Chapter 473: Strength

"The nerve!" The Penglai Dao Lord, still on alert, gave a soft snort and swiftly parried the Kunpeng Demon Paragon's brazen strike.

As the Heaven-Devouring Kunpeng Technique swept down over her, the Great Dao of origin answered. A fire phoenix radiating boundless light and heat manifested, spread its wings, and soared, holding off the demon paragon's devouring technique with its energy alone.

The Jade Scale Demon Paragon's attack followed immediately behind Kunpeng's, and on the other side the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign and the Light Divine Venerable launched themselves at the Central Heaven Dao Lord and the Sovereign Radiance Dao Lord.

"The lot of you are courting death!" Both Dao Lords reacted at blinding speed, unleashing Dao Techniques in counterattack.

As the fighting broke out across the whole field, only an instant later, the Extinction Dao Lord made his move. Using a special secret art, or perhaps some strange object, he crossed the distance between himself and Yaoguang without a sound and brought a Great Void Disintegration Technique crashing down on the space Yaoguang occupied.

The battle had erupted out of nowhere, and not one of the Void-Shattering perfected lords on the field had time to react.

The perfected lords could not react, but the Taiwei Dao Lord, a void Dao Lord himself, had sensed something coming. Given the choice between intercepting the Extinction Dao Lord and shielding the warship beneath him with his own disciple, Perfected Lord Tian Xiao, aboard, he chose the latter.

"Look out!" He swept the warship up in void power at once and pulled it and every perfected lord aboard clear of the battlefield, retreating far off.

Of the remaining two, the Pill Cauldron Dao Lord's expression shifted slightly, and he too withdrew from the field.

The Azure Crow Dao Lord, by contrast, proved utterly decisive. "Light, it seems you never took a word I said seriously! Then let me see what a divine venerable who's lost his divine kingdom actually has left!"

Psychic thought radiated outward as he drew a swath of blazing fire cloud before him, driving the power of the Great Dao of fire toward the Light Divine Venerable.

In just a heartbeat, the whole field turned into a chaotic battle of Dao Lords. Great Dao resonance, Great Dao manifestations, and Great Dao rhythm clashed with one another alongside the manifested Dao Techniques, and the entire stretch of sky became the most terrible hell on earth imaginable.

Destructive energies collided in several corners of that space at once, and each collision would, a second later, release everything it held as a shockwave capable of rattling the whole North Sea Star and tearing the sky apart for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

For all the ferocity of the fighting, what every Dao Lord was actually watching was another patch of sky entirely.

Yaoguang. The newly advanced Yaoguang.

Even the Penglai Dao Lord was no exception.

Facing the Jade Scale and Kunpeng Demon Paragons closing on her together, she seemed to have a way to hold off both demon paragons and still block the Extinction Dao Lord.

But just as she prepared to commit fully, a transmission from Yaoguang reached her; she stopped, and the Great Void Disintegration Technique the Extinction Dao Lord had cut loose slammed into the void where Yaoguang sat without the slightest obstruction.

"Die!" Savagery and killing intent filled the Extinction Dao Lord's eyes.

The void shattered. Everywhere that technique passed, chaotic, raging void power turned everything to powder!

Force on that scale was more than any being below Dao Lord could withstand, and more than most Dao Lords could withstand without a defensive Dao Technique or a top-tier protective Dao Artifact.

One strike like this would settle beyond doubt whether Yaoguang's advancement was real, and exactly how much weight this newly advanced Dao Lord carried.

Yet the moment the Great Void Disintegration Technique struck the space Yaoguang had occupied, the Extinction Dao Lord and the Kunpeng Demon Paragon alike felt an unspeakable lurch in their hearts.

Nor were they the only ones. Even the Taiwei Dao Lord, who had pulled his warship full of perfected lords away at the first sign of trouble, felt his heart shudder, a horror welling up in him like an inferior meeting a superior, or prey meeting its natural predator.

The instant that feeling surfaced, all of them abruptly sensed that their grip on the Great Dao of void had dropped noticeably.

It was not that their allotted share of void power had shrunk. It was an indescribable sense of being diminished, as though their fusion with the Great Dao of void had, in that moment, grown less intimate than before.

And at that same instant, the Great Void Disintegration Technique struck Yaoguang with nothing held back.

Through it all, Yaoguang did not so much as shift to evade. He let the technique's power cover him completely and land, and let the space around him be ground apart, pulverized, and disintegrated by the Great Dao of Void.

"Yaoguang!"

"Daoist?!"

The Central Heaven Dao Lord and the Sovereign Radiance Dao Lord both cried out. Even the Penglai Dao Lord's expression flickered.

But in the end she chose, once again, to believe in Yaoguang. Exactly as she had believed he could refine a top-tier Dao Artifact, and that he could achieve Dao Integration.

The void howled as it raged chaotically, and violent void tremors tore up that stretch of sky, yet the omnipresent power of the Great Dao of void quickly repaired it.

As that power knitted the region back together, a figure gradually emerged from the disordered currents, simply letting void power capable of shredding any substance wash over him again and again as he walked out of the twisted space one step at a time.

The instant they made out that figure, Central Heaven and Sovereign Radiance both let out a breath of relief.

"That's Yaoguang?!"

"He's unharmed. Thank goodness!"

Even the Penglai Dao Lord's mouth curved into the trace of a smile.

"How..." The Extinction Dao Lord's expression changed.

He withstood it?! Yaoguang, a newly advanced Dao Lord, had withstood his Great Void Disintegration Technique?!

Yaoguang's gaze crossed the warped space and settled on his attacker. Then he put out a hand. "Come on."

Seeing Yaoguang clearly dismiss his power sent the Extinction Dao Lord into a fury. "You're asking to die!"

Void power surged around him again as he gathered an even stronger force, meant to annihilate everything. But before it could reach its peak, the eyes Yaoguang had fixed on him suddenly brightened.

It was nothing more than a look, and yet the Extinction Dao Lord felt with perfect clarity that marshaling void power had become difficult. It was as though another source of power stood beside him, dragging at his heels, leaving him unable to bring out anything near his full force.

The battle gave him no time to hesitate. Abandoning any attempt to bring the technique's power to its peak, the Excinction Dao Lord drew his hand and sent the disintegrating force blasting toward Yaoguang once more.

"Look out!" the Sovereign Radiance Dao Lord shouted in warning.

Yet Yaoguang neither dodged nor evaded this second Great Void Disintegration Technique. He did not even cast a Dao Technique. Relying purely on his understanding of the Great Dao of void, he stretched an arm and pressed his hand flat against the strike coming down at him.

The moment his right hand touched it, an invisible ripple seemed to spread outward.

Great Dao of void met Great Dao of void, and in that brief span of space and that fleeting moment of time, the collision between those two forces reached an unprecedented intensity. Space and time seemed to freeze.

The next instant, the technique descending toward Yaoguang dissolved at its very foundation, all void power within it broken apart.

A strike carrying enough force to obliterate a hundred thousand kilometers of the North Sea Star landed on Yaoguang, yet it looked like nothing more than a light breeze.

Perhaps a light breeze wasn't an accurate description. It was closer to a force-5 or force-6 wind at most, enough to make Yaoguang's robes flap in the wind and his long hair stream behind him, but nothing more. It did him no real harm whatsoever.

He had made receiving that attack look completely effortless.

Yaoguang's nonchalant demeanor made the pupils of the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign, the Light Divine Venerable, the Jade Scale Demon Paragon, and the Kunpeng Demon Paragon constrict, even as each one of them remained locked in a fight with a Dao Lord from the Ten Great Immortal Dao Sects.

Nor was it only the foreign-race Dao Integration cultivators. The Central Heaven Dao Lord, as well as the Sovereign Radiance, Azure Crow, Pill Cauldron, and Taiwei Dao Lords reacted with shock as well, their eyes widening.

"This..."

For a moment, no one had words.

Yaoguang paid the astonished Dao Lords no attention. His gaze stayed on the Extinction Dao Lord.

"Again," he said, extending a hand in a beckoning gesture.

"How..." The Extinction Dao Lord's mind had taken a serious blow.

But a Dao Lord could not be felled by something so small. Within moments, he drew on an even vaster void power.

Vast, at least, by comparison. Compared with what he commanded in an ordinary fight, it was clearly a step weaker.

It felt as though some terrible presence were controlling the void power he was trying to gather, holding it down. If he could easily summon ten parts on any other day, now it came down to three or four at most, and only by giving it everything he had.

That power gathered swiftly into an enormous Void Sword, which came slashing down toward the spot Yaoguang occupied.

"Whatever Dao Technique is protecting you, break!" the Extinction Dao Lord roared.

The Void Sword, called the finest tool in the void path for cracking defenses and shattering arrays, came down with a swooshing sound, only to stop in front of Yaoguang amid violent spatial tremors.

This time, every Dao Lord present looked that way with wide eyes, wanting to see exactly what method Yaoguang had used to break the previous technique.

But there was none.

Yaoguang cast no Dao Technique. He simply reached out, fingers spread wide, and the instant the massive Void Sword struck his body, he clamped his hand around the blade, which was formed entirely from condensed void power.

Void power seeped from his five fingers into the sword. Yaoguang's void power wasn't especially strong, but far more precise, delicate, and responsive.

In under a second, as his grip tightened, the huge Void Sword blew apart with a loud boom, scattering into visible ripples of void that spread in every direction. The backwash of its collapse extended for more than five thousand kilometers.

The Extinction Dao Lord felt every scrap of strength drain out of him, and the shockwave from the detonation knocked him into an involuntary slump.

"This is impossible!" he roared in despair.

He stared fixedly at the figure who had crushed a Void Sword containing his full strength without using a single Dao Technique, and felt the confidence and arrogance he had held so firmly in his heart collapse.