Within the Unity-stage disaster battlefield.
Qi Ping watched as the final sixteen Saint-grade demons remained fused in that grotesque state. Dragon scales, like dark crystals, covered every single one of them. A terrifying phantom of a giant dragon slowly formed at the center of the fusion, while the chilling Power of Years began to permeate the heavens and earth.
"They are merging! Disasters cannot touch them, and they radiate the Power of Years..."
With just one look, Qi Ping felt the touch of that eerie, soul-chilling power. An unprecedented sense of crisis rose within him.
"What kind of monster is this!?"
It had been a long time since Qi Ping had felt such primal fear and pressure based on the disparity of life-tiers. Beyond that, he sensed a familiar aura from the fusion.
"This aura... could it be the legendary Demon Nest?"
"But according to records, the Demon Nest never appears unless the Demon Realm itself is facing extinction, does it?"
In the limited records available, the Demon Nest was the core that governed everything in the Demon Realm—the origin of all demons that made the myriad domains tremble, and the highest, most supreme will. It might not awaken once in ten thousand years, and some demons didn't even know of its existence. Some legends even claimed that different demon worlds and different branches of the demonic race all shared a single Mother Nest.
Yet now, the Demon Nest had appeared.
"Damn it! What secret is hidden in the Star-Sea World that even the Demon Nest was lured here?"
Qi Ping had suspected it before, but now he was certain: the Star-Sea World held a secret of unimaginable magnitude. It was a secret so great that it terrified the powerful Sky-Dragon World, leading them to never cease their machinations even as the Star-Sea fell into decline. And now, it had even forced the Demon Nest into awakening!
However, Qi Ping had no time to ponder the nature of this secret. With every passing moment, the black dragon phantom grew more solid, and its aura became more horrific.
Qi Ping did not hesitate. He unleashed his cultivation foundation to its limit, even burning his soul and foundation as the price to trigger his Five-Colored Divine Light (Extinction). He layered this power over the Heaven-Cleaving Demonic Blade and lunged forward with absolute ferocity!
However, this divine ability was different from before.
The innate ability of the Five-Colored Celestial Physique was originally a power capable of annihilating the five elements. However, there had always been a limit to its destructive intensity. Just as the physique was strong but not yet legendary throughout the heavens, the light had its ceiling.
The true strength of the Five-Colored Divine Light lay in its near-infinite growth potential. The more insights and spells one fused into it, the more powerful it became. Qi Ping had already integrated all his past realizations, bringing its power to an unprecedented level.
Yet, he had always felt it hadn't reached its ultimate peak. Until this moment. Feeling the Power of Years radiating from the black dragon, an unprecedented enlightenment struck him.
"It was missing the Power of Years!"
In an instant, the momentum of his Five-Colored Divine Light surged, expanding until it covered the entire sky! Immediately after, the light swept down alongside the strike of the demonic blade, crashing into the increasingly solid phantom of the black dragon!
At almost the same time, the black dragon phantom opened its maw and spat out a similarly vast and boundless beam of pitch-black light. This black light's momentum was not at all inferior to Qi Ping's enhanced Five-Colored Divine Light!
The speed of both attacks was horrific. In the blink of an eye, they collided!
For a single instant, the entire world fell into absolute silence. It was as if time itself had frozen.
But in the next heartbeat, the stasis shattered. All things began to crumble and vanish inch by inch. The spatial fabric was torn asunder, time became chaotic, and the erosion of all matter was affected—either accelerating or slowing down in unpredictable bursts.
The natural disasters of the Unity battlefield were routed and dissipated by the shockwave!
The power of this clash far exceeded the boundaries of the Unity stage, making the once-terrifying disasters seem as fragile as grass. This was a level of power that only Mahayana stage cultivators should be able to unleash!
As the world crumbled, a horrific scene unfolded. Shards of broken laws began to destroy everything in their path without distinction. If an ordinary cultivator were to enter this zone, a single glance at that chaotic power would have seen them obliterated in an unpredictable manner.
As the center of this destructive collision, Qi Ping's situation was dire. The horrific shockwave instantly shattered all his defensive spells. His physical body suffered the brunt of the impact and collapsed almost immediately. His form was lost to the void.
Fortunately, damage of this level was not a death sentence for a cultivator of this rank. From the Soul Transformation stage onward, a cultivator's body transcended the mortal realm. As long as their spirituality and cultivation foundation were not extinguished, they could restore themselves with spiritual power.
Qi Ping's foundation was protected by layers of Yin-Yang and Five-Element energy, with further strata of spatial power shielding his core.
However, the physical impact was merely a byproduct of the dragon's attack. The true horror was the Power of Years that eroded all things! Within this temporal turbulence, Qi Ping's cultivation foundation began to decay rapidly at varying speeds.
This uneven decay caused the stable foundation he took such pride in to spiral out of control, even showing signs of collapse! More terrifyingly, under the temporal assault, some of his memories began to blur. His insights into laws and spells began to fade and be forgotten!
At this moment, Qi Ping's main body lost contact with the avatar's consciousness. His main body's memories of the battle stopped at the final instant of the collision. All connection was severed!
"The Demon Nest..." On the Seven-Colored Immortal Vein of the Star-Sea Nine Domains, Qi Ping's main body looked toward the disaster battlefield, his eyes filled with unprecedented gravity.
"What on earth happened over there? To think the conscious link with my Treant Avatar could be severed so completely..."
This was the first time such a thing had happened. However, what puzzled Qi Ping was that while the avatar's consciousness and body had been crushed in an instant, he could still feel that the avatar was fighting. It had not been completely destroyed.
Before the link was cut, the avatar's strike had managed to tear several savage rifts in the black dragon phantom. Two of the partially fused Saint-grade demons had been obliterated and devoured by the demonic blade. Using the power gained from that devouring, the blade had barely managed to hold on.
Though the rust on the blade grew more mottled, that sliver of arrogant demonic nature actually became even more defiant within the temporal turbulence.