With a fierce roar from Li Fan, a colossus dozens of times larger than the former Tianyang puppet abruptly emerged in the deep void.
It was the Nascent Soul dharma manifestation that Li Fan had conjured forth, fueled by the near-bottomless primal energy of the Five Elements Grotto-Heavens!
Had it manifested in the Xuanhuang Realm, this giant would have been large enough to prop up the firmament, drawing the eyes of cultivators across the entire world.
Behind the titan's head, the faint apparitions of five great grotto-heavens hovered like five interlocking rings, lending Li Fan's dharma manifestation an aura of transcendent divinity.
Compared to this titan, Tianyang was hardly larger than an ant.
"Suppress!"
Looking down, the giant thrust its right index finger downward, pressing brutally toward Tianyang's head.
The finger loomed overhead like the collapse of heaven itself. Even the whorls of its fingerprint resembled concentric sealing talismans, threatening to crush Tianyang in an instant.
Tasting for the first time what he looked like in the eyes of ordinary cultivators, Tianyang felt no panic in the face of the colossus's sky-cleaving strike.
His clothes fluttered without any wind, and the space encircling him began to bend in a wondrous way.
The spatial warps rippled outward in waves, centered on Tianyang.
As the distortions expanded, his figure grew increasingly indistinct.
Within mere moments, he had vanished entirely from the scene!
Li Fan's index finger ground downward, only to strike empty air!
"Interesting! Even by combining the power of the five elements with a space-locking formation, I still couldn't stop you from escaping..."
The dharma manifestation's booming voice resounded as Li Fan swept his gaze across the surroundings, searching for Tianyang's traces.
Yet Tianyang seemed to have vanished into thin air, without leaking even the faintest ripple of aura.
"Junior Brother, don't—"
Li Fan was only halfway through speaking when Tianyang materialized without warning, like a specter right before the dharma manifestation's head!
Appearing out of thin air, he pointed from afar straight between the manifestation's brows.
Like a droplet disturbing a placid pond, the manifestation's head warped bizarrely.
Then, it shattered with a roar!
Tianyang was about to pull back his strike.
Yet even with its head shattered into scattered pieces, the manifestation's movements were not impaired in the least.
Its hands clamped together swiftly before its chest, fingers curving outward to form a cage.
The energetic remnants of its shattered head seemed endowed with life, rushing back at breakneck speed.
Outside the cage of fingers, they instantly congealed into an array!
Tianyang froze slightly.
For he realized that within this formation, not only could he not shatter space to escape, but even the Spatial Folding technique he had just used was rendered completely useless!
It had worked just moments ago, yet in the span of a single exchange, Li Fan had devised a formation to counter it!
What astonishing genius!
Before Tianyang could dwell on it, layer upon layer of illusory formations manifested continuously outside the cage of fingers.
As though knowing no limit, within just a single breath, the combined power of these stacked arrays swelled to a level that moved even Tianyang, a cultivator of the Dao Integration realm.
The price, of course, was that Li Fan's Nascent Soul dharma manifestation rapidly shriveled like a punctured balloon.
Sensing the imminent peril of everything around him detonating at any moment, Tianyang did not dare move.
Li Fan's figure materialized not far away, beaming with smug satisfaction. "Well, Junior Brother? Convinced?"
Tianyang gave a sullen nod.
"Haha." Li Fan did not press him further. A blue light flashed across his eyes.
He then tapped a finger gently toward Tianyang's position.
In an instant, the massive array—which in Tianyang's eyes was complex beyond measure—was casually undone by Li Fan!
"I haven't even used my real strength yet. Wouldn't want to hurt you, after all," Li Fan emphasized, noting the faint stubbornness on Tianyang's face.
"Me... too," Tianyang squeezed out with some difficulty.
He looked back at Li Fan and took the initiative to ask for another round.
"Hey, now!" Li Fan merely waved a hand and declined.
"A spar is meant to stop at the first touch. We're fellow disciples—are we really supposed to fight to the death? No more fighting, no more!" Li Fan chuckled.
Tianyang had no choice but to let it go.
"Speaking of which, your power is tied to space as well. Not far ahead lies a pocket world filled with a certain kind of spirit body that might be of some help to you." Li Fan introduced the circumstances of the Hunyin Realm to Tianyang.
Although Tianyang had attained Dao Integration, setting aside the law power endowed by the anima of Heaven and Earth, his knowledge and worldly experience were hardly different from those of a Foundation Establishment cultivator walking the Path of Bodily Transformation a thousand years ago.
Naturally, he could make neither head nor tail of such strange occurrences.
Still, he had always listened to Li Fan.
And so, the two ventured deeper along the spatial passage.
By now, they were far from the Xuanhuang Realm proper, and Li Fan no longer harbored any reservations.
The Seven-Colored Divine Light cut across the vast expanse, traversing ten thousand li in a breath.
Tianyang, who commanded spatial power with adept mastery, likewise shrank ground to an inch, following closely behind.
Even at such blazing speed, the length of this spatial passage exceeded their expectations.
By Li Fan's calculation, it took them nearly a month before they finally caught the faint presence of the Realm-Rifting Whale pods ahead.
Li Fan halted in his tracks.
Looking into the distance, he saw countless Realm-Rifting Whales resembling a vast sea of leviathans, travelling in pods as they carved pathways through the nothingness.
And that was merely what was visible on the surface.
Deep within the pitch-black void, there was no telling how many more Realm-Rifting Whales lurked.
The sheer, unified aura radiating from the entire swarm made even Li Fan change countenance slightly.
"This has already reached the absolute apex of quantitative change turning into qualitative change."
"How could there be so many of them?"
Li Fan couldn't help but look toward the Hunyin Realm hidden not far off.
"Let's go."
Transforming into a streak of rainbow light, Li Fan descended into this pocket world moments later.
"Hiss..."
The moment his feet touched down, Li Fan couldn't help but furrow his brow.
This place was far too cold.
Even the spiritual energy inside his body showed signs of freezing over.
Circulating the power of the five elements, Li Fan tried to stave off the bitter cold by shifting his spiritual energy into the fire attribute.
Yet the very instant he did so—
A terrifying wave of icy chill welled up from within Li Fan without rhyme or reason.
He instantly turned into an ice sculpture. Then, as an eerie wind blew from nowhere, the sculpture shattered into countless icy granules that scattered across the ground.
A moment later, with a ripple in space, Li Fan's body reappeared.
"Bizarre."
A look of intrigue appeared on his face.
Just now, what had emerged alongside the fire-attribute power within him had not been heat, but extreme, biting cold.
This chill had not come from the outside; rather, here, it was an inherent characteristic of the fire attribute itself.
"Senior Brother, something is wrong here."
Tianyang, rare as it was, spoke a fully coherent sentence.
His expression was solemn.
"It feels like something around us is gnawing away at my power."
"Yet I can't find them anywhere."
Tianyang continued via divine sense transmission to explain what he had sensed.
Chapter 870