The Eight-Winged Divine Tiger's gaze finally fixed on Ling Feng.
It narrowed, slitted pupils contracting like a predator locking onto prey.
"…Named Hero?" his voice rolled out slowly, ancient and hoarse, heavy with disbelief. "Interesting. To kill Heavenly Sovereigns at that level… you must be borrowing some external power."
Murmurs rippled through the battered citadel.
Ling Feng's smile didn't change.
'Of course, an old monster at this stage can't believe it,' he thought, amused. 'If they admit I'm just this strong, they have to admit their entire world is small.'
He chuckled, voice lazy.
"External power, eh? Classic delusions."
The Divine Tiger's killing intent spiked.
Worldly essence erupted from the depths as the White Tiger Great Vein stirred—ancestral power that had slept beneath this land since the Tiger God first refined the Terra Root and turned this place into his den. A phantom white tiger curled beneath the mountain range, fangs bared, claws sunk into the bones of the earth. Its roar was silent, but its presence alone made the sky dim.
The suffocating pressure that had been bearing down on the trapped guests—Chi Xiaodao, Chi Xiaodie, the Bao Clan, even the visiting experts from other sects—receded a fraction, drawn back to coil around its true master.
Stone tiles cracked. Pillars groaned. The heavens above Tiger's Howl country seemed to tilt.
The Eight-Winged Divine Tiger took one step forward.
Space shrank with that step. Demon blood, refined across eras, burned like a sun in his veins. Each of his eight wings unfolded behind him like a war banner, their snowy feathers sharp as blades, his aura surging straight toward Ling Feng.
And then—
He froze.
No one saw Ling Feng move.
There was only a soft sound, like a page being turned, and space… folded.
An invisible weight dropped from above.
It wasn't the weight of a mountain, or even a world. It was the weight of a will.
The Eight-Winged Divine Tiger's blood energy, which had just surged to the heavens, suddenly clenched. It was as if a colossal hand had reached down, pressed against his chest, and pushed his entire existence half a step backward—pinning the eruption of his aura in place.
The eight wings trembled.
"This old demon has walked through eras," the Divine Tiger growled, shock flashing in his bestial eyes. "Even a Godking aura cannot so easily—"
Ling Feng tilted his head, as if listening for a sound no one else could hear.
"Relax," he said mildly. "If I was actually trying, you'd already be a fur rug."
Gasps rippled through the crowd. Arrogant juniors went pale. Even veteran Heavenly Sovereigns felt their scalps grow numb.
The Demon Ancestor's pupils shrank.
Around Ling Feng's body, four rays of light flickered for an instant—green, red, yellow, cyan.
Space, power, energy, time.
They vanished in the blink of an eye, but the Divine Tiger's Dao senses screamed. That brief glimpse had been enough for an old monster who once stood at the peak of an era to understand one thing:
This "Named Hero" did not belong to the framework of their world.
"You—" he muttered, throat dry. "What are those—"
Ling Feng ignored him.
He swept his gaze across the gathered elders and high-level demons of Tiger's Howl instead.
"Prime Imperial Sire?" he asked lazily.
The old demon in simple robes stepped forward, separated from the line of elders as naturally as a mountain emerging from a field of stones. His back was slightly hunched, but the divine rings behind him spun slowly like a river of laws, each ring heavy with tiger roars and old blood.
"This old man," he answered coldly. "You are the so-called Heavenly Dao Academy's guardian demon?"
"So they say," Ling Feng replied. "Personally, I like 'Ling Feng' better. Easier to shout when you're begging for mercy."
Several Tiger's Howl elders flushed with anger, demonic qi flaring.
"You junior!" one of them barked. "This place is the ancestral ground of Tiger's Howl School—"
Ling Feng waved a hand, dismissing the interruption like smoke.
"Funny how you think home advantage means anything against me," he said casually. "So let me break that little dream for you. Today, two things are happening."
He raised one finger.
"First, Chi Xiaodao and Bao Yun walk out of here free. That part is already done."
Chi Xiaodao clenched his fists, eyes burning. Beside him, Chi Xiaodie bit her lip, the cold light in her gaze trembling with barely contained emotions
Ling Feng raised a second finger.
"Second," he said, voice still soft, almost conversational, "there will no longer be a Tiger's Howl School in the Eastern Hundred Cities."
He didn't raise his voice. But every cultivator on the mountain felt a chill creep into their bones.
Below the main platform, older cultivators from various powers felt their hearts seize.
"He really dares…" someone whispered. "Destroy a first-rate sect like Tiger's Howl… doesn't he know that even to level this place, one needs a Virtuous Paragon at minimum?"
Prime Imperial Sire's eyes narrowed, his demonic visage twisting with fury.
"Junior," he said, voice cold enough to freeze bone. "Do not think that a few beauties at your side and some strange tricks allow you to speak such arrogant words."
He lifted his hand.
The divine rings behind him roared awake.
Forty-nine rings, each one a world of law. Tiger shadows leaped within them, galaxies of shattered stars flowed along their edges, storms of killing intent surged and collapsed. The rings layered together, forming an impervious fortress, a spinning wall of Dao that had once made even beings at the verge of Heavenly Soverigen feel helpless.
The air groaned as the ring-field expanded, compressing space, grinding the void itself into dust.
Ling Feng smiled as if someone had just started playing background music for him.
He turned his head slightly.
"Shangyuan, Baojiao," he said, tone light. "Turn him into meat paste. This fly is annoying me. Don't make me lose face."
Li Shangyuan rose gracefully from the platform behind him.
Her Pure Jade Physique shimmered with a soft, crystalline luster—not the fragile, brittle jade of a young maiden, but a flawless immortal mineral, able to bear immense force without cracking. The Black Tortoise Hammer resting in her hand seemed almost understated, its massive head veined with faint Dao patterns like ancient turtle shell lines, each stroke a law of defense and counterforce.
Beside her, Chen Baojiao rolled her shoulders, bronze bangle already flashing as the Imperial Violent Hammer materialized in her grip. Deep within her body, the Tyrannical Valley Immortal Spring Physique roared: each spring of essence surging, violent power bubbling like magma beneath a thin crust.
Chen Baojiao flashed Li Shangyuan a grin full of teeth and fighting spirit.
"Race you?" she asked.
Li Shangyuan's lips curved faintly, calm eyes reflecting the spinning divine rings ahead.
"To the corpse or the shattered rings?" she replied.
"To the scream," Chen Baojiao decided without hesitation.
They moved.
It was like watching two different branches of the Dao answer the same bell.
The Prime Imperial Sire's forty-nine divine rings thundered, stacking into an enormous, rotating fortress of law. Tiger roars, lightning, storm winds, mountains—countless phenomena manifested and were crushed, refined, and re-manifested between the rings, forming a grinding domain that aimed to crush anything entering it into dust.
"Presumptuous juniors!" he snarled. "Be crushed to dust!"
The rings spun faster, the void around them distorting, light bending as entire patches of space-time were dragged into their rotation.
Li Shangyuan raised her Rod.
Pure jade light blossomed around her, coating skin, meridians, bones—turning every part of her into a crystalline lattice designed to channel and redirect force.
She didn't roar or chant. She simply stepped into the storm of divine rings, jade qi rising like a calm tide.
The first ring slammed into her domain.
Instead of shattering her, its terrifying momentum slid along the crystalline structure of her Pure Jade Physique. The impact force threaded itself through the lattice, guided along Dao lines Ling Feng had personally drawn for her, and was redirected—flowing down her arm, into the Black Tortoise Hammer.
Her Rod descended.
"Dong—"
The sound echoed like an ancient temple bell tolling across the mountains.
A single divine ring flickered.
A tiny crack appeared on its surface.
Prime Imperial Sire's pupils contracted.
"What—"
Before the thought could finish forming, Chen Baojiao's laughter crashed into his ring domain.
"Coming through!"
She charged like a goddess striding out of a violent sea. Immortal Spring power surged beneath her skin, every droplet in her countless inner springs refined into tyrannical might. With each step, fountains of violent energy erupted beneath her feet, blasting her forward, making space quiver.
Her Imperial Violent Hammer met another divine ring head-on.
"Boom!"
This time, the ring didn't merely crack—it detonated.
Shards of law scattered like broken glass. The backlash that should have ravaged her meridians plunged into her Chaos-refined springs instead, devoured in an instant. The Immortal Spring Physique drank in destruction, turned it into nourishment, and hurled it back as even more terrifying strength.
"Again!" she laughed, eyes bright. "Old dog, let me hear you squeal!"
Hammer and jade collided with ring after ring.
Li Shangyuan's blows were measured, almost scholarly—each strike landing on the precise point where a ring's flow of law intersected with its neighbor, forcing tiny mismatches in their rotations. Chen Baojiao's attacks were ferocious, wild, tearing open gaps with brute force that Li Shangyuan immediately exploited, widening fractures into fissures.
Divine rings that had once withstood the assaults of near-Heavenly King experts began to fracture in mere breaths.
"Impossible!" Prime Imperial Sire roared, demonic blood boiling. "You two—what level—"
He poured more blood energy into the spinning rings, forcing them to close like a giant maw. Laws surged, tiger roars shook the sky, the White Tiger Great Vein resonated beneath their feet, sending up streams of ancestral power to bolster him.
Li Shangyuan's eyes flashed.
For a heartbeat, in the clear mirror of her Pure Jade Physique, Ling Feng's reflection shimmered—his finger tracing casual circles over the scarred bark of the World Tree during their training.
Change the flow. Don't challenge the wall head-on. Turn the fortress into a well.
Her hammer shifted.
Instead of striking the outer edge of a ring, she stepped in, pivoted her waist, and swung along a strange, inward-curving arc, tapping the ring at a hidden node inside its circulation.
"Dong—"
The divine ring shuddered.
Its rotation faltered, one side slowing by a fraction, the other surging ahead. The perfect balance of the ring domain wobbled.
In that same heartbeat, Chen Baojiao's hammer descended from above, wrapped in a tidal wave of Immortal Spring power.
"Break!"
The compromised ring collapsed.
The remaining rings tried to close ranks, but their formation had already been disrupted. Micro-cracks started spreading through them like spiderwebs, each heartbeat worsening the fracture.
Prime Imperial Sire coughed blood, the backlash of his own laws biting into his heart.
"You wretches—!"
He raised his hand, gathering a furious dragon of laws. It coiled behind him, formed entirely from dozens of ring-worlds, ready to crash down and erase the two women from existence.
A shadow fell over him.
He looked up.
The face of a hammer filled his vision.
The Black Tortoise Rod came down like an entire mountain range sinking.
In that instant, Li Shangyuan's Pure Jade Physique burned with clear light. All the force flowing through her—rejected laws, ring impacts, the push and pull of the domain—converged, refined through the crystalline lattice, and poured into that single blow.
The dragon of laws shattered.
The Rod struck his chest.
Bones snapped. Divine rings imploded. His body arced downward like a broken comet.
Before he could hit the ground, a laughing figure flashed above him—Chen Baojiao riding an eruption of spring power, Imperial Violent Hammer spinning in her hands like a reaper's scythe.
"Old thing!" she shouted, voice fierce and bright. "If you bully Xiaodao again in your next life, I'll come kill you there too!"
Her hammer fell like a world-ending tempest.
The Prime Imperial Sire's body exploded into a rain of blood.
His True Fate rose, trying to flee—only to be swept up by a casual, invisible surge of Chaos energy from Ling Feng's direction. The soul was refined in an instant, condensed into rings and stored away before the Tiger's Howl ancestral spirits could even stir.
Below, Tiger's Howl disciples stared, faces bloodless.
"The Prime Imperial Sire… Supreme Elder… dead…"
"In just a few exchanges…"
"Those two women—what realm—"
On the main platform, a few visiting Heavenly Dao Academy elders swallowed hard. Even for those used to seeing mountains topple, that brutal, efficient dismantling of a demon supreme elder was enough to make their Dao Hearts quake.
Ling Feng's voice drifted down lazily from the center of the air.
"Good job," he called. "Shangyuan, Baojiao—remember how that felt. Later we'll polish it again."
Li Shangyuan's snow-white cheeks carried a soft, warm glow, the satisfaction of a student whose answer had been praised by her teacher. Chen Baojiao lifted her hammer and flashed him a bright, unashamed grin.
"See?" she shouted. "You pick good wives!"
Bing Yuxia, standing off to the side with fan in hand, clicked her tongue.
"Shameless," she muttered, snapping her fan open to hide the faint flush at the tips of her ears. "All of them."
Her fingers, however, tightened around the fan's ribs; even she could not deny the exhilaration of watching Tiger's Howl's fortress of laws be smashed apart like rotten wood.
…
On the other side of the battlefield, another storm was brewing.
Freed from the pressure of the Prime Imperial Sire's domain, the remaining high-level demons of Tiger's Howl School moved at once. Several supreme elders, along with the Tiger's Howl School Master himself, surged forward. Demonic qi erupted, treasures blazing with ferocious light—the Galaxy Parting Hook, the Four Beasts Divine Pagoda, tiger-head axes, claw gauntlets that had drunk the blood of countless enemies.
"Slaughter them!" the school master roared, his voice breaking from rage and fear. "Offer their heads to the ancestor!"
Lightning crawled along Xu Pei's azure halberd.
Three distinct currents spiraled together around the halberd's blade—one thin and fast as needle rain, one heavy and deep as a thunder sea, one pale and silent, slipping between the others like a ghost.
Her storm domain snapped into place, a tempest that answered her breathing.
"The three pillars…" she murmured under her breath, remembering Ling Feng's hand guiding hers over the Worldly Prime Liquid, his easy voice explaining what others would call heaven-defying Dao.
Fast, heavy, silent. Strike their nerves, crush their defenses, kill them from the inside.
She stepped into the charge.
Fast lightning speared out first, a web of thread-thin arcs that laced through the charging elders like a net. Wherever it passed, limbs stiffened, joints misfired; bodies stumbled as their nervous systems were jolted, commands scrambled.
Hearts raced. Muscles locked.
Heavy lightning crashed down a breath later.
Thick pillars of thunder fell from the heavens, hammering their protective qi, smashing formation shields, slamming into the Four Beasts Divine Pagoda's outer light. Each impact made the pagoda tremble, its four beast phantoms—azure dragon, white tiger, vermilion bird, black tortoise—roaring in protest.
Silent lightning slipped in last.
It was colorless, soundless, leaving no burn marks. It threaded through gaps in defenses, seeped through eye sockets and open mouths, and bloomed quietly inside organs and meridians.
The elders screamed.
Blood sprayed from noses and ears as the invisible lightning detonated within them, turning their carefully fortified bodies into cages for their own execution.
"Impudent junior!" one of the supreme elders bellowed, forcing his cracking meridians to obey. "Four Beasts, suppress!"
The Four Beasts Divine Pagoda roared awake, growing to a towering height. Four colossal beast phantoms emerged—fierce and majestic—stepping out to suppress the heavens and trample the storm.
Steel hissed.
Bai Jianzhen had already drawn her sword.
She did not bother with declarations.
Her Sword Life Treasure, nourished atop the World Tree's scarred leaf and tempered in Ling Feng's insane training regimens, now carried a new edge—the memory of an ancient sword that had once tried and failed to leave a mark on that primordial bark, and the quiet surpassing of that mark.
Her blade left its sheath in a simple motion.
For an instant, there was nothing flashy—just a straight cut.
Heaven and earth split with it.
The roaring four beast phantoms staggered. Invisible sword scars appeared across their colossal bodies. The azure dragon's head partway separated from its neck, the white tiger's spine cracked, the vermilion bird's wings shredded, the black tortoise's shell fissured.
The pagoda shook. A fine crack split its surface from top to bottom, its suppressive power faltering.
The elders barely had time to understand what had happened.
Xu Pei's halberd descended, wrapped in swirling triple thunder.
Bai Jianzhen's sword followed, cold and precise, every stroke a line that erased someone's future.
An elder brandished the Galaxy Parting Hook, dragging an arc of starlight through the sky, attempting to cleave Xu Pei in two. Fast lightning snapped his fingers numb; the hook's path skewed. Heavy lightning punched into his chest, shattering ribs. Silent lightning bloomed in his heart. Bai Jianzhen's sword cut through the starlight, then through his neck. His head flew, eyes still wide.
Another supreme elder roared, tiger-head axes sweeping out to form a sea of bloody blades. Xu Pei's storm peeled that sea apart, layer by layer; Bai Jianzhen walked along the gaps in the axes' trajectories, her sword drawing a single, elegant curve. The elder's body split diagonally, sliding apart with a neatness that would have made a craftsman weep.
The Tiger's Howl School Master himself activated the last trump card in his possession—a tiger-claw treasure infused with a wisp of the Tiger God's fang. Demonic patterns flared across his arms as he lunged, claws stretching for Bai Jianzhen's throat.
Lightning turned his feet to mud. Sword light met his claws.
There was a brief, blinding collision—then the sound of something hard being cut.
The ancient tiger-claw treasure, which had once torn apart royal scions, fell in two pieces. The School Master stared, aghast, as his arms from the elbow down dropped away in a spray of blood.
Xu Pei's halberd swept in, triple lightning coiling along its blade.
"Fall."
The strike tore through his chest, shredding heart and destiny both.
In the span of a dozen breaths, the Tiger's Howl School Master and the supreme elders under him fell one after another—bodies torn by storm, souls cut by sword.
Blood rained across the citadel, splattering the carved white-tiger statues, falling like crimson flowers upon the stone steps that had once seen generations of Tiger's Howl disciples ascend proudly.
The disciples below could only kneel, legs numb, minds blank.
Prime Imperial Sire—dead.
School Master—dead.
Supreme elders—dead.
Their so-called "great plan" to swallow Lion's Roar Gate and the Bao Yun Clan, to use Chi Xiaodao's imprisonment as a lever to twist the Eastern Hundred Cities around their claws—now seemed like a joke carved onto their own headstone.
Only one pillar remained.
Eight-Winged Divine Tiger.