The atmosphere didn't just heat up. It caught fire.
A thousand-foot wave of condensed starlight doesn't just fall from the sky; it crushes everything in its path. Wuji felt his eardrums pop as the vacuum created by the descending blade sucked the oxygen right out of the courtyard. The sheer pressure of the attack forced the surrounding Orthodox soldiers to drop their weapons and cover their heads, screaming as the ambient light blinded them.
Wuji didn't bother looking back at his own terrified disciples. Panic was a useless metric. He had exactly three seconds before Black Blood Mountain turned into a smoking crater.
Blocking it was mathematically impossible. His cells were already screaming at fifteen percent damage. The Extreme Yang energy was tearing his meridians apart just keeping him upright. Putting a raw Qi shield up against a Nascent Soul ultimate attack would just turn him into a greasy smear on the balcony a millisecond before the rest of the sect evaporated.
You don't catch a falling piano. You just step out of the way.
But you can't step a whole mountain out of the way. So, he had to tilt the floor.
Wuji slammed both hands flat against the cracked stone of the balcony. He ignored the Blood Formation he used earlier. He dug deeper, driving a thread of his volatile Extreme Yang Qi straight down into the bedrock, searching for the sect's core Illusion Array. It was ancient. The previous sect master used it to generate the heavy, toxic fog that normally hid the mountain from aerial scouts. It was barely functioning, but it was still plugged directly into the mountain's deepest ley lines.
"System," Wuji thought, his teeth grinding together as the heat from the falling sword began to blister his bare shoulders. "Reroute all remaining illusion nodes. Pull them from the perimeter and stack them directly above the central pavilion. Make it a prism."
The Karma Lotus interface flared blue over his vision.
[PROCESSING. REROUTING SPATIAL ANCHORS. WARNING: STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF ILLUSION ARRAY WILL REACH 0%. PERMANENT HARDWARE FAILURE IMMINENT.]
"Burn it," Wuji ordered.
The mountain groaned. It wasn't a metaphorical sound. The actual tectonic plates underneath the sect shifted as the array forcefully warped the spiritual gravity of the peak. A massive, transparent hexagonal shield materialized directly in the path of the falling starlight.
It wasn't a solid barrier. It was a mirror, set at a sharp, forty-five-degree angle.
The Heavenly Sword Cleave hit the prism.
The noise was completely indescribable. It sounded like two continents grinding against each other, amplified a million times. Wuji's nose immediately started bleeding. The violent feedback from the array ripped through his connection, tearing the skin completely off the palms of his hands. The raw kinetic friction of the holy attack hitting the angled illusion barrier caused the air around the pavilion to instantly combust into a ring of plasma.
But the math held up.
The starlight didn't pierce the mountain. It skidded off the refractive barrier. The massive, world-ending wave of destructive energy bent. It sheared right through the thick cloud cover and angled sharply away from the sect, completely missing the main pavilion and the courtyard.
The shockwave from the deflection alone knocked Wuji backward. He hit the stone wall of the pavilion hard enough to crack the mortar, sliding down to one knee. He spat out a mouthful of blood that was more red than black this time. Progress.
Down in the courtyard, absolute silence reigned. The demon disciples slowly opened their eyes, patting their own bodies, genuinely shocked to find they weren't piles of ash.
Up in the sky, Ye Chen hovered. His chest heaved wildly, his holy sword still pointed downward. He looked completely bewildered. His ultimate execution move, fueled by his absolute righteous fury, had just slipped off the target like water off a greasy plate.
But energy that massive doesn't just vanish into thin air. It has to go somewhere.
Wuji wiped his mouth with the back of his bleeding wrist. He pushed himself off the wall and walked back to the edge of the shattered railing. He looked past the courtyard, down the sheer, jagged cliff face of Black Blood Mountain.
The redirected wave of starlight was still traveling. It illuminated the entire southern ridge as it fell, carving a massive, glowing trench through the ancient pine forest.
And it was heading straight for the Black Valley.
Wuji knew exactly what was down there. The inherited memories of the Demon Sect painted a very clear picture. The Black Valley wasn't a military outpost. It was a refugee camp. The Orthodox Alliance loved to purge "heretical" demihumans from their pristine territories. Whenever the righteous sects burned a fox-kin village to clear land for an alchemy farm, or flooded spider-kin caves to secure a new trade route, the survivors ran here.
They huddled in the cold shadow of the Demon Sect because the demons were the only ones who didn't care if you had animal ears, tails, or fangs, as long as you paid your protection taxes. There were at least five thousand people down there right now. Mostly elderly, wounded, and terrified kids living in patched-up canvas tents and cheap wooden shacks.
The Karma Lotus pinged violently, flashing a bright, urgent red.
[TARGET AURA TRACKING: YE CHEN.]
[THREAT TRAJECTORY UPDATED. ESTIMATED IMPACT WITH REFUGEE SETTLEMENT: 8 SECONDS.]
Wuji looked back up at the glowing hero blockading the sky.
Ye Chen saw it too. The blinding light from his own attack was reflecting off his pristine white robes, casting long shadows across his face. He was looking down at the valley. Even from a mile away, Wuji could see the absolute horror creeping into the hero's flawless features.
Ye Chen could stop it.
Wuji knew exactly how Nascent Soul techniques worked. The massive sword cleave was still spiritually tethered to Ye Chen's core. If the hero forcefully severed the connection and detonated the attack early in the empty forest, the shockwave wouldn't reach the camp. The refugees would survive.
But detonating an ultimate art mid-flight carried a massive, brutal cost. The spiritual backlash would whip backward up the tether. It would shatter Ye Chen's meridians, cripple his cultivation for months, and likely make him vomit blood in front of his entire ten-thousand-man army.
He would look weak. He would look like he made a catastrophic mistake.
Wuji watched the guy's face. The Karma Lotus interface spelled out the internal crisis in cold, hard numbers.
[TARGET EMOTIONAL STATE: SEVERE PANIC. EGO PRESERVATION PROTOCOLS ACTIVATING.]
[CALCULATING PROBABILITY OF ATTACK CANCELLATION...]
[12%...]
[4%...]
[0%.]
Ye Chen slowly lowered his sword.
He didn't cut the tether. He didn't detonate the spell. He just gritted his teeth, his jaw muscles popping, and deliberately looked away from the valley. He stared straight ahead at the empty sky.
He was actually going to let it hit.
He was going to let five thousand innocent demihumans vaporize just so he didn't have to face the embarrassment of a backfiring spell. Wuji could already guess the spin Ye Chen would put on it later. He would call it "unavoidable collateral damage" or claim the cowardly demons were hiding among the refugees. The Orthodox PR machine would clean it up in a week.
Wuji let out a rough, breathless laugh that scraped against his ruined throat. It was just too perfect. The hypocrisy wasn't just a strategy for these people; it was baked right into their DNA. When forced to choose between his own shiny reputation and the lives of the innocent, the great hero chose himself without a second thought.
"You're a coward, Ye Chen," Wuji whispered into the freezing wind.
[ESTIMATED IMPACT: 4 SECONDS.]
The starlight wave was tearing through the final treeline. The glow was so bright it was casting shadows backward up the mountain. Wuji could almost hear the screams starting down in the valley as the refugees looked up and saw a second sun falling on their homes.
Wuji didn't have an army. He barely had any Qi left in his cracked meridians. But he had a perfectly functioning brain, a body running on Extreme Yang adrenaline, and a system that heavily rewarded him for completely breaking the plot armor of arrogant heroes.
He stepped up onto the broken stone railing of the balcony.
The wind whipped his dark hair wildly around his face. He didn't hesitate. He didn't look back at his disciples.
Wuji simply leaned forward and stepped off the edge, free-falling directly toward the doomed valley below.