The spiritual dust was slowly settling over the battlefield, but the silence that followed the impact of the light beam was anything but soothing.

BaiShe painfully straightened up in the middle of a pile of shattered basalt, his black tunic now nothing more than a heap of rags revealing jade skin marked by burns. He adjusted his sage monocle, while his Omega Heart was pounding wildly to stabilize the flows of Khao and Qi that threatened to tear his meridians apart.

A few dozen meters away from him, Long Huang, the Black Flame Dragoness, was emerging from a crevice.

However, they did not have time to catch their breath. The last survivor of the first three Demigods stood upright at the top of a rocky ridge.

"He is still alive!?"

His face was disfigured by fanatical hatred. In a gesture of pure desperation, he plunged his hands directly into his own abdomen, shattering his Dantian to release a scarlet shockwave.

"Brothers! Ancestors! The time has come to claim what is ours!" he shouted, his voice breaking in a bloody rasp before his body evaporated in a colossal discharge of energy.

Simultaneously, seven spatial tears occurred in the purple sky of the Seed World. Demigod-level auras, the survivor having sacrificed his essence to summon his peers, instantly saturated the atmosphere. The spiritual pressure became so dense that the air literally solidified, making every movement laborious.

Seven silhouettes slowly descended to encircle the duo. They were the Great Ancestors of the Azure Kingdom, wrinkled old men dressed in ancestral blue robes. Their eyes, bloodshot and burning with millennial ambition, fixed BaiShe as a predator fixes its prey. BaiShe, despite his recent advancement to the 2nd stage of Overlord, instinctively felt that the equation had just shifted against him.

"Well, well... Why all these fine people?"

The leader of the newcomers, a man of imposing stature named Lord Wu, took a step forward. His Qi was so vast that it seemed to absorb all the ambient heat from the volcano.

"Xuan BaiShe..." began Lord Wu, his voice resounding like thunder in the throat of a mountain.

"Indeed, I did a little research on you... And no one from the Uppers Realms knows that you are here." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

"You are probably wondering why Demigods exiled themselves in this lower realm to protect a simple seed. In reality, our world, the Azure Kingdom, is dying. The Qi there has become as rare as water in a desert of fire. We spent centuries cultivating in the dust, hoping to reach Immortality, but the land offered us nothing more."

He fixed the entrance of the sacred cave with sickly greed. "Therefore, we united. We pooled our last relics, our last forces, to forge this Seed World. A sanctuary capable of creating a pocket universe saturated with original Qi, where we could finally transcend our limits."

Long Huang let out a contemptuous laugh, spitting a mixture of saliva and black blood on the ground. "And yet, here you are, tearing each other apart like vultures over a dry carcass. Your alliance stinks of betrayal from miles away, old wrecks."

Lord Wu clenched his fists, making the surrounding space crack. "Shut up, beast of the Origins! We were supposed to merge with the Seed together. But at the last moment, selfishness took over. No one agreed to let the other lead the creation. What was supposed to be our salvation became the theater of a fratricidal war. It is in this chaos that the Seed was lost... until today."

BaiShe adjusted his monocle one last time, his violet eyes analyzing the combat trajectories. ’They are too powerful to be defeated head-on... Their combined azure domain is an impassable barrier for my current illusory swords.’

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"Well, I hoped that the young heir of the Immortal Xuan family would leave and let us old men discuss immortality." Knowing BaiShe’s identity, killing him without trying to resolve the problem amicably would be a mistake. So they used psychological pressure, after all he was an immature twenty-year-old young man.

"It seems I must return to the Upper Realms... So give me the Seed World."

"Hmmm, Young Master Xuan, it seems you did not quite understand one thing..."

As the seven remaining Demigods began to channel their Qi for a final attack, one of them, a massive warrior located just behind Lord Wu, made a sudden movement. Without any warning, he extended his bare hand and plunged it directly between the shoulder blades of the neighbor to his left.

The sound was that of silk fabric being torn, followed by the sharp crack of the spine. The traitor’s hand came out through the Demigod’s thorax, clutching between his fingers a Dantian pulsing with a desperate blue glow. The victim did not even have time to scream before his energy core exploded violently in the palm of his attacker.

The divine blood spurted out in a golden fountain, staining the faces of the other Ancestors frozen in surprise. The traitor warrior withdrew his arm, letting the corpse of his brother collapse like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Suddenly, the silhouette of the assassin began to undulate. His imposing build retracted, his muscles fluidified to adopt graceful curves. In a few seconds, the Constitution of 100 Faces dissipated, revealing a provocative beauty with vibrant pink hair and nine silky tails that twitched with morbid excitement.

Yi Lan, the Fox of Desire, appeared in all her yandere splendor. She held in her left hand the World Seed, a crystal sphere pulsing with original light. Her face was splashed with the blood of the Demigod she had just assassinated, which accentuated the contrast with her pink sapphire eyes that shone with sickly obsession.

She completely ignored the cries of rage from the remaining Ancients and turned toward BaiShe, a carnivorous smile stretching her lips.

"Darling... did you really think I would leave you alone with that arrogant dragoness?" she asked, her voice a suave murmur that pierced the surrounding tumult.

"I infiltrated these fools from the first day. I waited for them to weaken each other to strike. I found what you were looking for, my love... the Seed is ours."

Long Huang widened her black eyes, a glimmer of fury and incomprehension dancing in them. "You... little fox... you dared..."

BaiShe, for his part, remained motionless, observing Yi Lan with intellectual curiosity mixed with the usual coldness of the Celestial Demon. In reality, he was not surprised by Yi Lan as it was her specialty, but by the effectiveness with which his servant had taken things in hand and manipulated these Demigod-rank experts without him asking her anything, which would always astonish him.

"Lan’er... your timing is, as always, impeccable," declared BaiShe as the six remaining Demigods, mad with rage, began to deploy their domains to annihilate them.

"However, your betrayal has just triggered a storm that even we will not be able to calm by simple brute force."

Yi Lan licked a drop of golden blood from her thumb, her gaze never leaving BaiShe, ignoring the azure energy pillars that were beginning to rise around them.

"Let them come, darling. As long as I am with you, the entire universe can collapse. But first..." She threw the Seed toward BaiShe with a fluid gesture. "Take your treasure. I will take care of entertaining these insects."