Chapter 466: Confrontation
The Unchained Dao Lord moved with unprecedented decisiveness.
From the moment he appeared to the moment he sealed off the space Yaoguang occupied with the Void-Sealing Tower and turned it into a world like a lump of amber, the whole sequence flowed smoothly and finished quickly. Not one wasted word.
Once the space Yaoguang stood in congealed into amber, the Unchained Dao Lord immediately retracted the Void-Sealing Tower, intending to draw the entire hundred thousand-plus kilometers of void into the Dao Artifact and carry it far away with him.
It would've been like landing a single hit and fleeing fifty million kilometers, and the execution would've been perfect.
But just as he made to leave with the space Yaoguang occupied in tow, void power suddenly spread out from the region centered on Yaoguang, seeping into the congealing force all around it.
That void power did not break the spatial seal. Instead, it reinforced the amber-like space enormously, and the energy spilling outward reached even the Unchained Dao Lord himself, dragging his body in as well.
The change made him frown.
He waved a hand, and the Void-Sealing Tower's power contracted rapidly. As he drew it in, the hundred thousand-plus kilometers of void the tower had congealed contracted along with it.
Fifty thousand kilometers, forty thousand, thirty thousand, twenty thousand...
It felt as though this stretch of space had been given life and was drawing itself toward the Unchained Dao Lord's Void-Sealing Tower of its own accord.
Moreover, as the space converged on the Void-Sealing Tower, the tower’s power, the congealed void's power, and the Unchained Dao Lord’s own strength seemed to merge into a single whole, making the entire region virtually impregnable. It was as though one mass of amber had closed around another, even larger one, while all three forces were steadily being drawn into the completely solidified space.
And this space...
"A grotto-heaven?! You want to drag a Dao Lord like me inside a grotto-heaven?" A brief probe was all the Unchained Dao Lord needed to grasp Yaoguang's intent, and its sheer arrogance made him laugh in anger.
He had looked into Yaoguang before moving against him, so he knew that when Yaoguang had dealt with the fiendish cultivators of the Yin Lunar Sect, he had more than once beaten them back to their heavenly fiend origin and then refined them with the power of his grotto-heaven.
Nonetheless, refining a fiendish cultivator's heavenly fiend origin was one thing. Refining a Dao Lord?! The Great Dao origin wielded by a Dao Lord whose body was fused with the Great Dao?
Reckless did not begin to cover it. Only one word fit: Stupid!
Around then, Zhen Xuanyuan and Gu Li, the two Heavenly Dao Sect supreme elders traveling with Yaoguang, finally seemed to come to their senses and understand what was happening.
"A Dao Lord! It's a Dao Lord!"
"The Void-Sealing Tower! Is this the Unchained Dao Lord?! Impossible... At a critical moment like this, why would a Dao Lord take such a risk to move against Yaoguang? Against Yaoguang, who at most is only useful as leverage over that mysterious artifact paragon?!"
For a moment, the two supreme elders could not hold back their cries of terror and despair.
By their reckoning, many void Dao Lords envied the talents of the void Dao and wouldn't mind strangling them in the cradle, but they would only make a move when they faced no danger at all.
Something like this, as though he had deliberately waited for Yaoguang to leave the sect and had gambled on the narrow window of less than an hour while Yaoguang went out to receive the Central Heaven Dao Lord, overturned everything they could imagine.
Since when was one small Void-Shattering cultivator worth a great Dao Lord scheming over him for so long?!
"How could this be happening?! Why?!"
"If a Dao Lord really meant to act, shouldn't it be against the artifact paragon behind Yaoguang? How could..."
The two supreme elders could rack their brains and still make no sense of the Unchained Dao Lord's behavior.
Facing a Dao Lord of such power, neither Void-Shattering cultivator could muster a single thought of resistance beyond the desperate hope that the Central Heaven Dao Lord might arrive ahead of schedule and stop the Unchained Dao Lord's murder.
Resistance would've been pointless. Before a Dao Lord, a Void-Shattering cultivator meant nothing.
The lofty Unchained Dao Lord naturally cared nothing for what Void-Shattering cultivators thought.
If anything, realizing that Yaoguang actually wanted to swallow him whole into his grotto-heaven was rather amusing. An ignorant Void-Shattering cultivator, daring to resist? Youths sure were fearless. Still...
"I admire your courage," the Unchained Dao Lord said, his psychic thought circulating as he pointed an idle finger at the grotto-heaven world Yaoguang had unfolded.
A ring of void power rippled from his fingertip like a wave across water, spreading circle after circle in every direction; each ripple seemed to carry the force of ten thousand colliding stars, building layer upon layer and forming a void tsunami without precedent.
Under an impact like that, forget one Void-Shattering cultivator's grotto-heaven world; even a true Dao Artifact set before it would have been ground to powder.
Yet casual as that point truly was, the ripples did not crush Yaoguang's grotto-heaven the way he expected. They behaved more like bullets fired into water, their force dissipating completely within moments.
Not only that... Under their impact, the grotto-heaven world seemed to keep contracting, and in that same brief span it had already compressed the "amber" to less than five thousand kilometers in diameter.
"Hmm?! Something's wrong!" The Unchained Dao Lord finally realized something.
He swept his hand in front of him, releasing a Void Sword. The amber space, strong enough to withstand ripples from ten thousand stars, was almost torn open by that single cut.
But as the sword fell, another Void Sword took shape within the grotto-heaven world and met it head-on, edge against edge.
And when the two collided, the Unchained Dao Lord's Void Sword didn't simply crush the other like rotten wood.
The Void Sword coming from within the grotto-heaven broke, scattering into ripples of space that dispersed in all directions, yet it took a large portion of the Dao Lord's sword power with it.
When a second Void Sword followed immediately behind, the Dao Lord's slash was stopped outright.
That sight finally made the Unchained Dao Lord, who had assumed he could easily deal with Yaoguang with one hand, pause to think.
He pressed down with a palm and sent out another Void Sword, then drew his right hand back and began to shake the surrounding Great Dao of void, trying to seize control of it so that the powers of every other Great Dao, lacking the void to carry them, could not be manifested at all.
This was the most effective killing technique of Dao Lords, especially void Dao Lords, against any cultivator below the Dao Lord Realm. There was no countering it.
Once they stripped away the Great Dao of void, the force that carried the manifestation of every other Dao, then no matter how strong a Void-Shattering cultivator was, he could not even cast a Dao Technique. He could only stand there and be beaten to death, with no power to resist.
It was also why Zhen Xuanyuan and Gu Li could summon no will to fight the instant they realized their attacker was the Unchained Dao Lord. There was simply no fight to be had.
Yaoguang's command of the Great Dao of void, though nowhere near a Dao Lord's, had however progressed further by using the three top-tier Dao Artifacts and the nature of the human immortal path.
His Void Swords lost some power under the interference, but with the Torrent of Time driven to its limit, one Void Sword after another slashed out in an unbroken stream.
If one would not do, then two. If two would not do, then three, then four!
The Void Swords came out one after another from within the grotto-heaven, shattering the Unchained Dao Lord's attack once again. Difficult though it appeared, Yaoguang's Void Swords were ultimately still capable of contending with the Dao Lord.
"Hmm?" Seeing that Yaoguang could still release Dao Techniques even after he peeled the Great Dao of void away, the Unchained Dao Lord couldn't help unleashing his psychic thought. "Which of my peers is playing games with me? If you want to speak for this man, just say the word, and I, Unchained, will turn around and leave!"
His psychic thought pierced the surrounding void barriers like a storm and pushed steadily deeper into the grotto-heaven; within moments, it told him something. "No, that's not it. A Dao Lord's power could never be this weak, and if a void Dao Lord were drawing near, the Great Dao of void I have fused with could not have failed to warn me... Is it the Great Dao Golden Book?!"
He was not the only one thinking that. Zhen Xuanyuan and Gu Li made the same leap. They doubted that a sect master like Yaoguang could easily carry the Great Dao Golden Book out of the sect, yet nothing else explained what they were seeing, and for a moment the desire to live rose in both their eyes.
But the Unchained Dao Lord, despite his "guess", was not frightened off in the slightest. He smiled faintly instead, because he believed he had seen through Yaoguang's trump card.
"Careful and thorough indeed, keeping the Great Dao Golden Book at your side for a trip this short just to be safe. If the one who came for you today were some aged Dao Lord like Abyssal Ruins, whose psychic thought doesn't circulate quickly enough, you might really have been able to resist until Central Heaven arrived. Unfortunately, the man you've run into is me, Unchained!"
He swung his hand hard, and the resonance between his own Great Dao of space and the Void-Sealing Tower climbed to its peak. A visible ring of ripples carrying the power of a tsunami rushed out in every direction, as if to scatter every trace of congealed void around him.
Under that impact, the amber-like space thawed rapidly, and its edges—the edges of Yaoguang's grotto-heaven—even began to collapse and break apart in places.
Seizing the moment, the Dao Lord brought his hands together, and the waves rolling outward in every direction condensed into one and crashed down toward the depths of the grotto-heaven with the force of a collapsing heaven and a splitting earth.
"Whatever tricks the lot of you are playing at, get out here now!"
Under those surging waves, the entire outer shell of Yaoguang's grotto-heaven shattered. And with it, the figure hidden deep within, along with the source of the power congealing this space, was laid out clearly before the Dao Lord.
Every array that had been carefully engraved, as well as every Dao Artifact meticulously positioned, and the foundation stone bearing the whole array formation, all of it stood in plain view.
One glance was enough. The Unchained Dao Lord, who had some attainments in array arts himself, had already identified the array's tier.
"A sect-protecting grand array?!"