The blade energy that cleaved the air belonged to Luo Zhen.
He had tracked the faint, erratic trail of spiritual Qi across the rugged terrain, following it like a shark following a scent of blood in the water. The moment he crested the ridge and descended into the valley, the scene unfolded before him with brutal clarity: a group of human martial artists, swords drawn, cornering the serpent demon Hong Yu. They were seconds away from executing her with a synchronized volley of sword Qi.
Luo Zhen didn't hesitate. He didn't think; he simply acted. His saber swept out, unleashing a violent arc of energy that intercepted the killing blow, shattering the human attack and saving Hong Yu from immediate decapitation.
"Brother Luo! It really is you!" Hong Yu cried out, her voice cracking with a mixture of disbelief and overwhelming relief.
Luo Zhen turned slightly, offering her a faint, reassuring smile. But his eyes quickly scanned her surroundings, and the smile didn't reach them.
The ground around Hong Yu was a slaughterhouse. The twisted, lifeless bodies of giant snakes—her cousins and kin—littered the valley floor. Of the entire group that had set out, only Hong Yu and her eldest male cousin remained breathing. They were survivors, but barely; both were drenched in blood, their breathing ragged, their bodies marred by deep lacerations that spoke of a desperate, losing battle.
Across the clearing, the human attackers regrouped. One of the martial artists squinted at Luo Zhen, tilting his head as if trying to recall a forgotten memory.
"Wait a minute," the man muttered, his brow furrowing. "Why does this guy look so familiar?"
Then, realization dawned on his face like a sunrise. "Ah! I remember now! This is the Demon General! The one Senior Red Face put a bounty on!"
The revelation rippled through the group of five humans.
"You're right! That's the target!"
"Haha! Luck is shining on us today, brothers!" another laughed, a harsh, grating sound. "Not only do we get the Spirit Fruit, but we also get to mount this Demon General's head and trade it for resources with Senior Red Face!"
The humans laughed together, their eyes gleaming with greed and mockery. They looked at Luo Zhen not as a threat, but as a walking bag of gold coins. In their eyes, he was already dead—a trophy waiting to be collected.
Luo Zhen's brow furrowed slightly. He stood his ground, his gaze cold and analytical as he assessed the threat.
There were five of them. They wore identical uniforms, marking them as disciples of the same sect or faction. Their cultivation bases were solid, all resting firmly in the late stage of the Yuan Dan realm. More importantly, they all wielded longswords, and their positioning was too precise to be accidental.
They stood in a geometric pattern, a pentagon of steel and hostility. As they settled into their stances, a palpable pressure began to radiate from them—a sharp, cutting aura that felt like needles against the skin.
"Brother Luo, be careful!" Hong Yu screamed, clutching her wounded side. "They've formed a Sword Array! It's incredibly powerful!"
"Oh? A Sword Array?" Luo Zhen nodded slowly, his expression unimpressed. "That explains the sharp sensation in the air."
Despite his casual tone, Luo Zhen was not careless. He was simply confident. His internal System had already scanned the opponents. The analysis was clear: while the formation amplified their power significantly, it was not insurmountable.
Sword Arrays, like martial artists, had tiers and limits. This one was dangerous, but it was not enough to kill him.
Seeing Luo Zhen's nonchalant attitude, the leader of the human group felt his ego bruised. His face flushed with anger. "Brothers! This guy named Luo dares to look down on us? Let's show him what real power looks like!"
"Yes!" the others roared in unison.
The air in the valley hummed as the five men channeled their Qi simultaneously. The Sword Array is activated. A beam of white sword energy, as thick as a man's arm and blindingly bright, coalesced in the center of their formation and shot toward Luo Zhen with the scream of a banshee.
Luo Zhen chuckled. He didn't dodge.
He gripped his long blade, feeling the thrum of thunder energy coursing through his meridians. With a casual flick of his wrist, he unleashed a twenty-meter arc of blue lightning.
BOOM!
The collision shook the valley floor. The white sword Qi and the blue thunder blade Qi slammed into one another, struggling for dominance for a fraction of a second before Luo Zhen's power overwhelmed them. With a sound like shattering glass, the lightning crushed the sword beam.
The thunder did not stop there. Carrying the momentum of the strike, the remnant energy roared toward the five humans.
Bang!
The lightning slammed into the group.
"Yes!" Hong Yu jumped in place, clapping her hands, ignoring the pain in her ribs. Her cousin, too, looked on with wide eyes, his pale face flushing with excitement as he cheered.
But Luo Zhen did not cheer. He frowned.
His sensory perception told him something the visual flash had hidden: the enemy had taken zero damage.
As the dust and sparks settled, the five men stood revealed. They were completely unharmed. Roughly two meters around their group, a thick, swirling layer of white airflow acted as a barrier. It was this dome of energy that had absorbed the impact of the thunder, dispersing it harmlessly into the ground.
"Phew... that was close," one of the humans exhaled, wiping sweat from his forehead.
"It's fine. Don't panic," another reassured him. "The Array protects us."
The leader stepped forward, his confidence restored. He sneered at Luo Zhen. "Surprised? Our Sword Array is a perfect fusion of offense and defense! It kills, and it protects. You can't touch us."
The cheers from Hong Yu and her cousin died in their throats. The hope that had flared in their eyes was extinguished, replaced once again by the cold dread of impending death.
"Offense and defense, is it?" Luo Zhen's eyes narrowed. "A turtle shell with thorns. Fine. I'd like to see just how hard this shell really is."
Luo Zhen's wrist flickered. He didn't use one strike this time; he unleashed a barrage.
Eight distinct streaks of thunder blade Qi erupted from his weapon, tearing through the air with ear-splitting shrieks. They hammered into the Sword Array in rapid succession.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The valley echoed with the explosions. The ground beneath the humans was pulverized, sending plumes of dirt and rock into the air. The sheer force of the concussions caused the earth to tremble violently.
Luo Zhen lowered his blade, watching the smoke.
A minute passed. The dust drifted away on the wind.
The five men were still standing. They looked disheveled—hair wild, faces pale from the exertion of maintaining the barrier—but they were alive. The white airflow still swirled around them, unbroken. They had been shaken, rattled by the kinetic force, but the blade Qi had failed to penetrate their defense.
"Hahaha!" The leader threw his head back and laughed, a sound bordering on mania. "It's useless! Useless! Our defense is impenetrable! You cannot break this!"
"Cannot break it?" Luo Zhen's voice dropped an octave, resonating with a dangerous calm. "Then try eating this."
He raised his arm, pointing his blade directly at the zenith of the sky. Dark clouds seemed to gather instantly in response to his call. He slashed the blade downward in a violent, vertical motion.
"Wild Thunder Strike!"
The sky tore open.
A bolt of lightning, thick as a water barrel, descended from the heavens. It didn't crackle; it roared. It slammed into the center of the Sword Array with the force of a falling meteor.
CRACK-BOOM!!!
The sound was deafening, a physical blow to the eardrums. The ground within a ten-meter radius of the impact simply ceased to exist, collapsing inward into a smoking crater.
Silence followed the thunder. The lightning arc fizzled and faded, leaving the smell of ozone and burnt earth thick in the air.
Luo Zhen stared into the pit, his expression grim.
Movement.
From the bottom of the crater, five figures scrambled out. They were ragged, covered in soot, and terrified—but they were alive. The moment they hit level ground, they instinctively snapped back into formation, terrified that Luo Zhen would fire again.
"Even that didn't kill them?!" Hong Yu gasped, her eyes bulging.
She had felt the heat of that lightning from fifty meters away. It had carved a hole in the earth deep enough to bury a house. Yet, these humans, though looking like beggars now, had no fatal wounds. No severed limbs. No gushing arteries.
The leader of the humans was panting heavily, his chest heaving like a bellows. He looked at Luo Zhen, fear finally creeping into his eyes alongside the arrogance.
"Luo!" he wheezed. "We admit... You are strong. But you can see it yourself. You cannot kill us."
He took a ragged breath. "You can block our swords, and we can tank your thunder. It's a stalemate. Neither of us can win today. So, let's just... walk away. We go our way, you go yours."
Luo Zhen's mouth curled into a strange, unreadable smile.
He had to give them credit. The Sword Array was impressive. The Wild Thunder Strike was a technique approaching the level of a Half-Step Demon King. For five Yuan Dan cultivators to tank it meant their defensive coordination was elite.
But a stalemate? Hardly.
He had other cards to play. The Green Scale Fire might struggle against the barrier, and summoning the Nine-Headed Demon Shadow—his ultimate trump card—felt like using a cannon to kill a mosquito. He didn't need to go that far.
"Hey! Luo! Did you hear me?" the leader shouted, mistaking Luo Zhen's silence for hesitation.
"I heard you," Luo Zhen said softly. "You're making a lot of noise. You want a truce? You aren't worthy of negotiating with me." He paused, his grip tightening on the Thunder Cloud Blade. "And who told you I can't break your toy formation?"
The leader shook his head, regaining some bravado. "Don't bluff. Your energy attacks can't penetrate—"
"My blade couldn't break it a moment ago," Luo Zhen interrupted. "But what about now?"
As he spoke, Luo Zhen's eyes changed. The pupils dilated, glowing with a bizarre, psychedelic white light.
Illusion Light Eye.
"What the..."
The leader's sentence died in his throat. He blinked, shaking his head, but it was too late for three of his companions.
The mental attack bypassed the physical barrier entirely. Three of the martial artists went rigid, their eyes glazing over as their minds were dragged into a hallucinatory abyss. They stood like statues, their connection to the array severed instantly.
Without their spiritual energy fueling the circuit, the protective white barrier flickered and died. A massive gap opened in the formation.
Luo Zhen didn't waste a microsecond.
Whoosh!
A twenty-meter blade of condensed thunder ripped through the air.
The two martial artists who had resisted the illusion could only watch in horror as the blue death approached.
BOOM!!
The interior of the formation exploded. It was as if a grenade had gone off in a closet. The three entranced cultivators were vaporized instantly, blown into a red mist by the sheer density of the blade Qi. The remaining two were blasted backward, their bodies skipping across the ground like stones on water.
They survived the initial impact, but they were broken. They lay on the ground, vomiting blood, their internal organs shattered.
The Sword Array was no more.
Luo Zhen walked forward casually. He flicked his wrist one last time.
"No! Please!"
The plea was cut short as a final arc of energy swept over the survivors, ending their misery.
Silence returned to the valley.
"We won... we actually won!" Hong Yu sobbed, tears streaming down her dusty face.
Her cousin was trembling, his face flushed red, muttering incoherently to himself. The adrenaline dump was overwhelming. They had accepted death, closed their eyes to it, and now they were standing in the quiet aftermath of victory.
Luo Zhen ignored their emotional display. He walked among the corpses, the consummate professional. He stripped the spatial pouches from the human bodies, tossing them into his own storage ring. Then, he moved to the snake corpses—Hong Yu's fallen kin—and began collecting their pouches as well.
This action seemed to snap Hong Yu's cousin back to reality.
"Hey! What are you doing?!" the cousin screamed, scrambling to his feet.
He charged at Luo Zhen, face twisted in outrage.
"What am I doing?" Luo Zhen paused, holding a blood-stained pouch. "Collecting loot."
"Loot? Those belong to my cousins!" the male snake demon roared. "Hand those over right now, or I won't be polite!"
Luo Zhen looked at the man. He looked at the pouch in his hand. Then, with a speed the cousin couldn't comprehend, he backhanded him across the face.
SMACK!
The sound was crisp and violent. The cousin spun in the air and hit the dirt hard, clutching a cheek that was already swelling to the size of a melon.
"You... you hit me?!" He stared at Luo Zhen, shock warring with humiliation. He turned his head, screaming toward Hong Yu. "Hong Yu! Look! Look at what your 'friend' is doing to me!"
Hong Yu hurried over, but her anger was directed at her family member. "Cousin, stop it! Stop making a scene!"
"I'm making a scene?!" He scrambled up, spitting blood. "He's stealing our family's inheritance! He's robbing the dead, and you say I'm the problem?"
"Have you forgotten who just saved us?" Hong Yu snapped, her patience evaporating. "We would be headless corpses right now if not for Brother Luo! Compared to our lives, what do a few spirit stones matter?"
"But he's your friend!" the cousin argued, clinging to a twisted logic. "Friends don't rob friends! Is this how a brother acts?"
Luo Zhen laughed. It was a cold, dry sound.
"Let's get one thing straight," Luo Zhen said, stepping closer. "I am Hong Yu's friend. I am not yours. You are nothing to me. Do not presume to call me 'brother'."
He extended a hand, palm up. "Now. Hand over the Spirit Fruit."
The cousin froze. "Spirit Fruit? What... what fruit?"
Luo Zhen didn't argue. He didn't count to three. He simply swung his blade.
Slash.
A precise beam of energy sliced through the air.
"ARGH!"
The cousin collapsed, shrieking, clutching the stump of his shoulder. His arm lay on the ground a few feet away.
"My arm! My arm!!"
The bravado evaporated instantly. The realization hit him like a bucket of ice water: Luo Zhen was not a hero. He was a demon. He was a killer. And he had absolutely no patience for insolence.
Luo Zhen watched the wailing man with contempt. Some people, he mused, only learned their place in the food chain when they were actively being eaten. If not for Hong Yu, the cousin's head would be lying next to his arm.
"I will say it one last time," Luo Zhen said, his voice bored. "The fruit."
"Yes! Yes! Here!"
Trembling violently, the cousin reached into his bloody robes with his remaining hand and pulled out a wrapped parcel. He shoved it toward Luo Zhen as if it were burning hot.
Luo Zhen unwrapped it. Inside sat a fruit the size of a large pear, but its skin was the color of deep, rich loam. It pulsed with a heavy, dense earth-elemental energy.
The Earth Spirit Fruit.
Luo Zhen wiped the fruit on his sleeve to clean off the dust, then bit into it. He chewed loudly, ignoring the whimpering cousin.
As he swallowed, the fruit dissolved into a warm, thick liquid that flooded his system. He could feel his cultivation base swelling, the energy integrating into his cells.
A semi-translucent prompt flashed in his mind—the System interface only he could see:
[Consumed Top-Grade Spirit Medicine: Earth Spirit Fruit.]
[Experience Points Gained: 260,000.]
"Two hundred sixty thousand," Luo Zhen murmured, licking his lips. "Not bad."
Hong Yu, who had been watching in stunned silence, finally found her voice. She looked at her maimed cousin, then at Luo Zhen. She knew better than to complain.
"Brother Luo," she said, bowing her head. "Thank you. Truly. Without you, we would be dead."
"Yes, yes," the cousin blubbered from the ground, clutching his stump. "Thank you, Big Brother Luo, for sparing my life."
Luo Zhen glanced at the cousin with disgust, then turned to Hong Yu. "It was convenient. Nothing more."
He sheathed his blade. "What will you do now?"
Hong Yu let out a bitter, exhausted sigh. "What can we do? We came here seeking treasure and power. Now... look at us." She gestured to the carnage. "We just want to survive. We'll hide. Wait out the month until the Secret Realm opens again, and then leave."
Luo Zhen nodded. It was the only rational choice. "Find a cave. Dig in deep. As long as you aren't holding a treasure, no one will waste energy hunting you. The ambient Qi here is dense enough that a month of hiding is worth a year of cultivation outside. It won't be a total loss."
"We will. Thank you for the advice," Hong Yu said.
"Good luck," Luo Zhen said.
Without another glance at the sobbing cousin, Luo Zhen turned. His massive serpentine tail materialized, sweeping across the ground as he propelled himself out of the valley, disappearing into the wild, dangerous expanse of the Secret Realm.