The roar didn't just break the silence; it shattered the atmosphere.
Jiang Dao moved with a velocity that defied the laws of physics. His body was a blurring comet of golden light, accelerating with such violence that the air around him burst into flames. Mid-charge, his physiology began to warp and expand, muscles swelling and hardening into something ancient and terrifying. In the blink of an eye, the man was gone, replaced by the towering, nightmare-inducing silhouette of the Heaven-Desolate God-Slaying Form.
He didn't stop. He didn't even slow down.
Carrying the gravitational weight of a collapsing star, Jiang Dao's personal Blazing Sun Domain erupted outward. He was a miniature sun, a celestial body of destruction crashing headlong into the ink-black gloom of the Evil Domain.
The Evil God residing within had been complacent. It had just finished butchering a township, its maw dripping with fresh blood, already dreaming of further expansion. It never calculated for a scenario where the sun itself would come crashing down on its head.
The collision was cataclysmic.
The searing heat of Jiang Dao's aura boiled the darkness away instantly. The Evil Domain, a construct of shadow and malice, evaporated like morning mist under a nuclear flash. For a split second, the entity felt as though it had been dropped into the caldera of a primordial volcano. The terror wasn't physical; it was spiritual. Its very soul began to vibrate with the frequency of impending death.
"What… what is this?" the creature shrieked, its voice a discordant scrape of metal on glass. It panicked and dumped its Yin energy, trying to create a shield, a buffer, anything to stop the encroaching light.
It was useless.
BOOM!
Jiang Dao tore through the defenses. His hand, now the size of a grinding wheel and glowing with molten heat, slammed into the Evil God's face. It wasn't a fight; it was an execution. The impact was wet and heavy. The entity's skull collapsed inward, its facial features twisting and caving like wet clay struck by a sledgehammer.
Boundless Yang Fire and pure True Qi flooded the creature's broken form. The energy didn't just burn; it detonated. Internal explosions racked the Evil God's body, sending it careening backward with a miserable, gurgling wail.
It smashed into a nearby mountain peak with the force of a meteorite, pulverizing the stone and sending a plume of debris into the stratosphere.
Jiang Dao touched down. The earth groaned under his weight. He stood amidst a crater of his own making, his expression icy, his skin encased in golden scales that seemed to burn with an eternal flame. His Blazing Sun Domain pulsed, locking down everything within a dozen miles in a grid of searing heat.
His golden irises, void of human empathy, locked onto the broken heap in the distance. He took a step. The ground shook.
But before he could finish the job, his head snapped up.
Sensory warnings flared in his mind. To the north, east, and west, the horizon was darkening. The temperature plummeted as vast, rolling tides of Yin energy stained the sky like spilled ink.
More Evil Domains. And they were converging.
"Blind, arrogant things," Jiang Dao rumbled, his voice sounding like shifting tectonic plates. "You dare treat my territory as your hunting ground? Today, I ensure you never crawl your way out of hell again."
The approaching entities were Evil Gods, creatures of the Void. They were notoriously slippery, capable of phasing into the Void Realm to escape death. But they had made a fatal miscalculation. They had entered Jiang Dao's domain. Under the oppression of his Blazing Sun field, space itself was rigid. There would be no phasing. There would be no escape.
In the rubble, the first Evil God was trying to reassemble its face.
"Cough... cough..."
It was delirious, its mind shattered by the initial blow. The Red Sun True Fire clinging to its skin was acting like acid, eating away at its regenerative capabilities. It looked up, eyes wide with a primal fear that transcended its alien nature.
"You... You are Jiang Dao," it gurgled, spitting out clots of coagulated black blood. Smoke rose from the cracks in its skin. "What... what kind of monster are you?"
Jiang Dao didn't offer a villain's monologue. He offered silence and violence.
Boom!
He launched himself forward, a golden spear thrusting into the heart of the darkness. His hand, stiffened into a blade, punched straight through the entity's face.
The sound was nauseating—a wet pop followed by the hiss of cauterized flesh. Space warped around the impact point. The Evil God screamed, a sound so high and wretched it seemed to strip the paint off reality.
Jiang Dao's hand had entered the front of its skull and exited the back. Brain matter and black ichor boiled instantly, splashing onto the burning ground. The creature thrashed, but it was pinned, a butterfly on a corkboard, burning alive from the inside out.
The commotion halted the approach of the other three entities.
Hovering in the high air, wrapped in their cloaks of shadow, the newcomers froze. They stared at the scene below, their unnatural instincts screaming at them to run. They saw the monstrous silhouette, the golden scales, the fire that seemed to consume the sky.
They saw their kin, an immortal being of the Void, skewered like livestock.
"What is that thing?" one of the Evil Gods hissed, its voice trembling. "That physique... It's impossible."
Jiang Dao heard them. He slowly lifted his head, the corpse of their brother still impaled on his arm. He grinned. It was a nightmare of a smile—a mouth filled with rows of serrated, needle-thin teeth, set in a face of golden armor.
"You asked what I am?"
Jiang Dao ripped his hand free and grabbed the thrashing entity by the neck.
"You trash invade my land, slaughter my people, and then have the audacity to ask what I am?" His voice rose to a deafening crescendo. "Today, I don't just kill you. I consume you!"
Craaaack.
Jiang Dao's jaw unhinged. His mouth expanded unnaturally, stretching wide like a python, revealing a throat that looked less like a gullet and more like a spiraling black hole lined with razor-wire teeth.
He didn't hesitate. He jammed the broken, burning body of the Evil God into his maw.
The creature, suppressed by the domain and broken by the beating, couldn't fight back. It could only scream.
"Save me! Help!"
The plea was cut short as Jiang Dao clamped his jaws shut.
Gulp.
Observers would have seen a massive, grotesque bulge travel down Jiang Dao's throat and settle into his abdomen. Almost immediately, his golden aura intensified. The [Thousand Tribulations Spirit Slaughter] technique roared to life within his gut, dissolving the entity and strip-mining it for power.
For a few seconds, muffled screams echoed from inside Jiang Dao's stomach. Then, silence.
High above, the three remaining Evil Gods recoiled in absolute horror. They had seen war. They had seen death. They had never seen predation like this.
"He... he ate him," one whispered.
"Kill it! Kill it now!" another shrieked.
But the command was futile. The moment the words left its lips, the air shimmered. Jiang Dao was no longer on the ground.
He appeared directly in front of the screaming entity, his massive palms clapping together on either side of its head like two crashing tectonic plates.
SPLAT.
There was no resistance. The Evil God's upper body was flattened instantly, resembling crushed rubber. Golden flames erupted on contact, turning the flattened remains into a torch.
The remaining two entities didn't even pretend to fight. The bravado of the "higher beings" evaporated, replaced by the terrified instinct of prey realizing they are in the cage with the tiger.
"Run!"
"Monster! It's a monster!"
They turned, tearing at the fabric of space, desperate to flee.
"Leaving so soon?" Jiang Dao's voice was right behind them, dripping with sadistic mockery.
The aftermath was quiet, save for the crackling of fires.
"Gang Leader..."
"Gang Leader, you finally came!"
From the ruins of the town, survivors from the Flame Gang emerged. They were covered in soot and blood, their faces masks of trauma. They ran toward Jiang Dao, collapsing to their knees, weeping uncontrollably.
They were hardened criminals and fighters, but they had been reduced to children. The things they had faced were not human; they were calamities. But the thing standing before them now... he was a catastrophe of a different breed.
"What faction was this?" Jiang Dao asked. His voice was still thick with the distortion of his transformation.
"Reporting... reporting to the Gang Leader," a rudder master stammered, tears streaming down a face caked in grime. "They said... they said they were from the Corpse Dao Sect."
"The Corpse Dao Sect."
Jiang Dao's eyes narrowed, the golden fire within them flaring.
Hangzhou City. The memories were fresh. Along with the Spirit Child Palace, the Corpse Dao Sect had turned that city into a slaughterhouse. He had exterminated the Spirit Child Palace. It seemed the Corpse Dao Sect was eager to join them in oblivion.
"Good," Jiang Dao said, the heat radiating from him scorching the grass at his feet. "Let them come. It saves me the trouble of hunting them down one by one."
He turned to his men. "Go back to headquarters. Do not leave until I say so."
"Yes, Gang Leader!"
Jiang Dao turned to leave, but stopped. His head cocked to the side. His sensory perception, heightened to a supernatural degree, picked up a disturbance. Three hundred meters away, in a darkened alley, a shadow was moving wrong.
Boom!
He didn't run; he exploded into motion. He smashed through three brick walls, debris showering the street, and intercepted the fleeing shadow.
It was a blur of grey motion, cold and indistinct. Jiang Dao's hand, a claw of absolute dominance, slammed down.
"You—"
The shadow tried to retaliate, firing a bolt of Yin energy. Jiang Dao didn't even dodge. He backhanded the bolt, shattering it, and followed through with a strike that connected with solid matter.
A man tumbled out of the shadows. He was middle-aged, pale as death, coughing up blood. His chest was a ruin.
It was an Elder of the Anyang Xie Family.
"You're that Jiang Dao!" the Elder screamed, scrambling backward on broken limbs. "Stay back!"
"The Anyang Xie Family," Jiang Dao mused, looming over him. "You people... you're the best supplements of all."
The Elder tried to invoke his fused Evil Spirit to escape, but Jiang Dao was faster. His hand punched through the man's back, ripping out the spine and the transparent, wriggling spirit attached to it.
With a wet crunch, Jiang Dao crushed the spirit in his fist. He didn't linger. He vanished into the night.
The hunt had begun.
Jiang Dao didn't go to Sifang City immediately. He started north of Qianyuan City and carved a path of destruction southward. He moved like a natural disaster, a sentient storm of steel and fire. Every evil spirit, every monster, every corrupt "Spirit Remover" he found was dismantled.
He was fast. He was brutal. And he was hungry.
Sifang City. The Meeting Hall.
The atmosphere was suffocating. The leaders of the three great powers—the Anyang Xie Family, the Tuoba Family, and the Corpse Dao Sect—sat in a circle of high-backed chairs. The luxury of the room contrasted sharply with the panic on the faces of their subordinates.
"Repeat that," the head of the Xie Family snapped.
"Our forces... they're gone, sir," a disciple whispered, trembling. "Jiang Dao is retaliating. He's moving from the north, sweeping toward us. He's killing everyone."
"Impossible," hissed the Vice Sect Master of the Corpse Dao Sect, Shi Wuliang. A shroud of grey mist constantly swirled around him, obscuring his features. "How can one man kill so many Elders? Does he have infinite stamina?"
"Brother Shi, panic serves no one," said Tuoba Guang heavily. He was a large man, radiating the aura of a veteran killer. "He killed Xie Xuan. We knew he was dangerous. We simply underestimated how dangerous it was. But we have the numbers. We dig in, we ambush, we kill him."
"Where is he now?" Xie Lingtong, the Xie leader, demanded.
"We don't know," the disciple cried. "He moves too fast. He hits a location, leaves no survivors, and vanishes."
"Useless trash!" Xie Lingtong roared.
Suddenly, the doors burst open. A former hall master of the Black Tiger Gang stumbled in, holding a piece of parchment as if it were a bomb.
"Senior Xie! A letter! Jiang Dao sent a letter!"
Xie Lingtong snatched the paper. The other two leaders leaned in.
The message was scrawled in fresh, wet blood. The calligraphy was jagged, furious.
[I give you two hours. Roll your bodies to Broken Soul Valley and accept your death. If you are not there, I will come to your homes. I will kill your dogs. I will kill your chickens. I will leave nothing alive.]
Silence descended on the room. It was the heavy, pressurized silence of a tomb.
Then, the killing intent exploded.
"Arrogant!" Tuoba Guang roared, slamming his hand on the table.
Rip.
The letter in Xie Lingtong's hand disintegrated, turned to dust by the sheer force of his projecting energy.
"Heh... hehehe." Shi Wuliang began to laugh, a dry, rasping sound from within his mist. "Good. Very good. A gangster threatens the Great Families? Unprecedented. Truly unprecedented."
"He wants Broken Soul Valley?" Tuoba Guang stood up, his eyes cold and hard. "Get me the map."
A map was unfurled. Their eyes locked onto the location. Thirty miles west.
"We don't take chances," Tuoba Guang commanded. "I'm contacting the Family Head. We bring the Sacred Artifact. We don't just fight him; we obliterate him."
He turned to a scribe.
Write a reply. Tell him we accept his invitation. Tell him to wait for us at Broken Soul Valley. We end this today."