The demon god had arrived, and the host of fur seals he’d brought with him rained blood across the North Sea.

The fur seals were too spine-chilling. As ancient beings, each of them was equivalent to a void-ascended immortal. More terrifying still was that they weren’t limited to the true immortal realm. There were empyrean immortals among them, august, golden... all the way to peerless immortals.

Since they possessed no methods or combat arts, one or two wouldn’t have been an issue. Alas, that wasn’t the case when they numbered in the dozens of thousands. Moreover, they were encased in a layer of black smoke that was demonic energy. When shaped in a unified whole, it became a nigh-indestructible barrier that no flying swords nor sundry treasures could pierce through.

The legion of fur seals charged forward without any discipline, and like a flood of steel, they left nothing but mangled corpses in their wake.

“Disperse, disperse… everyone scatter!!” a dao immortal shouted. The fur seals didn’t utilize any fancy attack formations, but anyone unlucky enough to find themselves too close to one ended up dead without reprieve.

“Hehehe…” a sinister chuckle sounded in the dao immortal’s vicinity. His blood running cold, the man whirled around and found his vision filled with an ugly, obese face, even as Ge Yanxia opened her mouth wide and swallowed him whole.

“Children, kill them all! Don’t leave anyone alive!” Ge Yanxia suddenly swung her head in a certain direction, or more precisely, at the mighty immortals waiting on the sidelines there.

……

“Are we still forbidden from participating?” A celestial emperor looked at Silverlight.

“Kill!” Silverlight didn’t bother replying. Instead, she shifted into a silver blur and charged straight at the figure of the demon god in the air.

The demon god’s body had been destroyed in the prodigious collision, but the stone spirit’s body was indestructible. Therefore, the demon’s true spirit had conveniently slipped into the stone spirit, swallowed its burgeoning true spirit, and occupied its body. Together, the combination of demon god and stone spirit strength reached unfathomable heights.

Bang!

Silverlight’s staff smashed heavily onto the demon god, spraying a shower of sparks. Goldenlight joined her, the staff in his hand also smacking the stone body.

Filled with endless rancor and a nigh-infinite accumulation of yin energy, the stone spirit’s body was incomparably hard. Even though the two scarlet apes’ staves were connate treasures, they didn’t leave a scratch!

The demon’s strength beggared belief!

For their part, the celestial emperors present made no move to help the others. They hadn’t yet truly grasped what it meant to be a real celestial emperor. The deaths of their Exalted and Truespirit colleagues were still fresh on their minds and shaken to the core, none of them wanted to throw themselves headlong into danger.

“How dare two insignificant bugs attack this noble self!” the demon god snorted coldly. His four arms whipped through the air and blasted the two scarlet apes away. It was simply on another level altogether!

“Your Lordship, your original body’s on that kid!” Ge Yanxia shrilled, her thick finger pointing straight at Lu Yun. 

The demon god’s body… in other words, the Demonic Sovereign Cauldron.

…… 

In that instant, Lu Yun blinked back to hell.

“So the ancient demon sovereign and this demon god are one and the same.” He suddenly recalled the way Ge Yanxia had looked at him before entering the Exalted Divine Tombs. The demon god’s body was in his possession, so as long as the demon god came into the world, he was certain to target Lu Yun.

“Unfortunately for you, you just had to possess that stone spirit...” Lu Yun’s fingers blurred into motion as he began drawing talisman runes. He’d found a way to deal with stone spirits a while ago. 

Back on the Path of the Dead in the lineal tomb, he’d used talismans to kill them. Only, the one he’d come across in the Exalted Divine Tombs was too powerful for one single talisman. Incidentally, hell had been overrun with akasha ghosts at the time, so it’d been impossible for him to go back to craft new talismans.

Coalescing talismans from the void? Talismans of that level would be utterly meaningless against a stone spirit this powerful.

Thankfully, he had ample time at his disposal now. He wanted to attempt a jumbo size Pure Yang Talisman to dispel the stone spirit’s rancor and weaken its strength. But slaying the stone spirit outright? He wasn’t conceited enough to think his talismans could achieve such an impossible feat.

He flew into the sky formed by the Cosmic Sea and absorbed the pure yang energy emanating from the Divine Fire Bead, then rolled up his sleeves and got to work.

The Divine Fire Bead was a connate treasure, so the pure yang energy it contained was also connate energy comparable to that which was found in the sun above the world of immortals. In fact, the Divine Fire Bead was now a scorching sun inside hell, and it even seemed to be merging with the Cosmic Sea.

This time, Lu Yun stayed a full fifty years inside hell.

Without a second of rest or sleep, he repeatedly sought to improve the talisman through formula dao for fifty long years, finally finding success with a jumbo-sized Pure Yang Talisman in the end.

Using the Principal Nineheavens Talisman as a blueprint, he added terrifying energy of pure yang that formed the perfect amalgam to dispel the yin energy and accumulated resentment inside the stone spirit.

“Too bad the stone spirit isn’t riddled with any retribution, or I could’ve simply used Judgment of Life and Death to kill him!”

The Nineheavens Pure Yang Talisman—such was the name Lu Yun gave to this talisman.

In the annals of the world of immortals, such a talisman had never existed; it was a brand new creation. The fabrication process was extremely complex, so much so he’d had to spend a full fifty years on the first one.

“Let’s make another two!” He spent another eighty years to draw two more talismans before exiting hell.

Time in the outside world… was still at the same point at which he’d left. With a wave of its arms, the demon god sent the two scarlet apes flying. Its four heads then turned together in Lu Yun’s direction.

“So this noble one’s body is on you… die then!!”

Boom!

The void shook as spatial tears ripped the sky. Snarling, the demon’s giant frame flashed in front of Lu Yun, one of his mammoth hands already closing around the human.

“We’ll see who’ll be doing the dying today!” Lu Yun grit his teeth, a malicious grin on his lips.

Hum!

Three talismans bore down on the demon god like three blazing suns.

“What are those?!” The demon god turned pale with shock. From the three talismans, he could sense an aura that struck fear into his heart. This fear didn’t come from his own consciousness, but from the body he occupied. The indestructible stone spirit body was afraid!

“Die!!” Even so, a bloodthirsty glint flashed through his eyes as he clenched his fist hard and squeezed the life out of the puny human!

Bang!!

Lu Yun’s body, along with the misty, purple nascent spirit, exploded at the same time. A cool breeze blew past, taking his dusty remains with it and leaving nothing behind at all.

Everyone froze.

“Did Lu Yun... die? Did he die so shortly after ascending to immortality?” The crowd was dumbfounded; such an outcome was hard for them to accept. Even those who hated him to the bone and wanted nothing more than his spontaneous death found it all too unreal.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The three miniature suns that were the talismans exploded violently on the demon god, eliciting screams of agony. Wisps of black smoke arose from his figure, as though he were on fire.

“Attack!!” Reinvigorated by the sight, the two scarlet apes threw themselves at him once again. However, a hundred pillars of white light struck even faster than them: crystal cannons from Dusk Province!