It's All Your Smoke and Mirrors

With a loud crash, the vines withdrew, and the dried corpse fell onto the bluestone slab, instantly shattering into ashes that scattered in the wind.

In mid-air.

Luo Shenyao's exquisitely beautiful body, which was tightly bound by dark red vines, suddenly went taut like a fully drawn bow.

In her clear eyes, the last trace of human despair and pleading was rapidly fading.

Taking its place was an extremely eerie, ancient dark green gleam.

Having sucked dry Luo Tianheng, this top-tier fertilizer, the demonic vine finally bared its most hideous fangs.

It was frantically obliterating the original consciousness of this vessel, attempting to complete the most perfect possession and revival!

On Luo Shenyao's tender, cold-white skin, extremely demonic dark red magic patterns began to surface.

She painfully tilted back her fragile neck, letting out an agonized shriek from her throat that did not belong to a human.

The collapse of her consciousness plunged her sea of consciousness into the deepest darkness.

...

"Evil spirit! Submit to your death!"

Right at this instant, when the demonic vine's soul alternation was most intense and its main body was at its weakest.

From the depths of the dark karst cave, a loud shout suddenly rang out like a morning bell and evening drum.

A dazzling white sword light, like lightning tearing through the night sky, explosively illuminated the entire altar.

Ye Chen, dressed in clothes whiter than snow, came walking through the air.

His handsome face bore a compassion and righteousness that made people want to prostrate in worship.

Beside him, a cluster of top-grade flame wrapped in a white jade glazed lamp was emitting a terrifying high temperature capable of boiling rivers and seas.

The flame displayed an extremely pure bright white color, and deep within its core, it was as if a Golden Crow was crying out.

The heavy treasure of the Dao One Sect—the Profound Sun True Fire!

In the depths of Ye Chen's eyes hid an unsuppressible fanaticism and greed.

His deductions were not wrong!

These were the ten breaths when this ancient demonic vine was at its most vulnerable!

"Heaven cares for every living thing, so today, I, Ye, will enforce justice on behalf of Heaven and use this Profound Sun True Fire to incinerate a man-eating monster like you!"

Ye Chen shouted sternly with awe-inspiring righteousness.

But his cold eyes were dead set on Luo Shenyao in mid-air, who was entangled by vines, her clothes half-faded, revealing large patches of breathtaking snow-white skin.

The Profound Sun True Fire would extinguish the demonic vine's vitality.

This humanoid grand medicine that had been ripened to the extreme would then become an ownerless object.

As long as he plucked and nourished himself with her on the spot, draining the Flower God origin essence from her body.

A first-grade Noble Spirit Golden Core would be easily within reach!

Even the grudge of losing half a palm could be completely erased in the face of this supreme fortune!

Ye Chen formed a sword hand seal with one hand, and that cluster of white Profound Sun True Fire turned into a fire dragon. Carrying a masculine energy capable of destroying the world, it lunged straight at Luo Shenyao in mid-air!

"Buzz—!"

Just as the white fire dragon was less than three zhang away from the altar.

The air in the entire underground cave suddenly twisted without any warning.

There was no earth-shattering spiritual energy fluctuation.

There was only an extremely plain, indifferent snap of fingers that revealed absolute control.

"Snap."

Gu Yang once again disguised himself as Mo Bufan.

His dusty gray figure, like a ghost that had torn through space, appeared extremely abruptly right in the inevitable path of the Profound Sun True Fire.

He didn't even look at the white fire dragon that was capable of burning an ordinary Golden Core cultivator to ashes.

He merely raised his right hand slightly and spread his five fingers.

Within his dantian, on the chaotic lotus platform flowing with five colors, the long-dormant Great Sun True Fire let out an extremely excited roar.

A streak of dark golden flame, pure to the extreme, quietly bloomed in Gu Yang's palm.

There were no monstrous waves of heat.

There was only a kind of absolute high-tier suppression that seemed capable of melting all things in the world, along with its rules!

"Swallow it." Gu Yang's voice was as calm as if he were feeding his own vicious hound.

"Boom!"

The dark golden Great Sun True Fire instantly surged like a giant abyssal maw, and extremely brutally and unreasonably swallowed that white Profound Sun fire dragon whole in one bite!

"What?!"

Ye Chen's awe-inspiringly righteous face instantly froze and twisted!

His proud sect's heavy treasure.

That Profound Sun True Fire, which claimed to be able to incinerate all wood-attribute evil spirits.

At the moment it touched that dark golden flame, it didn't even spark a trace of resistance before vanishing without a trace, like a clay ox entering the sea!

Not only that.

Ye Chen felt with terror that the sliver of his natal divine sense remaining on the Profound Sun True Fire was instantly crushed to dust by an extremely domineering, terrifying force that carried the sensation of soul burning!

"Pfft—!"

With his divine sense destroyed, Ye Chen threw his head back and wildly sprayed out a large mouthful of blood, instantly dyeing a large patch of his white Daoist robe red.

He clutched his chest tightly, his eyes bulging from their sockets due to extreme horror.

He stared dead at the streak of dark golden flame on Gu Yang's fingertip, which was slowly digesting the white firelight and becoming even more dazzling.

An extremely familiar sense of fear, yet one that made the depths of his soul tremble madly, tightly coiled around his heart like a poisonous snake.

Yin Yang Tomb!

That peerlessly domineering black flame! That condescending mockery!

That demonic cultivator Mo Bufan, who snatched his Good Fortune Fruit and forced him to sever his own arm!

Although the gray-robed youth in front of him had changed his appearance and the color of his flame had also changed.

But this extreme Dao aura that treated all things as nourishment, this terrifying oppressive feeling that rubbed him into the mud, it was definitely the same person!

Stormy waves surged in Ye Chen's mind as countless self-righteous clues were forcibly pieced together by him at this moment, forming a truth that made his scalp tingle!

"A blindfold... So everything in the third-floor hall just now was all your blindfold!"

"What deep calculations! What vicious scheming! That Mo Bufan just now, who was forced by my Noble Sword Qi to sever two fingers and turn into a Formless Blood Body to flee in panic, was not your real body at all! That was merely a substitute blood shadow you condensed using some ancient demonic art!"

"You deliberately showed weakness, deliberately controlled that blood shadow to be beaten by me and flee like a stray dog, just to make me lower my guard, to make me think that the only competitor in this underground palace had been completely crippled and eliminated by me!"

"This true main body of yours, which hid all its auras, has been hiding in the dark all along!"

He, the grand Dao Child of the Dao One Sect, was actually treated as free labor to clear the way and test for danger twice in a row by the same demonic cultivator in such a playful manner!

"You watched coldly as I let Bai Zhi withstand the killing array, watched me wait bitterly for Luo Tianheng to be completely sucked dry, and even the step where I brought out the Profound Sun True Fire to obliterate the demonic vine's vitality was all within the calculations of a demon like you!"

This extreme sense of grievance of having all his secrets seen through and being treated as a chess piece to be arbitrarily drained of surplus value caused Ye Chen's flawlessly disguised mask to shatter at this moment.

He was furious and aggrieved.

But he could only stare dead at Gu Yang.

...

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