Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Silent Quibus rebounded against the ground, his body practically shutting down on impact. However, Ryu’s sword didn’t manage to cut through him.

Ryu himself didn’t seem surprised by this, nor did he care very much at all. Controlling a qi on the same level as Embryonic Qi was far from something that would be easily dealt with, especially not when the Faerie had suddenly reached this state.

By triggering a Heart Demon like this, Silent Quibus had actually become several times more powerful.

The reason Ryu’s black flame had become tar-like was because of how the rebounding of Karma reacted with the laws of the world. It either swallowed or rejected.

The end result was an exceptionally bouncy, but also sticky substance that had defenses like no other.

Of course, if you couldn’t control your mind, it also made you a complete madman as well, something that Silent Quibus was more than displaying now.

Right now, the backlash that Silent Quibus was experiencing was far beyond anything Ryu had, and it showed.

Ryu’s sword blade rose into the air.

CHI.

All of a sudden, the tough, unbreakable substance was split in two by his white sword. Silent Quibus writhed on the ground, but couldn’t move at all as though an ant pinned to the ground.

Holding onto the hilt of his great swordstaff, Ryu bent down, tilting his head and looking at the writhing form of the Faerie that had pissed him off so much.

“I really can’t bear to kill you just yet.”

Ryu seemed to have entirely ignored Iam’s presence, but not only had the Dao God not reacted with any offense to this, he just stood there, seemingly trying to calculate something.

After suffering Ryu’s last attack, Iam knew that it would be impossible to deal with this situation in his current state. He needed his real power.

But if he used his real power, then the Title Stele would react and smite him. That wasn’t something that even he could survive. There was no choice but to rely on the hodgepodge of skills, techniques, and otherwise that he had gathered up from Title Stele World.

It wasn’t enough.

Iam suddenly met Ryu’s gaze, only to see the latter’s smile. It was the face of a man who had the world in the palm of his hand, of a man who could finally sniff the mountain peak that he had been chasing his entire life…

The smile of a Quasi Dao Lord who could look down on a Dao God as though he were an ant.

At that moment, Iam felt something trigger in him. A feeling that he hadn’t felt in a very long time, a feeling that he had suppressed for so long he had forgotten that he had suppressed it in the first place…

Pride.

How long had he felt that distaste on the tip of his tongue? How long had it been since something had triggered his boiling blood? How long had he been beneath the thumb of the Ruin Master Guild, suppressing his truest urges so that he could inch forward in life a little bit more?

He turned his power onto children he found useful, weaklings he could easily manipulate into doing what he wanted. And then there was Ryu, someone he knew had Summons, someone he was certain had a large and powerful army that he could summon right this moment to put an end to everything.

And yet he hadn’t, right up until the very end when he reversed everything.

Now he stood there, his arrogance oozing out of him.

Before he reached this point, how many people had told him that his inflated sense of ego was too much? How many people had looked down on him, thinking that he thought too much of himself? How many times had he been suppressed again and again, only to rise up once more?

Not once had he compromised, not once had he lost his edge.

That was the difference between the two of them.

The light in Iam’s eyes blazed bright and brighter.

His arms suddenly flared out, the flapping of his heavy sleeves slapping against the wind. A pair of magic circles appeared around his wrists and the Title Stele rumbled.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The skies split, arcs of Karmic Flames descended and enveloped Iam whole. As though replaying some time lost to the past, only a pair of eyes could be seen.

It was something that Ryu had personally gone through just days ago in order to save his wife. But now, Iam was pulling out his full strength for no other reason than to save himself.

His way of cultivation.

He wasn’t thinking about success or failure. He was thinking about rekindling the flame in the depths of his heart.

Ryu’s gaze flashed, and then a wild grin spread across his face.

BANG!

They both moved at the same time, Ryu’s blades had vanished from his hands. One after another, runes lit across his bones, his white scales reflecting their dancing aura within their crystalline sheen.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Crackles of thunder echoed as Ryu activated his Nine Revolution Skybreaker Bone Structure to the absolute max, Cosmic Fog billowing around him.

His fist met Iam’s and his arm almost exploded on impact only for it to be reconstructed.

The strength Iam was outputting now was a completely different level. On the one hand, the Karmic Flames were stripping him of everything. But on the other, he was using his truest path now, and thus his strength was no longer artificial.

It was every ounce of real it had once been.

He was heavily injured, but he was a heavily injured Dao God on the verge of a breakthrough of a lifetime.

And it was a challenge that Ryu embraced with every fiber of his being.

Two resounding laughters echoed through the air, the air shattering as they separated only for them to accelerate into a dozen more exchanges in the blink of an eye.

Eternal Dawn.