An elder aboard the mothership expressed his admiration, saying, “Exactly. By dragging the Xianyu Qi Family in, they’re half-owners of this living star. If they make their move, it will shake the heavens.”

“Plan it out carefully — make it so every last member of the Qi Family gets drawn in and can’t escape,” Cao Lin said, then broke into a manic laugh, her expression twisted and vicious, utterly unlike her usual bewitching beauty.

“Reporting in — we just received word that the ascetic cultivator stormed one of the Qi Family’s divine islands. He slaughtered everyone in a sea of blood and killed Qi Yun and his entire entourage.” A young man burst into the command center and shouted out his report.

“What?!” Several elders leapt to their feet.

“Could it be… that ‘the Divine’ has truly taken a liking to him, and he’s already joined their ranks?!” They harbored their doubts.

“Heh heh…” Cao Lin let out a chilling cold laugh. “This couldn’t have come at a better time. Now all we have to do is give it one push, and the Xianyu Qi Family will absolutely be dragged into the water with us — standing and falling together. With this local snake on our side, everything becomes so much easier. I’m going to cut that little dog apart, one slice at a time!”

“Indeed! Ha ha ha…” The several elders broke into loud laughter as well. This truly was a rare opportunity. The Qi Family was surely furious, and with just a little guidance on their part, they could achieve what they wanted.

“Why are you all still standing there? Get in contact with the Qi Family and send our most sincere condolences — and oh, don’t forget to tell them that we’ll avenge the dead on their behalf.” Cao Lin laughed with venomous glee.

“We need to be careful ourselves, too. He dared to launch a sneak attack on the Qi Family — his audacity is sky-high. There’s no guarantee he won’t come here to kill us.” One elder frowned.

“I’d welcome his arrival. This place is protected by the runes of an ancient Great Sage, and our clan’s formation arrays are here as well. I look forward to seeing him defy the heavens.” Cao Lin licked her vivid red lips and flashed her snow-white, razor-sharp teeth in a smile that made those around her skin crawl.

BOOM!

All of a sudden, the heavens and earth began to tremble. The primitive mountain range rocked and shook as if it were about to flip over. Chaotic energy erupted, and many of the ships perched atop the mountain peaks tumbled and fell.

“Not good — we’re under attack!”

The mountains descended into chaos. Warships roared to life, and sacred symbols of all kinds radiated in every direction, blurring together into a terrifying expanse.

“This place is the meditation ground of an Ancient Great Sage. Who dares to run wild here? I’ll make sure they get in but never get out — their soul and bones will be reduced to ash. Let’s hope it’s that little dog who’s come!” Cao Lin’s gaze was dark and vicious.

BOOM!

An even more violent collapse took place. Every ancient sage rune awakened. Mountains and rivers turned upside down, the sun and moon whirled, and the river of time itself seemed to fall into disarray.

“This is terrible — this place is falling apart.” The several elders felt a chill run from head to toe.

At the same moment, the heads of the other two motherships were stricken with fear as well. The ancient Great Sage’s runes had been ignited, becoming their nightmare.

“Go, get out of here!” Everyone cried out at once.

The great Dao of heaven and earth was burning. The power of the sun, moon, and star rivers all rotated together, threatening to bury everything in this place. Even the defensive light screens of the motherships were shattering, and it was clear they would not be able to hold much longer.

“What… is happening? Not even the runes of an Ancient Great Sage can stop this? Who is doing this?” Cao Lin’s face changed colors.

Far away, Ye Fan watched all of this with cold indifference. From the moment the Source Heaven Yin-Yang formation had taken shape, he had known that this place would inevitably become a peerless death trap.

The soul-platform runes of the forbidden grand formation flickered and flashed. The great Dao thundered, its divine power surging like a flood tide. The earth’s veins transformed into true dragons, tearing everything apart.

Almost in the very same instant, the primitive mountain range boiled over. Dragon energy rolled and surged, and killing intent flooded the sky. Within the first moments, over a dozen warships were reduced to powder, ground to dust.

“Retreat, retreat!”

Everyone was screaming. This had been an impregnable base, one that had never come under attack throughout the entirety of Xianyu Star’s history. Now, however, it had been broken through by an unknown enemy, throwing every single person into a panic.

“Could it be that a member of ‘the Divine’ has arrived?” That possibility sent a chill through the hearts of the crowd.

The three motherships deployed massive light screens to shelter their ship groups, attempting to ascend to the skies — but found it extraordinarily difficult.

The ancient Great Sage’s runes had originally been set to protect this place, but Ye Fan had undermined them from within. The Source Heaven patterns altered the flow of the mountains and rivers, transforming this location into a land of tribulation — the Great Sage’s formation was burning!

The consequences were catastrophic. The supernatural power of an Ancient Great Sage was immeasurably vast — capable of piercing the heavens and penetrating the earth, of summoning wind and rain, of swallowing stars and devouring the moon. Nothing was beyond it.

Now, however, the grand formation had lost control, collapsed, and was burning, spiraling toward destruction. Its remaining majestic power erupted in full, launching indiscriminate attacks that even cosmic fleets could not withstand.

“Ahhh… No!”

Agonized screams rang out one after another. Warship after warship split apart. A single sweep of the Great Sage’s radiance was enough to destroy a great swath of ships — in an instant, several dozen vessels were blown to pieces, and untold numbers of powerful warriors were buried where they stood.

“Break through, get out of here now!” People screamed, warships packed together in dense clusters all blasting off toward the sky, fleeing for their lives.

But the grand formation of an Ancient Great Sage was no ordinary thing. Even the sky was woven through with crisscrossing light. In the very instant of its collapse and rupture, its annihilating force blanketed every last inch of space.

Ship after ship fell like moths after autumn, dropping in swathes and clusters — a portrait of the apocalypse.

“No!” Inside the mothership, Cao Lin screamed, utterly unhinged. She roared with fury: “Who is it?! Come out!”

“Enjoy yourselves, Cao Family.” Ye Fan appeared, standing in the distant sky. He no longer concealed his aura. Those aboard the mothership could now detect him on their scanners.

“Ahhh…” The Cao Family members were driven to madness with rage, yet were utterly helpless.

“You bastard, I will never let you go. I’m going to grind your bones to powder and scatter the ashes!” Cao Lin’s features contorted beyond recognition. She no longer looked like a noblewoman — her eyes blazed with murderous hatred, and she screamed like an evil spirit, her hair flying wild.

“Charge! Get out of here!” The three motherships deployed their light screens and rocketed skyward at maximum speed, desperate to break free of this terrifying zone.

What was an Ancient Great Sage? Once, they had stood undefeated beneath the heavens. Though their formations had long since fallen into disrepair, once ignited and transformed into an ocean of destruction, they were terrifying beyond imagining.

All three motherships had sustained devastating damage. They could no longer spare any attention to protect the surrounding warships and could barely manage their own escape, struggling frantically to get free.

This was a catastrophe. The sky was thick with warships destroying themselves within the formation, exploding one after another in the Great Sage’s radiance — becoming a vast, all-consuming disaster.

To say the sky was drenched in blood would not even begin to capture the horror.

No blood blossoming through the air, no tears, no wails of anguish — only warships meeting their end. Each detonation claimed a group of powerful warriors. Yet in Ye Fan’s eyes, this great calamity bloomed merely like fireworks. Not a ripple stirred within him. He watched in quiet silence.

BOOM!

At last, one mothership exploded — making this catastrophe all the more staggering. Every important member of the Cao Family’s direct bloodline aboard that ship perished entirely, body and soul obliterated. Not a single one escaped.

From underground, two true dragons surged forth — one black, one white — stretching tens of thousands of zhang in length, overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Their dragon scales glittered with a metallic sheen, their might utterly astonishing.

These were the two main dragon veins beneath the earth. They had transformed into the yin and yang energies of the Source Heaven Forbidden Formation, grinding to dust everything in their path — like an autumn wind sweeping away fallen leaves, reducing warship after warship to rubble.

In the end, only one mothership managed to rocket skyward and flee for its life, not pausing for even an instant. It abandoned Xianyu Star entirely, rocketing away toward the Eternal Main Star.

The fleet of warships had been annihilated. The mountain range lay in ruins as far as the eye could see, swept clean and flattened. Metal fragments were strewn everywhere, and columns of dark smoke rose in every direction.

One mothership had fled. One mothership had been destroyed. And one mothership lay shattered and fractured in four pieces, plummeting to the ground below.

The Great Sage’s runes had been consumed and extinguished. The Source Heaven Forbidden Formation had likewise dissipated. The dragon veins returned to stillness. Ye Fan, like a demon god, strode into this wasteland — where not a single blade of grass remained standing for tens of thousands of li in every direction.

He offered no words. He opened with the Golden Divine Treasury secret technique — an indiscriminate attack — driving it through the several thousand zhang of wreckage that was all that remained of the mothership, shattering it to pieces once more.

Many people inside had not died, but all had been critically wounded. They crawled out from the ruins of the broken mothership, coughing up great mouthfuls of blood, struggling to move.

“You came here in full force. Was this the outcome you were after?” Ye Fan asked.

“You…” Several of the important figures were so enraged that their wounds tore open, and they vomited blood again in great gushing mouthfuls.

One woman among them screamed herself hoarse, her eyes blazing with a terrifying intensity as she cursed Ye Fan at the top of her lungs. It was Cao Lin.

“There’s nothing worth saying. I’ll send all of you on your way. With so many warships lost, I imagine the Cao Family will be quite heartbroken.”

Ye Fan made his move. He unfurled his phenomenon. Boundless radiance surged up, submerging this entire place. Screams and cries rang out one after another from every direction.

When silence fell at last, nothing remained. Even the wreckage of the mothership had been reduced to fragments and scraps. The ground was bare and stark — the primitive mountain range, the base, all of it had vanished without a trace.

The sky brightened with the light of day. The dark night had passed. Morning clouds rose on the horizon. The great wilderness was tranquil. The slaughter had drawn its curtain closed.

Far away, two members of “the Divine” whispered to one another. Both were shaken. They had witnessed this battle with their own eyes, and they agreed that Ye Fan had the qualifications to enter “the Divine” — perhaps even to become one of its core members.

“Brother Ye, please wait!” they called out.

Yet Ye Fan did not linger. He transformed into a bolt of lightning, tore open the void, and vanished in an instant.

On that morning, Xianyu Star shook to its foundations. Two terrifying events had taken place during the night, and word of them spread across the world at the fastest possible speed.

Qi Yun had been annihilated — cut down and killed inside his own meditation island. The divine island had withered and fallen, leaving everyone petrified with shock. One had to understand — the Qi Family was the half-sovereign power of Xianyu Star, its foremost and greatest force. For members of their direct bloodline to be struck down inside their own residence was a portent of a violent storm about to arrive.

“It was… that ascetic cultivator from beyond the domain who did it. He went in alone and killed Qi Yun and all of his followers. Truly supreme in power and audacity!”

There was no concealing such things. Ye Fan had dealt the blow and departed without a backward glance — but many people had survived the previous night, and word naturally reached the outside world.

“Serves him right. Qi Yun was the cruelest and most vicious of men. Someone finally dealt with him.”

“This time he repaid kindness with treachery. The man saved Qi Meng, and in return he helped outsiders hunt him down. He deserved to die!”

All manner of voices weighed in on this incident, but on one point they were unanimous: they acknowledged Ye Fan’s power. That he dared to act in such a way was astonishing.

If that incident was a storm, then the second was a tsunami that swept across the entire star domain. The Cao Family’s three mothership fleets had been annihilated, and the news shook all of Xianyu Star’s skies.

Every single person was left slack-jawed and speechless. Those had been three mothership fleets — enough firepower to sweep through an entire star domain — yet a single person had torn them apart and shattered them, reducing them to near-total annihilation.

“Ye Fan did it. He alone destroyed that many warships — even the motherships, only one escaped. This is too terrifying!”

“I don’t believe it. One person did this? Are you certain this wasn’t a group of the most powerful cosmic warriors combining forces to destroy the Cao Family’s base? This… my God. It defies belief. It’s horrifying!”

The second incident left people’s mouths dry. It was too dreamlike — was this truly the work of a being of flesh and blood? Surely only a divine being could have accomplished this!

The Cao Family had suffered a crushing defeat, worse even than their previous losses. Three mothership fleets had been crippled, with only a single mothership making it back. For that clan, it was nothing short of a catastrophe.

There was naturally no concealing this. Many of the great powers on the Eternal Main Star came to know of it, and each and every one was left wide-eyed, finding it difficult to believe.

The Cao Family was so eaten up with regret that they could barely stand it. The whole affair felt unreal even to themselves.

“Damn it all — is that boy even human? He single-handedly destroyed our three mothership fleets?”

“A physique this powerful, an ascetic cultivator this extraordinary — you won’t see another in ten thousand years. Spare no cost to recruit him. Beautiful women, divine artifacts — let him have his pick of anything!”

On the Eternal Main Star, many great powers made exactly this decision the moment they learned the news.

In the heavens, when the Fan Clan received word, they were left wide-eyed and stunned, expressions shifting through a remarkable range.

“He has grown this powerful?” Fan Xian murmured to herself, her expression one of utter disbelief.

“He is most likely connected to the ascetic cultivator from several years ago — we can use that as a hook. Perhaps we can bring him back!” Fan Zhou said.