Supreme Sword Sect, Swords Lan Shan.

The black wasteland vanished.

Replacing it were countless immensely complex lines of karma and trajectories of spiritual energy, shimmering with different halos.

He could even see clearly, deep underground dozens of meters away.

The extremely faint spiritual power circulation route within the body of a minuscule, dormant Void Scavenger Bug.

No secret could escape the absolute illusion-shattering gaze of these eyes.

"Buzz—!"

The yin wind of midnight blew across this deathly still wasteland with extreme punctuality.

In Gu Yang's mind, the long-absent mechanical synthesized voice rang out with a booming, extremely cold metallic texture.

[Ding! The daily midnight hour has arrived. Today's intelligence has been refreshed.]

[Host has successfully advanced to the Core Formation stage. The intelligence system has shielded most low-level intelligence and increased the refresh rate of high-level intelligence.]

A pale blue light screen rapidly unfurled in the gloomy void.

Gu Yang's deep black eyes showed not a ripple of emotion as he swept an extremely cold gaze over the jumping text.

The pale blue system screen shattered and dissipated completely silently in the dark void.

Deep within his dantian.

That dark gold demonic core, heavy enough to crush the void, rotated half a circle with extreme slowness.

The cluster of seven-colored Sword Dao origin, forcibly stripped away by the Great Sun True Fire and the Nine Nether Soul-Locking Flame, shattered explosively under the crushing weight of the extreme demonic core.

It transformed into countless ancient golden runes exuding a dense aura of deathly stillness, which ruthlessly charged into Gu Yang's sea of consciousness.

Heaven-tier supreme sword art, Great Desolate Annihilation Sword.

It lacked the gorgeous phenomena of immortal cultivation techniques, such as the purple qi coming from the east or the harmonious resonance of the Great Dao.

This peerless art of slaughter, accumulated over millions of years by the ancient Sword Demon, stripped away all hypocritical holy cloaks.

Leaving only the purest, most despair-inducing death.

Gu Yang's body, cold and hard as ten-thousand-year profound ice, stood quietly in place.

The circulation route of the Great Desolate Annihilation Sword was extremely overbearing. Following the acupoints of his entire body, under the scouring of his extreme yang vitality, it forcibly opened up a brand new cycle of slaughter.

The minute cracks on his meridian walls, burned by the Great Sun True Fire, were forcefully reshaped amidst the ultimate destruction.

He did not draw any divine weapon.

He merely reached out his large hand, covered in rough calluses, with extreme casualness, and delved into the inferior storage bag hanging at his waist, which he had looted from the corpse of an unknown rogue cultivator.

"Click."

A highly ordinary, tattered iron sword, its blade covered in dark red rust, was casually held in his hand.

The anti-slip hemp rope on the hilt had long since rotted, and the rough wooden texture rubbed harshly against Gu Yang's palm.

The air was filled with a pungent smell of sulfur and the metallic stench of rust.

Gu Yang slowly raised his eyes.

A hundred zhang away.

A pitch-black poisonous peak, exuding a dense purple miasma, pierced the sky with extreme ferocity like a venomous fang covered in sores.

The surface of the mountain was densely covered with highly venomous centipedes as thick as buckets and poisonous vines.

Those poisonous creatures squirmed greedily in the miasma, making scalp-numbing rustling sounds.

The corners of Gu Yang's thin lips showed no fluctuation.

He slowly raised the tattered sword in his hand, which looked like scrap iron.

He did not mobilize the extreme demonic power in his dantian that was like an abyssal sea, nor did he stimulate even half an inch of earth-shattering, dazzling sword qi.

Not even the surrounding air produced the slightest violent fluctuation of being displaced by spiritual power.

He simply and mechanically performed a basic horizontal sweep starting stance, something even a beginner sword apprentice would know.

He swung the sword.

"Swish."

An extremely faint sound, as if it couldn't even sever a falling leaf.

The rusty iron sword in Gu Yang's hand, at the extremely weak moment of swinging out a half-moon arc, unreasonably turned into a sky full of fine iron powder.

Mortal iron simply could not bear even a single trace of the absolute concept of Great Desolate Annihilation.

The iron powder slipped through his fingers and fell onto the cold, black scorched earth.

The wind stopped.

The extremely noisy black poisonous peak a hundred zhang away, crawling with venomous creatures, fell into absolute deathly stillness in this single breath.

There was no earth-shattering explosion, no mournful howling of crisscrossing sword qi.

It was as if an invisible abyssal giant hand had taken a very rough rag and casually wiped the canvas of heaven and earth.

"Rustle, rustle..."

A light breeze blew again.

That hundred-zhang-tall poisonous peak, starting from somewhere near the summit.

A massive section of the mountain, along with those hard poisonous rocks and extremely arrogant venomous centipedes.

Extremely bizarrely and without warning, turned into a sky full of extremely fine grayish-white powder!

The powder drifted and scattered with the wind, like a heavy snow of ashes falling on the deathly still wasteland.

What remained in place.

Was only a terrifying cross-section, like tofu sliced by a peerless divine weapon, so smooth that it could perfectly reflect light.

Stripped of all flashy light and shadow effects, leaving only the most ultimate, most primitive obliteration.

Gu Yang's abyss-like black eyes reflected that mirror-smooth mountain fault.

He casually tossed away the bare sword hilt left in his hand.

This kind of lethality that returned to its original simplicity, able to ruthlessly sever even karma.

Was perfect for dealing with those favored geniuses who liked to use all sorts of flashy magical treasures to protect their lives.

Just a few breaths after the upper half of the poisonous peak had completely turned to powder and scattered.

Above this originally absolutely dead black wasteland, a violent vortex of spiritual energy suddenly swept up.

The Great Desolate Annihilation Sword had severed the spiritual karma of that space; the instantly formed spiritual vacuum was like a massive whirlpool, madly sucking in the outside air.

"Whoosh—!"

An extremely ear-piercing, mournful sword cry that seemed to tear eardrums apart crashed down from the end of the horizon.

The air was violently sliced open, and a streak of aloof, cold, frost-white sword light, exuding an insufferable arrogance, smashed toward this scorched earth like a meteorite.

"Bang!"

The sword light dissipated.

A gaunt old man, wearing the attire of an inner sect core elder of the Supreme Sword Sect, stood extremely arrogantly on a hovering supreme-grade flying sword.

His feet were fully three feet above the ground, as if the dirt of this wasteland was unworthy of staining his exquisite cloud-patterned white boots.

The newcomer had a withered face, the crisscrossing wrinkles on his cheeks like deep sword scars.

His long grayish-white hair was meticulously pinned up high by a crystal-clear cold jade sword hairpin.

The Supreme Sword Sect's Core Formation Late-Stage Great Circle Elder, Jian Lanshan.

The temperature in the air instantly plummeted with his arrival.

An extremely glaring layer of frost condensed on the black scorched earth, and the cold air, like countless hissing venomous snakes, spread insidiously toward Gu Yang's ankles.

Jian Lanshan's sharp, cold triangular eyes, like those of a vulture, swept presumptuously across the ruins.

Ultimately.

His greedy gaze stuck fixedly to the mirror-smooth fault of the poisonous peak a hundred zhang away.

"What a terrifying remnant of sword intent..."