The Modern Martial Immortal

The moment the Void Swords came out, everyone felt with perfect clarity that terrifying sharpness, a sharpness that could cut anything that could stand in its way.

"Break it!" Divine Sovereign Yinghuo roared with his psychic thought.

The three other divine sovereigns each focused on their strongest suit—interfering, weakening, suppressing—and sent their techniques surging toward Yaoguang. Yet even so, the first Void Sword cleaved apart the Dao Technique Yinghuo had fired with his full strength, the Crimson Flame Streaming Light.

And before a second Crimson Flame Streaming Light could take form, the second Void Sword followed in the same trajectory, rushing straight in and slashing across Divine Sovereign Yinghuo's body.

A protective Dao Artifact manifested over Yinghuo in an instant and barely caught the blow, but the energy within it carried through, washing into his divine kingdom. Having already been stretched to the limit by the forbidden technique, the interior of his divine kingdom began to cave in.

Yaoguang held his rhythm, launching the next round of attacks without any apparent hurry. He even brought out the Heaven-Sealing Stele and used its power to suppress Yinghuo's Crimson Flame Streaming Light, rendering the technique's trajectory clearly visible, so that he no longer needed to rely on Void Flicker alone to evade it as he had at the start.

Under the second round of Void Swords, Divine Sovereign Yinghuo's protective Dao Artifact shattered, costing him one of his life-saving treasures. And before he could catch his breath, the next round of Void Swords was already upon him.

The offensive was simple. The tactics were plain to see. Yet that very simplicity pressed down on Yaoguang's opponents with a suffocating weight, driving them to despair.

The Void Sword was too strong! Strong enough that only the combined power of all four of them could break a single one. And Yaoguang released two per round.

It was like a war between two nations where one side deployed every economic strategy, every propaganda campaign, every tactical maneuver, and the other side had exactly one move: drop nukes. Two at a time.

Against that, the side without nukes simply had no way to fight.

By only the fourth round, Divine Sovereign Huiguang and the other divine sovereign could no longer hold on. Their forbidden techniques had left their divine kingdoms quaking, on the brink of collapse.

Seeing it, Yaoguang spared a moment to send one streak of Great Annihilation Sword Qi toward each of them, hurling both figures backward out of the battle.

As for the other two, or rather the only one who could trade blows with him at all, Divine Sovereign Yinghuo, his aura abruptly plummeted.

Yaoguang wondered at first whether it was some trick or scheme, but a closer look revealed that this divine sovereign had only been able to clash with him because of the drop of True God Quintessence he had refined. And now the True God Quintessence's energy had run dry.

I was wondering why this divine sovereign was so fierce. Aren't the divine race supposed to be weakened away from their divine kingdoms? Weakened, and he still blocked half of my attacks. If he were standing in his divine kingdom, would I need my full strength just for him alone?

Yaoguang collected himself, and the Void Swords fell again. This time, Divine Sovereign Yinghuo finally broke. His entire divine body and his divine kingdom were cleaved apart by two Void Swords in succession!

"Run! Scatter! Save yourself if you can!" the divine sovereign's psychic thought roared, laced with fury and terror alike. "We were deceived! He is far stronger than he shows! Never mind the top ten of the Dao Lord Candidate Rankings! Not even Kong Xuan or Tian Xiao are necessarily his match! Only the Destruction Divine Lord, standing within the earthly divine kingdom, could match him! I'll buy you one last chance at life. Go!"

In the next moment, he released every scrap of energy within his divine kingdom at once, becoming an incomparable wave of destruction that rolled toward Yaoguang.

With only a single thought on his part, Yaoguang activated Void Flicker and vanished from that stretch of starry sky in an instant. These days, even the self-destruction of a top Void-Shattering existence couldn't harm him in the least. At most, it cost him part of the spoils.

Meanwhile, the three remaining divine sovereigns didn't hesitate for a second, turning into three streams of light and shooting off in different directions.

"Run? Can you do that?" Yaoguang sneered.

The ways the Dao Lords wielded the Great Dao of void flowed through Yaoguang's mind. He flung his right hand high and pointed through the air at the Heaven-Sealing Stele overhead. A visible ring of void power erupted from the high-grade Dao Artifact, and in an instant the three divine sovereigns, who had been running away after having turned into streaks of light, were caught mid-flight like insects set in amber.

Then, as the void ripples faded and the power of the Great Dao of void withdrew, something else happened. Just as the sea, receding, drags loose sand along with it, the three divine sovereigns were dragged back by the receding power of the Great Dao of void.

That exquisite use of void power set all three sovereigns' souls screaming. They pushed their divine kingdoms with everything left in them, trying to dissolve into light and flee.

Yaoguang simply repeated the motion, pinning all three with void power, then used the receding force that smoothed the void as the Great Dao dispersed to pull them back again. After several rounds of this, not only had the three failed to escape the Heaven-Sealing Stele's suppression, but the two weaker sovereigns gave out first.

"No!"

Amid unwilling tremors of psychic thought, the two divine sovereigns' kingdoms collapsed completely, one after the other.

"Yaoguang, does your sect really want to start a war with the Light Divine Race, one that won't end until one side is destroyed?" Divine Sovereign Lyra asked, despair creeping in as he watched.

Yaoguang gave him an odd look. "Shouldn't your real worry right now be whether the Light Divine Race gets exterminated for provoking me? After all, even if the Dao Lord behind you comes, it won't be within the next century or two. Forget having a century... If I chose to act, every member of the Light Divine Race above the Void-Refining Realm would be dead at my hands within twenty years at most."

Divine Sovereign Lyra's pupils constricted violently. "You—"

"It's over." Yaoguang flipped his hand and followed up with four more streaks of Great Annihilation Sword Qi.

"One day, His Majesty, the great divine venerable, will avenge me—"

"How unoriginal."

Yaoguang pressed down with his empty hand. Locked utterly immobile by the Heaven-Sealing Stele, Divine Sovereign Lyra was swallowed by the Great Annihilation Sword Qi in an instant.

It had to be said that this divine sovereign's style matched the late Divine Sovereign Suoka's exactly. Even their threats were nearly word for word; both reaching for the Light Divine Race, and the Dao Lord behind it, to threaten him.

But since Divine Sovereign Suoka had already left that mark on him, to avoid being hunted by the Light Divine Race forever after, destroying the Light Divine Race and, if circumstances allowed, killing that Light Divine Venerable seemed to have become the only real solution.

That being so, he would naturally have to weaken the Light Divine Race's capacity to resist as much as possible before acting.

With a single Void Flicker, he shot straight for the divine race's warship. The ship sensed something wrong, and the Void-Refining cultivators aboard tried to fly it to safety, but how could they outrun Yaoguang?

Torrents of terrifying energy raged through that stretch of starry sky, and the battle soon came to its end.

Having cleared out every divine race member in the vicinity, Yaoguang glanced at the Dao Lord's cache, from which he had already taken everything, and didn't linger any longer. He shot toward Li Hanqiu's warship, and before long he appeared directly in its interior.

"Deputy Sect Master." Everyone saluted the moment he appeared.

"Let's go. This region will grow violent very soon. We must leave before the spatial structure breaks down. Return to the Heavenly Dao Sect," Yaoguang ordered.

"Yes." Li Hanqiu set the warship in motion at once.

The ship's detection device had in fact already detected the fluctuations from the battle.

But even energy propagating outward at light speed lagged behind Yaoguang, so much so that the fight was long over while its destructive shockwaves had yet to reach this part of the sky.

As the warship threaded back through the spatial nodes, Yaoguang reviewed the battle. This fight had been easier than the one against Divine Sovereigns Qiming and Suoka. Its intensity hadn't even matched his battles with the Heavenly Prison and Eerie Night Fiend Lords.

Yet in truth, Lyra and Yinghuo were both stronger beings than the Heavenly Prison Fiend Lord. Yinghuo, above all, was the Light Divine Race's hidden trump card, the figure they considered Perfected Lord Jinghong's equal. Even away from the earthly divine kingdom, his overall strength was likely no less than Zhen Xuanyuan's, perhaps even slightly more.

At the Void-Shattering Realm, I should have no opponents left. I can even defeat eight or ten of them together. In other words, other than Dao Lords, I now have the power to destroy a top sect single-handedly, even one guarded by a level 14 or level 15 grand array. After all, my Array Caster branch has broken through to level 16. Breaking a level 15 array is only a matter of time. Yaoguang smiled faintly, calm and confident.

Of course, in destroying a top power, how could the Dao Lords really be set aside? Having a Dao Lord was a requirement for any top faction.

And he couldn't rule out quasi-Dao-Lords like the Golden Book Venerable hiding in some of them. Paired with a level 15 array, an existence like that would give even a Dao Lord a headache.

Now, then, the spoils... Four divine sovereigns, two damaged high-grade Dao Artifacts, three intact Dao Artifacts, twelve damaged ones...

Tallying the battle's loot, Yaoguang turned his psychic mind to the glass treasure tree in his mental world.

The Merchant branch did surprisingly well too?

As he mused, all the energy accumulated in the Daemon Hunter and Merchant branches poured into the Dao Integration branch. Under the infusion, the branch grew a little, at a sluggish pace, and then... nothing.

Yaoguang fixed his attention on the progress figure still sitting at one ten-thousandth, and frowned slightly.

"That should have added about four hundred-thousandths."

𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

Of those four hundred-thousandths, the four divine sovereigns accounted for roughly 0.0025%, and the remaining 0.0015% came from the two ruined high-grade Dao Artifacts and the assorted lesser ones.

Too little. Yaoguang sighed.

But then something occurred to him. A Dao Lord's power was vast beyond measure; hundreds or thousands of Void-Shattering cultivators joining forces might not be able to stand against a single Dao Lord...

On the North Sea Star alone, there were perhaps a thousand, and for sure no less than eight hundred Void-Shattering cultivators.

At the rate at which he gained experience, Yaoguang calculated that a little over a hundred thousand Void-Shattering cultivators would provide enough experience to complete the progress of the Dao Integration stage. That was almost managing to advance a thousand kilometers in a day

Looked at that way, it isn't that much. The question is whether the returns diminish as my cultivation rises.

Yaoguang considered this, then sank his psychic mind into the information carried by the new four hundred-thousandths of progress. With luck, this progress would teach him something about the actual cultivation method.