"Do you think golden needles can break through my body?" the Immortal sneered, flexing his immortal physique to dispel the needles before they could even touch his clothes.
"Again!" Mo Lingtian yelled, commanding the needles to charge violently toward him. But the effort proved futile, as the needles continuously bounced off the frozen barrier surrounding the vice captain.
"Turns out it is nothing more than this," the Immortal snorted, casually waving his hand as the needles froze mid-flight in the air.
"What are you doing? That ice lotus is getting closer. You won't be able to survive if it clashes with you," one of the commanders in his sea of consciousness warned anxiously.
"Again!" Mo Lingtian commanded, stimulating the frozen needles to release the energy he had infused within them. With a sharp, continuous turn, they shattered their ice confinement, charging once more toward the Immortal with void and death energy violently warping around them.
"Enough! Di.." the Immortal began to shout, abruptly halting as the approaching needles effortlessly pierced his ice barrier this time, surrounding him in a fierce attacking formation from every side.
"What exactly are you doing?" asked one of the chief commander's two aides inside Lingtian's sea of consciousness, watching the needles break through the Immortal's defense.
"First, distract him from controlling the ice lotus, buying me enough time to destroy it," Mo Lingtian explained. He enacted the Immortal Basic Gravity Law directly over the descending ice lotus, forcing deep cracks to spiderweb across its massive petals.
"You!" the vice captain stuttered. He effortlessly dashed through the needles, evading every inch of their attack while simultaneously trying to reinforce the cracking lotus.
"Seal!" Mo Lingtian yelled. Immediately, lines of interconnecting threads between the needles glowed brilliantly, trapping the Immortal mid-air within a complex web of golden energy.
"Enough! Break for me!" the vice captain roared, closing his fist tightly.
From behind him, the towering dharma of a woman emerged, filling the entire sky with an intense, frozen light. In her right arm, a massive, ice-sculpted halberd slowly took shape. The sheer energy it released repulsed everything in front of it, slamming Mo Lingtian backward through the air with a blast of frozen energy.
"It is an honor for you to see this move before you die," the Immortal said, exhaling deeply. Freezing air blasted through the entire region, encasing Mo Lingtian's body in solid ice mid-air.
"That is the dharma of a Sovereign Immortal. He is getting serious now," a voice echoed from Lingtian's sea of consciousness.
"His aura has reached that of a late-stage Immortal; he can freeze your entire soul with a single stare. Open your sea of consciousness. One of the commanding vanguards will burn his soul to get you out of this predicament," the chief commander stated, sighing deeply.
"No need. This is the second step," Mo Lingtian replied coldly, forcefully shattering the ice encasing him with a violent blast of energy.
"Die!" the vice captain's voice boomed as he pointed downward. The towering dharma immediately responded, dragging the gigantic halberd through the sky and plunging its frozen tip directly toward Mo Lingtian.
"Senior, excuse me," Mo Lingtian said, igniting a flame of intertwined death and void energy in his right hand.
The interconnecting threads and needles surrounding the Immortal reacted simultaneously, instantly combusting with the intense flames of the two energies.
The towering dharma suddenly flickered and dissipated into nothingness, along with its halberd and the crumbling ice lotus.
"What is..." the vice captain staggered in the air, his skin slowly beginning to burn with the exact flames he saw on the needles. He frantically tried to dispel the fire with his cold essence, but he couldn't. Something had invaded his veins, completely blocking the pathways of his qi.
"What did you do to me?" the vice captain stuttered, his voice shaking with sudden, absolute terror.
"Rise," Mo Lingtian whispered.
The burning needles instantly resonated, rising in rapid unison to circle protectively around him.
"Senior, it is your turn now," he said to the chief commander within his consciousness. He manipulated the web of threads to press tightly against the Immortal's body, invading his skin with even more of the volatile flame energy.
With a single wave of his hand, Mo Lingtian summoned his death domain, shattering the clouds of liquid cold essence that had formed the massive dome around them.
Seeing the domain law Mo Lingtian had just enacted, the Immortal shriveled in sheer terror. Only Sovereign Immortals could create a domain with active laws.
"How is that possible?" the vice captain gasped, much to Mo Lingtian's confusion. The Immortal's voice shook violently as he looked around at the monochromatic color reconfiguration Mo Lingtian's domain had forced over the entire region.
Then, from Mo Lingtian's sea of consciousness, the chief commander's soul emerged.
With one step, time and motion froze completely. Her time domain violently expanded, spanning several kilometers and covering the massive landmass of the entire wilderness, stopping exactly at the boundary between the outskirts and the mainland.
"Child, you didn't tell me if I could kill him," she said casually, her eyes sweeping across the frozen landscape.
"Here they come. Greedy thieves," the chief commander muttered, looking higher into the clouds.
"What an exquisite domain law!" a booming voice echoed from afar, as a massive eye tore through the sky, greedily observing the paused time flow she had enacted.
"Let me see who this peerless master is!" another voice echoed. From the sky, a colossal palm descended, reaching toward Mo Lingtian's death domain.
"Scram!" the chief commander said softly. The sheer, unfathomable weight of her voice immediately and effortlessly wiped the descending palm and the giant eye from the sky.
"You dare attempt to capture me without your real bodies?" she snorted casually, using her energy to draw the time-paused Mo Lingtian closer to her.
"Since when did a mere soul fragment learn how to brag in front of us old monsters?" yet another voice echoed.
Three spatial rifts suddenly tore open high above the clouds, expanding silently and smoothly. Three figures stepped out simultaneously, looking down at the death domain surrounding the chief commander.
"Dao You, exposing yourself so vulnerably will get you killed in the Demon Realm," one of the three figures sneered, all of them staring at her hungrily, like hunters looking at prey.
"If I could refine just a fragment of this time law into my own domain, I might be able to reach the mid-stage of the Sovereign Immortal realm," another laughed loudly. The other two watched quietly, steady and ready to strike at any given moment.
"There should be two more. He told me he was sure five Sovereign Immortals would show up," the chief commander muttered to herself, glancing around the sky.
"The Demon Realm is governed by the iron rule of survival of the fittest. Your foolishness is what caused your misfortune today," the first figure spoke, releasing a devastating blast of green light toward the chief commander.
"Fall," she commanded simply.
Instantly, all three of them fell out of reality, plunging directly into an alternative spatial dimension.
"The two of you, join them," she said to the empty sky. Immediately, two more hidden Sovereign Immortals were violently yanked through space rifts and thrown into the alternative space alongside the others.
"Senior..." one of the Sovereigns gasped, his voice trembling violently at the sight before him.
In front of them stood a massive, cosmic existence whose transparent body glowed with blinding rays of starlight and radiation. The five Sovereign Immortals found themselves standing at the very edge of a planet, drifting inside a solar system, which was itself drifting within an infinite galaxy held gently in the hands of the cosmic entity.
That cosmic existence was the soul projection of the chief commander.
Before her, these absolute rulers of the wilderness were less, far less than a microscopic speck of dust.