This was not a killing art meant for open battle.
It was a hunter's spell.
A Bloodmoon Rakshasa technique designed to follow wounds, breath, heartbeat, and emotional rupture. Against a calm target, it was difficult to land. Against a wounded target, it was dangerous. Against someone furious enough for their blood rhythm to surge openly?
It became a hook cast into living flesh.
Xue Moren's lips parted.
A thin breath of black-red mist left his mouth.
"Go."
The shadow sank into the formation.
The blood lines flashed once.
Then the phantom reached through distance.
Back in River Ridge, Ning Huang's body suddenly locked.
Her eyes widened.
A red-black shadow coiled around her ankles.
Then her waist.
Then her wrists.
Then her throat.
It happened so quickly that most people only saw her lightning flare violently and then collapse inward.
"Ning Huang!"
Mei Qingxue reacted first.
Lunar-cold energy burst from her body. Her Moonfrost Veil Needles shot out in a silver arc, moving silently through the air. Frost Qi condensed around them, delicate but sharp, aimed not at Ning Huang but at the dark bindings wrapped around her.
The needles passed through the shadow.
For a heartbeat, Mei Qingxue's eyes narrowed.
Then the shadow tightened.
Ning Huang coughed blood.
A streak of red ran down the corner of her mouth. The moment it appeared, the bindings shivered with hunger.
Zhao Chuan and Lei Yunhe's faces changed violently.
Lei Yunhe barked, "Bloodmoon Rakshasa!"
That name struck the city harder than thunder.
Bloodmoon Rakshasa Dominion.
Even in the Lower Domains, where most cultivators had never seen a true demon, that name was not unknown. It belonged to nightmares traded between caravans, battlefield reports sealed by sects, and old stories told in cities near corrupted lands.
Demons who cultivated blood and moonlight.
Demons who grew stronger from slaughter.
Demons whose arts did not simply kill, but marked, twisted, and fed.
Zhao Chuan tried to move.
The blood shadow released a suppressive pulse.
It did not suppress through cultivation alone.
If it had, Zhao Chuan would have broken it by force.
Instead, the pulse slipped into wounds, fatigue, breath, and dantian rhythm. It found every injury left by Long Shenyu's strike. It found torn circulation, disrupted meridians, and the places where Zhao Chuan's thunder gauntlets had failed to protect him.
His face changed.
The pulse drove downward.
Zhao Chuan slammed one knee into the air, as if an invisible mountain had dropped onto his shoulder.
"Demonic filth!"
His thunder gauntlets crackled. Black-blue lightning crawled across them, but the flow was unstable. Each time he tried to gather force, the blood shadow tugged at the rhythm of his wounds and scattered the surge.
Lei Yunhe moved faster.
He thrust his thunder-spear forward.
White-blue lightning gathered at the spearhead, compressed into a straight line. It shot through the air and struck the bindings around Ning Huang's waist.
Lightning was one of the strongest powers against demonic energy.
Heaven's Edict Thunder Palace had built half its reputation on purging evil cultivators, oath-breakers, and demonic sects. Their thunder did not merely burn flesh. It judged impurities. It shattered corrupted Qi. It forced sinister energies to reveal their weaknesses.
The white-blue bolt struck.
The shadow rippled.
Cracks appeared across its surface.
For a breath, hope flashed through Zhao Chuan's eyes.
Then Ning Huang coughed again.
A second bead of blood touched her lip.
The shadow drank it.
The cracks repaired.
Lei Yunhe's heart sank.
"This is not a normal binding art," he said.
Ning Huang's fingers twitched around her spear, but she could not lift it. Her lightning surged and died, surged and died, each pulse swallowed by the red-black cords circling her body.
The binding did not need to overpower her entire cultivation.
It only needed to interrupt the rhythm between her heartbeat and her lightning.
And for Ning Huang, whose Thunder Empress Heart-Vein turned that heartbeat into law resonance during combat, that interruption was like a hand wrapped around the root of her power.
Mei Qingxue's face went even paler.
She formed a seal with both hands. Frost gathered beneath Ning Huang's feet, spreading into a thin mirror of ice. The mirror reflected the blood shadow from below, trying to trap its image and seal its movement.
For a moment, the bindings slowed.
Shen Lanyue's eyes sharpened.
She stepped beside Mei Qingxue, two fingers brushing the hilt of her Mirror-Ice Straight Sword.
Cold Qi gathered without sound.
Unlike Mei Qingxue's lunar frost, Shen Lanyue's coldness was still and cutting. It did not burst outward. It condensed inward, turning into a clear sword line that seemed almost too thin to be dangerous.
She drew.
A pale slash passed through the shadow around Ning Huang's throat.
The blood binding distorted.
Ning Huang managed to inhale.
But the shadow did not break.
It simply retreated half an inch, then tightened again.
Shen Lanyue's expression grew colder.
"Not enough."
Mei Qingxue gritted her teeth.
"Again."
They attacked together.
Frost needles. Mirror sword-light. Lunar seal. Cold-aspect Qi.
Each strike carried precision. Each one targeted weakness. Against a normal Sky Lord technique, their combined effort would have mattered.
But this was a Bloodmoon Rakshasa marking art cast through sacrifice, distance, and emotional rhythm.
It did not stand in the air like an enemy to be cut.
It hid inside the connection.
Far away on the barren ridge, Xue Moren coughed.
Blood spilled down his chin.
The formation beneath his hands trembled, several lines cracking open and releasing smoke. His fingers dug deeper into the earth.
Luo Xuechan leaned closer.
"Can you pull her?"
"No." His voice was rougher now. "Not alone."
"Then why touch her?"
"To mark her."
His eyes stayed fixed on the pulsing formation.
"If the boy breaks the cage, he will move toward her first. Then we see how he reacts." His voice became colder. "If he cannot break it, Heaven's Edict loses her, and we gain a bargaining corpse."
Luo Xuechan's smile deepened.
"Practical."
"Necessary."
"You make necessity sound dull."
"You make danger sound like a toy."
"It often is." Luo Xuechan's gaze drifted toward River Ridge City, though it was hidden beyond miles of land and formation haze. "But this one? No. This one feels different."
Xue Moren said nothing.
His eyes were steady, but his chest tightened with each breath.
He had read the corpse site. He had seen enough of Long Shenyu's traces to understand one thing: that young man was not a simple Lower Domain monster.
For the demons, capturing her was an utmost task.
Not because she was the strongest person in River Ridge.
She was not.
But she was a chain.
One end tied to Long Shenyu's emotions.
The other tied to Heaven's Edict Thunder Palace.
If Bloodmoon could seize that chain, then whether Long Shenyu loved her, wanted her, or merely considered her useful, he would react. Heaven's Edict would react too. A young war-heiress was not a disposable disciple. She was prestige. She was blood investment. She was future authority.
One girl could drag three powers into the same storm.
But the demons were not the only hunters watching the cage.
Miles from the opposite side of River Ridge, in a broken valley surrounded by yellow stone, Gu Man and Gu Yaohe stood within a ring of beast bones.
The bones came from many creatures.
Horned tigers. Scale-backed wolves. Mountain apes. Serpents with antler-like growths. Some were old and gray. Others still held traces of fresh marrow.
Each bone had been planted point-first into the earth, forming a crude circle. There were no elegant human formation marks here. No carved jade flags. No spirit ink.
The Heaven-Horn Desolation Court did not cultivate like humans.
Their power came from bloodline, territory, instinct, and the devouring memory of beasts.
Gu Man stood at the center.
His curled white horns glowed with ancient yellow light. His old face was lined and heavy, but his eyes were sharp enough to pierce through miles of wind. He gripped a bone staff in both hands, and each breath he took sounded like a herd moving across dry earth.
Beside him, Gu Yaohe trembled.
Her beautiful beast-like features were twisted with pain. Her pupils had narrowed into vertical slits, and phantom beasts gathered behind her in overlapping silhouettes. Every phantom scraped against her body essence as it formed.
She was young.
Talented.
Proud.
But this art was not easy for her.
Gu Man's voice was rough. "The thunder cage has trapped them. Now."
Gu Yaohe breathed hard.
"That woman is really worth this?"
Gu Man did not look at her.
"She is Heaven's Edict's chain."
He raised the bone staff.
"Grab the chain, and every beast in the region hears where the thunder runs."
Gu Yaohe's lips tightened.
She understood.
Heaven-Horn Desolation Court did not care about human morality or sect face. They cared about territory. Which humans were valuable enough to turn stronger powers against each other.
Ning Huang was not merely a person.
She was leverage with a heartbeat.
They had the same plan as the demons.
Grab Ning Huang.
Secure their future.
Force Long Shenyu to reveal whether he was monster, inheritor, beast-controller, or something worse.
Gu Man slammed his staff into the earth.
The beast bones shook.
A low roar rose from the valley.
It was not one sound, but many layered together.
A horned tiger appeared first, its body formed from yellow-brown mist and old blood memory. Then a scale-backed wolf emerged beside it, ribs visible through its phantom hide. A great taloned ape unfolded from the air, its arms long enough to drag across the ground. Finally, a serpent with broken antlers coiled around them all, its tongue flickering between worlds.
They were not alive.
They were instincts pulled from dead beasts.
Hunger.
Pursuit.
Pack rage.
Territorial hatred.
The last will to bite before death.
Gu Yaohe gasped as the phantoms merged.
Her skin split along one shoulder. Blood ran down her arm, but before it could fall, the formation drank it.
Gu Man's horns brightened.
"Reach."
The merged phantom became one massive clawed hand.
Then it tore forward.
Space above the valley groaned.
The hand stretched across miles.
Over barren ridges.
Over cracked roads.
Over outer farms where mortals collapsed without knowing why.
Over River Ridge's boundary formations, which flashed once, screamed, and failed to stop it.
When the hand appeared above River Ridge City, despair spread like winter.
Its palm alone could cover a courtyard.
Its claws were not flesh, not bone, but layered beast instinct compressed into killing shape. Each claw carried the pressure of chase and slaughter. The city's weaker cultivators felt their knees buckle before it even descended.
The air stank of wild blood.
Someone screamed, "Beast art!"
Another voice broke. "Peak Sky Lord pressure!"
It was not truly peak Sky Lord cultivation.
But it bordered on that level in raw destructive force.
For River Ridge City, the difference did not matter.
A peak 8th layer Sky Lord's prowess might as well have been a god descending upon ants.
This was the cruelty of realms.
Minor realms were not numbers written beside a name. They were layers of transformation. Denser Qi. Stronger soul. Deeper dantian. More stable Dao resonance. A cultivator one or two minor realms above could suppress an opponent cleanly. Three or four minor realms could decide battle before a technique was even completed.
Early Sky Lords had stepped above Origin Core.
Late Sky Lords stood on an entirely different slope of the mountain.
As for the gap between the middle-layer Sky Lord and powers brushing against peak Sky Lord?
That was not a gap.
It was a cliff.