The peace of the Green Mountain Sect was a fragile, precious thing, a thin veil of tranquility that could be torn asunder in an instant. Li Yu was in the highest chamber of his pagoda, deep in the silent, internal practice of the techniques granted to him by the Leviathan Heart Sutra. The world outside, with its gentle breezes and the distant, soft calls of sect cranes, had faded into an irrelevant backdrop.
It was in this state of profound, internal focus that the veil of tranquility was torn.
A frantic, desperate pulse of spiritual energy erupted from the communication talisman tucked in his sleeve. It was a pre-set, emergency signal, one he had established with his three retainers for a situation of absolute, life-or-death crisis. His eyes snapped open, the deep concentration shattered. He snatched the talisman, his heart suddenly a cold, heavy stone in his chest.
He infused it with a sliver of his Koi Qi, and Kui's voice, ragged and strained with desperation, flooded his mind.
"Wise Host! We are under attack! We cannot handle him! He is too powerful! We need… urgh… we need you! Come quickly!"
The message was a jumble of panic and exertion, punctuated by the sound of a violent impact that made the talisman crackle. Then, silence. The connection was severed.
For a single, terrifying heartbeat, Li Yu's mind went completely blank. Panic, a cold and unfamiliar emotion he had not truly felt in a long time, seized him. Kui. Cyra. Spine. His retainers, out in the world carrying out the tasks he had given them, were now in mortal danger.
For all three of them to be pushed into a state of such utter desperation… the enemy had to be a monster of an unimaginable level. The thought of them being injured, or worse, sent a wave of icy fury through him that was so intense it made the very air in his pagoda grow cold.
They were far away, on the long road south from the Boreal Empire. Conventional means were useless; fights at this level were decided in moments, not days. He was too far. He was too slow.
His own Void Step, even at its absolute limit, could only take him half a mile at a time, and the energy cost was immense. He could make a dozen such jumps before his reserves were dangerously low, and they were thousands of miles away. It was useless. The panic returned, a frantic, helpless feeling that clawed at his throat.
A desperate, last-resort idea, a plea to the only being he knew who could warp the very fabric of reality, formed in his mind.
"Khaos!" he projected, his voice not a request, but a desperate, raw plea that echoed through his own sea of consciousness.
The shadows in the center of his room, which had been still, seemed to deepen and coalesce. The tall, impossibly handsome man was already standing there, his expression uncharacteristically serious. He had heard the message.
"Khaos, I need your help! My people are in danger! They are under attack by an enemy they cannot fight! I need to get to them, now! Please!"
Khaos did not mock him. He did not lecture. His ancient gaze was piercing. "Point the way," he said, his voice a low, resonant hum.
Relief, so potent it almost made him buckle, washed over Li Yu. He focused on the last lingering trace of the talisman's signal, a faint, spiritual echo of Kui's location deep in the plains. "There!"
Khaos reached out and placed a hand on Li Yu's shoulder. His grip was not physical; it felt as if a piece of the cold, empty void itself had taken hold of him. Without another word, Khaos raised his other hand and tore it through the air.
Reality screamed. It did not warp or bend. It tore. A ragged, black fissure, a wound in the world, opened before them. It was not the clean, silent step of Li Yu's technique; it was a violent, brutal act of dominance over the laws of the void. Through the tear, Li Yu could see not a destination, but a chaotic, swirling vortex of color and light. Khaos stepped into the fissure, pulling Li Yu with him.
The sensation was indescribable. It was a feeling of being turned inside out, of his physical form and spiritual self being stretched thin across an infinite distance and then snapped back together in an instant. He was a cultivator who had mastered his own form of spatial translocation, and he knew, on a fundamental level, the immense amount of energy such an act required.
The power Khaos was expending was not just greater than his own; it was on a completely different plane of existence. It was the difference between a man taking a step and a god moving a mountain. What Li Yu didn't realize was Khaos mastery over the law of the void was so far ahead of him. Yes, the energy used was still immense but even though he was going further, each jump was actually using less energy than Li Yu's own.
They burst back into reality, appearing high in the sky, hundreds of miles from the Green Mountain Sect. The air was different, the sun in a different position. Without a moment's pause, Khaos tore another rift in the sky, and they plunged back into the chaotic, disorienting vortex.
Again and again, he tore the world open, each jump covering a distance that would have taken a flying ship a full day to traverse. The journey took only a tiny bit of time, a few heartbeats that felt like an eternity, and Li Yu, caught in Khaos's grip, could only watch in stunned awe, his own panic momentarily overshadowed by the sheer, terrifying majesty of the power on display.
Back in the ancient forest, the battle was a desperate, one-sided struggle for survival. The clearing around the carriage was a scene of devastation. Massive trees were splintered and felled, the ground a crisscrossing mess of deep gouges and shattered earth. At the center of it all, Kui, Cyra, and Spine were fighting for their lives.
Their enemy, the cloaked man, stood as an island of perfect calm in the storm of their attacks. He moved with an effortless, almost lazy grace, his feet barely seeming to touch the ground. "Is this the full extent of your power?" his voice echoed from beneath the hood, calm and faintly disappointed. "Impressive, for beasts of your realm. But ultimately, insufficient."
Cyra, the Chimeric Kaleido-Kraken, was a vortex of deadly motion. She unleashed her unique arts, and the very air around the cloaked man shimmered and distorted. A dozen illusory copies of herself appeared, each one a perfect, lifelike mirage that lashed out with phantom whips, trying to overwhelm his senses. Simultaneously, her six true phantom limbs, glowing with a cold, blue light, struck like vipers from every conceivable angle, each lash carrying enough force to shatter steel.
Her physical whip would then snake through the air, trying to find a gap in the chaos, to wrap around a leg or an arm, to bind their foe. But the man was untouchable. He seemed to ignore the illusions completely, his spirit too strong to be fooled by such tricks. He would take a single, small step, and a dozen whips would miss by a hair's breadth.
He would raise a hand, and a simple, almost invisible barrier of energy would shimmer into existence, effortlessly deflecting a powerful strike. He never counterattacked; he simply evaded and blocked, making her furious, multi-pronged assault look like a child's tantrum.
Spine was a force of nature, constantly trying to land a decisive blow. He charged again and again, his fists glowing with the deep blue, abyssal power of his true form. Each punch carried the weight of the deep sea, a force that could pulverize a fortress. But the cloaked man met his every attack with a casual, almost contemptuous ease.
He would use a single finger, glowing with a soft, white light, to meet Spine's devastating punch, the impact resulting in a dull thud and a shockwave that would shatter the ground beneath their feet, yet the man would not move an inch. He was negating Spine's monstrous physical strength with an even greater, more refined form of power.
Kui was the only reason they were still alive. His colossal, earthen-yellow turtle shell projection remained around the carriage, a bastion of absolute defense. The cloaked man had not yet attacked it directly, but the shockwaves from his effortless parries against Spine were a constant, brutal assault. The cracks in the shell had spread, a fine, spiderweb network that covered its entire surface. Kui was pouring every ounce of his spiritual energy into maintaining it, his face pale and drenched in sweat, his hands trembling from the strain.
They could all feel it. Their enemy was not trying to kill them. His movements were too precise, his blocks too perfect. He was a master swordsman using a wooden stick to effortlessly disarm three frantic children. If he had wanted them dead, they would have been nothing but a bloody paste on the forest floor moments after he arrived. He was trying to restrain them, to capture them, but his sheer, casual power was still enough to push them to the absolute brink of death.
After several more minutes of this fruitless struggle, a faint sigh escaped the cloaked figure.
"I have seen enough," he said, his voice losing its faintly disappointed tone and becoming cold and decisive. "The time for playing around is over."
An aura, a pressure much more potent and terrifying than the passive weight that had silenced the forest, erupted from him. It was a crushing, absolute power that slammed down on the three of them like a falling mountain. It was the unmistakable, undeniable aura of the Soul Formation realm.
Kui cried out, blood trickling from his nose as his turtle shell projection flickered violently, on the verge of shattering.
Cyra and Spine, as demonic beasts, felt it even more keenly. The pressure was not just physical; it was spiritual, a fundamental suppression of a lower life form by a higher one. Their movements became sluggish, their spiritual energy circulation choked to a trickle.
But the man wasn't finished. From within his hood, a soft, brilliant ball of pure, white light emerged. It floated above his shoulder, radiating a spiritual pressure that was even more terrifying than his cultivation aura. It was his soul, raw and unsheathed. It was not a nascent soul with a specific form; it was a pure, condensed sphere of immense spiritual power, the mark of a human cultivator at the 2nd level of the Soul Formation realm.
For Cyra and Spine, whose own souls were powerful but still fundamentally bestial in nature, the effect was devastating. Their souls, the very core of their being, trembled in absolute, primal terror before this pure, dominant spiritual entity. They could barely move, their bodies locked in place, their minds overwhelmed. The fight was over.
It was in that moment of absolute, crushing despair that a ragged, black wound tore open in the sky directly above the clearing.
The journey through the void had taken only a few minutes. They burst back into reality, and the first thing Li Yu saw was the scene below: Kui's defensive shell cracked and flickering, Cyra and Spine frozen and struggling under an immense pressure, and a cloaked figure radiating a power that made his own formidable cultivation feel like a candle before a sun.
Rage, pure and absolute, a protective fury so intense it burned away every trace of his usual calm, consumed him. He didn't need to analyze the situation. He didn't need a plan. He only knew that his people were on the verge of death.
He shot out of Khaos's grasp like a bolt of lightning, a streak of opalescent energy plummeting towards the battlefield.
"Khaos! Protect them!" he roared, his voice a thunderclap that shattered the suffocating silence.
As he charged, his mind was a vortex of cold, murderous fury. He was the silent leviathan, and someone had dared to harm the creatures that swam in his sea. The harbor was no longer quiet. The storm had arrived.