With a hundred simultaneous roars, they attacked.
The hall, the sky, the very world seemed to dim as their combined power blotted out the sun.
Domains unfolded, spiritual treasures were summoned, and an avalanche of destructive energy surged towards Huo Ling'er.
This time, Huo Ling'er's expression changed. The playful smirk vanished. Her eyes grew cold and serious.
The gentle, warm aura around her intensified, the flames coiling tighter, their color shifting from a fiery orange to a deep, mysterious, oceanic azure.
She had been taught many things in the Eternal Sect. Her senior brother, Lin Feng, had taught her the Way of the Sword was to be direct and unstoppable.
Her other seniors had taught her about formations, alchemy, and a hundred other arts. But it was the Sect Master's own technique, the Eternal Divine Technique,
a scripture that explained the fundamental truths of the universe, that had formed her foundation.
From it, she had comprehended her own path of fire.
She raised a single, slender hand, her palm facing the oncoming apocalypse.
"You have exhausted my patience," she said coldly, her voice devoid of all emotion. "Let me show you the difference between the light of a firefly and the heart of a star."
She spoke the name of her technique, her voice echoing with a divine, undeniable authority.
"Fiery Palm: First Form… Azure Sea Palm."
In the void above her, a new phenomenon was born. An enormous hand, hundreds of meters long, materialized from nothingness. It was beautiful, terrifyingly so.
It was shaped like a perfect, celestial hand, but it was composed entirely of roiling, liquid azure flames. It did not radiate heat; it radiated a profound sense of finality.
It looked like a calm, deep ocean, but everyone who looked at it knew that to touch that sea was to be erased from existence.
The palm descended. It did not move quickly. It floated down with a serene, unhurried grace, as if it had all the time in the world.
The first to meet it was a Soul Transformation Level 9 elder, a man who had been famous for his indestructible golden bell defense for five hundred years.
He roared, pouring all his power into his artifact. The golden bell expanded, becoming a fortress of defensive power.
The Azure Sea Palm touched it.
There was no clang, no explosion. The moment the azure flames made contact with the golden bell, the artifact simply… dissolved.
It melted into golden liquid and then evaporated into nothing.
The elder's eyes went wide with horror. Then, a single, azure tendril of flame from the palm brushed against his arm.
"AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!"
A scream of such horrific, soul-tearing agony ripped through the air that it made the previous laughter sound like a nursery rhyme.
The elder did not just burn. His very soul was being ignited. The azure flame spread over his body in an instant, and he burned, not to ash,
But to a screaming, writhing silhouette of blue fire, before his screams, his body, and his spirit were utterly extinguished.
The palm continued its descent.
It touched the storm of techniques, the hundred different attacks that had been meant to annihilate Huo Ling'er.
They vanished into it like snowflakes falling into the ocean, without causing so much as a ripple.
The Soul Transformation masters stared in primal terror. Their strongest attacks, their most powerful defenses—they were useless.
They tried to flee, to tear open space and escape. But the pressure from the Azure Sea Palm had locked down reality itself. There was no escape.
The palm swept through them. Each cultivator it touched, regardless of their realm be it level one, level six, or the very peak of Soul Transformation was met with the same fate.
A touch, a brief, horrific scream as their soul was set alight by the azure fire, and then… nothing.
It was a harvest of death, conducted with the serene, inexorable grace of a natural disaster. The azure flames were beautiful, hypnotic, and utterly, absolutely lethal.
In less than a minute, it was over. The huge, beautiful palm faded from existence, as if it had been a dream.
The sky was empty once more. The hundred-plus Soul Transformation masters were gone.
The power of this single palm was so immense that its residual energy continued outward, striking one of the ten Void Refinement elders who had been standing too close.
The man, a level two Void Refinement master, let out a startled cry as a wisp of azure flame touched his shoulder.
He acted instantly, his sword flashing as he severed his own arm before the flame could spread. The severed arm turned to nothingness in mid-air.
The elder stumbled back, his face as white as a sheet, clutching his bleeding stump and staring at Huo Ling'er in raw, unadulterated terror.
This palm… it could even kill Void Refinement beings.
Lei Zhan stood frozen, his mind a complete and utter blank. The laughter, the humiliation, it was all gone, replaced by a cold, empty void of pure shock.
He stared at the empty sky, then at the terrified, one-armed elder, and then at the serene girl in white.
The world no longer made sense.
The Dragon's Gulp, The Beggar's Throne
The silence that followed the Azure Sea Palm was different.
It was not a silence of shock or awe. It was a silence of pure, primal dread. The kind of silence one finds in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean, where monstrous things lurk.
The last, fading echoes of the soul-rending screams of a hundred Soul Transformation masters served as a grim testament to the power they had just witnessed.
In the center of it all, Huo Ling'er floated, her expression serene once more. She lowered her hand and smiled gently at the remaining members of the Thunder Light Sect.
It was a beautiful smile, radiant and warm. And to the nine remaining Void Refinement elders and the shell-shocked Lei Zhan, it was the most terrifying sight in the world.
That gentle smile felt like a colossal, soul-freezing sword piercing through their hearts, promising a death more horrific than any they could possibly imagine.
They were no longer looking at a girl; they were looking at a harbinger of their own extinction.
But Lei Zhan's mind, already shattered by humiliation and shattered again by terror, had been pushed past the breaking point.
It had circled all the way back around to a state of pure, unadulterated, delusional rage. He no longer processed cause and effect.
He only knew that he, the great Lei Zhan, had been wronged.
He looked at Huo Ling'er, his eyes bugging out of his head with utter disbelief, spittle flying from his lips. "You… you dare?! You dare kill my sect's elders?! The elders of the Thunder Light Sect!?"
he screeched, his voice a shrill, hysterical shriek. "Girl, you are dead! You are history! When my father, the Patriarch, hears of this, he will hunt you to the ends of the universe! He will peel your skin from your flesh and extinguish your soul for ten thousand years! You are dead! Dead for sure!"
Before he could continue his impotent, shrieking tirade, Huo Ling'er moved.
She did not glide. She did not float. She simply vanished from her position in the air and reappeared directly in front of him.
It was not a flicker, not a flash of light. It was a cessation of existence in one place and a beginning of it in another.
It was a casual application of spatial laws that made the Void Refinement elders' blood run cold.
Her hand was already in motion.
SLAP!!!
This slap was different from the first one. The first had been a casual dismissal. This one was loaded with contemptuous force.
The sound was like a thunderclap, sharp and brutal, echoing through every corner of the city. Lei Zhan's head snapped to the side with such violence that his neck emitted a sickening crack.
A shower of red and white sprayed from his mouth as several of his teeth, knocked clean from their roots, went clattering across the marble floor.
He stumbled backward, a long string of bloody saliva dangling from his lip, his face now bearing two perfect, overlapping handprints.
His entire world narrowed to the throbbing, explosive pain in his jaw and the profound, soul-crushing humiliation of this moment.
His father, the mighty Body Integration Patriarch of the Thunder Light Sect, had never so much as raised his voice to him.
He was the treasured prodigy, the future of the sect. But today, in front of the entire world, a girl had slapped him. Twice.
A guttural, animalistic sound of pure hatred escaped his throat. He burned with an anger so total, so absolute, that it momentarily eclipsed his fear.
He glared at his last line of defense the nine Void Refinement elders and the one-armed tenth who was barely conscious.
"YOU!" he roared, his words slurred and wet from his ruined mouth.
"You useless pieces of trash! Are you just going to stand there and watch your Young Master be humiliated?!"
" Is the honor of the Thunder Light Sect a joke to you?! KILL HER! KILL THAT BITCH NOW! I don't care what it costs, I want her head!"
This time, the elders moved. Not just out of loyalty, but out of self-preservation. They had already crossed the point of no return.
Their disciples were dead. Their Young Master was brutalized. Fleeing was not an option; the Patriarch would execute them for their cowardice.
Their only path forward was to kill this monstrous girl, capture her soul, and hope it was enough to appease their master's wrath.
All ten Void Refinement cultivators, including the one-armed man who hastily cauterized his wound, unleashed their power simultaneously. The world went dark.
Ten domains, each a universe of personal law, unfolded and overlapped. One was a world of endless storms, another a mountain range of crushing gravity, a third a sea of corrosive poison.
The combined pressure of ten Void Refinement masters was a cataclysmic force. The ceremonial hall, already damaged, began to groan and disintegrate, its foundational structures turning to dust.
The three peak Void Refinement masters floated to the forefront, their eyes glowing with cold, murderous light. One of them, a man with a face like a hawk, pointed a finger at Huo Ling'er.
"Girl, you have brought this upon yourself," he said, his voice like grinding stones.
"Your talent is monstrous, but you are still just a Nascent Soul. You cannot comprehend the chasm between us. Surrender now, and we might grant you a swift death."
Huo Ling'er looked at the ten overlapping domains, at the ten demigods who were preparing to erase her from existence.
She knew they were right about one thing. In a direct confrontation,
her own power was not enough to defeat ten Void Refinement masters, three of whom were at the peak.
But a gentle smile bloomed on her face once more. It was a smile that said, You think this is all I have? How quaint.
"You're right," she said, her voice calm and clear, easily cutting through the roaring vortex of their combined power. "I can't fight you all on my own."
Her hand dipped into a small, embroidered pouch at her waist, a pouch that had gone completely unnoticed until this moment. She pulled out a single slip of paper.
It was a talisman. It was made of a heavy, golden paper that seemed to drink the light around it, and it was covered in cinnabar-red lines so complex and profound that just looking at them made one's soul feel dizzy.
A faint, almost imperceptible heat radiated from it. It was a 9th-tier talisman, a strategic-level weapon that could decide the fate of kingdoms.
This was one of the hundreds of "low-grade" trinkets her Sect Master, Shen Huai, had casually tossed to her and Senior Brother Lin Feng before they left for their 'training.' He'd called them "pocket money" and "firecrackers for scaring away stray dogs."
She looked at the talisman, then at the ten Void Refinement masters, a flicker of something almost like pity in her eyes. "But who said I was on my own?"