Chapter 474: Annihilated

"How..."

The Extinction Dao Lord was not the only one whose convictions collapsed. The Kunpeng Demon Paragon, locked in a savage exchange with the Penglai Dao Lord nearby, and the Taiwei Dao Lord, watching from well clear of the battlefield, wore the same look of disbelief.

"This is impossible!"

The Extinction Dao Lord was past a hundred thousand years old, and his mind had lost a little of its edge, but he still held eighty percent of what he had been at his peak.

Even if the Taiwei Dao Lord faced the Extinction Dao Lord, he might beat him, but never this easily. Never in such an overwhelming way!

"How can this be happening?!" The Taiwei Dao Lord could not accept it.

It was fine for Yaoguang to achieve Dao Integration. But how could he be this strong?!

Where the others were baffled, something occurred to the Penglai Dao Lord, and her eyes grew brighter.

"His comprehension!" she said.

That was it. Before his breakthrough, Yaoguang had been like her: though he had yet to achieve Dao Integration, his understanding of his own Dao had already reached an extraordinary height, surpassing even that of many true Dao Integration powerhouses.

Thanks to that comprehension, far beyond what ordinary people could reach, he could display combat power greater than that of other Dao Lords despite having only just broken through. Against Dao Lords who cultivated the same Great Dao, the suppression was especially evident

"No! I don't believe it! I refuse to believe it!" the Extinction Dao Lord roared. With convictions shattered, he started frantically marshaling every scrap of void power he could still command into Void Swords, the sharpest instrument the path had for cracking defenses and killing, and sent them slashing down one after another. "You're a newly advanced Dao Lord, and you got there only thanks to some unorthodox method! How can you be this strong?! I don't believe it! I don't believe it!"

Yaoguang, having now learned the true measure of his own strength, had no interest in continuing to spar with him.

His command of the Great Dao of void was absolute right now. To some degree, he was the void's ruler, governing how the Great Dao of void moved through this entire region.

With comprehension that approached the level of an immortal venerable, he had stripped the Extinction Dao Lord of most of his grip on that Dao.

Facing the Void Swords coming at him in a frenzy, Yaoguang simply walked into them, a Void Sword appearing in his own hands.

But he kept that Void Sword concentrated along his arms rather than slashing out; instead, he swatted each descending sword like a man waving off mosquitoes.

Yet every sweep of his arm shattered one of the Extinction Dao Lord's Void Swords like they were rotten timber. No matter how the Extinction Dao Lord struggled, nor however hard he pushed, the swords he released could not touch Yaoguang in the slightest.

Yaoguang walked straight through that storm of blades and finally stopped directly in front of him.

Yaoguang's gaze settled on him. It was the gaze of a superior, of a natural predator, and at last it made the Dao Lord, a man whose convictions had shattered and who had nearly given himself over to twisted madness, afraid.

He stared, eyes wide, at Yaoguang standing an arm's length away, and felt rooted in place, his mind and awareness frozen by terror he could not put into words. He found himself unable to move.

So he stood motionless and watched Yaoguang approach and slowly raise an arm, his eyes widening.

"Extinction!" The Kunpeng Demon Paragon's shout came from the side, shocked and furious. Yet the Extinction Dao Lord stood exactly where he was, face pale, staring in absolute terror at Yaoguang's raised hand.

An instant later, a loud bang rang out, and the edge gathered in that hand released energy like a Great Void Disintegration Technique, blasting the Dao Lord into powder. Through it all, the Extinction Dao Lord had been cowed so thoroughly that he never resisted once!

"What the f..." The Taiwei Dao Lord's pupils constricted to pinpoints. His mouth opened reflexively as though to cry out, but the sound died in his throat and only half of the words escaped his mouth.

As for the others, the shock hit them like a physical blow. Dead?! The Extinction Dao Lord is actually dead?!

Yaoguang, a newly advanced Dao Lord, had displayed enough combat power to eclipse any veteran among them, and had blown apart an ancient Dao Lord with nearly a hundred thousand years of renown like rotten wood? This was simply unbelievable. Yaoguang's combat power was far too terrifying!

"Damn it!"

"He's already dead?!"

"Extinction, you useless thing!"

On the other side, the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign, the Light Divine Venerable, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon, and the Jade Scale Demon Paragon all cursed at once as they pressed their respective opponents.

The plan had failed. And Yaoguang had shown power that seemed far beyond anything they had accounted for! The Extinction Dao Lord was beaten to death incredibly quickly!

Faced with a monster like that, what courage did any of these Dao Integration cultivators have left to fight to the bitter end? Every one of them made the call instantly and pulled back at full speed.

"Retreat! Fall back, now!"

"Go! Let the void Dao Lords deal with the void Dao's newcomer. This is not our business!"

"Get out of human territory!"

Amid the shuddering of psychic thought, demon paragon, fiend sovereign, and divine venerable alike turned into streaming light, cutting through the void as they fled with all their might.

"Leaving? Do you really think you can?" The Penglai Dao Lord gave a cold snort and closed her hand, and origin power surged out like an endless sea, trying to bind the Kunpeng and Jade Scale Demon Paragons.

But the situation was dire, and the two demon paragons acted quickly and decisively, each deploying its own life-saving treasure.

One did as the Unchained Dao Lord had done before, using the Void Origin to try to escape the area.

The other drew pure destructive force from a secret treasure and opened a gap through the ocean of origin power hemming it in.

Just as the Penglai Dao Lord hesitated, trying to decide which one to chase, Yaoguang's psychic thought reached her. "Leave Kunpeng to me. Jade Scale carries two top-tier Dao Artifacts, and it's about time you settled things with that one, Dao Lord."

Her eyes lit up at the message, and without any hesitation she swept origin power forward, sending it surging toward the Jade Scale Demon Paragon.

Elsewhere, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon deployed the Void Origin, completed a single spatial transit, and vanished from the battlefield in the blink of an eye.

But almost at the same instant it moved, Yaoguang caught on to something thanks to his exquisitely fine command of the Great Dao of void, and unleashed a Void Flicker.

His figure blinked several times in half a breath. When it solidified again, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon was just emerging into view right behind him.

Seeing Yaoguang standing squarely in its path, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon mind went blank for a moment. Its reaction was quick, though, and it moved without hesitation, attempting to go through another spatial transit to get away.

But as it tried to do so, Yaoguang pressed down with one hand.

Though the Kunpeng Demon Paragon was still in the state Void Origin conferred, it felt an indescribable pressure come rolling in, and in the end, that pressure forcibly squeezed it out of its profoundly mysterious fusion with the void.

The change made it stare at Yaoguang. "How is that possible?!"

Yaoguang did not speak again. Having forced the Kunpeng Demon Paragon out of its special state, he brought both palms together, and an overwhelming force seized the power of the Great Dao of void and rushed into the hollow between Yaoguang's palms.

As the Great Dao stirred, the Kunpeng Demon Paragon could feel with perfect clarity that every scrap of void power had come alive and was gathering toward Yaoguang of its own accord.

"This is bad!" the demon paragon exclaimed.

The Kunpeng Demon Paragon pushed its own resonance with the Great Dao of void to the absolute limit, meaning to summon a vast enough surge of void power for one more ultra-long-range transit, all the way back to the territory of the Nine Demon Race Lineages in a single jump.

But the moment it channeled void power at full strength, it realized the sensation was real. Void power was really flowing toward Yaoguang.

With all the Great Dao power rushing toward Yaoguang, the amount the demon paragon could control was greatly reduced. Even as it pushed itself, giving everything it had for a long-range transit, he ended up like a carp that leaps believing it can clear the dragon gate and rise into the sky, only to land on a cutting board instead.[1]

The transit failed, and there was no time to convert a movement art into a defensive or offensive Dao Technique. The Kunpeng Demon Paragon could only watch as Yaoguang, having condensed void power to its utmost, pointed down at the spot where it stood.

"Great Void Techniqu—Great Disintegration Technique!"

The share of the Great Dao of void he could command was still too small. He could not yet fully perform the Origin Dao Technique of the void, the Great Void Technique itself. He had to settle for the Great Disintegration Technique, which embodied only such aspects as "wounding" and "destruction."

Even so, when he released an attack carrying a thread of an Origin Dao Technique, it bore down on his opponent like a collapsing mountain. That rolling, all-annihilating void power was so oppressive and ruinous that it made the Kunpeng Demon Paragon's scalp feel ready to split.

"Aahh!" It bellowed and revealed its heavenly demon true body, becoming a terrifying phantom tens of thousands of meters long, pulling on the surrounding void power with everything it had to try to escape.

But before its true body could even fully manifest, the annihilating force within the Great Disintegration Technique had already broken it down, revealing the raw flesh beneath.

That devastation finally made the Kunpeng Demon Paragon understand why the Extinction Dao Lord had been so helpless against Yaoguang.

It had assumed the man was simply too old, and his thinking had become slow, turning him into a useless relic. Only now did it really understand. Extinction had not been weak. Yaoguang was just too strong!

A new Dao Lord, yet strong enough to defy all understanding, strong enough that he should not have appeared anywhere outside the Immortal Realm!

"No!" With a despairing cry, the demon paragon of the void path was shattered and unmade by the Great Disintegration Technique. Nothing remained but a small quantity of demon paragon essence blood, which Yaoguang gathered and kept.

The instant the Kunpeng Demon Paragon fell, Yaoguang's powerful psychic thought shuddered violently, and his resonance with the Great Dao climbed at tremendous speed.

This was the Great Dao of void's origin allotment.

Faintly, a far more majestic power seemed to pull at that allotment, drawing it back toward somewhere else. But it was too far away.

That majestic force was distant enough to seem as though it were in a different dimension than this stretch of the starry sky, and however profound and vast it was, it could not outcompete Yaoguang, who stood right there and whose comprehension was close to that of an immortal venerable.

Before long, a far denser void Dao resonance welled up from him.

Yaoguang had no chance to savor the change. A brief probe was enough to locate the Penglai Dao Lord's aura.

With the Void Flicker, his figure vanished without a trace.

1. "Carp leaping over the dragon gate" is a Chinese saying that means achieving great success. Author is drawing reference from the saying here. ☜