Li Guanqi watched the sword spirit vanish, lost in thought.
He was certain something had happened while he was unconscious.
Shaking his head, he cast those stray thoughts aside.
Looking around at the surrounding void, he did not even know whether he had reached the Taiqing Domain yet.
With a flick of his hand, spatial power surged, tearing an opening through the void, and he stepped out.
*Hum!*
Still heavily injured and drenched in blood, Li Guanqi emerged from the rift looking rather battered.
The moment he stepped through, he was greeted by the sight of verdant mountains stretching for miles beneath his feet and winding rivers below.
Sunlight poured across the earth, casting a golden shimmer across the water.
Sensing his surroundings, he noticed that the concentration of spiritual energy in the Taiqing Domain was considerably higher than in the Great Xia Domain as a whole.
The Dao platform in his sea of consciousness trembled slightly as his divine sense surged forth, blanketing ten thousand zhang around him in the blink of an eye.
Steadying his focus, he compared his surroundings with the map of the Taiqing Domain stored in his mind.
He found himself in the Southern Domain of the Taiqing Domain, in a place called Luwu Circuit.
Judging by the map, he was not far from Fumu Valley, which Tianji Pavilion's intel had mentioned.
Getting his bearings, Li Guanqi moved as swift as lightning, vanishing past the horizon in an instant.
After flying for half a day, he suddenly came to a halt as he passed over a mountain range.
Within his perception, there happened to be two exceedingly formidable great demons lurking within these mountains.
Both were early rank-six demons, equivalent to Void Refining Realm experts among human cultivators.
Li Guanqi licked his lips. By now, his injuries had healed by seventy to eighty percent.
He softly woke Jiuxiao, who was coiled around his wrist.
"Wake up. Want to race and see who kills their target first?"
Jiuxiao slowly unfurled its body, stretching to nearly twenty zhang long!
Li Guanqi had been feeding it medicinal pills constantly of late, and its cultivation had advanced at a blistering pace. It was not lagging behind him in the slightest, having reached the late fifth rank.
Jiuxiao swayed its massive head and nuzzled Li Guanqi, its golden eyes brimming with excitement.
Li Guanqi closed his eyes for a moment. In his perception, the two great demons were a rank-six Jiutian Deer and a Three-Tailed Kunwu Wolf!
Li Guanqi claimed the Three-Tailed Kunwu Wolf for himself, prompting Jiuxiao to spit two sparks of lightning in protest.
The Three-Tailed Kunwu Wolf appeared much stronger, while the Jiutian Deer was noticeably weaker.
Li Guanqi laughed aloud, stepped onto lightning, and vanished into the forest.
Jiuxiao threw its head back and roared, letting loose waves of draconic cries before whipping its tail and disappearing into the sky.
With their targets far apart, Li Guanqi darted deep into the forest.
Deep within the woods, the clear sky above was blotted out by the dense canopy, casting the area in dim gloom.
A dozen zhang ahead lay a colossal cave.
Peering into the opening revealed only pitch-black darkness. A gentle breeze blew through, setting the branches rustling with faint whispers.
Yet the sound felt jarringly out of place here.
It was quiet—eerily quiet—as though only the wind existed.
Wafting from the cave came waves of foul stench, smelling of rotting meat and rank musk that clung stubbornly to the air.
Looking sideways, where his divine sense swept, dozens of piles of stark white bones lay discarded at random across the ground.
Yet the area surrounding the cave possessed the densest spiritual energy in the vicinity. Amid the thick wild grass beneath his feet grew a good number of low-grade spiritual herbs.
A slight smirk touched the corner of Li Guanqi's mouth. Sensing the formidable fluctuations within the cavern, he took a slow half-step back.
He sank his qi into his dantian and rooted his momentum into his feet, clenching his right fist tight!
In an instant, Li Guanqi's frame expanded noticeably. Lightning coiled around his fist, and he drove a thunderous punch straight toward the cave's entrance!
*Thud! Boom, boom, boom!*
With that single blow, the entire mouth of the cave was smashed to rubble.
As the mountains trembled and the earth shook, countless spirit beasts in the forest scattered in panic, while flocks of birds took flight in vast waves.
In moments, the woods echoed with a continuous chorus of roaring and screeching beasts.
Yet before anything inside the cavern could react, a dragon's roar suddenly echoed from afar.
*Rumble!*
Suddenly!
The ground quaked, and the mountain rocked violently as massive boulders tumbled down from the summit.
Li Guanqi's eyes narrowed, his blood rushing as his vigilance spiked to its peak.
*Boom!*
The giant boulders choking the cavern's mouth abruptly shattered!
A pitch-black giant wolf, fully thirty zhang long, lunged straight at him!
The Three-Tailed Kunwu Wolf was astonishingly fast—so fast that Li Guanqi could not even take in its full form.
Its slit-pupiled, teal eyes, dripping with murderous intent, were already right in front of him.
Li Guanqi's heart leaped into his throat. Almost entirely on instinct, he swung his hand back, slamming the sword coffin from behind him down into a guard!
At the same time, he drove his left knee hard against the back of the sword coffin!
*Thump!*
Li Guanqi felt as though he had been hit by a mountain. The staggering recoil forced a mouthful of blood from his lips.
Half his body went numb, feeling as though every bone had come undone.
Thrown entirely out of control, he shot backward through the air, splintering countless towering ancient trees along his path.
Li Guanqi could only sense his surroundings blurring backward at breakneck speed, blows repeatedly crashing against his back.
*Crash!*
*Clatter!*
Li Guanqi landed against a pile of rubble, grimacing in pain.
Hundreds of zhang away, the giant wolf threw its head back and howled. Three pitch-black tails whipped through the air behind it like massive scourges, lashing at the void.
Wherever they struck, trees shattered, cliffs crumbled, and space collapsed beneath their fury, fracturing in webbed rifts in every direction.
The pitch-black wolf was covered in fur as stiff as steel needles, gleaming with a metallic sheen.
A pair of teal, slit-pupiled eyes stared forward, narrow and cold as a serpent's!
With every swipe of its thick paws, space was shredded into jagged fissures.
The Three-Tailed Kunwu Wolf fixed its gaze dead upon Li Guanqi in the distance. An eerie fluctuation rippled out, accompanied by the raspy, broken sound of human speech!
"Human... cultivator... you... seek death!"
A sharp light gleamed in Li Guanqi's eyes. He had not expected this great demon to speak the human tongue, which meant it had already unlocked its sapience.
Li Guanqi slowly rose from the rubble and licked his lips, battle intent surging high!
This time, he intended to test his physical body against it first—he would only draw his sword if pushed to the brink!
As the Dragon Elephant Prison-Suppressing Art surged in wild circulation, the blood in his veins roared.
Stepping into the Traceless Nether Step, Li Guanqi clenched both fists, leaving an array of afterimages as he struck toward the giant wolf in an instant.
The Three-Tailed Kunwu Wolf cast a glance around, a spark of murderous intent flashing in its eyes.
To it, a human cultivator of such extraordinary talent was nothing less than a sumptuous feast.
*Whoosh! Rip!*
Li Guanqi dodged the incoming claws by a hair's breadth, driving a punch squarely into the wolf's joint.
The blow carried such immense force that it knocked the giant beast off balance.
Having landed his strike, Li Guanqi gave it no room to breathe. He dodged a sweeping tail and dashed right beneath the wolf's belly, unleashing a relentless barrage of punches!
*Boom! Boom! Boom!*
Beneath the terrifying onslaught of force, the giant wolf was driven upward, blasted straight from the earth more than a hundred zhang into the clouds!
Chapter 464