Li Yu looked at the colossal, unmoving form of the Earth-Shaker Ape, then sank his consciousness into his sanctuary. The cultivation of this ape was indeed at the rank 10 of beasts.
"Khaos," his thought was a simple, direct statement. "The next one is a creature of pure earth and physical might. Its defenses are profound. Are you sure it's going to go like before?"
Li Yu saw what had happened before but it was still a thing that didn't fully register in his mind. Everything had happened so fast, so easily that he was still a bit dazed about it so he had to ask, like he was reassuring himself.
A wave of ancient disdain washed over him. "You are still thinking like a mortal, little one. You see a mountain of rock and think of defense. I see a flawed, chaotic amalgamation of energy and law. It is a poorly constructed sandcastle, waiting to be kicked over."
"Its defenses…" Li Yu began.
"Are irrelevant," Khaos interrupted, its voice a blade of absolute certainty. "You have seen what happens when I hammer a shell. Do you truly believe a pile of rocks will fare any better? The principle is the same. I do not break things, little one. I unmake them. Don't test my abilities again."
Li Yu withdrew his consciousness. He focused his will again and the crimson-gold portal opened silently in the shadow of the boulder.
The moment the pinprick of Khaos's aura leaked into the world, the Earth-Shaker Ape, which had been watching the distant battle at the formation with a lazy air froze. Its massive eyes swiveled, its head turning with a slow, grinding sound as it tried to locate the source of the sudden, terrifying pressure that had just descended upon its soul. Its instincts, honed over a millennium of brutal, territorial warfare, were screaming at it, a silent, primal alarm that a predator of a higher power had just entered its domain.
Khaos raised one of its tiny, galaxy-shelled pincers. It did not use its domain of Absolute Weight. It used something different. Something far more insidious.
"Domain of the Stygian Void: Second Edict - Law of Dissolution," Khaos's voice echoed, not as a command but as a simple statement of fact.
An invisible silent wave of power washed over the Earth-Shaker Ape. It was not a wave of pressure or of force. It was a wave of pure negation.
The colossal ape let out a roar of confusion. It felt… wrong. The unbreakable connection it had with the earth, the very source of its power and its being was suddenly… gone. The spiritual laws that held its massive, rock-like body together, the very principles of cohesion and density, began to fray, to unravel.
It looked down at its own hand, a fist the size of a house and watched in horror as a fine, grey dust began to flake away from its knuckles, not from an external attack, but from its own internal dissolution.
"What is this?!" its furious, terrified roar echoed in the minds of every creature on the battlefield.
Khaos's cold, dispassionate voice replied, a god passing judgment on a mortal. "It is the end of your life."
Khaos flickered, appearing directly before the Beast King's massive eyes. It raised its pincer. It did not hammer. It simply tapped.
The tiny, crystalline pincer touched the center of the ape's brow. The web of black, void-aspected cracks that had appeared on Kui's shell now appeared on the ape but they were not just on its surface. They spread deep into its body, a cancer of pure non-existence.
The Earth-Shaker Ape, a being of unyielding physical might, a creature that could have traded blows with core formation experts was being unmade from the inside out. It roared in fury and agony and swung its massive, mountain-like fist at the tiny creature before it, a desperate final act of defiance.
But its movements were slow, clumsy. Its own body was betraying it. The swing, which should have shattered the very air, was a ponderous weakened blow. Khaos did not dodge. It simply floated and the massive fist passed harmlessly through it, as if it were a phantom.
"Your existence is a flawed concept," Khaos stated. "You are too weak."
With a final, silent pulse of its void energy, the cracks on the Earth-Shaker Ape's body spread and the entire, four-hundred-foot-tall mountain of a creature crumbled, dissolving into a massive, silent cloud of fine grey dust and inert powerless rock.
Li Yu watched on in surprise and shock. He had witnessed a battle of concepts and a war of laws. Khaos had not just killed the Beast King; it had erased the very idea of it from existence.
With the fall of their king, the army of earth-aspected beasts, their minds now free from the dominating will, fell into a state of chaotic terror. Khaos floated in the air for a moment, it had no interest in such insignificant prey. But Li Yu did. Before Khaos could act further, Li Yu moved. His first priority was not the harvest, but the rescue.
He made his way to the edge of the now-empty battlefield, to the small, muddy, underground stream where he had sensed the familiar, sorrowful aura. He found them huddled in the darkness, a few dozen small, three-eyed toads, trembling with a fear that was soul-deep.
As he approached, he did not try to capture them. He simply knelt at the edge of the stream and projected a feeling of pure, gentle and familiar calm. He sent them the feeling of his blood-red Koi spirit, an aura of boundless nourishing life.
The small toads, who had been on the verge of scattering in terror, suddenly went still. They looked at him, their three eyes filled with a dawning confused recognition. They felt a sense of safety from his aura, a feeling that was completely alien in this world of death and destruction.
They did not flee. They slowly, cautiously, began to hop towards him, their small, psychic voices a chorus of a single question: Safe?
Li Yu opened the portal to his sanctuary, a warm, inviting glow of crimson-gold light. "Yes," he projected back, his own voice a gentle, reassuring promise. "Safe."
One by one, the small, lost toads hopped into the portal. A small, insignificant but meaningful addition to his growing kingdom.
With the toads secured, he turned his attention back to the battlefield. "Cleanse the field," Li Yu requested.
It raised its pincer and did as before on Kui's side. An invisible vortex, centered on Li Yu's Koi spirit, roared to life. Their physical bodies—tons of ores, spiritual minerals, and earthen cores—were drawn into the sanctuary's portal, a massive harvest of resources.
He stood up and he looked towards the last two Beast Kings, their auras a beacon of ice and wind on the distant horizon.
Two down. Two to go.