The atmosphere within the Evil Infested Ridge was thick enough to drown a mortal. The grey mist swirled like the restless souls of the damned, carrying the scent of metallic blood and ancient, wet rot. Every step forward was a battle against the suppressive pressure of the ridge, a pervasive force left behind by the residual will of gods and devils that weighed down upon the Dao Heart and the Life Wheel alike. To walk here was to walk through molasses made of killing intent.
Unless, of course, you were Ling Feng.
To Ling Feng, this terrifying forbidden zone felt like a slightly humid afternoon in Florida, just without the retirees and alligators. The Chaos Force surging through his meridians did not acknowledge the rules of this reality. It did not care about the restrictions left behind by Immortal Emperor Min Ren. It acts like a pressurized submarine moving through the crushing depths of the ocean—sealed off, self-contained, and utterly unaffected.
"You know," Ling Feng broke the heavy silence, casually winding up his leg and booting a loose, sun-bleached human skull across the path like a soccer ball. It clattered loudly against a stone, echoing sacrilegiously through the gloom. "I really thought we'd have more fan clubs chasing us by now. I mean, I basically slapped the face of the entire Grand Middle Territory back at the entrance. Where's the outrage? Where are the clout chasers?"
He knew, strictly speaking, that in the original timeline, Li Qiye had been pursued by various sects hungry for his Emperor Laws.
But Ling Feng had gone a step further; he hadn't just acted arrogant, he had actively humiliated the Heavenly God Dao Child and one-shotted an Enlightened Being.
He glanced back at his entourage. The Cleansing Incense Seven were tense, their knuckles white on their hilts, eyes darting into the shadows at every rustle of leaves.
Su Yonghuang maintained her regal composure, though her golden eyes were sharp, her hand hovering near her artifact.
"Young Noble," Li Shuangyan said, her voice cool and crisp, cutting through the humidity. She walked beside him, her white dress unblemished despite the slaughter of the wolves they had just conducted. "You decimated an Enlightened Being and humiliated the Heavenly God Dao Child. Most cultivators are sheep. They fear power. They likely believe you are an Old Monster in disguise playing a pig to eat the tiger."
"Old Monster?" Ling Feng scoffed, running a hand through his hair with a grin. "Please. I'm in the prime of my life. I've got skincare routines better than half the women in this realm. No wrinkles here, just pure vibes."
He winked at Chen Baojiao, who was walking on his other side. The supreme beauty rolled her eyes, but a faint, amused smile tugged at her luscious lips. Since the "unclog the hose" conversation regarding her physique, her aura had settled. She felt less like a ticking time bomb of frustration and more like a dormant volcano—dangerous, brimming with heat, but controlled.
"However," Su Yonghuang interjected, her tone grave as she scanned the shifting mist ahead. "Arrogance is a blinding drug. There are those who will convince themselves that what they saw outside was a trick. Or worse, they will believe that the Ridge itself is their ally."
"Really now?," Ling Feng said, though he already knew the answer. He simply enjoyed hearing her speak; her voice carried a natural authority that he found incredibly attractive.
"The Evil Infested Ridge suppresses cultivation," Su Yonghuang explained, her gaze piercing the gloom. "If an Ancient Saint were to enter and unleash their true power, the laws of this place would instantly execute them. Everyone is forced to suppress their level to the limit. They might think that because you showed such overwhelming power outside, you will be the most heavily restricted inside. They likely believe you are vulnerable now."
As if summoned by her words, the mist ahead began to churn violently.
Shadows emerged from the gloom—not the twisted shapes of Heavenly Beasts, but the distinct silhouettes of men. A large group blocked the path, the sheer number of them causing the air to vibrate with hostile intent.
On the left stood the elite forces of the Jiangzuo Clan. Leading them was an old man with eyes like a hawk, Noble Jiangzuo, radiating the heavy aura of a Royal Noble. Beside him stood the younger, cunning Jiangzuo Tieyi, fanning himself with a sinister smile. Their killing intent was cold, calculated, and focused entirely on the Cleansing Incense Ancient Sect.
On the right, a golden chariot hovered slightly above the mud, defying the muck. Standing atop it, looking down with a sneer that twisted his handsome features into something ugly, was Nantian Hao. The genius of the Southern Heavenly Kingdom.
"Speak of the devil, and the trash appears," Ling Feng muttered, stopping in his tracks. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't shift into a combat stance. He just shoved his hands into his pockets and tilted his head to the side, looking at them with mild annoyance. "What is this? A convention for people I don't care about? Did I miss the invite?"
Nantian Hao's eyes bypassed Ling Feng entirely, fixating instantly on the three supreme beauties: Li Shuangyan, Su Yonghuang, and especially Chen Baojiao. Seeing the fierce princess of the Jewel Pillar Sacred School standing so obediently next to Ling Feng, her expression soft only when she looked at this stranger, made the jealousy in Nantian Hao's gut curdle into pure poison.
"Chen Baojiao!" Nantian Hao barked, his voice laced with possessive entitlement. "You have fallen so low! To associate with this unknown animal? Does the Jewel Pillar Sacred School have no shame? You are a pearl cast into the mud!"
Chen Baojiao's expression hardened instantly. The softness vanished, replaced by the ferocity of the Tyrannical Immortal Physique. Her eyes flashed with dangerous lightning. "Nantian Hao. Watch your tongue. My choices are not your business, and I am certainly not yours to lecture."
"It becomes my business when you throw away your dignity!" Nantian Hao sneered, pointing a trembling finger at Ling Feng. "And you! Brat! Do not think you can act rampant here. Outside, you used some demonic art to catch Si Tu off guard. But here? In the Ridge? The restriction suppresses all! If you try to use that power again, the Ridge will execute you instantly!"
Jiangzuo Tieyi stepped forward, his fan tapping rhythmically against his palm. He smiled, a snake-like expression that didn't reach his eyes. "Brother Nantian is correct. This brat is merely bluffing. He is walking tall to hide his fear. He cannot unleash that force inside here without triggering the execution laws. He is a toothless tiger."
Jiangzuo Tieyi's gaze slid toward Li Shuangyan, gleaming with naked greed. "Li Shuangyan, hand over the Emperor Laws and the Kun Peng's Six Variants. Perhaps, if you are obedient, the Jiangzuo Clan will leave the Cleansing Incense Sect with a few whole corpses."
Ling Feng looked at the two groups. He looked at their confident smirks. He looked at the way they eyed his women like pieces of meat to be divided up.
He started to laugh.
It wasn't a villainous cackle, nor was it a nervous chuckle. It was a genuine, belly-shaking laugh of pure disbelief. He doubled over slightly, wiping a tear from his eye.
"Oh my god," Ling Feng gasped for breath. "You guys are actually serious. You actually sat down, had a meeting, and decided, 'Yeah, let's rob the guy who one-shotted an Enlightened Being.' That is some next-level cognitive dissonance. The delusion is real."
He straightened up, and the atmosphere shifted. The casual, 2020-slacker vibe evaporated instantly. In its place was something cold, sharp, and infinitely heavy. The pressure around him didn't rise; it deepened, like the sudden drop of a stomach in freefall.
"Hey, stupid," Ling Feng looked directly at Nantian Hao, his green eyes glowing with a terrifying light. "Do I look suppressed to you?"
"Bluffing!" Nantian Hao roared, his pride refusing to accept the fear creeping up his spine. He drew his weapon, a massive golden halberd that hummed with royal power. "Kill him! I want the women alive! The men act as fertilizer!"
"Jiangzuo Clan, formation!" Jiangzuo Tieyi commanded sharply.
"Alright, ladies and gents," Ling Feng yawned, stepping back and waving his hand dismissively. "It's trash day. Take them out. I want to see what you've learned. Don't disappoint me."
The moment the command left Ling Feng's lips, the air exploded.
"I will handle the Jiangzuo Clan," Li Shuangyan announced.
Her voice was devoid of warmth. She stepped forward, and the temperature in the humid jungle plummeted thirty degrees. Frost began to creep across the rotting vegetation, turning the mud into iron-hard permafrost.
Noble Jiangzuo roared, his Royal Noble aura flaring like a beacon. "Arrogant girl! You think you alone can stop the Jiangzuo Iron Formation?"
Dozens of Jiangzuo elites moved in unison, their Life Wheels spinning rapidly. They linked their blood energy, creating a massive spectral fortress—a projection of iron walls and spikes—that rushed toward Li Shuangyan to crush her into paste.
Li Shuangyan didn't retreat. In the past, she would have used a powerful Movement Merit Law to dodge. But Ling Feng had taught her something else. He had opened her mind to the concept of Chaos Control.
She didn't dodge the space; she slid through it.
Her figure blurred, turning into a streak of white light that seemed to glitch through reality. She appeared right in the center of the formation, bypassing the outer shields entirely.
"What?!" Jiangzuo Tieyi's eyes widened, his fan freezing in mid-air. "Impossible! How did she bypass the spatial lock?"
"You are too slow," Li Shuangyan whispered, her voice right next to his ear.
Her sword didn't just slash; it bloomed.
Kun Peng's Six Variants: Ocean Freezing Strike.
But this wasn't the standard technique. It was infused with the "anti-magic" property of the Chaos Force Ling Feng had shared with her. Her ice didn't just freeze matter—it froze the flow of Spirit Energy itself.
CRACK-BOOM!
The spectral fortress didn't just break; it shattered from the inside out. Jiangzuo disciples screamed as their blood energy was forcibly congealed in their veins. The feedback loop was catastrophic. They fell like statues, their faces frozen in masks of terror, their meridians clogged with emerald-tinted frost.
Noble Jiangzuo, realizing the formation was broken, panicked. He swung his heavy saber, summoning the power of a collapsing mountain. "Die, witch!"
Li Shuangyan met the heavy saber with her slender, elegant blade.
CLANG!
She didn't budge. The force of the Royal Noble was nullified, absorbed by the Green Chaos energy swirling around her wrists like liquid jade.
She twisted her wrist, and a blast of kinetic force—borrowed from Ling Feng's teachings on vector manipulation—sent the old man flying backward, coughing blood.
She stood amidst the chaos, a goddess of war, white dress fluttering, untouchable and terrifying.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the clearing, the air was crackling with a more volatile, explosive violence.
"You want me?" Chen Baojiao laughed, a sound that was equal parts mockery and fury. "Come and take me, you entitled prick!"
She charged Nantian Hao. Her saber, usually graceful, was now a blur of violent oppression. The Tyrannical Immortal Physique roared to life, no longer hindered by the improper cultivation method.
Nantian Hao, enraged beyond reason, met her head-on with his halberd. "Why... why are you with him?! I am a King! He is nobody!"
BOOM!
Weapon met weapon. The ground beneath them disintegrated into a crater five meters wide. Mud and water vaporized instantly.
Nantian Hao expected to overpower her. He was a genius, a Named Hero! But to his horror, he felt a strength coming from her that felt endless, like a tsunami crashing against a crumbling wall.
"Because you're boring!" Chen Baojiao shouted over the clash of steel. "And you're weak!"
She remembered Ling Feng's words. Unkink the hose. Let it flow.
She stopped trying to suppress the violent energy in her blood to fit the "lady-like" expectations of the Jewel Pillar School. She let it scream. She let it burn.
Her saber glowed with a chaotic red light. She swung again, a vertical slash that carried the weight of a mountain range.
Nantian Hao blocked, but the force buckled his knees. The golden halberd groaned under the stress, hairline fractures appearing on the shaft.
"Junior Sister! Now!" Chen Baojiao shouted.
From the shadow of Baojiao's explosive attack, a small figure darted out.
It was Xu Pei.
Nantian Hao had completely ignored the "weak" disciple. To him, she was an ant, unworthy of notice. That was his fatal mistake.
Xu Pei wasn't aiming for a kill. She was aiming for disruption. Her sword, coated in the Green Chaos Lightning Ling Feng had helped her cultivate, stabbed toward Nantian Hao's exposed wrist.
ZZZZT!
"Argh!" Nantian Hao screamed as the Chaos Lightning bypassed his protective aura entirely and electrocuted his ulnar nerve. The pain was blinding, white-hot and alien. His hand went numb, and his grip on the halberd loosened.
WHAM!
Chen Baojiao didn't miss the opening. She spun, momentum building, and delivered a roundhouse kick fueled by the full might of the Tyrannical Physique directly into Nantian Hao's chest.
The sound of ribs snapping was audible even over the chaos of battle. The Southern Heavenly King's genius was launched like a cannonball, smashing through three ancient trees before hitting the mud face-first, plowing a trench through the earth.
"Is that it?" Chen Baojiao spat, flipping her hair back. She was breathing hard, sweat glistening on her neck, looking devastatingly beautiful in her fury. "I expected more from a 'Young King'. Pure disappointment."
Behind them, the Cleansing Incense Seven were having the time of their lives.
"Formation! Turtle Shell!" Zhang Yu shouted.
The seven disciples moved with practiced synergy. They weren't powerful individually, but under Ling Feng's "sink or swim" training, they had learned to fight dirty. They moved like a pack of hyenas.
"Go for the eyes! Kick the groin!" Qu Daoli yelled, sliding under a Jiangzuo elite's guard and stabbing him in the thigh.
They were a whirlwind of unorthodox violence, tearing through the demoralized troops who were already terrified by seeing their leaders getting thrashed.
Su Yonghuang watched from the back, her arms crossed. She felt a swelling in her chest that she hadn't felt in years. Pride.
"They are strong," she murmured. "Truly strong. You have transformed them."
"They're okay," Ling Feng said, standing next to her. He was casually peeling an orange he had pulled from his pocket. "Form is a bit sloppy. Baojiao is overextending on the downswing—too much emotion. Shuangyan is playing with her food; she could have ended that in two moves. But hey, C-plus for effort."
Su Yonghuang looked at him, incredulous. Her golden eyes widened slightly. "You call destroying two Royal Noble groups and humiliating a genius a 'C-plus'?"
"I have high standards," Ling Feng shrugged, popping a slice of orange into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully. "Want some? It's citrusy. Good for the stress. Lots of Vitamin C."
The battle was winding down, but the enemies were not dead yet.
Noble Jiangzuo, bloodied and disheveled, pulled himself up from the mud. Jiangzuo Tieyi was panting, his fan broken, his eyes darting around for an escape route that didn't exist.
Nantian Hao was screaming in the mud, trying to channel his Life Treasure to nuke the area, ignoring the suppression rules.
"Enough!" Nantian Hao shrieked, blood streaming from his eyes. His humiliation had broken his mind. "I will kill you all! I will summon the Ancestor's Will! I don't care if I die!"
A terrifying aura began to rise from Nantian Hao's body. He was burning his longevity blood—the very essence of his life—to summon a projection of an Invincible Existence.
"Oh, look," Ling Feng sighed, tossing the orange peel away into a bush. "He's going super mode. How original. Why does every villain have the same playbook?"
The atmosphere grew heavy. Sensing the desperation, the Jiangzuo duo also began to burn their blood, their Life Wheels spinning to the point of cracking. They were preparing a suicide attack to take everyone down with them.
"Young Noble!" Li Shuangyan shouted, sensing the danger. "They are trying to detonate their True Fates! The blast radius will be massive!"
"Yeah, I see it. Boring," Ling Feng muttered. He briefly wondered if Min Ren's restrictions would kill them first, but seeing no immediate response from the Ridge, he assumed their cultivation hadn't quite reached the threshold to trigger the auto-kill.
He stepped forward.
"Alright, recess is over. I'm bored, and you guys are making way too much noise. I'm trying to vibe here, and you're ruining the aesthetic."
Ling Feng didn't assume a stance. He simply raised his right hand, palm facing the battered group of enemies.
Inside his Inner Void, the Red Chaos Emerald (Power) and the Green Chaos Emerald (Space) began to spin in perfect unison. A hum, deep and resonant, began to emanate from his body.
"You think you can stop us?!" Noble Jiangzuo screamed, his body swelling with explosive energy like a balloon ready to burst. "We will drag you to hell with us!"
"Hell?" Ling Feng smirked. A dark, jagged grin that promised something far worse than death. "Buddy, I am the landlord."
Chaos Art: Gravity Well / Absolute Compression.
He didn't fire a beam. He simply closed his hand into a fist.
CRUNCH.
It wasn't a sound of bone. It was the sound of space itself collapsing.
A sphere of distorted reality appeared in the center of the enemy group. The light bent around it. Instantly, the gravity within that ten-meter radius increased by ten thousand times.
Nantian Hao's scream was cut short as his body was flattened. He didn't explode; he imploded. The "Ancestor's Will" he was summoning was crushed into nothingness before it could even manifest.
Noble Jiangzuo, Jiangzuo Tieyi, and the remaining elites were instantaneously compressed. Armor, flesh, bones, and Life Wheels were squeezed together. There was no resistance. The Grand Dao itself crumpled under the sheer weight of the Chaos Force.
In less than a second, the threat was gone.
In its place was a perfectly spherical, dense ball of meat and twisted metal, the size of a beach ball, hovering slightly above the ground, dripping blood into the mud.
Ling Feng unclenched his hand, and then he twisted his wrist. The sphere shimmered, the Refining Souls ability activating. The gore vanished, rapidly condensing into pure energy.
PING.
A large, golden Ring dropped into the mud.
Silence.
Absolute, terrified silence. Even the insects of the Ridge stopped chirping. The mist seemed to recoil from Ling Feng.
Far away, hidden in the shadows of a distant peak, an old man with a grey beard—Grandpa Guan, the protector of Heavenly Prince Qingxuan—shuddered violently.
Beside him, Heavenly Prince Qingxuan, a genius who feared nothing, felt his hands trembling.
"That... that is not Dao," Grandpa Guan whispered, his face pale as a sheet. "That is not the power of this world. No laws were used. He simply... commanded space to crush them. Even inside here, he treated Royal Nobles like insects. Who is this monster?"
Shi Gandang, who was still following Chen Baojiao's shadow to protect her, was stunned into sheer bewilderment. He had seen many things in his life, but he had never seen someone weaponize gravity with a wave of their hand. It seemed there was no end to this man's powers.
Back in the clearing, Ling Feng waved his hand, absorbing the Golden Ring into his Inner Void. 'That should be enough energy to start condensing another Emerald. But that Heaven Extermination Demon Ape and that Tree... those will be the real treats.'
He turned to the girls and the seven disciples. They were staring at him with wide eyes, their weapons lowered, processing the sheer ease with which he had dispatched their enemies.
Ling Feng dusted off his hands, his casual demeanor returning as if he hadn't just committed a mass execution.
"Too much?" Ling Feng asked, tilting his head innocently. "I felt like it was efficient. No muss, no fuss. Plus, easy cleanup."
He walked over to Chen Baojiao and gently wiped a speck of mud from her cheek. "You did good, by the way. But next time, more follow-through on the kick. Don't just break the ribs; aim to send them into the next zip code."
Chen Baojiao looked at him, her heart pounding against her ribs. Fear? No. What she felt was an overwhelming sense of safety. With this man... the heavens themselves could fall, and he would just catch them.
"I will... keep that in mind," she whispered, a genuine smile breaking through her shock.
"Good girl," Ling Feng grinned. "Now, let's go. I'm hungry, and this place smells like wet dog."