"In the next five seconds, my face will be the last thing you see," Mo Lingtian said, looking down at the Dao practitioner on the ocean floor. His voice resounded with a terrifyingly calm tone, causing everyone, including the old hunched man and the Dao elder in the sky, to instinctively retreat a few inches in fright.
"You really think you..." the Dao practitioner said before clenching his throat tightly, it was as if oxygen was being drawn out of his lungs.
He slowly fell to his knees making loud grunts and groans mirroring the excruciating pain he was going through.
"It's the mist, it has spread all over his body!" one of the practitioners in the sky yelled out causing several of them to retreat metres back in fear. They didn't want the mist to contaminate them.
"Litt..le an..ant....I.. I" the Dao practitioner said as he tried to rally up the last bit of power he had but he failed desperately as streams of blood escaped through the pores of skin on his face and body. His body instantly got soaked wet with his own blood.
"The more you use energy, the more the mist consumes your internal organs and the more painful your inevitable death would be," Mo Lingtian said as the Dao practitioner fell deep into the ocean, the mist thoroughly consuming his body leaving nothing but dust.
"You lasted more than I thought," Mo Lingtian said watching his dust drift deeper into the ocean.
"What a cruel beast!" the old man yelled at Mo Lingtian causing everyone around to gasp in fear instantly becoming wary of Mo Lingtian.
"Evil Beast!" the voice echoed from the sky again.... "Accept your judgement!" and from the sky, a colossal palm fell, golden, bright and all encompassing. The focus of attention immediately returned to the Dao tribulation when the brightness of that palm hit everyone's eyes.
The palm wrapped around the dragon, strangulating its entire body like a dry slender stick. The dragon struggled and writhed like a worm locked in a jar but couldn't even in the slightest bit shift its body under the crushing clutch of that palm.
"Enact the judgement!" the voice spoke ordering the bull headed giants, and immediately, they channeled golden energy through their bodies dispelling the mist latches on their hands and the festering it had caused in seconds.
They immediately raised their hands grabbing something in the invisible air and dragged it down. As their hands came down, the palm wrapping the dragon let go, retreating back into the sky, and two series of large golden chains flew down from the tunneled clouds in the sky and firmly coiled around its body suspending the dragon from two ends in the sky.
And out of thin air, in between the descending clutched hands, the invisible thing they were holding suddenly materialised, transforming into the colossal execution axes. The axes descended majestically cutting through the atmosphere as it slowly brought its edge closer to the dragon's body.
And in one strike, the dragon was slit open by the axes. The golden chains binding it shattered and the massive beast plummeted from the sky to the depths of the ocean drifting into the cold darkness of the waters.
"Could this be it?" everyone thought as they watched the dragon fall into the ocean. Everyone present from the vessel cleansing stage experts to the Dao realm practitioners were all eager to make their move, their fingers itched at the thought of what they could harvest from the fallen dragon's body but the thought of what befell the Dao realm elder when he took action rather impulsively struck fear into everyone present.
But Mo Lingtian still looked at the bull-headed giants holding their axes as they stood on both sides of the tunneled clouds. He watched anxiously, still anticipating something.
"Forget it! I'm going in first!" a cultivator at the vessel cleansing stage yelled before diving into the ocean from the sky.
"The second Dao tribulation," Mo Lingtian whispered and immediately, the ocean began to stir into massive waves, manipulating the air above it into gigantic tornados as big as the size of the dragon beast.
From the violently swirling waters, the Vessel Cleansing cultivator was abruptly launched back into the sky, screaming for his life. But before anyone could even blink, the mighty jaws of the dragon burst from the ocean and swallowed him whole.
As it towered into the visible clouds writhing amongst the violent ocean waves and the apocalyptic tornado, the golden light from the tunneled clouds in the sky fell on its grey and hard scaled body, revealing the deep red cut the divine axes had left on it.
Its aura after surviving that cut from the divine axes became stronger, its physical body grew thicker and larger, even its grey scales looked harder, stronger and more impenetrable than before.
"What is your Dao path?" the voice echoed from the sky as the bull headed giants leaped back into the blinding bright end of the tunneled sky.
"Destruction, dominion, strength, that is the only way I can rebuild my lineage," the dragon beast said to himself.
"Then prove your Dao!" the voice echoed from the sky instantly taking the dragon beast's consciousness captive pulling into another plane of existence where its Dao would be proven.
The dragon beast now having its consciousness out of its body was now vulnerable from any attack as weak and low as that from a cultivator at the vessel cleansing stage. This was the perfect opportunity to strike.
"Fellow Daoists! Set up the formation now!" the second Dao elder yelled to the four practitioners at the great perfection and perfection stage of the Qi Refining realm.
As swift as lightning, they closed the gap between them and the dragon beast, holding the talismans the old hunched man had given them in between their fingers.
They stood at four corners on the air surrounding the levitated dragon as they jointly set up a confining formation laced with layers of killing formations embedded in it to strike the dragon while it was still trapped in the Dao plane.
"My companion in grief...." Mo Lingtian said as his eyes flickered with that dangerous dark green hue...."It's my turn to act."
"One, two, three...." that was the number of times the energy around Mo Lingtian surged repeatedly from his body.
The first surge shattered the confining formation from the base immediately.
The second and third surge struck the four cultivators in the great perfection and perfection stage of the Qi Refining realm severely, sending them flying backwards by several metres.
"Run!" one of them shouted flying off swiftly clutching his chest. The rest of them followed suit, flying off as quickly as possible. They were already severely injured just from the surge of power from his body. Mo Lingtian wasn't someone they wanted to test even if he appeared to just be at the vessel cleansing stage.
Mo Lingtian simply stretched his hand watching them as they ran for their lives and all four of them paused mid-air, their bones loudly cracking under the intense pressure squeezing on their bodies.