The moment the False King Essence Pill completely lost its effect, everything changed.
The overwhelming pressure that had covered the battlefield disappeared without warning.
The invisible weight pressing upon everyone vanished as if it had never existed.
Aksai did not hesitate for even a fraction of a second.
He had been waiting for this exact moment.
Whoosh!
His figure shot forward like a streak of black lightning.
His right arm stretched toward the countless Third Order treasures floating before Kalina.
His fingers spread open before suddenly closing into a fist.
At the same time, his powerful Spirit Sense exploded outward.
It wrapped around every jade box, every bottle of pills, every ore, every beast material, every jade slip, and every scroll that Kalina had taken out from her storage ring.
All of them flew toward him at terrifying speed.
Only then did Kalina’s pupils shrink.
Her beautiful face froze.
The aura before her...
It was gone.
The majestic pressure of a Nascent Soul King had completely vanished.
In its place remained the aura of a Core Formation Lord.
Not only that...
It was merely the aura of a peak sixth-level Core Formation cultivator.
A mid-stage Lord.
Her mind went blank.
’What...?’
’Impossible!’
Before she could understand what had happened, Aksai had already taken the next step.
The space beside him rippled repeatedly.
One figure after another rushed out from the opening connected to the Enchanted Everwood Farm.
Dozens of humanoid creatures appeared all at once.
Their bodies were wrapped in dirty cloth and dried leather. Their limbs looked unnaturally long. Their joints bent at strange angles.
Instead of flesh, patches of tightly packed straw could be seen beneath their torn skin. Blood-red threads covered their entire bodies like veins, holding everything together.
Their eyes glowed with a dull crimson light. They looked like scarecrows that had been stuffed with flesh instead of hay.
These were not Aksai’s ordinary Sentient Fiends.
He had created them by combining the Scarecrow Puppet Technique with the Bloodfiend Creation Manual in an entirely different way.
Instead of making durable and reusable servants, he had created living weapons. Or more accurately putting, disposable weapons.
Their bodies continuously leaked Spirit essence from countless tiny cracks. The unstable Bloodfiend blood cores inside them pulsed wildly. Every movement caused more cracks to spread across their bodies.
Their lives had already begun burning away the moment they were born. Even if nobody attacked them tonight, they would not survive until sunrise.
Their only purpose was to explode. If they killed one opponent, they broke even and killing two was profitable for them.
As with the rest of Aksai’s Fiend creation, they had no fear. And since they were lacking sentience, they also had no hesitation. No instinct to survive.
Sometimes sentience got in the way of daring acts. Especially in cases where the beings were supposed to walk on the path of no return. It was better to lower their sentience level to bare minimum.
The moment these Sucide Fiends appeared, they immediately charged across the battlefield.
Aksai never gave them a single command.
He didn’t need to.
Each one already carried its mission inside its unstable soul.
Like a swarm of angry bees rushing toward someone who had smashed their hive, the Sentient Fiends scattered in every direction before locking onto Kalina’s surviving subordinates.
The royal faction cultivators remained frozen. Their minds were still occupied with the shocking disappearance of the King’s aura.
None of them understood what was happening. Some looked toward Kalina. Others stared at Aksai. Nobody reacted immediately.
That single moment of hesitation was all Aksai needed.
The first Sentient Fiend reached the enemy formation.
Its body suddenly swelled.
The Gu Poison Bomb hidden inside its chest instantly activated.
Boom!
A violent green explosion erupted.
Poisonous mist spread in every direction.
Before the screams could even begin, a second explosion followed.
Boom!
Then a third.
Boom!
The disposable Sentient Fiends threw themselves directly into the middle of the enemy formation without caring about their own lives.
Each explosion released a different Gu Poison Bomb.
Some produced black smoke that rapidly corroded Spirit energy barriers.
Some scattered invisible poison dust into the air.
Others released swarms of tiny poisonous Gu insects that immediately bit into exposed flesh.
The battlefield descended into complete chaos.
"Aaaah!"
"My arm!"
"What is this poison?"
"Get away from them!"
"Don’t let them come close!"
The royal faction cultivators finally reacted.
Spirit Spells filled the sky.
Flying swords slashed toward the incoming monsters.
Several Sentient Fiends were instantly destroyed.
Yet that only made things worse.
The unstable Bloodfiend Cores inside their bodies detonated the moment they were cut apart.
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
Explosions echoed everywhere.
This was a double-amplification explosion that Aksai had created by applying some basic principles of the Heretic Dao.
The Heretic Dao allowed two opposing concepts to complement each other, provided the fusion was performed correctly. That was also why it was so easy to make mistakes while learning the Heretic Dao.
Aksai had Nuri by his side.
Because of her assistance, the number of mistakes he made while studying the Heretic Dao was so small that it would make others wonder if he had inherited the true legacy of the Heretic Dao Emperor.
However, even with Nuri’s tremendous computational abilities, Aksai was not perfect.
This was especially true during the early stages of his study of the Heretic Dao.
Since it was a mistake that even Nuri had failed to predict, it had been extremely dangerous. It had almost cost Aksai one of his arms back when he was still only a Foundation Establishment Expert.
Of course, being a druid, Aksai could have grown a new arm if the existing one was destroyed without paying a heavy price. However, that incident had still given him a scare.
Instead of treating that accident as a failure and forgetting about it while creating Heretic Dao talismans, Aksai had asked Nuri to record every step of the process and preserve it for future use.
And instead of minimizing the mistakes that led to failure in the creation of the Heretic Dao talismans, he introduced new ones and made the imbalance between the two opposing elemental forces within the talismans even more prominent.
Aksai wanted to weaponize his own mistake.
The double-amplification explosions occurring tonight were the result of that decision.
The poisonous mist grew thicker and thicker as explosions continued to erupt in rapid succession.
***
As she heard the sounds of blast due to the triggering of the Poison Gu Bombs, Kalina stood frozen for only a single heartbeat.
Then her beautiful face twisted with uncontrollable rage. She didn’t even spare a glance to her subordinates who were dying at an alarming rate.
The calm and composed Lord from the Shinayin Empire disappeared completely. In her place stood a furious cultivator whose pride had been trampled into the dirt.
She had been fooled. And as if that humiliation wasn’t enough, by a native cultivator from the Dadangar Subcontinent. A land she had looked down upon.
In her eyes, the cultivators born here were nothing more than frogs living at the bottom of a well, never knowing how vast the true world was.
And yet, one such frog had deceived her from beginning to end. Her chest rose and fell violently.
"You’re as good as dead, you bastard!"
Boom!
Spirit essence erupted from her body. She transformed into a streak of crimson light and shot toward Aksai with unmatched ferocity.
Her speed was astonishing. Far faster than Aksai’s.
At the same time, she stretched out her right arm exactly as Aksai had done. Her fingers opened before suddenly clenching shut.
’My belongings!’
Although Aksai had wrapped his Spirit Sense around her treasures, Kalina remained their rightful owner. Her storage ring still maintained a faint spatial connection with every item within a certain range.
As long as she entered that range before Aksai stored everything away, she could instantly pull them back. She was absolutely confident.
After all, her storage ring was far superior to the ordinary storage artifact worn on Aksai’s finger. Most of those treasures had also been personally refined by her. They carried her Spirit Imprints.
More importantly...
Those encrypted jade scrolls belonging to Great Elder Runiye’s faction were protected by special spatial prohibitions.
They could only be stored inside Kalina’s storage ring. No ordinary storage artifact could accept them without her consent.
Even a stronger storage treasure would have difficulty bypassing those restrictions within such a short time.
Victory was already within reach.
She was only a few meters away.
Just a little closer...
Then—
Every treasure vanished.
However, Kalina saw it clearly. It didn’t vanish into Aksai’s storage ring. Not into any visible artifact.
A tiny spatial ripple suddenly appeared beside him. It was no larger than a person’s palm.
The countless treasures disappeared into it one after another. The ripple closed almost instantly. Then it vanished without leaving behind the slightest trace.
Everything happened so quickly that Kalina almost thought she had imagined it. Her pupils shrank violently.
"What?"
"Impossible!"
She immediately spread her Spirit Sense across the surrounding space.
Nothing.
There was nothing.
Her belongings had completely disappeared.
Even the spatial connection between her storage ring and those items had been severed.
It was as though they had never existed.
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