The black-rhino demons' huge true forms shrank fast. It was dread out of pure instinct, the urge to hide themselves.

But the crack that came again beside their ears shattered the night in an instant. Their sight filled with thick scarlet gore and blurred.

All that was left in front of them was a pair of eyes, and the handsome, calm face they belonged to.

Two black-shirted figures drew their palms back from the ruined skulls and dispersed once more.

Shen Yi put away the two demons' corpses.

He turned his eyes on the demons scattering all around him and pressed a palm down lightly. A sea of fire swept up across the sky again like a tsunami off the open ocean, and from it rose several gold-fire phoenixes with long trailing tail plumes.

They wheeled in the air, then plunged away in different directions.

Savagely reaping the demons' lives.

"Heh… this old man can hardly imagine it. To think I'm a cultivator of the very same realm as the exalted immortal."

Jing Jingsong watched it through to the end, and something like shame at his own inadequacy rose in him. He had assumed this exalted immortal was at the very least a late-stage Return-to-Void cultivator.

At a moment like this, the lower Shen Yi's cultivation, the more it proved how deep the Nanyang Sect's foundation ran.

A cultivation realm might be explained away by some rare stroke of fortune.

But to beat the strong as the weaker party, to fight across realms — that had to rest on a sect with strength enough behind it.

A very simple principle.

To dare to squander lifespan on anything but raising one's realm meant the sect was fully confident it could lead him up to the White Jade Capital.

"……"

The Zhao family still kept their silence.

They had, after all, only come to lend support, and had never given the Nanyang immortal sect any offense.

The Puppet Sect's people were another matter — the faint-hearted among them were already shaking from head to foot.

There was no need to report this…