The cavern was so quiet you could hear a drop of water hit the damp stone floor.
The four remaining Righteous Alliance disciples stared at the crumpled, unconscious body of their leader. His neck was bent at a horrifying angle. His high-tier defensive aura had been completely bypassed by a single, casual slap.
They slowly turned their heads back to Yan Shuo.
The fifteen-year-old boy was still standing in the exact same spot, casually wiping his right hand with a white silk handkerchief. His golden Foundation Establishment Qi was humming around him, dense and heavy, completely suffocating their own spiritual pressure.
"You..." one of the disciples stammered, his spear shaking violently in his grip. "You used a demonic artifact! That's the only way you could break Senior Brother Liu's aura!"
Yan Shuo sighed, tossing the handkerchief aside. "If believing that makes you feel better before I break your legs, go ahead. But I really don't want to waste any more energy on you. Hand over your storage rings, crush your escape jades, and get out of my sight."
"Don't be arrogant!" another disciple shrieked, panic overriding his common sense. "There are four of us! Attack together! Formation of the Four Winds!"
The four of them moved in unison, their boots kicking up dust as they dashed in a circle around Yan Shuo. Wind-attributed Qi flared from their weapons, creating a localized hurricane of slicing blades meant to trap and shred their target. It was a flawless, highly synchronized sect formation.
Against a normal opponent, it would have been lethal.
Against the man who had spent a century fighting grandmasters, it was like watching toddlers perform a dance routine.
Yan Shuo didn't even draw his Qi this time. He just waited for the exact fraction of a second when the wind shifted.
He stepped forward, completely ignoring the swirling blades, and extended his foot.
Trip.
The disciple leading the formation stumbled over Yan Shuo's casually placed boot. Because they were moving so fast and their Qi was entirely linked, the single trip caused a massive, catastrophic chain reaction.
The leader crashed face-first into the stone floor. The disciple behind him tripped over his legs. The remaining two tried to stop, lost control of their surging wind Qi, and violently blasted each other in the chest with their own attacks.
In less than three seconds, the feared 'Formation of the Four Winds' collapsed into a groaning, bleeding pile of tangled limbs on the floor.
Yan Shuo stood over them, shaking his head in sheer disappointment.
"Your footwork is atrocious," Yan Shuo lectured mildly. "You over-commit to your dominant leg, leaving your center of gravity completely exposed. Did your master teach you that, or did you learn it from watching drunk mortals fight?"
The disciples just groaned, coughing up blood, too injured to even form a coherent curse.
Yan Shuo crouched down and methodically stripped the storage rings off their trembling fingers. He tossed them into the air, caught them smoothly, and slipped them into his own sleeve.
"Thanks for the pocket change," he said cheerfully. "Now, stay here and take a nap. If you wander deeper into the ruin, the traps will kill you a lot faster than I did."
He didn't bother killing them. Without their storage rings, weapons, and healing pills, they were effectively neutralized. Plus, leaving them alive to report back to the Alliance that the "cripple" had effortlessly dismantled their elite team would be far more humiliating.
Yan Shuo turned away from the entrance cavern and walked toward the dark, ominous corridor leading deeper into the Mystic Realm.
As he stepped into the shadows, his expression relaxed into a look of deep, nostalgic familiarity.
The obsidian walls were lined with glowing green runes, casting a sickly, eerie light over the damp stone. To the modern disciples of the Righteous Alliance, these runes were an ancient, terrifying mystery left behind by a forgotten civilization.
To Yan Shuo, they were just his old security system.
I really overdid it with the gloom, Yan Shuo thought to himself, brushing a cobweb off his pristine white robes. I must have been in a really edgy mood when I carved these hallways. But I suppose it keeps the rats out.
He strolled down the corridor with his hands clasped behind his back, completely ignoring the pressure plates hidden beneath the floor tiles. He remembered every single one. Step two paces to the left, skip the third tile, brush the wall to avoid the poisoned dart trigger. It was muscle memory.
He moved so casually it looked like he was taking a post-dinner walk through his own garden.
After about twenty minutes of uninterrupted walking, the narrow corridor suddenly opened up into a massive, cavernous chamber.
And it was completely packed.
Nearly a hundred elite disciples from various major sects were gathered at the entrance of the chamber, completely halting their progress. The air was thick with tension, frustration, and the metallic tang of fresh blood.
Yan Shuo stopped at the edge of the crowd, quietly looking over the heads of the disciples to see what was holding them up.
It was the Hall of a Thousand Severing Blades.
The chamber was easily a hundred yards long. The floor was a complex grid of hexagonal tiles, glowing faintly with different colors. Lining the walls on both sides were massive, imposing bronze statues of armored executioners, each holding a heavy, jagged broadsword raised high above their heads.
In the center of the grid lay the severed, bloody remains of three disciples who had clearly tried to sprint across and failed.
"This is impossible!" a disciple from the Heavenly Saber Sect cursed, slamming his fist against the wall. "The pattern keeps shifting! Every time someone steps on a blue tile, the statues in that row swing their blades. If you step on a red tile, the floor releases toxic gas!"
At the front of the crowd, a young man wearing the starry robes of the Heavenly Array Sect was sweating profusely. He was holding a complex, spinning bronze compass, furiously calculating the shifting Qi flows of the room.
"Shut up and let me think!" the Array genius snapped, his eyes bloodshot. "This is an ancient, supreme-tier slaughter array! The geometric permutations are endless! I need at least three hours to calculate the single safe path through the grid!"
The rest of the disciples groaned in frustration. Three hours? By then, the treasures deeper in the ruin might be completely swallowed up by whoever solved it first. But nobody dared to step onto the grid after seeing the chopped-up bodies in the center.
Yan Shuo stood in the back, listening to the Array genius babble about geometric permutations.
He let out a tired sigh.
Idiots, Yan Shuo thought. It's not a math problem. It's a pressure lock.
He had built this room specifically to annoy people who overthought things. The shifting colors and the complex grid were entirely a visual distraction. The actual mechanism was tied to the weight distribution on the very first row of tiles.
Yan Shuo didn't want to wait three hours for an amateur to fail at a puzzle he designed while he was drunk a century ago.
He calmly parted the crowd, his pristine white robes standing out starkly against the dirty, battle-worn armor of the other disciples.
"Excuse me. Pardon me. Coming through," Yan Shuo murmured politely, slipping past the heavily armed geniuses.
A few disciples glared at him, recognizing his Azure Sword Sect uniform, but before they could sneer at his low cultivation, Yan Shuo had already reached the front of the crowd.
He didn't pause. He didn't consult the Array genius. He didn't even draw his sword.
He just kept walking directly toward the lethal grid.
"Hey! Are you crazy?!" the Array genius shouted, looking up from his compass in horror as the fifteen-year-old boy casually stepped past the safe line. "Stop! The array is fully active! If you step on the wrong tile, you'll trigger the whole room!"
Yan Shuo ignored him.
He stepped onto the grid. He didn't aim for a "safe" green tile. He stepped directly onto a glowing red tile—the exact color that was supposed to release a cloud of flesh-melting toxic gas.
The entire crowd of disciples gasped, instinctively taking a massive step back, bracing for a gruesome death.
Yan Shuo's boot pressed down on the red tile.
Click.
Nothing happened. No gas. No swinging blades.
Yan Shuo didn't stop. He took another step, planting his left foot onto a blue tile. Then his right foot onto a yellow tile. He was walking in a perfectly straight line down the absolute center of the room, completely ignoring the complex, shifting patterns that the Array genius had just spent thirty minutes claiming were the key to survival.
The massive bronze executioner statues lining the walls suddenly groaned, their heavy stone joints grinding together. Their glowing red eyes locked onto Yan Shuo.
The Array genius screamed. "He triggered them! The statues are moving! Fall back!"
The massive broadswords began to swing down in a terrifying arc, aimed directly at the pathway Yan Shuo was walking on.
Yan Shuo didn't flinch. He didn't even break his leisurely stride.
As he walked past the third statue on the left, he casually reached out his paper fan and tapped a very specific, unassuming dent in the bronze statue's knee.
Clunk.
A loud mechanical grinding noise echoed through the massive chamber.
Instantly, the glowing red eyes of all the bronze statues flickered and died. The massive broadswords, which were mere inches away from slicing Yan Shuo into ribbons, froze completely in mid-air. The glowing colored tiles on the floor powered down, fading to a dull, ordinary gray stone.
The heavy, oppressive hum of the supreme-tier slaughter array completely vanished.
Yan Shuo snapped his paper fan open, gave it a lazy wave to clear the stale air, and kept walking perfectly straight until he reached the heavy stone doors at the opposite end of the hall.
He pushed the doors open, stepping into the deeper, treasure-filled sections of the ruin, and disappeared into the darkness without ever looking back.
Back at the entrance of the chamber, nearly a hundred elite geniuses of the Righteous Alliance stood in absolute, mind-shattering silence.
The Array genius slowly lowered his complex, spinning bronze compass. His hands were shaking. He stared at the deactivated room, his brain completely failing to comprehend what he had just witnessed.
"He... he just walked," a disciple from the Heavenly Saber Sect whispered, his voice trembling with sheer disbelief. "He just walked in a straight line and poked a statue's knee."
"Who was that?" another disciple choked out, rubbing his eyes to make sure he wasn't hallucinating. "Was that a Core Formation grandmaster using an illusion?!"
"No," the Array genius swallowed hard, a cold sweat breaking out across his back. "That was... that was Yan Shuo. The boy who married the Saintess."
The crowd fell dead silent again. The rumors said the boy was a useless piece of trash who was only surviving because he hid behind his terrifying wife.
But as they stared at the deactivated, supreme-tier slaughter array that had stumped their best minds, a horrifying realization began to dawn on them.
Maybe the Saintess hadn't been tricked by a demonic artifact.
Maybe, just maybe, the Righteous Alliance had just locked them inside a deadly ruin with a true monster.