Far, far from the Puppet Sect, out over the waters and lands.

White light flickered.

The light gave up a wretched figure, broken all over and soaked in blood, his original look no longer easy to make out.

Every sign of a lamp burned dry.

If the eight-trigrams plate at his chest had not been holding the life in him, he would very likely have been dead already.

The air stirred.

Someone had followed by translocation — Wei Yuanling, who had been watching earlier from concealment.

She reached out and took Li Yu from the air, and when she saw the state of him her fair face filled with fury. "I never once meant to take his life! And this is how he treats you — he plainly knew who you were, and he still struck to kill!"

Wei Yuanling could not make sense of it. If Li Yu had meant to play in earnest, he could have stayed hidden among the demons and burst out without warning; from showing himself to being smashed down through Beiyan Mountain, he had had at least three chances to strike from ambush.

The warning before he moved, the proper request for instruction afterward — both of them fell one word short of saying outright that this was a joke.

"So he wants it in earnest! Fine! At worst I'll kill him and pay him back a life of my own!"

It had been Wei Yuanling's own high spirits that turned Li Yu into a pig demon in the first place.

And now it had ended like this.

How could she possibly stand by and do nothing.

As the turmoil in her heart spread, an aura far beyond Li Yu's welled up around her, until the boundless ocean itself howled.

An immortal sect's prodigy at the eighth layer of Return-to-Void was already a presence to be feared across these waters and lands.

Even the Dragon Palace's demon soldiers spying from below could only keep obediently to the water in the face of a rage like that, and steal glances outward.

"……"

It was then…