At one end of the street, a lone figure stood motionless.
'I must have triggered some restriction to be teleported here. Judging by the looks of this place, it seems to be an independent space. People should have lived here in the early years. But for some unknown reason, it has become like this. Could this be an ancient cultivator's ruin? Hiss! No, this entrance is so close to the Malevolent Spirit Sect. Why has no one discovered it in thousands of years? Otherwise, it wouldn't look like this. This makes no sense…'
The First Sir thought rapidly, not moving his body rashly, just standing at the beginning of the street.
When he was outside earlier, as soon as he flew close to the place emitting a somewhat familiar aura, a pulling force suddenly appeared beneath his feet. Startled, the First Sir hastily circulated his power to resist, but his attention had been focused on finding the familiar aura. This suction force appeared too abruptly. By the time he discovered it, it was already too late. The world blurred before the First Sir's eyes, and he appeared at the end of a street.
When he tried to find the entrance again, there was no passage leading to the outside world, neither behind him nor in the sky above.
'It's not impossible that this is a trap set by Gu Jiuqi... No, no matter how powerful he is, he definitely couldn't have determined my flight path. And how could he create the aura of my cultivation method? ... Hm? This... could this be... the secret realm space I've been looking for all this time?'
As thoughts raced through the First Sir's mind, his body suddenly trembled. He deduced that the probability of this being a trap set by Gu Jiuqi was less than ten percent.
He suddenly realized something. When he was investigating the secret realm back then, the information he obtained said that both the Ten-Pace Courtyard and the Malevolent Spirit Sect had an entrance to the secret realm he was looking for. And wasn't the place he was at just now near the Malevolent Spirit Sect?
'Master and Martial Uncle said that when they used to live in the secret realm, because that mysterious cultivator hadn't appeared for a long time, they later began to occupy most of the secret realm space. Several sects even established their own external passages. The sect my Master and the others belonged to happened to have established one as well. Could it be that the place I just entered was an entrance opened by the seniors of my branch of the sect? Is that why I sensed a familiar aura, and coincidentally, the way to open the passage is with my sect's cultivation method…'
At this thought, the First Sir's heart began to pound with excitement. Last time, in order to find the entrance to the secret realm, he had continuously tried to tear the void from places he thought were likely, to see if he could find anything. Then one day, a fifth-rank demonic beast had suddenly appeared before him and fought with him. That old wolf was extremely difficult to deal with, its cultivation even a bit higher than the First Sir's. Fearing he would attract other Spirit Transformation cultivators from the Desolate Moon Continent, the First Sir had no choice but to retreat.
Thinking of this, the First Sir's eyes shone as brightly as stars. Then, his body moved!
...
Under the dim sky, the door of a cloth shop on the left was open. From the outside, one could see several rolls of brightly colored cloth on the counter. In the wooden shelves behind the counter, many more vibrantly colored fabrics were piled up!
The First Sir flashed into the cloth shop...
Five breaths later, with a "boom," the entire cloth shop was blown to pieces by a powerful wave of air, and the First Sir's figure flew out. His expression was a little strange, but overall, he was still very calm.
Then, the second shop, a blacksmith's; the third, a butcher's... Loud explosions echoed continuously on the silent street.
When the First Sir rushed out of a restaurant again, pots, bowls, ladles, and basins rained down on him from behind, mixed with all sorts of sharp knives and a storm of bamboo chopsticks.
The First Sir's face had lost its earlier composure and was now filled with confusion and disbelief!
'This doesn't seem like an abandoned place at all. Otherwise, how could there be traps everywhere!'
By now, the First Sir felt that something was wrong. It was normal for a place where cultivators lived to have restrictions, but most of them were for defense and concealment. But here, one could enter every place freely, without any defense whatsoever. And as soon as you entered, you were greeted with all sorts of deadly traps.
In the First Sir's eyes, this place was simply a killing field.
Just as he rushed out of the street again, a sense of unease growing in his heart, he suddenly realized that the light on the street had also changed. The sky was no longer dim but had turned gloomy and dark.
His Divine Sense immediately swept out. Then, the First Sir stared into the distance, his eyes somewhat dazed!
From the end of the street he had come from, a huge black shadow blotted out the sky, slowly pressing down. As the black shadow in the sky moved, it grew larger with every bit of distance it covered, like a paintbrush slowly dyeing the sky black, layer by layer…
And wherever the large black shadow passed, everything below it strangely and silently turned into a pile of fine powder, which was then sucked into the black shadow like dust. This caused the black shadow to churn and grow ever denser in the sky, pressing down with increasing power!
Now, below the black shadow, only a bare street remained where it had passed. The previous shops, goods, and everything else had returned to nothingness. And all of this happened in complete silence.
Before, even the First Sir's Divine Sense had not sensed anything at all.
"What kind of restriction is this!"
Although the First Sir felt a sense of trepidation from the huge black shadow pressing down from the horizon, with his cultivation, there were very few things in this world that could make him feel apprehensive.
After a moment of thought, he actually advanced instead of retreating, flying directly toward the huge black shadow. Truly, an expert is daring.
With just a flicker, his figure appeared a hundred zhang in front of the advancing black shadow. Then, with a wave of his hand, a strange long staff appeared in his grasp. The staff was reddish-brown, its surface pitted and extremely coarse, looking as if it were made of some special stone material. The staff's color was dark, as if covered by a layer of dried, old bloodstains. It felt quite heavy, but in the First Sir's hands, it was as if it weighed nothing.
He just casually swung it, and the staff swept out a bone-chillingly cold, wild wind in a fan shape in front of him. With his strike, the heavens and earth here began to tremble violently.
In the blink of an eye, the fan-shaped wild wind swept into the churning black shadow. However, the black shadow in front showed no sign of being blown back or scattered. On the contrary, the moment it came into contact with the cold wind, its slowly moving speed suddenly accelerated, pouncing toward the First Sir.
The distance of a hundred zhang was covered in an instant. This scene left the First Sir somewhat stunned. He could predict seventy to eighty percent of the effect of his attacks, even if he wasn't clear on the final result. Otherwise, what was the point of dueling with others? He had long been able to directly command some of the power of rules, rather than just borrowing it. Those powers of rules were the laws of heaven and earth. Even Gu Jiuqi would not have taken that last strike head-on.
"This is..."
Just as the thought arose in his mind, his hands did not stop. His subconscious reactions were already faster than his thoughts.
Under the urging of his magical power, the temperature of the long staff in his hand instantly became extremely cold, so much so that the surrounding space crackled. If this were in the outside world, even cloud and mist ghostly souls would be instantly frozen. But the black shadow was completely unobstructed by this, showing no signs of slowing down at all.
The next moment, the black shadow enveloped the First Sir's arm and the long staff.
The First Sir felt a bone-piercing pain from his arm. He hadn't felt this kind of pain for a long time. His body trembled, and he couldn't help but let out a miserable scream. His figure shot backward like lightning. As he retreated, his arm and the long staff emerged from the black shadow.
But now, the long staff, made of some unknown material, was a section shorter, as if one end of a piece of refined iron had been melted into droplets and disappeared. And the First Sir's arm, protected by a spiritual light shield, was also in tatters. Not only was the protective light shield shattered, but a great deal of flesh had also disappeared from his physical body, which was as indestructible as a Buddhist vajra.
The entire arm was like a piece of decaying, blackish-brown wood. From the elbow down, it seemed to have been air-dried, becoming a section of arm with only blackish-brown skin clinging tightly to it. On the surface, a few shriveled green veins bulged like dead earthworms, lifeless and quite frightening.
The retreating First Sir looked at the large black shadow in the sky with disbelief in his eyes. He couldn't believe that his body was so fragile that it had become like this after a single touch. He didn't even know what had happened.
And that large black shadow, as if sensing the First Sir's panic, was like a giant shark in the sea that had smelled blood, pouncing over with even greater speed...
And all of this, besides the First Sir, was being watched by a pair of indifferent eyes in the dark…
If Li Yan had seen all this, he would have been shocked to find the scene so familiar. It was the scene of life and death, of reincarnation, experienced once again!
The only difference was that the power of the attacks here was countless times stronger than when they had entered back then. If they had been under such an attack then, no one would have survived even half a breath in the first cloth shop. In an instant, everyone would have died on contact!
And from then on, Gu Jiuqi would wait for several hundred more years, only then beginning to suspect that the First Sir had either left because he could find no opening with him guarding the Malevolent Spirit Sect, or had perished in an accident!
...