The raging coastal storm off the western edge of Sea God Island seemed to cower before the streak of demented crimson-and-black light tearing across the churning surf.
Behind him on the basalt ridge, Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and High Priestess Bo Saixi stood frozen for a breath before immediately launching themselves into the sky to follow him, their faces etched with deep alarm at the terrifying, unhinged malice radiating from Tang San's spiritual sea.
Half a mile out in the boiling black waves, perched atop a jagged, isolated sea stack, Xue Ji was still curled up in her dark, tattered cloak.
The freezing ocean spray lashed against her leathery, grayish-gold skin, washing away the dried dark-golden blood from where the Sea God Trident had cracked her collarbone an hour ago. Despite the bone-deep pain in her chest and the stinging rejection she had suffered, her two slightly crooked, vertical-slitted red eyes had never once left the distant cliff where Tang San was meditating. The divine imprint stamped into her blank, reshaped brain by the Asura God drove her with a singular, animalistic obsession: she existed solely to be accepted by this man and to serve as his sheath.
Suddenly, seeing the streak of blood-red and black light hurtling straight toward her lonely rock, Xue Ji scrambled up onto her bare, clawed feet, her oversized, veined bat ears twitching frantically with excitement.
BOOM!
Tang San landed heavily on the wet, jagged peak of the sea stack, the sheer kinetic force of his descent shattering the top three feet of stone into flying gravel!
In his right hand, the golden light of the Sea God Trident was completely dim, suppressed by the boiling, suffocating wave of pitch-black and blood-red killing intent pouring out of every pore of his body. His long hair, dyed dark by his psychotic hatred, whipped around a face that was pale as a corpse, stained with dried tracks of blood beneath his eyes, nose, and mouth.
"Master! My sweet Husband!" Xue Ji rasped joyfully in her triple-layered, sonar-clicking voice, completely ignoring the terrifying murderous aura rolling off him as she stumbled forward with her arms open, her rosy blood-mist glamour flickering weakly around her form. "You came for Xue Ji! You finally came to look at me—!"
"Drop the illusion," Tang San spoke.
His voice was so cold, hoarse, and devoid of human emotion that even the mind-wiped bat-woman paused half a step away from him, blinking her crooked red eyes in confusion.
"I said drop that useless blood-mist illusion," Tang San repeated, lifting his bloodshot eyes to stare directly into her face.
He did not activate the Purple Demon Eye this time, yet his gaze pierced her to the bone.
"I already know what you look like underneath," Tang San said, a twisted, bone-chilling smile curling the corners of his blood-stained lips. "A three-hundred-thousand-year Dark Golden Three-Headed Bat King from Hell Road. A hideous, misshapen monster forged from rotting blood and slaughter. Show me your true form."
Xue Ji tilted her wide, asymmetrical head at an unnatural angle, hesitating for a second. "Master... doesn't like Xue Ji's pretty mist? Earlier, Master said Xue Ji's true face was disgusting..."
"Earlier, I was a fool clinging to a laughable dream of purity and devotion!" Tang San barked out a harsh, maniacal laugh that echoed over the roaring waves just as Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi descended in the air a hundred yards behind the sea stack, hovering above the surf in stunned silence.
Tang San didn't even spare his family a backward glance. The image of Xiao Wu's flushed, ecstatic face on that floating projection screen—hearing her mock him, watching her beg Zhang Tian to claim her maidenhood, and realizing that every pure ideal he had cherished for twenty years had been trampled into filthy mud—burned inside his skull like inextinguishable hellfire!
What use was righteousness?!
What use was pride, dignity, or waiting faithfully for a woman who was currently moaning beneath his mortal enemy?!
In this cruel, filthy world, only overwhelming, absolute power mattered! Only the power to butcher Zhang Tian, tear down his empire, and drag everyone who had betrayed and humiliated him into an eternal abyss of agony mattered!
"Show me your true form!" Tang San roared at Xue Ji.
Obeying his command instinctively, Xue Ji retracted the ultrasonic rosy blood-mist clinging to her skin.
Instantly, before the eyes of Tang San—and before the horrified gazes of Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi hovering in the sky behind him—the alluring, pink-skinned mirage vanished completely.
Standing on the wet black rock in the storm was the grotesque abomination the Asura God had hammered together in Hell Road: her skin a coarse, sickly grayish-gold pulsing with thick, worm-like dark veins; her head wide and lumpy from three bat skulls crushed into one; her oversized, hairless bat ears twitching; four long, yellowed fangs dripping with acidic saliva over her cracked black lips; and those two bulging, cross-eyed crimson orbs staring hungrily at Tang San!
Hovering above the waves, Tang Hao and Tang Xiao sucked in sharp breaths of sheer revulsion upon seeing what lay beneath the illusion for the first time.
"By the heavens..." Tang Xiao whispered, his face paling. "That is what she truly looks like?! No wonder Xiao San tried to kill her on the spot earlier!"
Yet now, standing three paces away from that stomach-turning visage, speaking directly into the foul, blood-scented breath wafting from Xue Ji's fanged mouth, Tang San did not flinch, nor did he take half a step back.
Instead, he looked straight into her bulging, crooked red eyes and extended his left hand toward her.
"You told me earlier that the Asura God imprinted the secret of the living sword sheath into your soul," Tang San said, his voice dead calm beneath his raging hatred. "Tell me how the ritual works. If I accept you right now, what can you give me?"
Seeing that Tang San was no longer looking at her with disgust, and was actually holding his hand out to her, Xue Ji shivered from head to toe with fanatical, trembling ecstasy! She lunged forward and grabbed Tang San's left hand with both of her cold, clawed, leathery hands, pressing his palm tightly against her rough, scarred cheek as she rubbed her face against his skin like a starved beast.
"Everything! Xue Ji can give Master everything!" she shrieked in her raspy, three-toned voice, her yellowed fangs gleaming as drool dripped onto Tang San's wrist. "Master, you only passed two trials of the Asura God back when you cleared Slaughter City and walked Hell Road! Because you never received the formal God Position trials of the Asura God after that, your Asura God Affinity is far too low—barely twenty percent! With such low affinity, you cannot truly comprehend or refine the Asura God's Divine Energy on your own, nor can you summon and wield the true Asura Demon Sword without its divine killing intent tearing your meridians and spiritual sea to shreds!"
Tang San's eyes narrowed sharply. "And with you?"
"The Lord Asura God poured a strand of his own divine origin and ten thousand years of Hell Road's condensed law directly into my three-hundred-thousand-year core when he reshaped me!" Xue Ji panted excitedly, pressing Tang San's hand down against the center of her heavy, vein-covered chest where a dark-red, sword-shaped rune pulsed beneath her grayish-gold skin. "This ritual has nothing to do with your martial spirits or your Spirit Rings! It is the Asura Blood-Soul Sheath Covenant!"
She stepped closer, her wide, fanged mouth inches from Tang San's chin as she explained the terrifying mechanics stamped into her mind:
"As long as Master opens his spiritual sea and his heart to me—abandoning all disgust and genuinely accepting Xue Ji as his most intimate partner, his other half—we can fuse our blood, our souls, and our physical bodies together!" Xue Ji rasped fervently. "Through our bond, my core will act as a permanent bridge that directly elevates your comprehension and mastery of the Asura God's Divine Energy, bypassing your low affinity! Better yet, when we merge our bodies together in the Living Sheath Fusion, it is a divine transformation far surpassing any mortal Martial Spirit Fusion ability!"
"In that fused state," Xue Ji's crooked red eyes blazed like twin pools of boiling blood, "you will be able to directly summon the projection—and eventually the true body—of the Asura Demon Sword! And all the terrifying side effects, the soul-corroding backlash, and the meridian-shattering weight of channeling the Asura Godking's Divine Energy while holding the Sea God's power will be diverted entirely into my flesh and my three-hundred-thousand-year beast origin! You get all the supreme killing power of the Asura God, and Xue Ji takes all the pain for you!"
Hovering in the storm winds behind them, Tang Chen's deep black eyes widened in profound shock as he listened to Xue Ji's explanation.
"Bypassing the trial affinity restrictions to directly comprehend Asura Divine Energy... and a divine flesh-and-soul fusion that lets him wield the Asura Demon Sword while she bears a hundred percent of the backlash?!" Tang Chen breathed, his heart pounding. "The Asura God actually created such a heaven-defying shortcut for Xiao San?!"
"But to trigger a soul-and-blood covenant of that level, the two participants cannot have a shred of mutual rejection in their hearts," Bo Saixi murmured beside Tang Chen, looking at Tang San's rigid back with deep concern. "Can Tang San truly force his heart to accept... that?"
On the sea stack, Tang San looked down at the grotesque bat-woman clutching his hand against her leathery chest.
He smelled the stench of ancient blood-rot on her skin. He felt the rough, scaly pulse of the dark-gold veins beneath her fingers. He saw the four yellowed fangs and the wide, asymmetrical skull.
A single hour ago, his pride as a human, a scholar of the Tang Sect, and Xiao Wu's devoted lover would have made his spiritual sea violently reject her touch.
Now?
Tang San closed his eyes for one breath. Inside the darkness of his mind, he saw Zhang Tian sitting on that velvet bed in the Star Luo Imperial Palace, laughing down at him through the screen while Xiao Wu—the girl he had treasured for a lifetime—screamed in shameless pleasure in Zhang Tian's arms.
Compared to the agony of that humiliation... what was a hideous face?!
Compared to the burning need to slice Zhang Tian into ten thousand pieces with the Asura Demon Sword... what was human dignity?!
If this grotesque bat monster from the bottom of Hell Road was the only creature in the universe that would never betray him, never abandon him for Zhang Tian, and willingly bear the agony of a Godking's backlash so he could hold supreme power—then she was infinitely more precious to him than any peerless beauty on the mainland!
When Tang San opened his eyes again, the last trace of hesitation, disgust, and human reluctance in his spiritual sea had been burned away completely by his all-consuming hatred.
"You will never betray me to Zhang Tian?" Tang San asked, his voice a low, gravelly rasp.
"Never! Xue Ji only knows Master! If Master tells Xue Ji to die, Xue Ji will tear out her own heart right now!" the bat-woman hissed with fanatical devotion.
"Good," Tang San said.
And before the stunned, widened eyes of Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi watching from the sky, Tang San did not pull his hand away.
Instead, he stepped forward, wrapped his right arm firmly around Xue Ji's broad, muscular, scar-covered waist, pulled her leathery, foul-smelling body flush against his chest, and lowered his head toward her wide, fanged mouth to initiate the Asura Blood-Soul Sheath Covenant!
"Master~!!"
Xue Ji let out an ear-piercing, ecstatic ultrasonic screech that shattered the waves around the sea stack into mist!
As Tang San forced his mind and heart to completely let go of all resistance—pouring his hatred, his obsession with power, and his total acceptance of this monster into his spiritual sea—Xue Ji bit down sharply on her own forked tongue, drawing a mouthful of boiling, three-hundred-thousand-year dark-golden bat blood, while simultaneously sinking her four yellowed fangs into Tang San's lower lip and shoulder!
CRACK—BOOOOOOM!!
The moment their blood and spiritual seas connected without a trace of rejection, the sword-shaped divine seal branded into Xue Ji's chest by the Asura God erupted like a detonating crimson star!
A pillar of pitch-black and dark-red light, thick as a castle tower and howling with the phantom wails of a million slaughtered souls from Hell Road, shot straight out of the sea stack and pierced into the storm clouds above Sea God Island!
Inside that pillar of crimson light, the Asura Blood-Soul Sheath Covenant took effect immediately.
Tang San threw his head back with a guttural roar as a torrent of ancient, high-dimensional memories and profound law comprehensions flooded straight from Xue Ji's core into his brain!
Previously, because he had only passed the surface trials of Slaughter City and Hell Road without undergoing the formal nine trials of the Asura God Position, his understanding of the Asura God's power had been stuck at the level of crude killing intent—the evolved Deathgod Domain and the three surface strikes on his hammer.
Now, through the bridge of Xue Ji's three-hundred-thousand-year origin—which had been personally baptized and remodeled by the Asura Godking—Tang San's spiritual sea was forcefully elevated to comprehend true Asura Divine Energy! He saw how pure slaughter condensed into divine law; he understood how to convert his own spirit power and hatred directly into the razor-sharp, world-ending crimson power of the Divine Realm's chief enforcer!
And it did not stop at comprehension!
"Fuse with me, Master! Let Xue Ji become your sheath and show you our true power!" Xue Ji shrieked inside the pillar of blood-light, wrapping her thick, leathery arms and legs tightly around Tang San's torso like a giant parasitic bat latching onto its host!
"Asura God Secret Art — Blood-God Fusion!!"
What happened next made Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi hover in the air with cold chills running down their spines.
This was not a Martial Spirit Fusion ability where two Spirit Masters blended their martial spirits into an energy avatar. This was a visceral, horrifying flesh-and-soul fusion between a human Super Douluo and a reshaped three-hundred-thousand-year abyssal Spirit Beast!
Under the blazing crimson light of the covenant, Xue Ji's physical body softened and melted like boiling dark-golden wax against Tang San's chest and back!
Squelch! Crunch! Crack!
Sickening sounds of shifting bone and merging sinew echoed over the thunder of the storm as Xue Ji's three-hundred-thousand-year flesh, her nine Spirit Rings, and her Asura-baptized meridians sank directly into Tang San's body, wrapping around his internal organs and his skeleton like a living, breathing layer of internal and external armor!
Within five breaths, the blinding pillar of blood-light shattered outward.
Standing alone atop the ruined sea stack where two figures had stood moments ago was a single, towering figure.
When the mist cleared and Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi saw Tang San's fused appearance, even Tang Hao—his own biological father—instinctively gasped in shock.
Tang San's height had surged to nearly three meters tall, his frame packed with explosive, unnatural muscle. However, his formerly human appearance had mutated into a nightmarish, grotesque hybrid caused by the temporary fusion with Xue Ji!
His skin was now covered in a thick, coarse layer of dark grayish-gold leathery armor laced with throbbing, blood-red and dark-gold veins that crawled across his neck and face. From his shoulder blades sprouted a pair of massive, twelve-meter-wide leathery bat wings etched with glowing crimson Asura runes, flapping slowly in the wind.
His face had widened and warped, taking on the ferocious, angular contours of the Three-Headed Bat King: two sharp,scabby bat ears pointed upward through his tangled mass of blood-red and midnight-black hair; four long, curved fangs jutted out from beneath his darkened lips; and sitting right above his two original eyes—which now burned with slitted, cross-eyed crimson light—a third, vertical blood-red bat eye had split open in the center of his forehead!
On either side of his neck, just above his collarbones, two faint, grotesque relief-faces resembling the Bat King's other two heads pulsed slightly beneath his leathery skin, breathing in and out to filter and absorb the violent backlash of the divine energy raging inside him!
He looked completely inhuman—a hideous, demonic monster crawled straight out of the deepest pit of hell!
Yet, while his appearance had become terrifyingly grotesque, the power radiating from this fused form was undeniable!
Hovering around his mutated body were no longer just his own Spirit Rings, but a fused resonance that pushed his temporary aura straight past the ninety-sixth rank, past the ninety-seventh and ninety-eighth ranks, surging all the way to the absolute pinnacle of a Level 99 Limit Douluo—and layered atop that Limit Douluo spirit power was a genuine, razor-sharp current of Asura Divine Energy!
Tang San slowly raised his clawed, dark-golden left hand toward the storm clouds above.
"Come forth... Asura Demon Sword!"
Tang San's voice echoed from his throat as a chilling, overlapping blend of his own cold tone and Xue Ji's raspy, ultrasonic screech.
High in the sky, the clouds were violently dyed the color of fresh blood! In response to the divine imprint inside Xue Ji's fused core and Tang San's newly unlocked Asura Divine Energy, a colossal, two-meter-long greatsword condensed from pure, solidified crimson slaughter law and dark golden light materialized in Tang San's left hand!
It was the high-tier divine projection of the Asura Demon Sword!
The instant Tang San's left hand gripped the hilt of that crimson greatsword, a catastrophic surge of Godking-level killing intent—which should have instantly shredded his mortal meridians and clashed explosively with the Sea God Trident held in his right hand—rushed into his arm.
Yet, before a single meridian in Tang San's arm could tear, the two grotesque bat-face reliefs pulsing on his collarbones—the fused consciousness and body of Xue Ji acting as his living sheath—greedily sucked in ninety-nine percent of the destructive backlash, channeling the tearing damage into her own three-hundred-thousand-year beast vitality and leaving Tang San's mind and meridians completely clear and unburdened!
In his right hand, he held the golden, one-hundred-and-eight-thousand-catty Sea God Trident.
In his left hand, he wielded the crimson, world-severing projection of the Asura Demon Sword.
With a casual, test swing of his left arm, Tang San slashed the crimson greatsword horizontally toward an empty stretch of the ocean half a mile away.
SHING—BOOOOOOOOOM!!
A three-hundred-meter-long crescent of pure, dark-red Asura Divine Energy tore silently through the air! It sliced an entire jagged sea stack half a mile away cleanly in half like hot iron through butter, and then carved a bottomless, two-mile-long chasm straight across the ocean waves that took ten full seconds for the surrounding seawater to refill!
Hovering in the air behind him, Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi stared at that two-mile chasm in the sea with wide, trembling eyes.
That single casual slash carried a destructive lethality that already rivaled—and in pure cutting power, even surpassed—Tang Chen's own full-powered strike as a Level 99 Limit Douluo!
Slowly, Tang San dismissed the crimson greatsword projection. The dark-golden bat wings folded back into his shoulder blades, and with a wet, squelching ripple of flesh, Xue Ji's body separated from his torso, materializing on the rock beside him once more.
As soon as they separated, Tang San's physical appearance returned to his normal, handsome human form—though his eyes remained a cold, dead crimson-blue—while Xue Ji dropped to her knees beside his boots, coughing up a mouthful of dark-golden blood as her body bore all the accumulated strain and meridian damage from that single swing of the Asura Demon Sword!
Yet, even as she coughed up blood, Xue Ji looked up at Tang San with a wide, fanged, blissed-out grin, rubbing her leathery cheek against his shin.
"It didn't hurt Master at all, right?" Xue Ji rasped happily. "Xue Ji took all the pain! Whenever Master wants to turn into that form and swing the Lord God's sword to kill Master's enemies, Xue Ji's body will bear everything for you!"
Tang San looked down at the blood-coughing, hideous bat-woman kneeling at his feet.
For the first time, he reached down with his left hand and patted her coarse, moss-like hair without a single twitch of revulsion.
"You did well, Xue Ji," Tang San said in a flat, icy voice.
He then turned around on the shattered sea stack and looked up at Tang Chen, Tang Hao, Tang Xiao, and Bo Saixi hovering in the storm winds.
Seeing the terrifying, dead calm in Tang San's eyes after what he had just watched on the projection screen and the demonic fusion he had just undergone, even Tang Hao felt a knot in his throat as he landed on the rock alongside Tang Chen and Bo Saixi.
"Xiao San..." Tang Hao began hoarsely, placing a heavy hand on his son's shoulder. "About what Zhang Tian showed on that jade slab just now... you must not let your hatred destroy your reason—!"
"My reason has never been clearer than it is right now, Father," Tang San interrupted calmly, his cold eyes sweeping across his father, his great-grandfather, and the High Priestess. "Before today, I still held onto soft, mortal illusions. I refused the Asura God's arrangement because I cared about appearances and past promises. Zhang Tian woke me up."
Tang San raised the Sea God Trident in his right hand, while Xue Ji stood up obediently behind his left shoulder like a shadow from the abyss.
"We are not waiting ten days anymore," Tang San stated, his voice ringing with absolute, chilling finality across the stormy sea. "With my current Level 96 foundation, my current Spirit Rings, my five hundred-thousand-year Spirit Bones, the Sea God Trident, and my fusion with Xue Ji, my combat power can already match a peak Limit Douluo! Combined with Great-Grandfather, Father, the High Priestess, and the two remaining Sacred Pillars, we have more than enough strength right now."
He pointed the golden prongs of the Sea God Trident straight toward the dark, churning waters of the northern ocean two hundred miles away.
"We march north tonight," Tang San declared, his crimson-tinted eyes burning with a vow of total annihilation. "Tonight, we hunt and slaughter the Deep Sea Demonic Whale King! I will take its million-year Spirit Ring for my Clear Sky Hammer, I will take its million-year Spirit Bone, and I will use its Whale Core to awaken the Sea God Trident! And then, I will open the Ninth Trial, claim the thrones of both the Sea God and the Asura God... and turn the entire Douluo Continent into a sea of blood for Zhang Tian and that traitorous bitch!"
Looking at the demonic resolve radiating from Tang San and the hideous bat-woman standing faithfully behind him, Tang Chen and Bo Saixi exchanged a solemn, heavy glance before nodding their heads.
The final, desperate counterattack of the defeated vanguard had officially begun—starting with the slaughter of the ocean's oldest nearly million-year overlord!