Sunlight cascaded down like a waterfall, piercing through the gray canopy and refracting through the river of blood that spanned the horizon, draping an ominous crimson veil over a vast swath of the streets below.
A distance of a hundred zhang vanished in a flash.
Facing the youth who suddenly flickered before him, the White Emperor did not dodge at all, slamming a straight punch directly into the boy's raised left hand.
*Boom!—*
Fist and palm collided, and the ground cracked and caved in an instant. The force generated by the impact formed a visible white shockwave that whistled outward across the surrounding streets!
Yet at the center of this collision,
The White Emperor's gold-scaled arm hesitated for only a fraction of a second before continuing to press down. The boundless might coursing through it was simply not something Mu Nuo could block with a single hand.
Under such a heavy blow, a normal human arm would twist and fold as its bones buckled under the unbearable load. Mu Nuo's arm, however, began to shrink and cave in like modeling clay, enveloping the White Emperor's dragon-scaled limb.
Seeing this, Xu Yuan, overlooking everything from above, unconsciously narrowed his eyes.
He realized what Mu Nuo was trying to do.
He wanted to use his body's immortal exclusionary nature to counter the White Emperor, causing the Lord of Guyuan's arm to annihilate during its self-healing process.
It was a rule similar to gravity.
But if the brat thought he could use such a trick against the White Emperor, he was looking down on this thousand-year dragon emperor a bit too much.
Even as the thought crossed his mind,
Without any warning or sound, everything blocking the White Emperor's fist radiance abruptly vanished.
Mu Nuo's arm, along with his entire left shoulder and most of his chest, vanished into thin air. Behind him, a through-and-through crater with a radius of a foot or so appeared in the ground.
Through this bottomless crater, Xu Yuan caught sight of the pierced body of the Insect Saint below.
With a single punch, the White Emperor
Had blasted through Mu Nuo's body,
Blasted through hundreds of zhang of tamped foundation,
And blasted through the shell of the Insect Saint hiding beneath.
The absolute violence possessed by the Lord of Guyuan
Was displayed to its absolute peak
At this very moment!
*Gulp.*
Xu Yuan swallowed hard.
With such terrifying strength and precise control, even a saint would be wounded by a graze and killed by a direct hit.
His uncle had actually been able to trade hundreds of rounds with such an existence in a mortal human body and even hold the upper hand. Xu Yuan once again appreciated just how much weight the title of Great Yan Sword Saint truly carried.
The White Emperor's dragon pupils, emanating a golden radiance, slanted slightly to glance at the pitch-black eyes of the youth before him and the fleshy scales emerging beneath. His voice was low and indifferent:
"Though I have no intention of making enemies of your family, the matter of the Dragon Intent brooks no compromise."
Looking at the missing left half of his body, madness seemed to surge within Mu Nuo's pitch-black eyes. He opened his mouth, yet failed to utter a sound.
Because his head was gone.
Withdrawing his fist and steadying his stance, the White Emperor's indifferent gaze suddenly shifted away from Mu Nuo toward West City. He murmured,
"So this is an ancient beast. It actually survived that."
Just as the White Emperor prepared to move again to finish off the Insect Saint,
*Tap.*
The heavily mangled "youth" before him suddenly reached out with his sole remaining right hand and seized his wrist.
Through his dragon scales, the White Emperor felt an icy, maddened vision transmit from the touch. A succession of memory scrolls, accompanied by tangled emotions, surged into his heart.
It was back in Guyuan,
Memories of the White Emperor spending time with his still-young son.
No, it could not be called a memory.
It was an illusion.
A demonic obsession of wrath and folly.
A technique used by yin ghosts to attack the intent soul. Those struck by it would, at worst, fall into a cycle of memories, or at best, become dazed and disoriented.
And this sinister art seemed to have already become a passive trait of Mu Nuo's body.
While the White Emperor was dazed, wisps of shadowy black smoke seeped from the ground, wrapping around his torso in an instant like silk and quicksand, steadily seeping inward along his streamlined, dragon-scaled body...
The two standing in the spectator seats closely watched everything happening on the ground. The White Emperor suddenly freezing in place naturally set off their alarm.
The rapidly shifting battlefield reversed far too quickly.
The White Emperor, who had just shattered Mu Nuo's catastrophe dream with two punches, was suddenly locked down in hard crowd control, allowing those bizarre wisps to wrap around him.
"Should we... go help?" Li Junwu asked hesitantly.
Although she could vaguely see the battle between the two below with the aid of the city defense formation, limited by her scope, she could not properly read the situation.
Xu Yuan turned his head, a strange look in his eyes.
"Who do you want to help?"
Li Junwu pointed below.
"The demonic dragon, of course. Hasn't that ghost infant already enveloped him? Did I judge wrong?"
Xu Yuan shook his head and said,
"You're not entirely wrong. An ordinary cultivator wrapped in that stuff would almost certainly lose their life, but the White Emperor can't be judged by ordinary standards."
"You mean the White Emperor still has cards up his sleeve?" Li Junwu asked.
Xu Yuan rolled his eyes.
Right now, the White Emperor had only stripped his shirt and bared his scales. If this were *Cangyuan*, he would have barely entered Phase Two, with not even a shadow of Phase Three in sight.
Xu Yuan did not answer the question immediately. Instead, he looked toward the area outside East City.
He felt a bit uneasy inside.
Although Mu Nuo and the White Emperor had exchanged blows for only a few breaths, judging from the power the dragon had displayed, unless Mu Nuo could burst into a frenzy and fight him to the point of exhaustion, the White Emperor could still instantly kill Li Junwu.
So their hopes still had to rest on his uncle.
The river of blood rushed outward, smashing through the city defense canopy from within and tearing an opening in Qin Ke's hundred-zhang Burning Flame Dao Domain, allowing the scene inside to be seen.
Unexpectedly, Xu Yuan did not see his uncle slaughtering in all directions. On the contrary, Feng Jiuxuan looked somewhat battered.
His snow-white clothes were stained with large patches of scorched black, part of his tied-back hair had been singed by flames, and the white light trailing from the Wuming sword in his hand was not on the offensive, but defending against wave after wave of tide-like assaults.
Seeing this, Xu Yuan's eyelid twitched involuntarily.
Wait, hadn't they agreed he would try to decapitate Qin Ke? And this was what he had to show for it?
Astonishment rose in Xu Yuan's heart, but it vanished in a flash, because he spotted another graceful, white-robed figure inside the Burning Flame Dao Domain.
His uncle was fighting one against two!
Tianyuan had teleported into the old man's Burning Flame Dao Domain at some point.
Meanwhile, the hunchbacked old man's flickering figure looked even more battered.
His clothes were already in tatters, dozens of sword wounds of various sizes marked his body, and one hand and half a thigh had vanished entirely.
Now, with the Dao domain suddenly suffering such a heavy blow from the outside, the old man coughed up a direct mouthful of blood.
Xu Yuan's attack from inside the city seemed to have become the straw that broke the camel's back. The burning flames of the Dao domain surged and roiled several times, trying to repair the breach, but every attempt failed.
The old man had most likely been pushed to the brink of exhaustion.
Having confirmed this, Xu Yuan's mind settled.
The battlefield outside the city would soon become a duel between the Great Yan Sword Saint and the Overseeing Heaven Pavilion Master. Both were high-offense and low-defense; conventionally speaking, the victor would certainly be decided in short order.
There should be enough time...
As the thought flickered past, Xu Yuan looked down at the ground while replying softly to Li Junwu,
"As the Lord of Guyuan, if his mind could be bewitched by such methods, the White Emperor would be far too—"
Mid-sentence, Xu Yuan's voice cut off abruptly.
As his gaze landed below, horror gradually surfaced in his eyes.
The White Emperor and Mu Nuo had already vanished from the spot.
And the block of streets where they had fought had silently turned into a hundred-zhang crater.
More importantly,
No sound had reached them just now.
Nor had there been any fluctuation in qi dynamic.
Nor had anyone noticed.
What... just happened?
In the next instant, Xu Yuan understood what had occurred below, and his plan seemed to have fallen apart once more.
Surrounded by dragon shadows, the Lord of Guyuan had already appeared before him and Li Junwu, descending at a speed that even a saint's reflexes could not follow.
He stared quietly at him.
In his hand,
He still held Mu Nuo's continuously regenerating mangled corpse.
Xu Yuan clicked his tongue. Sweeping his spiritual vision underground, he discovered that the aura belonging to the Insect Saint below had indeed completely vanished.
Looking closely, Mu Xingyi's corpse had continued boring tens of zhang deeper into the earth before belatedly grinding to a halt.
Having realized this, Xu Yuan met those indifferent, slitted dragon pupils for a moment, barely forcing a smile to his lips.
He realized...
The White Emperor's Phase Three seemed to be just a tiny bit stronger than expected...
Chapter 680