"Why did he come so fast?"

Even though Li Xun had prepared for everything, he never expected the Yu Attendant to be this direct, simply unleashing her hidden trump card without hesitation. He had thought it would take at least three or five rounds of harassment before that card was played.

Sensing the fierce, unstoppable aura rushing at him like a storm from the void below, he didn’t bother to think. He turned and fled, sending a signal to Yin Wanderer to have her side launch their attack right away.

He had just finished when the hair on his back stood on end.

A killing intent, cold as ice yet erupting like molten lava, surged up from the depths beneath the earth.

He sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, not daring to look back. With all the strength he could muster, he triggered the half-mastered Shadow-Devour escape technique. Under the blazing midday sun, his body blurred into a phantom-like shadow and slipped into the clouds nearby.

Barely half a breath later, the massive cloudbank that stretched for miles was torn open right in the middle, leaving a gaping hole.

Mist boiled upward, shreds of cloud scattered, and the unforgettable demonic figure of Net Throat Demon appeared, hovering in the very void he had just ripped apart.

The beastlike red pupils darted wildly in their narrow sockets. At the same time, he cast out at least a thousand probing strands of qi. In theory, nothing alive within several dozen li could escape his detection.

Soon enough, the target appeared.

The corners of his cracked mouth twisted into a strange, unsettling smile. His withered fingers flexed twice, trembling with excitement at the bloodshed to come. For tens of thousands of years, ever since he had gained sentience, this was the only thing that could stir even a trace of pleasure in him.

Wait. One, two, three… there wasn’t just a single target. There were nine of them! That wasn’t quite what that damned cat had said.

Net Throat Demon’s peculiar, straight-line way of thinking made him falter for a moment.

And in that instant, seven of the nine targets he had sensed suddenly flared with powerful auras. Countless streams of qi surged out and wove together, forming a vast, sky-filling net that closed in around it.

Threads of primordial qi twined together and connected seamlessly, yet not a single sound of explosion or rupture escaped.

Instinctively, Net Throat Demon grew wary.

Just then, the damned cat sent another message. This time, it was urging him to rush over to its location and deal with yet another powerful enemy.

With a furious snarl, he growled. It had been the same story for sixty years. This damned cat, and those damned women!

Rage burned in him, but his movements didn’t falter. His tall, gaunt body suddenly swelled, and the air around him expanded violently, blasting open a gap in the net of qis that had been about to close in.

Seizing the chance, he twisted his body, about to dive into the nearest clouds.

“Transform!”

The sharp command rang out. At the sound, the loosened net of qi snapped taut again. Countless streams of qi surged and intertwined, weaving together.

In an instant, Net Throat Demon felt the very nature of the true breath on that side undergo a complete upheaval. Under that transformation, the power he had unleashed was quietly erased, unable to make the slightest impact.

The primordial qi gathered by the net shifted in a heartbeat into bone-piercing cold, and its strange force froze his body for a brief moment.

Right after that, the countless streams of qi began to move in slow circulation. With every crossing, a shift took place, and with millions of crossings came millions of shifts.

During this, Net Throat Demon’s fierce true breath battered back and forth, but each time it was blocked in advance by these tightly interlocking fluctuations of primordial qi. After several attempts, he finally grew restless and let out a long, furious howl toward the sky.

With that cry, his tall, gaunt frame suddenly contracted, and countless gray-white rays of qi shot from the strange long spike on his shoulders, scattering like a storm of gray snow.

The flakes hissed and screeched as they fell, webbed together by threads of qi fine and dense as spider silk.

Hidden in a nearby cloud, Li Xun saw this and accidentally inhaled a mouthful of cloud vapor.

Ice-Sealed Ghost Domain, three thousand li wide… I’d only heard he absorbed the old ancestor’s qi, but no one ever said it managed to snatch such a profound technique too. I haven’t even learned this one myself!

Stunned for a moment, he quickly snapped out of it and gave the order: “Transform again!”

Off to the side, Qin Wanru, still watching with her arms folded, cast him a quick glance. She lifted her delicate hand, and a crimson glow hissed from her palm. Countless strands of qi shot out and, in an instant, wove themselves into the existing net.

The moment she joined in, the very nature of the true breath in the void shifted again. What had just been a frozen wasteland of bitter cold now came alive with leaping, vibrant energy.

The threads of true breath weaving through it flashed like lightning and blazed like fire, changing in a heartbeat. The sky churned as if a volcano had just erupted, magma surging forth with unbearable heat.

“A fine display of the Extreme Yin-Yang Transformation!” Li Xun exclaimed in praise.

The Ice-Sealed Ghost Domain had been an excellent counter to the freezing lockdown just now, but what Net Throat Demon never expected was that several masters of the Yin-Yang Sect were standing right above him. And what they excelled at most was exactly this: overturning yin and yang, driving change to its limits.

With such a shift, he was bound to suffer a bitter loss.

And sure enough.

When opposing natures clashed, no matter how terrifying Net Throat Demon’s cultivation, that direct blow left him reeling, his body even shrinking slightly.

Yet in the very next moment, the furious Net Throat Demon showed everyone present what it truly meant to be a monster worthy of being called one of the greatest demons under heaven.

In an instant, his eyeballs turned completely blood-red. From the pupils shot out beams of qi so dense they seemed almost solid. When they struck the air, they hissed like acid, thick and viscous like real blood, casting a faint crimson glow over everything around it.

Even with Li Xun’s steady nerves, being stared at by those strange, monstrous eyes made him suck in a sharp breath.

And it didn’t stop there. A wave of cracking sounds like splintering wood rang out, and across Net Throat Demon’s pitch-black body, hundreds of tiny blood-red mouths split open, each no bigger than an infant’s lips.

The sight of charred flesh outside, raw red within, all writhing and twitching with living meat, was enough to make anyone retch. Nothing in the world could be more disgusting.

Right at that moment, the once fluid and ever-shifting net of qi streams suddenly turned sluggish and rigid. It was as if the sealing effect they had just imposed was now being thrown back at them. That feeling of having strength in your hands, yet being trapped in a quagmire, was utterly suffocating. It'd made you want to scream in frustration.

Net Throat Demon let out a piercing shriek. His black body shifted in a flash from stillness to blinding motion. Before Li Xun’s eyes, he vanished from sight.

Shit…

Li Xun couldn’t understand it. Why was it that every one of these so-called Seven Demons of the World had such monstrous speed? The Demon Phoenix, Qing Luan, Shui die lan. And now even this Net Throat Demon!

The first three demons relied on flight, form shifting, and illusion transformations. Their speed had a kind of strange elegance, almost pleasing to the eye. This monster, though, was different. Its bursts of speed came purely from its warped body and savage beast nature. It was nothing but raw, brutal force.

There was no grace in it at all. By the time Li Xun managed to catch sight of him, a great spray of blood was already scattering through the air.

The unlucky one happened to be a male cultivator of the Yin-Yang Sect standing right next to Li Xun.

Net Throat Demon raised an arm thick as a tree trunk and slashed downward. From the man’s left shoulder all the way to the top of his thigh, half of his body was hacked clean away. Blood gushed unnaturally fast from the wound, and in just a blink his body shriveled and collapsed.

But the man’s life force ran deep. He didn’t die right away. His piercing screams echoed as his sundered halves tumbled through the clouds, his drawn-out death cry trailing endlessly into the abyss.

Qin Wanru, one of the leading candidates to be the sect’s next master, couldn’t allow Net Throat Demon to slaughter her people unchecked. Her slender fingers trembled, then flicked out in a dazzlingly sharp sequence of strikes, sealing off his escape route. The move succeeded. She had his attention.

Net Throat Demon turned his head, and with that motion his whole body twisted around in a grotesque spin, realigning with her. One long arm lashed out, and the air erupted with a dull crack as Qin Wanru’s projected finger strikes shattered apart. In the next instant, he flickered and drove straight from the centerline, closing the distance. He meant to grapple her directly.

Just the sight of that grotesque body was enough to make one sick for days, let alone the thought of grappling with it up close. No matter how composed Qin Wanru usually was, when Net Throat Demon lunged straight at her, her expression changed in spite of herself. Instinct screamed at her to retreat, but there was no time.

At that instant, a low shout came from behind her: “Raise your left arm, block with your elbow!”

It was Li Xun’s voice. Qin Wanru didn’t stop to question what he meant. She lifted her left arm, exposing the space beneath her ribs. In the same instant, a flash of cold light pierced past, driving straight into the outstretched palm of Net Throat Demon.

The sword tip met the palm with a teeth-grating screech of friction, followed by the crisp crack of a blade shattering.

Countless glittering fragments burst outward, only to be ground into dust by the violent clash of their true breaths.

Li Xun gave a muffled grunt, his chest tightening as a minor injury flared; but it didn’t slow him down. With a swift tug on Qin Wanru’s back, he pulled her with him as the two of them shot backward through the air.

Ahead, Net Throat Demon made no sound. He only faltered for a heartbeat after he clashed with Li Xun’s sword. Then he accelerated again, pressing forward without pause.

And inevitably, he passed through the cloud of shattered sword dust.

Li Xun’s Ghost Crow Sword had already been shattered in his desperate fight with Shui Die Lan, and the Azure Jade Sword was something he absolutely couldn’t use here. The sword just now had only been borrowed on the spot, ordinary in quality, so it was no surprise it broke.

But Li Xun had shattered it so decisively because he had something else in mind.

As he pulled back, his fingers flicked, sending a faintly glowing strand of qi silently shooting out. It struck the swirling cloud of iron dust at almost the same instant Net Throat Demon plowed into it.

There was a sharp crackle, and the sky suddenly flared with light. Net Throat Demon’s unstoppable charge came to an abrupt halt.

For a heartbeat it was as if a hole had torn open in the void, unleashing a suction force so strong it yanked the creature off balance before vanishing.

The unnatural disruption made him wary. He stopped and began to watch.

By then, his targets had already taken the chance to put plenty of distance between them.

Li Xun grinned, rather pleased with his little trick.