Wuji could literally smell his own hair starting to singe. The holy sword was that close.
Ye Chen hovered right above the balcony, holding a weapon made of pure, blinding starlight that was currently baking the air into a suffocating oven. Wuji didn't flinch. He just stood there on the cracked stone, completely unarmed, staring down the barrel of a Nascent Soul expert's ultimate attack. Up in the sky, ten thousand Orthodox cultivators were screaming for his blood. The noise was a physical weight pressing down on the mountain.
He needed to take control of the room.
Fighting Ye Chen right now was mathematically impossible. The system overlay in the corner of his vision was flashing a steady, obnoxious yellow warning. Cellular damage at fifteen percent. The Extreme Yang energy was still treating his internal organs like dry kindling. If he tried to channel enough Qi to block a direct strike from that starlight sword, his own heart would explode before the blade even touched him.
He didn't need a shield. He needed a microphone.
Wuji looked down at the courtyard below the balcony. The fifty Orthodox vanguard soldiers he had blasted earlier were just a mess of melted armor and charred bone. Blood pooled thick and heavy across the ancient stone paving.
Perfect.
Wuji slammed his bare heel into the stone floor. He didn't use the system points this time. He just opened the floodgates of his Yang sea for a fraction of a second, driving a spike of black lightning straight down into the mountain's bedrock.
The electrical surge hit the underground array network. It bypassed the broken shield generators and hooked directly into the blood on the courtyard floor, using the iron in the gore as a conductive amplifier. The ancient acoustic runes carved into the pillars of the Yin-Yang Demon Sect flared a dull, bruised purple.
Ye Chen took a deep breath, his chest puffing out beneath his flawless white robes. He raised the glowing sword higher, preparing to deliver his final, heavily rehearsed execution speech.
"Die, demon trash, and let the heavens—"
"Four million, two hundred thousand spirit stones."
Wuji's voice didn't just echo. It completely dominated the airspace. The hijacked Blood Formation took his quiet, flat tone and projected it outward with the concussive force of a bomb. It rattled the hulls of the three massive floating warships. It vibrated in the teeth of every single Orthodox soldier in the sky.
Ye Chen actually stopped mid-swing. He blinked, the holy momentum totally derailed.
"What?" Ye Chen snapped, looking genuinely confused.
Wuji leaned casually against the broken stone railing. He wiped another thin line of toxic black blood from his chin, making sure his hand hid the violent tremor in his jaw.
"Four million, two hundred thousand spirit stones," Wuji repeated. The amplified voice carried a cold, absolute authority. "That's the operating budget for a single Heaven-Class Warship for a one-month deployment. You brought three of them. Plus ten thousand cultivators. Every single one of them wearing Grade-Three silk robes laced with spirit gold. I ran the numbers while you were hovering up there trying to look pretty. We're looking at a logistical cost of roughly twenty million stones just to park your shiny army over my house."
The sea of white robes in the sky shifted uneasily. Soldiers exchanged confused glances. This was not how a demon eradication was supposed to go. The demon was supposed to roar, curse the heavens, and attack blindly. He wasn't supposed to give them an itemized financial audit.
"Shut up!" Ye Chen yelled. His handsome face tightened. "Your demonic lies won't work here! You try to confuse the righteous path with nonsense because you know your death is absolute!"
"Nonsense?" Wuji let out a short, dry laugh. It echoed like grinding rocks. "I'm just asking a simple supply chain question, hero. Where does all that money come from? The Orthodox Alliance doesn't farm. You don't manufacture goods. You just sit on top of mountains and talk about justice."
"We are funded by the righteous contributions of the mortal realms!" Ye Chen practically screamed, pointing his sword at Wuji again. "They gladly offer their wealth so we can protect them from parasites like you!"
Wuji shook his head slowly. He looked up at the armada, making sure his voice reached the youngest, most brainwashed disciples in the back rows.
"You really believe that," Wuji said. "That's the funniest part. You actually believe your own PR. Let me give you some receipts."
Wuji tapped his temple. The inherited memories of the Demon Sect's intelligence network were a goldmine. On Earth, Wuji destroyed rival corporations by exposing their dirty laundry. Here, the game was exactly the same. Only the currency was blood.
"The Southern Black Iron Mines," Wuji announced. "Currently managed by the Azure Sword Sect. Three weeks ago, Shaft Four collapsed. Official Orthodox report said it was a natural earthquake. Zero casualties."
Wuji paused. He let the silence hang for exactly two seconds.
"The actual report? The support beams failed because your foremen stripped the safety arrays to save money. Three hundred and forty Fox-kin slaves were buried alive. The youngest was six years old. They didn't even bother digging them out. They just sealed the shaft and opened a new one."
A low murmur rippled through the floating army. Several cultivators wearing the crest of the Azure Sword Sect suddenly looked extremely uncomfortable, avoiding eye contact with the surrounding squads.
"Lies!" Ye Chen's voice cracked. His golden aura flickered violently. The Karma Lotus interface in Wuji's vision started spitting out red alerts.
[TARGET EMOTIONAL STATE: CRITICAL. EGO FRACTURING.]
[DESTINY VALUE DROPPING.]
"How about the Eastern Silk Valleys?" Wuji didn't stop. He pushed the knife deeper. "Those pristine white robes you guys love so much. They look really clean. They should. They're woven by Spider-kin women kept in sensory deprivation pits for twenty hours a day so their silk remains perfectly white. When they go blind from the dark, your masters harvest their demon cores to make youth-retaining pills for your elder's wives."
"I said shut up!" Ye Chen roared.
"You call us demons because we don't hide it!" Wuji's voice finally rose, riding a wave of raw, cynical anger. The black lightning under his skin flared, responding to his mood. "We take what we want. We fight. We bleed. But we don't smile at a demihuman child, promise them salvation, and then chain them to a pickaxe until they cough up their own lungs!"
The sky fell into absolute, suffocating silence.
The murmuring stopped. The cheering was completely gone. The ten thousand soldiers of the Orthodox Alliance looked down at the demon on the balcony, and then they looked at their own hands. They looked at their expensive swords. They looked at their glowing white robes.
The cognitive dissonance was a physical weight. You could feel it crushing the morale of the entire army. Wuji had taken their holy crusade and stripped it down to raw, ugly capitalism. They weren't here to save the world. They were just a private security firm sent to eliminate a competitor.
Ye Chen hovered in the center of the silent sky. He was breathing fast, heavy, ragged gasps. The golden light radiating from his body wasn't warm anymore. It was harsh. Violent. Unstable.
He looked back at his own army. He saw the doubt in their eyes. He saw the hesitation.
For a guy whose entire existence was built on being worshipped, being doubted was worse than being stabbed.
"This is an illusion," Ye Chen said. His voice was entirely different now. It was completely stripped of that divine, echoing confidence. It sounded thin. Panicked. "He is using demonic mind arts. He is corrupting your Dao hearts. Don't listen to him!"
Nobody cheered. A few of the older commanders nodded slowly, trying to maintain order, but the damage was done. The fanaticism was broken.
Wuji watched the hero unravel. It was almost sad.
"You're losing them, Ye Chen," Wuji said quietly. The Blood Formation picked up the whisper perfectly. "They're realizing the bad guy is making a lot more sense than the hero. What are you going to do about it?"
Something inside Ye Chen snapped.
It was an audible sound. The holy sword in his hand shrieked as he poured an impossible amount of Qi into the blade. The sky above Black Blood Mountain instantly turned pitch black as the sword sucked all the ambient light out of the atmosphere.
The Karma Lotus interface exploded with warnings.
[CRITICAL THREAT. TARGET INITIATING ULTIMATE ART: HEAVENLY SWORD CLEAVE.]
[WARNING. TRAJECTORY UNSTABLE. COLLATERAL DAMAGE IMMINENT.]
Wuji looked up. Ye Chen wasn't aiming at the balcony anymore. His eyes were completely bloodshot, his face twisted in pure, desperate rage. He was aiming at the entire mountain.
"I am the justice of this world!" Ye Chen screamed, raising the massive, blinding construct of starlight high above his head.
He didn't care about the refugees in the valley below. He didn't even care about his own vanguard troops who were still trying to retreat from the courtyard. He just wanted to wipe Black Blood Mountain off the map so nobody could ever talk about the mines again.
He swung the sword down.
A wave of absolute destruction, a thousand feet wide, dropped from the sky.