Long Shenyin's voice was not loud in the normal sense. She did not shout until her throat strained. She simply spoke, and the sound drove through the thunder as if thunder were nothing but mist. It struck the city below like a hammer.
Several weaker cultivators fainted on the spot.
A few Nascent Essence cultivators staggered backward, eyes rolling white. Even some Origin Core experts felt their souls tremble.
Long Shenyu sighed.
"You have no appreciation for conversation."
Long Shenyin vanished.
One moment, she was lazily hovering above the Three Ridges Spirit Inn.
Next, she stood in front of Luo Zhenmu.
The distance between them disappeared so cleanly that most of River Ridge did not even understand she had moved. They only saw her figure blur, then reappear with the Black Sun Tyrant Spear resting in her hand, its dark shaft angled downward, its spearhead pointing toward Luo Zhenmu's chest.
Luo Zhenmu's pupils contracted.
He was not Lu Jiangheng. He was not a careless outer disciple intoxicated by borrowed sect prestige. He was an inner deacon of Verdant Edge, a true 4th layer Sky Lord. His sword had killed beast kings, rogue cultivators, city lords, and rival sect elders. He had seen geniuses before. He had humbled them. He had buried some of them.
So he reacted.
His Sky Qi surged.
Green sword wind burst outward from his body, thin and sharp as spring grass after rain, yet every strand carried killing force. His 4th layer Sky Lord aura descended like a cut mountain. It pressed toward Long Shenyin, seeking to lock her movement, slow her breath, and force her spear arm half an inch off rhythm.
At the same time, a deeper sword intent rose from him.
Verdant Edge Sword Qi was not brute metal. It was wood and wind refined into severance. It grew, twisted, layered, and cut from angles that ordinary eyes could not follow. Against body cultivators, it entered muscles and tore from within. Against beasts, it found joints and gaps beneath scales. Against heavy weapon users, it redirected impact and sliced the force apart before it could land.
The wind around Luo Zhenmu turned green.
His sword had not yet left its sheath, but the air was already full of edges.
Long Shenyin snorted.
That was all.
The sound was cold, contemptuous, and small.
Yet Luo Zhenmu's aura shuddered.
The green sword wind pressing toward her bent backward as if it had struck an invisible wall. The Sky Qi suppression he had released did not cover her; it cracked around her, splitting into ragged streams that tore apart before reaching her robes.
For the first time since arriving, Luo Zhenmu's expression changed.
Not fear.
Not yet.
But his confidence narrowed.
His sword left its sheath.
Green light flashed across the sky. A clean sword cry rang over River Ridge, so sharp that several cultivators below felt thin lines open across their cheeks. Luo Zhenmu's wrist turned, and the Verdant Edge Sword Qi gathered around him in layered arcs.
One arc became three.
Three became nine.
Nine became a rotating sword ring.
Wood-wind resonance condensed within it. The ring spun around him, not as a simple shield, but as a living sword field. Any incoming force would be cut, shaved down, redirected, and broken across the ring's layered movement. Heavy impacts would lose their center. Piercing strikes would be guided aside. Even if an enemy forced their way through the outer ring, inner sword qi would cling to the weapon and crawl toward the wielder's meridians.
Against an ordinary Sky Lord, this was an excellent response.
Against a spear user relying on force, it was even better.
Luo Zhenmu's eyes turned severe.
"A spear user thinks she can cross my sword field?"
Long Shenyin looked at him as if he had said something childish.
Then she released a sliver of aura.
The sky darkened.
It was not night, but for a breath, every cultivator in River Ridge felt as if the sun had retreated behind a battlefield. A warlike pressure erupted from Long Shenyin's body. It smelled of iron, ashes, and old blood. It felt like standing ankle-deep in a field where ten thousand warriors had died, only to realize the thing that killed them was still standing there.
The Black Sun Tyrant Spear grew heavier in her hand.
The air beneath the spearhead bent. Space seemed to groan. The weapon looked as though a furnace mountain had been compressed into its point, carrying the weight of molten ore, slaughter, and forward momentum.
Luo Zhenmu's sword ring slowed for half a breath.
That half breath was enough.
His confidence shattered before the spear even moved.
"What—"
Long Shenyin thrust.
There was nothing elegant about it.
No feint. No variation. No beautiful exchange of sword and spear beneath the storm clouds.
She simply drove the Black Sun Tyrant Spear forward and maliciously struck the center of Luo Zhenmu's sword ring.
The impact was ugly.
A deep boom tore across the sky.
The outer sword ring buckled inward. Green sword qi screamed, twisting around the spearhead in an attempt to cut, deflect, and scatter the force. For the briefest instant, it looked as if the Verdant Edge defense might hold.
Then Long Shenyin's wrist pressed forward another inch.
That inch destroyed everything.
The sword ring exploded.
Green sword qi scattered across the sky like broken grass in a gale. The wood-wind resonance collapsed into fragments, each fragment still sharp enough to cut stone roofs below. Several Qin Family cultivators hurriedly raised shields as stray sword light rained down.
Luo Zhenmu's sword screamed in his hand.
The spearhead drove through the broken ring, slipped past his guard, and punched into his shoulder.
His shoulder caved.
Blood burst outward.
The sound was wet, brutal, and final.
Luo Zhenmu's body shot backward like a meteor. He smashed through three layers of compressed air, each layer cracking with a sonic boom that shook the Qin Family district below. Roofs splintered. Formation lamps shattered. The outer wall of a high pavilion split from top to bottom.
He barely stopped himself above the Qin Family's inner district.
His face had gone white.
His right arm hung uselessly from the ruined shoulder, blood falling from his sleeve in long red threads. His sword remained in his hand, but only because his fingers were locked around it in reflex. The sword trembled. So did his arm.
River Ridge City could not understand what it had just seen.
A 4th layer Sky Lord from Verdant Edge.
A Noble Domain inner deacon.
One spear strike.
One.
Long Shenyin twisted her spear once, flinging blood from the spearhead. It scattered in a dark arc and vanished into the storm wind.
"Trash."
The word was quiet.
It carried farther than Zhao Chuan's thunder.
Lu Jiangheng's gleeful expression collapsed.
"Senior Brother!"
His voice cracked before he could stop it.
The cry pulled the city back from shock, but only barely. Qin Family elders stared upward with rigid faces. Some of them had spent their lives dreaming that one of their descendants might enter Verdant Edge and rise under a figure like Luo Zhenmu. To them, an inner deacon was already someone standing beyond their family's ceiling.
Now that same man hovered above their district with one shoulder crushed, blood pouring down his robes, not daring to immediately counterattack.
Qin Roujian stood on the highest platform of the Qin estate.
His fingers were clenched around his sword hilt.
Earlier, he had thought the spear woman was dangerous. After Qin Duanhai died, he had thought she might be above their measurements. Now, watching Luo Zhenmu bleed, he understood something colder.
She had never needed to hide.
They had simply never been qualified to measure her.
At the same time, Long Shenyu moved.
Zhao Chuan saw it happen, and still almost failed to react.
One moment Long Shenyu was across the sky, Mei Qingxue held lightly at his side as if this were a leisure outing. The next, Mei Qingxue had been gently released into Shen Lanyue's protective Qi, and Long Shenyu appeared close enough for Zhao Chuan to see the faint amusement in his eyes.
Too close.
Zhao Chuan's shock lasted only a breath.
Then rage swallowed it.
"You dare!"
His pressure slammed downward.
He did not think. Not properly. His pride did not allow him to take half a step back in front of a Lower Domain youth, not after Long Shenyin had injured Luo Zhenmu, not after Heaven's Edict's name had been spoken across the city.
He was Zhao Chuan of the Thunder-Ridge Enforcement Pair.
A direct enforcer of Heaven's Edict Thunder Palace.
In cities like River Ridge, people lowered their heads when his shadow passed over them. Family patriarchs offered spirit wine with both hands. City lords rewrote public decrees if he frowned. The doctrine of Heaven's Edict was simple: authority descended from heaven, and the strong carried that authority in lightning.
So Zhao Chuan did what Heaven's Edict disciples were taught to do.
He suppressed.
White-gold thunder erupted from his body. His gauntlets shone, black metal plates splitting open along formation lines. Lightning crawled across his shoulders, down his arms, around his chest, forming a defensive shell of violent light.
The pressure struck toward Long Shenyu.
It was enough to make the air hum. Enough to force several nearby Origin Core cultivators below to their knees. Enough to make the Qin Family's younger generation feel that resistance itself was a crime.
Long Shenyu's smile faded.
Only slightly.
A faint aura left his body.
It did not explode.
It did not spread wildly.
It simply appeared.
The difference was immediate.
Zhao Chuan's thunder pressure, which had just been bearing down like heavenly punishment, stopped in midair. Not physically, but spiritually, as if it had met a higher command and forgotten how to descend.
Then Long Shenyu's aura sharpened.
It was more domineering than Long Shenyin's battlefield pressure. Hers was slaughter. A war banner planted in a mountain of corpses. His was sovereignty. Ancient, devouring, absolute. It did not ask whether others feared it. It assumed they did, and the world seemed to agree.
For a breath, it even edged past Long Shenyin's aura.
The difference was subtle, but the strongest people present felt it.
Luo Zhenmu felt his throat tighten.
Lei Yunhe's eyes changed.
Ning Huang's heartbeat skipped.
Long Shenyin clicked her tongue in annoyance.
Long Shenyu's Sky-Severing Narrowblade appeared in his hand.
The blade was narrow, pale, and viciously calm. It did not blaze with light. It did not roar like Zhao Chuan's thunder. Its edge simply seemed too clean, as if the space around it had already accepted being cut.
Zhao Chuan's pressure cracked.
His body dipped half an inch in the air before he forced himself steady. The sensation was humiliating. It was as if a hand had pressed onto the back of his neck. Not hard enough to crush him. Just enough to remind him it could.
His anger reached its peak.
All caution vanished.
"Die!"
Zhao Chuan raised both hands.
The gauntlets roared.
A massive thunder palm condensed above him, white-gold and black at the edges, its five fingers formed from coiling arcs of verdict lightning. The clouds above River Ridge split open. Thunderlight poured downward, gathering into the palm until it looked less like a technique and more like a sentence delivered from the heavens.
This was not casual.
This was not a warning strike.
Heaven's Edict techniques grew stronger when backed by judgment and domination. Zhao Chuan's fury fed into the palm. His belief in the palace fed into it. His humiliation, his killing intent, his need to prove that a Lower Domain youth could not stand above him—all of it became fuel.
A faint verdict pressure descended.
The weaker cultivators below felt it first.
Their knees weakened. Their thoughts slowed. Some felt sudden shame for even looking at Long Shenyu, as if watching resistance to Heaven's Edict made them guilty. The technique did not merely attack the body. It pressed on the will. It whispered that defiance was wrong. That kneeling was natural. That heavenly order could not be challenged.
Ning Huang felt it in her bones.
Her expression tightened.
That pressure was familiar.
Not Zhao Chuan's exact aura, but the doctrine behind it. The Heaven-Coronation Lightning Canon had many branches, many personal expressions, but all of them carried the same root idea: lightning as authority, thunder as judgment, strength as a decree from above.
She had grown beneath that doctrine. She had trained under it. She had benefited from it. She had also endured its weight since childhood.
The palm falling toward Long Shenyu felt slightly more terrifying than the 7th layer Sky Lord beast and demon the siblings had killed before. Not because Zhao Chuan was stronger than both combined, but because this attack carried a complete sect inheritance behind it. The beast had been violent. The demon had been vicious.
This was institutional.
This was Heaven's Edict saying: submit.
Mei Qingxue tightened her grip on the sleeve of Shen Lanyue's robe.
Shen Lanyue's cold Qi gathered instantly. Her sword hand moved.
Ning Huang's lightning stirred as if it wanted to answer the palm, then hesitated.
Long Shenyu did not look back at them.
He only said, "Arrogant trash."
Then he swung.
The strike was narrow.
No storm of sword light. No dragon shadow. No mountain-splitting roar.
Just a single clean line drawn through the sky.
The Sky-Severing Narrowblade passed upward through the descending thunder palm.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the palm split.
The cut opened from wrist to fingertip, dividing the white-gold lightning into two halves so cleanly that even the thunder sound broke apart. The verdict aura hidden within the palm was severed with it. The oppressive pressure that had weighed on the city vanished as though someone had cut the throat of an invisible beast.
Zhao Chuan's eyes widened.
His gauntlets flared, formations blazing desperately as they tried to absorb the backlash. Defensive lightning wrapped around his chest, shoulders, and arms. He crossed his forearms in front of himself, intending to block whatever remained of the strike.
It did not matter.
Sky-Severing's internal cutting force slipped through the gaps in his circulation.
It passed between the arcs of his lightning armor. It ignored the surface defense. It entered through rhythm, through breath, through the microscopic pause between one pulse of thunder Qi and the next.
Zhao Chuan felt cold.
Only then did the wound appear.
A thin red line opened across his chest.
Then it widened.
Blood sprayed into the sky.
Zhao Chuan was thrown backward.
His body smashed through three layers of residual thunder, each layer bursting apart around him in violent rings. He flew nearly a hundred feet before his boots dug into the air and his gauntlets roared again, forcing him to stop.
He remained upright.
Barely.
His chest was open from shoulder to lower ribs. Blood soaked his battle robes. The wound did not bleed normally. The edges trembled with pale sword force, disrupting the circulation of his lightning Qi whenever it tried to close the flesh. His gauntlets hissed, struggling to drive the foreign cutting power out.
He looked down at his own blood.
For the first time, Zhao Chuan did not speak.
The entire city fell into stunned silence.
Not the silence from before. Before, people were afraid because powerful figures had arrived. This silence was worse. It was the silence of a city realizing the figures it had feared might not be the strongest ones in the sky.
Qin Roujian's face went gray.
One elder near him whispered, "That was Zhao Chuan…"
No one answered.
What answer was there?
Zhao Chuan was not some wandering cultivator. He was from Heaven's Edict Thunder Palace. In River Ridge, he might as well be a heavenly envoy.
And Long Shenyu had cut him open with one swing.
Lu Jiangheng felt his legs weaken.
He tried to hide it, but he could not stop his body from reacting. His eyes darted from Luo Zhenmu's ruined shoulder to Zhao Chuan's bleeding chest, then finally to Long Shenyu's blade.
He had thought he understood.
At the gate, when Long Shenyu injured him, Lu Jiangheng had told himself it was the weapon. A Heaven Rank sword in the hands of a reckless Origin Core youth. A hidden trump card. A moment of carelessness. An ugly humiliation, but not an impossible one.
Then Long Shenyin killed Qin Family experts.
He told himself it was a hidden guard. A spear-wielding monster, yes, but perhaps still tied to a treasure or forbidden art.
Now Luo Zhenmu was wounded.
Zhao Chuan was wounded.
And Long Shenyu hovered in the sky with a blade that looked far too calm after cutting Heaven's Edict lightning in half.
Lu Jiangheng's mouth went dry.