East King Duke stood like a defiant peak amidst a gathering storm, his posture rigid and his aura blazing like a refracted rainbow.
The suddenness of his stand sent a ripple of genuine shock through the Twelve Ancestral Witches. For a heartbeat, they simply stared. What was this creature doing?
"Di Jiang!" the Duke barked, his voice amplified by his Dao to echo through the very marrow of the mountain. "I am the Head of the Male Immortals, appointed by the Saint himself to maintain the primordial order. Grant me the Face that is my due... and retreat."
The silence that followed was broken by a collective gasp from the hidden observers. Was the man insane? Did he truly believe a title could act as a shield against the most violent force in the Honghuang world? Even Nuwa, Kunpeng, and Fuxi shared a look of baffled surprise. They wondered what honeyed poison Bai Ze had whispered into the man's ear to make him so suicidally bold.
"So you're the f*cking Head of the Male Immortals?"
Qiang Liang's voice was a physical detonation. The space around his mouth distorted into jagged fractures. He didn't wait for a rebuttal. He spat a bolt of pale purple thunder that twisted into the shape of a true dragon, roaring across the distance to consume the Duke.
"Presumptuous!" the Duke roared back. He raised his dragon-head crutch, the golden light of the Saint's mandate flaring out to disperse the lightning.
But he was too slow for what came next. A second bolt—thinner, but wreathed in the grey mists of Chaos and a sickening crimson heat—dropped from the firmament.
Rumble—
The air turned into a wall of fire as the God of Fire made his move. He brought the full weight of his Quasi-Saint cultivation to bear, joining Qiang Liang in a pincer maneuver.
East King Duke attempted to flicker through space, covering hundreds of millions of miles in a breath, but the Ancestral Witches were the masters of the earth. They were there before he could even land. The Void Realm collapsed under their sheer physical presence as they manifested their true bodies—colossi that held up the heavens. Violent laws and a deluge of fist-light swallowed the Duke whole.
"AH!"
It wasn't a fight; it was a butchery. The Duke was battered through the sky, coughing up fragments of his own essence. His hard-won Quasi-Saint Dharma Body groaned, spider-webbing with cracks as it neared total collapse.
"Is this the 'Head' of anything?" Qiang Liang mocked, his words cutting deeper than his fists. "So weak! You want Face? You're not even worth a fart in the wind to a son of Pangu!"
The psychological blow was lethal. As the Duke's pride shattered, a third Ancestral Witch surged into the fray, a giant hand of boundless brute force delivering a rhythmic, frantic beating. The surrounding space was beaten into a distorted, grey disillusionment—a scene of pure, unadulterated destruction.
"Help me! Back me up!" the Duke screamed, his voice a ragged edge of panic. Against three heartless war-machines of the flesh, he had no hope of striking back.
"Brutal... too brutal," the watchers whispered, their scalps tingling. They had to look away. Even so, the Duke's durability was grudgingly respected; a lesser immortal would have been mist after the first exchange.
"You seek death? I grant it!" Di Jiang roared. His true body loomed over the battlefield, his Space Law manifesting layer upon layer of world-phantoms. Mount Buzhou appeared like a dust-mote surrounded by a sea of orbiting Major Thousand Worlds.
The pressure was felt even on the far horizon, where Jieyin and Zhunti watched with growing satisfaction. "The East is a charnel house," Jieyin smiled. "The future belongs to the West. It is written."
"We move now! The battle is joined!"
Nuwa's voice cut through the chaos. She realized that if the Duke fell, the Witches would descend on them with the momentum of a landslide. Along with Kunpeng, Fuxi, and the Ten Protectors, she unleashed her premiere Divine Abilities, a tidal wave of Yao power crashing into the remaining Witches.
The Queen Mother of the West hesitated for a single heartbeat, then sighed and unfurled the Western Plain White Cloud Brocade Flag, her own aura joining the Yao defense.
Below them, the earth became a slaughterhouse. Witch horns sounded as tens of millions of warriors charged the mountain. colossi a hundred thousand feet tall moved with the weight of falling stars. The spine of Pangu—the great pillar of Mount Buzhou—vibrated under the impact of a billion feet.
"KILL!"
The Yao defenders roared, fighting from the higher ground, but the Witch tide was relentless. The entire eastern continent was swallowed by a bloody wind, a rain of gore that soaked the very roots of the world.
Within the silent, golden halls of the Ling Xiao Treasure Hall, Ling Xiao sat as the center of a storm.
The World Law fragments had been fully integrated. His flesh and blood had undergone a terrifying metamorphosis—every cell was now an independent pocket of space, a miniature reservoir for his blood Qi and magical power. The density of his energy was now staggering.
"I didn't expect the Space Law to follow suit," he mused. Through the synthesis of the world-mastery, his Space Law had finally crossed the threshold into the Hun Yuan Golden Immortal realm.
His foundation was now an immovable mountain. While his Law of Fire remained his spear—the easiest to wield due to his Golden Crow blood—his mastery of Space had become his shield.
He stood and walked to the entrance of his hall. Looking toward the horizon, he saw a wall of red, evil Qi permeating the atmosphere.
"Holy sh*t," he breathed, his eyes widening. "Are they going for the Grand Finale already?"
He projected his thought toward Mount Buzhou. The sheer scale of the conflict was appalling. The warriors of both races were so densely packed they seemed to have replaced the very earth. Shouts, the grinding of bone, and the blare of war-horns created a cacophony that echoed even on the Sun Star.
The battle of the titans—Nuwa against the Ancestral Witches—was a tapestry of world-shaking aftershocks. The bloody Evil Qi was so thick it threatened to stain the solar fires.
"Is it finally happening?" Ling Xiao muttered, a strange spark of hope in his eyes. "Who starts a fight with their ultimate move? But maybe it's for the best. If they all wipe each other out today, I can go back to sleep and forget about this Calamity. If the Witches and Yao are gone... I'm finally free."
He watched with the detachment of a man watching a forest fire from across a lake, genuinely admiring the "competence" of the leaders who were leading their kin into the meat-grinder.
But the tides were turning. Near the peaks of the mountain, Nuwa was a radiant sun, her Karma-light so dense that even Di Jiang struggled to pierce it. Her establishment of the Yao Race had given her a temporary, god-like elevation.
"Nuwa! You are strong!" Di Jiang's laughter echoed through the fractures of space. "But your people are made of glass!"
He pointed downward. The Yao ranks were buckling. For all of Nuwa's individual brilliance, she could not be everywhere at once. The "harvest" he had planned was in full swing.
The irony was thick: the very race Nuwa had built to survive was the thing now being systematically dismantled.