Desolate Devouring Art

Only a short distance separated the cultivators from Liu Wuxie, but the illusory array hid him completely from their eyes. They could sense nothing beyond the violent currents of energy unleashed by his breakthrough.

"There's no mistaking it. That's Liu Wuxie's aura," declared a peak Profound Immortal whose strength rivaled Gong Shangming's.

After pursuing Liu Wuxie for so many days, the cultivators had become intimately familiar with his aura. They recognized him the instant they sensed it.

"Liu Wuxie has remarkable skill with spiritual arrays. A concealment array must be hiding this area, so we'll combine our strength and tear it down," another high-level Profound Immortal said. His own knowledge of spiritual arrays had already allowed him to detect subtle distortions within the surroundings.

More than twenty cultivators immediately dispersed and began searching for the concealment array's weakest point.

At that exact moment, a black staff plummeted from above.

A low-level Profound Immortal stood closest to Blackie. The staff struck him squarely upon the skull, bursting his head apart like a watermelon.

Blackie disappeared without a trace as soon as the strike landed. When Liu Wuxie had constructed the spiritual array, he had placed markings throughout the ground. Blackie could follow those markings to move safely through the formation without getting trapped.

"Who did that?!" another cultivator shouted.

The cultivators swiftly regrouped around the headless corpse, horrified.

"He was killed by a staff. Liu Wuxie uses a short blade though. Is someone else hiding in this place?" one of the cultivators asked.

Shen San's death had already placed everyone on high alert. Some now suspected that a powerful protector had been secretly traveling beside Liu Wuxie from the beginning.

Origin Immortals could not enter the Ancient Origin Spatial Realm. Therefore, even if Liu Wuxie had companions, none should have possessed cultivation beyond the pinnacle of the Profound Immortal Realm.

Blackie, however, displayed no discernible cultivation whatsoever. Liu Wuxie therefore had no reliable means to measure its true strength. All he knew was that Blackie had a terrifying combat strength and an absurdly formidable physique.

"I found the spiritual array's weak point," shouted the cultivator skilled in spiritual arrays. He drew his sword and slashed down from the sky.

A thunderous detonation shook the surroundings and revealed the area's true appearance for a fleeting moment. Almost immediately, however, the illusory array restored itself.

"That's Liu Wuxie!"

During that momentary opening, one cultivator had seen Liu Wuxie seated in the tree hole.

"Hold nothing back. Destroy this spiritual array together," he shouted.

Everyone combined their strength and unleashed a dazzling storm of techniques from the sky.

Another deafening explosion rocked the area, far surpassing the first. Cracks raced across the light curtain until Liu Wuxie could be seen attempting his breakthrough into the Spirit Immortal Realm.

"We have to stop his breakthrough."

Every cultivator poured their remaining strength into the assault, completely forgetting the unseen attacker stalking them from the shadows.

By then, Blackie had already circled the spiritual array and appeared silently behind the group. A devilish grin exposed its teeth as it raised the black staff in both hands.

Liu Wuxie's eyes remained firmly closed, yet his divine sense allowed him to perceive every detail unfolding around him.

Blackie swept the staff horizontally. The weapon suddenly lengthened and released a terrifying aura that swallowed the surrounding area.

"Behind us! Watch out," a cultivator shouted.

The black staff shot toward the crowd, generating a violent gale that compressed the surrounding air until a chain of explosions ripped through it.

Every cultivator had their backs toward Blackie. With Liu Wuxie still inside the tree hole, none had the slightest idea who was attacking them from behind.

Sickening cracks tore through the crowd as bones shattered in rapid succession. Only a handful reacted quickly enough to leap forward and narrowly evade the blow. Most were not so fortunate. The black staff swept through their midsections, folding their bodies around its shaft before hurling them to the ground in broken heaps.

Only after escaping did the remaining four cultivators turn around and see Blackie's grotesque form.

"What kind of monster is that?!" all four screamed in terror, having never seen anything so bizarre.

Blackie's victims still lived, but none retained the ability to continue fighting.

The Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron appeared without a sound, and the crippled cultivators began vanishing one after another.

"No! I don't want to die! Someone save me," they screamed.

A pitch-black vortex opened above the fallen cultivators, wrenching screams of terror from their throats. Yet no one moved to save them, and not a trace of pity appeared among the onlookers.

This was the celestial realm, where the strong devoured the weak. Without Blackie standing guard, these same cultivators would have shattered the spiritual array and ripped Liu Wuxie apart.

The four cultivators in the distance exchanged uneasy looks, each finding their own fear reflected in the others' eyes. They were the strongest members of the group, and all four had reached the pinnacle of the Profound Immortal Realm.

"Blackie, leave none of them alive," Liu Wuxie said.

The energy within Liu Wuxie’s body had reached its limit, leaving him on the verge of a breakthrough. He could afford no interruptions, nor could he allow word of Blackie’s existence to spread. Therefore, every witness had to die.

Obeying the command, Blackie sprang high into the air, and landed directly before the four cultivators. Its speed on foot was unremarkable, but its jumping ability defied imagination. From Liu Wuxie's earlier observations, a single leap could carry Blackie across a thousand meters.

Such leaps consumed an enormous amount of Blackie's stamina. One look at the explosive muscles packed into its legs revealed the terrifying force behind them.

"What is this creature?" one of the four murmured.

They instinctively stepped back, none daring to attack first. Even an Origin Immortal would have struggled to slaughter so many people with one sweep of a staff.

"Let's attack together and kill it. Once that monster dies, every treasure Liu Wuxie owns becomes ours," one of them shouted.

The man in the center hardened his resolve. He knew that such an opportunity would never appear again. Regardless of Blackie's power, he refused to believe it could defeat all four of them at once.

They convinced themselves that Blackie had succeeded only because it had launched a surprise attack. Now that they were vigilant, taking them by surprise again would be far more difficult.

The remaining three nodded and drew their weapons. Without hesitation, they spread out and formed a circle around Blackie, intending to trap the creature and slowly exhaust its strength.

They had already dismissed Liu Wuxie as irrelevant. Even if he successfully entered the Spirit Immortal Realm, they believed he still could not escape death.

Fury twisted Blackie's face as it bared its pitch-black teeth at the four surrounding cultivators.

"Attack together!"

Their combined assault erupted into a violent storm that uprooted flowers and trees throughout the area. Razor-sharp sword rays tore across the forest in every direction, cutting down towering trees one after another.

Blackie regarded the oncoming barrage with complete indifference. Sword rays crashed against its body and scattered showers of sparks, but not one attack could penetrate its skin, much less cause actual harm.

Horror seized all four cultivators. "How can its body withstand that?!"

They had encountered immortal beasts with powerful physiques before, but none resembled this creature. Every one of them stood at the pinnacle of the Profound Immortal Realm, and their combined attack could kill an ordinary low-level Origin Immortal. Yet they had failed even to breach Blackie's defenses.

Two low chuckles rumbled from Blackie's throat before it swept the black staff forward with blinding speed. Until that moment, it had restrained its true strength. Even against Shen San, Blackie had never fought at full power.

A terrifying cloud of black mist swallowed Blackie's body. In the next moment, it resembled a demonic god. Its frame expanded from just over two meters to nearly five meters in the blink of an eye, looming above the battlefield like an immense black fortress.

The transformation drove the four cultivators backward one involuntary step after another.

Liu Wuxie's eyes snapped open, and his expression turned grave as he studied Blackie's transformed body.

"When the black demonic god appears, a great calamity will descend upon the world," Liu Wuxie murmured, repeating the final words his master, the Heavenly Daoist, had spoken before his death.

Liu Wuxie still could not determine whether Blackie was truly the black demonic god, but the omen before him carried undeniable dread. The appearance of the Divine Race heralded an age of chaos, while the rise of the black demonic god foretold a catastrophe destined to engulf the world.

Blackie's pitch-black eyes resembled the pupils of a demonic deity as they slowly passed over the four cultivators. The mere weight of its gaze made them tremble, leaving them utterly incapable of resisting the pressure.

The four swallowed with difficulty, their hands shaking beyond control.

"Run!" shouted the same cultivator who had demanded that they remain and fight. He spun around and fled without a moment's hesitation.

Blackie's transformed state was simply too terrifying. Its overwhelming strength was only part of that terror. A single glance from its demonic eyes could crush a person's will.

Blackie brought the staff down with a thunderous explosion. The impact shook the entire mountain range, while a devastating shockwave split the earth and toppled towering trees across the forest.

"Aaargh!"

One strike reduced the fleeing cultivator to bloody pulp. The horrifying sight froze the remaining three in place as cold sweat streamed down their foreheads and their legs trembled uncontrollably.

"G-Great One, we were wrong. Please show mercy and spare our lives," the three cultivators begged, collapsing to their knees.

Blackie ignored their pleas. It could not speak in the first place. Black mist streamed from its mouth while the staff in its hands released an increasingly terrifying aura.

Meanwhile, Liu Wuxie closed his eyes again. Summoning the mysterious axe imprint, he sent it crashing against the gateway to the Spirit Immortal Realm.

The gateway burst into countless fragments, then dissolved into laws of the Spirit Immortal Realm that sank into the Desolate World.

Those laws nourished the Desolate World and drove its continued evolution. The laws of the True Immortal Realm gradually merged, giving birth to laws belonging to the Spirit Immortal Realm. Within a single heartbeat, Liu Wuxie successfully entered the first-level Spirit Immortal Realm.

The three surviving cultivators in the distance could no longer spare any attention for Liu Wuxie. Their thoughts focused entirely on escaping alive.

Liu Wuxie cast vast quantities of crystals into the Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron, where they dissolved into pure immortal energy threaded with faint strands of primal chaos energy.

As primal chaos energy nourished it, the Desolate World gained an even more ancient presence. Primeval forests erupted from the earth one after another, transforming the landscape before Liu Wuxie's eyes.

Many regions now existed within the Desolate World that even Liu Wuxie's divine sense found difficult to penetrate. The birth of the thirty immortal spirit roots had also awakened a spark of spirituality within the realm. With that spark, the Desolate World finally possessed the potential to nurture spiritual lifeforms.

In this case, spirituality naturally referred to complete life forms with independent intelligence.

Liu Wuxie's aura continued soaring as he produced another five hundred thousand immortal stones and threw them into the Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron. In less than three breaths, his cultivation reached the pinnacle of the first-level Spirit Immortal Realm. Such advancement defied all imagination.

The Desolate Devouring Art began revolving at an even more astonishing speed. The Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron extracted the energy and cultivation laws from every cultivator Blackie had killed, supplying Liu Wuxie with an immense quantity of Profound Immortal Realm laws.

"Now, refine all of it!" Liu Wuxie roared, pouring every strand of those Profound Immortal Realm laws into the Desolate World without hesitation.

Thunderous rumbling filled the Desolate World as the number of Spirit Immortal Realm laws surged into the hundreds of thousands. Vast quantities of Profound Immortal Realm laws mingled among them.

Layer upon layer of laws merged, gradually forming entirely new laws that fused with the Desolate World.

In the distance, Blackie finally struck. The black staff swept toward the remaining three cultivators like a bolt of black lightning.

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