve spent tens of thousands of years comprehending? Never mind those cheap little tricks of yours. Annihilate my entire body and I will simply restore it. Haha! You’ll never understand — I am an undying body. You could burn through every power you have and you still couldn’t hurt me by a hair!”
Xiao Wenli was level with Yue Yang and had not risen into the divine realm, and although she had been condensing a divine rank a long time, she was not a match for the demon-formed mysterious man.
The situation turned over fast.
Xiao Wenli’s golden serpent-demon image was being driven back step by step, and its divine light was dimming.
“Move. I told you this fight would be finished by me.” Duoduo, newly risen as the Flower Goddess, came forward. Hundreds of millions of thorn-flower vines burst up out of the ground and wove themselves into a thorn-flower giant considerably more than a thousand meters tall. At the same time the petal giant her will was holding stayed where it was, and followed a step behind her.
“Except for Tianyu, there is nobody in the Heavenly Realm who can harm my thousandfold demonized body!” The demon-formed mysterious man had complete confidence in his second form.
“Is that so?” Duoduo sneered.
The petal giant reached out and took hold of the demon-formed man’s smoke-like arm.
He laughed. That arm turned formless, the way it had against the golden serpent-demon image.
And a second later the laugh stopped dead. The arm, already gone insubstantial, came back into shape — and under Duoduo’s Sovereign Intent it could not turn to smoke again. Not just the arm. No part of the demon-formed mysterious man could go insubstantial; all of it was forced solid under the petal giant’s will. On the other side, the thorn-flower giant put out a hand that reached the sky and, as crudely as a farmhand grabbing a wild boar bare-handed, forced the demon-formed man’s skull down and slammed an enemy who had been untouchable and full of himself one second earlier hard into the ground.
It did not wait for him to struggle. It came down on top of him.
Fists like rain.
Beating the demon-formed mysterious man, wildly and without aiming, into an old-fashioned pulp.
Yue Yang’s mouth hung open, and he heard himself muttering. “Is this the legendary Lu Zhishen beating Zhen Guanxi to death? Very obscene, very violent. Isn’t this the girl who’s always been such a pleasure to look at, who does everything beautifully, who fights like she’s dancing? When did she turn violent?”
(End of Chapter 1200)