In the Southern Region of the Central Continent, within the borders of the Silver Deer Kingdom.
Inside a lavishly decorated, exquisite capital city inn, Li Xuanxiao sat quietly by the window, drinking heartily and eating large chunks of roasted meat.
A full week had passed since his critical breakthrough.
During these seven days, he had strictly adhered to his new optimization strategy, bypassing the low-tier trash mobs to target early-stage Void Realm Demon Race members as his primary quarry.
The results were spectacular. Thanks to the dual passive Luck enhancement from running two distinct core cultivation systems simultaneously, his metaphysical endurance had been radically reinforced! Now, even when he went on an absolute, wanton slaughter spree across a region, his channels no longer easily fell into that debilitating state of spiritual fatigue.
Furthermore, reaching Minor Achievement mastery in his two Void Realm Martial Arts had proved to be an incredible investment. The sheer scaling on those high-tier skills allowed him to execute targets with clinical efficiency, minimizing his time spent per kill.
Currently, he was systematically liquidating around 10 Void Realm Demon Race members every single day!
To an outside observer, a count of ten might seem small, but a single Void Realm Demon provided an astronomical sum of Demon Value Points compared to the lower tiers. Besides, it wasn't a matter of him lacking the will to kill more; excluding the sovereign lineages of the four great Ancient Demon Clans, it was inherently rare for ordinary, rogue Demon Race members to successfully break through the bottleneck into the Void Realm. He had to spend nearly half of his daylight hours just flying across the map, hunting down their hidden signatures.
Of course, during his structural sweeps, he never spared the random Heaven or Origin Realm Demon cells he happened to stumble upon. Cumulatively, his average daily DVP generation had rocketed to a staggering 45 million points.
In just one week, his total balance had climbed back up to an incredible 350 million. His farming efficiency was almost triple what it had been during his first month in the south!
Looking at the massive figure swimming across his internal System Panel, Li Xuanxiao felt a profound wave of security. Once I extract the high-tier Daoist scriptures from the Taiyi Dao Sect, I can kickstart a triple-system engine and really break the balance of this world.
While happily mapping out his future progression paths, Li Xuanxiao's brow suddenly twitched. Within his expanded sensory radius, the environmental Luck had abruptly turned violently chaotic, warping like a fractured glass reflection.
He tilted his head slightly, peering out through the wooden window frame.
The sky, which had been a crisp, pristine blue just a heartbeat prior, was suddenly swallowed by a massive blanket of churning, ink-black clouds. A heavy, suffocating atmospheric pressure dropped over the capital like a physical weight.
Down on the streets, numerous common folk immediately cried out in alarm, completely bewildered and panicked by the unnatural, instantaneous shift in the weather.
"How is the sky changing this fast? I haven't even brought in the linens I hung out to dry!"
"Tell me about it! The wind feels entirely wrong. I'm heading straight home!"
Street vendors and manual laborers on both sides of the cobblestone road were already frantically packing up their merchandise to seek shelter under the nearest eaves, muttering tense complaints. Lacking even a baseline cultivation shred, the ordinary mortals merely assumed that nature was throwing a sudden tantrum.
But the higher a Martial Artist's cultivation realm, the faster their instincts screamed that an absolute disaster was unfolding.
Rumble—
Right on cue, the dark clouds in the upper atmosphere churned aggressively, and dense, swarming clusters of Demon Race combatants erupted from the vortex! They howled, roared, and screeched, their eyes bloodshot and filled with an unhinged, feral madness.
The moment the vanguard of the beast horde materialized, dozens of localized light streaks shot into the sky from various estates across the capital.
The Silver Deer Kingdom was a medium-sized nation, meaning its peak national security combat power was strictly capped at the Heaven Realm level. The inn Li Xuanxiao occupied happened to be situated right in the heart of the capital city. In other words, the Martial Artists taking flight right now represented the absolute first echelon of the kingdom's military elite.
Li Xuanxiao tracked them with his gaze; the specific cultivation levels of these native defenders were entirely transparent to his senses. They were uniformly arrayed at the Origin Realm.
Conversely, the attacking Demon Race vanguard, as far as his vision pierced, was also uniformly occupying the Origin Realm. For the moment, the frontline clash appeared superficially balanced.
Li Xuanxiao narrowed his eyes, leaning back against his chair and deliberately refraining from drawing his weapon.
The severe, warped fluctuation in the environmental Luck he had sensed earlier was a dead giveaway: there was at least one genuine Void Realm entity anchoring this entire assault. However, the mastermind was masking their specific coordinates exceptionally well. Acting rashly right now would only alert the high-tier target.
At the Void Realm bracket, Demon Race members possessed unique, slippery means of environmental evasion. If the boss detected a Void-level human hunter moving prematurely, they might choose to abandon the raid and flee into the spatial currents, forcing Li Xuanxiao to waste hours chasing them across borders. He would sit tight and monitor the board. If the main threat refused to show its face, he would simply let the local forces draw them out.
While Li Xuanxiao calmly observed the chaotic airspace from his table, a panicked inn waiter came rushing up the stairs. Seeing the youth casually sipping his drink while watching the unfolding war like a theater performance, the waiter's eyes nearly bulged out of his head.
"Guest! Are you completely tired of living?!" the waiter shrieked, his voice cracking. "Every single customer is hiding in the cellars, terrified of drawing the line of sight of those monsters! Why are you still standing right by the opening like it's a festival show?"
"Stop being so incredibly conspicuous! You're going to bring the whole swarm down on this building!"
As he yelled, the waiter frantically moved along the balcony, slamming the heavy wooden shutters closed one by one to block out the view. When he finally reached Li Xuanxiao's table, he found the youth completely unmoved, ignoring his frantic packing.
The waiter's panic instantly mutated into sharp, aggressive irritation. "Guest! If you love watching massacres so much, please go die outside! The shop is officially closing its doors right now. Pay your bill and move elsewhere!"
Hearing the venom in the mortal's voice, Li Xuanxiao merely glanced at him silently, too entirely detached to bother arguing. It was the standard, predictable reaction of an ordinary human whose survival instincts had been completely fried by proximity to high-tier violence.
He quietly rose, left a few silver pieces on the wood, and walked downstairs toward the main exit, planning to find a cleaner vantage point on a nearby roof.
However, the exact microsecond his boots reached the threshold of the main entrance, a sharp whistle cut through the air. Several low-tier Demon Race scouts came crashing down through the street, charging straight toward the inn's front doors!
Li Xuanxiao took a swift, analytical look. Their internal energy signatures were weak—all uniformly at the Xuan Realm.
Tsk. How highly unusual, he thought, his eyes tracking the screeching monsters. The realm disparity across this attacking army was absurdly wide, ranging from basic Xuan Realm cannon fodder all the way up to a masked Void Realm commander. This didn't look like a standard territory raid.
Seeing the demonic vanguard charging the entrance, the guests crammed inside the lobby immediately erupted into a chaotic, screaming stampede.
"They're coming inside! The demons are breaching!"
"Bar the doors! Bar the doors right now!"
"Hey! You braindead kid standing at the threshold! Get out of the way and slam the gates! Are you trying to get every single one of us executed?!"
The frantic waiter who had followed Li Xuanxiao down the stairs took one look at the approaching talons and felt his legs turn to jelly. Turning a pale, sweat-slicked face toward Li Xuanxiao, he pointed a trembling finger, his voice rising to a shrill, hysterical screech: "It's all your fault! It's all your fault!"
"If you hadn't been standing like an idiot by the second-floor window, how would the demons have locked onto this building?! You've killed us! You've ruined everything!"
Completely dominated by primal terror, his shrill accusations cut through the room, instantly directing the panicked wrath of the entire survival shelter toward the youth. Caught in a state of absolute hysteria, the remaining guests immediately glared at Li Xuanxiao, hurling furious, desperate curses and pinning the blame for the assault squarely on his shoulders.
Li Xuanxiao merely let out a soft, silent sigh. Humans who have entirely lost their capacity for rational thought are fundamentally no different from a startled herd of cattle or sheep waiting for the slaughterhouse blade.
Before the crowd's shouting could peak, the Xuan Realm Demons finally tore through the threshold, stepping into the main lobby.
The beast scouts laughed wildly, their jaws dripping with foul, acidic saliva. "Scream! Keep screaming! Even if you rip your mortal vocal cords to pieces, there isn't a single god on this continent coming to save your flesh!"
Their yellow eyes instantly locked onto Li Xuanxiao, who stood completely motionless right in the center of their path.
"Look at this one. The brat has been scared completely stupid, hasn't he?"
"Look at that clean skin and tender frame. He's going to taste incredibly sweet when we crack his bones!"
"Boss, let's keep this specimen alive for the final course—"
Before the demon's crude sentence could even clear its throat, a heavy, silent pressure snapped through the room.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Without a single flash of steel or a burst of visible Qi, the physical bodies of the Xuan Realm Demons abruptly ruptured from the inside out, disintegrating on the spot! Scattered limbs, broken claws, and dark, corrupted blood rained down, coating the entryway tiles in a gruesome display.
Facing mere Xuan Realm trash mobs, Li Xuanxiao couldn't even be bothered to lift a finger or unclamp his saber. He had detonated their internal organs instantly, purely by shifting a micro-fraction of his universal Luck to crush their physical spaces.
The absolute silence that followed was deafening.
The hidden guests, who had fully accepted that their character logs were about to be deleted, stared at the carnage with a mixture of profound shock and hysterical delight. None of them had anticipated that this eccentric, quiet young traveler was packing this kind of illegal, high-tier firepower.
In a split second, their faces flipped entirely. They scrambled forward, dropping their previous anger to hurl themselves at his feet, desperately begging for his personal protection, their words filled with groveling, high-amplitude reverence. The contrast with their behavior a mere ten seconds ago was almost comical.
Li Xuanxiao didn't bother giving them a backward glance. His body dissolved into a blur, launching himself straight up into the darkened sky like a reverse meteor.
Just a microsecond prior, the hidden mastermind had finally released an active burst of energy to coordinate the external assault. He had successfully locked onto the specific coordinates of that Void Realm presence!
Li Xuanxiao mobilized his core Martial Dao Luck, slicing through the atmospheric resistance as he closed the distance. As he ripped through the upper layer of the cloud cover, the ambient haze parted, giving him an unhindered, crystal-clear view of the enemy commander.
Standing suspended in the sky was a youth possessing an exceptionally delicate, handsome face.
But his facial symmetry was irrelevant. The detail that caused Li Xuanxiao's eyes to instantly lock down with lethal focus was the commander's eyes. His pupils were a vivid, piercing, unnatural dark green—entirely alien to the human race.
"The Devil Race!"
Li Xuanxiao made the diagnostic assessment instantly. That specific, glowing pupil coloration was the single most defining characteristic of the high-tier invaders from the Heavenly Abyss!
The Devil youth, looking entirely like an aristocratic human noble, clearly detected Li Xuanxiao's high-speed approach. A brief flash of genuine surprise crossed his elegant features.
"Oh? I must admit, I didn't expect a backwater, medium-tier kingdom like this to be harboring a native Void Realm Martial Artist," the Devil youth murmured, a faint, condescending smile playing on his lips as he looked up at the incoming hunter.
In the very next microsecond, without a single word of warning, the Devil youth snapped his fingers. A vast, suffocating wave of corrupted, heavy Luck erupted from his form, slamming down toward Li Xuanxiao like a falling mountain!