Jade Disc of Heaven's Way

At the very core of the Burial Heaven Abyss lay Tongtian Cliff.

There, towering at ten thousand zhang, stood a peerless jade monolith that seemed to use the heavens as its roof and the earth as its foundation: the Heavenly Dao Jade Wall.

The jade wall was entirely smooth and lustrous, exuding an ancient, timeless resonance of Dao rhythm that gripped the heart with awe.

Legend had it that this jade wall was formed from a single strand of undying primordial essence left behind by a true immortal who, in the ancient era, had come here to contemplate the profound truths of heaven and earth.

As the ages turned and epochs shifted, this wall had bathed in the essence of sun and moon across countless eras, long since becoming indestructible and impervious to all spells. Even time itself could not leave so much as a scratch upon its surface.

The laws of the Burial Heaven Abyss were unique. This place was an independent realm designed specifically for cultivators at the Void Refinement stage and below. The law essences of outside powerhouses could not be invoked here, rendering the terrifying might of Fusion-stage cultivators and above utterly useless.

For this very reason, the Heavenly Dao Jade Wall had become the sole yardstick by which truly supreme prodigies were measured.

If one could leave even a hair-thin mark upon the jade wall, it meant that person’s talent, enlightenment, and combat prowess had reached the absolute pinnacle within the Void Refinement realm, enough to etch a resplendent chapter into the vast annals of the cultivation world.

At this moment, the expansive martial arena before the jade wall had gathered thousands of prodigious talents.

Those who had managed to reach this place were at minimum mid-stage Void Refinement cultivators, and a large portion among them were half-step Fusion monstrosities who had suppressed their cultivation and waited long in ambush.

Direct heirs of the great sacred sects, scions of hidden ancient families, solitary killing stars from the nameless wilderness…

All manner of supreme figures had converged here. The entire arena shimmered with radiant treasure light and surging aura, blotting out half the sky.

Boom!

A cataclysmic sound erupted, as if a meteor had slammed violently into the earth.

A body-cultivation prodigy with bulging muscles and skin forged like black iron shattered the bluestone ground beneath his feet for ten zhang in every direction. Driving the bloodline power of the primordial savage beast, the Chaos Ape, to its absolute limit, he hurled a top-grade magic treasure warhammer — weighing over ten thousand jin and wreathed in dark ghost-flame — with overwhelming, mountain-crushing force against the Heavenly Dao Jade Wall.

The sheer might of that strike made even the void tremble.

The terrifying power compressed and detonated the air within dozens of zhang, forming a circular shockwave of air in front of the jade wall, rattling the eardrums of countless nearby prodigies and forcing them to stagger backward.

Yet that boundless jade wall only trembled faintly.

The next moment, a horrific backlash surged out from the wall’s surface like a breached dam!

That top-grade magic treasure warhammer shattered inch by inch in an instant, exploding outward as a storm of razor-sharp iron shards.

The body-cultivation prodigy let out a miserable scream as a rapid cascade of cracking sounds — like dense firecrackers — erupted from both his arms, bones shattering one after another. He spat out a mouthful of blood and flew backwards like a kite with a snapped string, carving a bloody trench several feet deep into the earth before finally coming to a halt.

And upon the jade wall’s surface, the radiance still flowed, the Dao rhyme remained subtle and profound.

Not even a single white scratch had been left.

Hiss!

A wave of sharp intakes of breath swept across the arena.

“The chief disciple of the Barbaric Sacred Sect, empowered by his Chaos bloodline, and he still couldn’t leave a single mark! Just what kind of existence is this Heavenly Dao Jade Wall?!”

“This is terrifying… The backlash alone is something no flesh and blood at the Void Refinement stage could withstand! Within the Void Refinement realm, this wall simply doesn’t seem possible to even budge!”

Discussion rose and fell like tides, laced with undisguised dejection and despair.

“Hmph.”

Amid the crowd, a scion of a noble family, dressed in brocade robes and waving a gold-inlaid folding fan, let out a cold sneer. He glanced contemptuously at the body-cultivation prodigy being carried away, then drawled, “A herd of arrogant fools dares to show off their meager skills before a master?”

“Even the Sword Sovereign, who in his time was hailed as the incarnation of the sword, and the Peerless Sword Emperor, who swept across an entire era and forced countless prodigies of ten thousand ages to bow their heads — when they stood here at the Void Refinement stage, they merely left sword marks of less than three inches on this wall. With the likes of you ordinary mortals, you think to leave your names here? You overestimate yourselves.”

The words landed with heavy impact, drawing a wave of murmurs and nods — yet they also made more people silently lower their heads, a weight of unspeakable gloom pressing upon their hearts.

Indeed. The Sword Sovereign, the Peerless Sword Emperor…

What towering figures those were, what unrivaled aptitudes — and even they had left only traces of less than three inches.

Just as the entire arena sank into a collective, suffocating low spirit, the outer edge of the crowd suddenly fell silent.

That silence spread like a plague, radiating inward in ring after ring toward the center of the arena. Those who had been boasting loudly found their words freezing in their throats one by one, and as if pulled by an unseen force, they moved aside left and right, opening up a broad, straight path through the crowd.

At the end of that path.

A young man in robes as white as snow, holding the hand of a delicate, jade-carved little girl, strolled leisurely into view.

The white-robed youth was breathtakingly handsome — as if sketched by the finest brush of heaven and earth — so striking that one dared not look directly upon him.

Yet upon that handsome face, there was none of the vigor or warmth expected of his age.

His eyes were deep and cold, like the very bottom of a ninefold abyss —darkness devoid of any light or warmth, holding nothing but a suffocating, absolute calm and indifference.

Those were the eyes of one who had witnessed too much life and death, endured too much betrayal, and had every strand of living emotion scraped away by the blade of time — leaving only a skeleton of iron will and unyielding resolve.

He released no deliberate pressure. He let none of the power within him leak outward by a single fraction.

Yet just walking peacefully through the crowd, those thousands of top-tier prodigies who had weathered countless storms of blood and battle all felt an involuntary shudder creeping up from the depths of their souls.

It was not the fear one feels before a greater power.

It was something more primal — the trembling that life feels when faced with death.

“White-Clad God of Slaughter…” Someone, in a trembling voice barely audible, uttered the title that had recently made the entire cultivation world speak of him in hushed, fearful tones.

“It’s him! He’s the one who cut down a Fusion-stage expert’s head with a single sword — Ye Xuan!”

“Why is he here? Is he going to challenge the Heavenly Dao Jade Wall too?”

The news exploded through the crowd like wildfire, and what followed was not agitation, but an even deeper, death-like silence.

All at once, everyone took a half-step backward, yielding an even wider space to the slowly advancing white-robed youth.

Ye Xuan held Ying'er’s small hand and walked to the foot of the ten-thousand-zhang-tall Heavenly Dao Jade Wall.

He lifted his head slightly, and with those fathomless eyes, surveyed the peerless jade wall before him — a monument flowing with ten thousand ages of ancient aura, unblemished through countless epochs.

The long passage of years had left a hazy, far-reaching halo of Daoist resonance upon its surface, within which faint fragments of ancient immortals' wills seemed to drift, as if silently looking down upon the insignificant junior before them, exuding a lofty, primordial pressure and arrogance.

Ye Xuan gazed at it for a moment.

Then, the corner of his mouth curled into a faint, utterly disdainful sneer.

His smile was so casual it was almost offensive.

It was as if what he beheld was not a timeless divine relic that had brought countless peerless prodigies to their knees, but merely an ordinary, inferior slab of stone—one that could be crushed at any moment.

"Leave a mark?"

Ye Xuan's voice was cold and raspy, neither loud nor low, yet it echoed with piercing clarity across the entire silent plaza.

There was no anger in that voice, no arrogance—only a bone-deep, instinctive indifference.

Like an emperor surveying the masses from on high, with no need for fury, and no need for concern.

"To chisel a single notch into this piece of broken rock, and that is enough to make you all swarm after it like moths to a flame, treating it as the glory of a lifetime?"

He withdrew his gaze from the jade stele and swept a cursory glance across the countless faces in the plaza—some reverent, some trembling, some furious. His eyes held not a trace of emotion.

"Truly, a pack of frogs at the bottom of a well."