"BOOM—!"
The golden sword array slammed into the Burial Soul Reef, the resulting shockwave clearing the black mist for a hundred meters in an instant.
"Cang Yaochen! You are a True Buddha of the Sacred Ground—how dare you openly shield the remnant of a Heretic God? Step forward and execute her now!" The Enforcement Commander's voice rolled down like thunder. A dozen Disciples of the Radiant Realm formed an encirclement, their blade-tips flickering with the sharp, piercing light of Pseudo-Divinity, all aimed at the two figures huddled in the rock crevice.
Cang Yaochen was half-kneeling in the mud, his white robes stained with gore, his eyes clamped shut. Within his sea of consciousness, the "True Buddha Persona" and the "God of Love Persona" were clashing violently due to the stab Jiang Li had just dealt him. Overlapping shadows of the Peach Blossom Illusion twisted and shattered in the air, accompanied by the shrill, mournful cries of ten thousand monks.
Jiang Li pressed her hand against the bloody hole in her chest. Her face was as pale as paper, yet a breathtaking, freezing sneer curled at the corner of her lips. Her right hand gripped the shard of the Black Chaos Jade with a death grip, allowing the frigid, turbid energy to pour back into her body through the wound.
The Record of the Turbid World's Divine Essence surged wildly within her. Her parched meridians groaned under the pressure of the rushing dark energy.
"Monk Cang... if your compassionate Buddha side can't kill, let the madman out," Jiang Li's voice was incredibly soft, yet it carried a violent streak that made the skin crawl. "Otherwise, we both die today beneath this sword array of 'righteousness.'"
"Witch! Even at death's door, you dare bewitch his heart!"
Seeing Cang Yaochen's internal energy in chaos, the Enforcement Commander saw his opening. He swung his heavy claymore, unleashing a golden sword-qi of the Void-Returning Realm. It swept across the sky like a celestial guillotine, intending not only to decapitate Jiang Li but to test the true depths of Cang Yaochen's strength.
The golden brilliance tore through the air, stopping a mere three inches from Jiang Li's brow.
Hum—
In that split second, a pale hand, crisscrossed with bloody scars, caught the blade firmly.
Space itself seemed to freeze.
Cang Yaochen slowly raised his head. His once holy and peaceful eyes were now utterly fractured. His left eye flickered with an eerie, dark violet, while his right eye overflowed with viscous, chilling, crimson blood-light. The Buddhist seal on his forehead shattered completely, splitting open into a vertical, bloody streak.
It was the Rakshasa. In the moment Jiang Li's life force hit its critical limit, he had forcibly smashed through the Sacred Ground's shackles, awakening his primal instinct.
"Colleagues of the Sacred Ground?" Cang Yaochen spoke, his voice as raspy as sandpaper. "Too noisy."
He squeezed.
CRACK. The golden sword-qi of the Void-Returning Realm was crushed into a pile of golden dross in his bare hand.
"What?!" The Commander's face contorted in shock. "You aren't Cang Yaochen! You're a demon!"
A dark red shockwave suddenly erupted from Cang Yaochen's body. The air for a hundred meters was dyed blood-red in an instant. The Radiant Realm disciples didn't even have time to scream before they were pulverized into a mist of blood by the surging light.
"A-Mu, take her back to the Black Hero Sect," Cang Yaochen said, turning his face slightly. That glimmer of blood-red light in his eyes sent a pang of heartache through Jiang Li.
"The debt you want, I will pay," he stared at her, his eyes filled with a manic obsession. "But until then... don't die."
Jiang Li took a deep breath. She grabbed A-Mu and flickered through the void, her silhouette cold and resolute.
Passing through a long, restricted corridor, the field of vision suddenly opened up.
Before her lay a ruin buried at the junction of magma and glaciers—the Secret Chamber of the Black Hero Sect. The fractured stone pillars were carved with twisted incantations of the "Stripping Art." Jiang Li walked to the center of the chamber, where a scroll emitting a faint golden light hung suspended in the air.
She pressed her blood-stained hand onto the scroll: [Extraction Sequence: The Heavenly Dao Harvest Plan].
The words on the scroll pierced her soul like steel needles. The so-called stripping of divinity and reshaping of the body was never about ascension; it was a trap set by the Heavenly Dao to maintain the strength of the Divine Realm by "refining and harvesting" the souls of all who reached the Void-Returning Realm. Those brilliant geniuses were nothing more than lambs to the slaughter in the eyes of the Heavens.
And at the very bottom of that list titled "Harvest," it was written:
[Sequence 001: Cang Yaochen (Pending Harvest); Sequence 002: Jiang Li (Pending Harvest)].
"So that's how it is..." Jiang Li let out a self-deprecating laugh that echoed through the empty ruins, carrying an infinite desolation.
In that moment, she finally understood. The Cang Yaochen in her memories hadn't tried to kill her. Instead, at the final moment of that ancient war, he had used those extreme methods to mask her aura, allowing her to escape the Heavenly Dao's sequence markers. He, however, chose to remain under the watchful eye of the Heavens, suffering the daily torment of a fractured divinity. That blood-soaked True Buddha had once torn out half of his own Demon Heart and planted it within her body just to give her a single chance at life.
"Cang Yaochen... you absolute... fool."
Jiang Li laughed as she wiped the blood from her lips, but her eyes held a resolve that would make even the gods tremble.
She slammed the shard of Black Chaos Jade directly into the bloody hole in her heart!
"Primordial Chaos Ancestor above... Today, I, Jiang Li—borrow the source of the Demon God!"
As that roar left her throat, the sound of a billion black iron chains clanging erupted from deep within the ruins. The turbid energy surrounding Jiang Li shot into the sky like an erupting abyss.
In the void behind her, a massive, heaven-shrouding shadow of an Evil God rose up, its twin eyes burning like blood-red suns.
"Since the Heavens give us no way to live, then today, I shall slaughter my way through the sky!"