Aokun Strikes

 Houtu lay limp on the ground, wrapped tightly in the pale-golden cocoon of light like a moth frozen in amber.

On her world-toppling face, shock, anger, and disbelief were already set in stone; only those once-vibrant eyes, now losing their light, retained a last scrap of awareness — fixed intently on the white-clad figure leaning on his sword, swaying on the verge of collapse.

Impossible… I command the power of the earth — within this palace I am invincible.

He’s clearly spent his last breath — how could he still defeat me?

Endless regret and venom gnawed at the remnants of her consciousness, but the seal acted like an invisible shackle, pressing her power and unwillingness down into that beautiful body; not even a sliver of spirit could escape.

Not far away, Qingmu lay pierced at the shoulder in a pool of blood. In the haze of fading consciousness, he vaguely perceived Houtu’s vast, heavy aura abruptly extinguished.

A bone-deep cold, mixed with searing pain, nearly made him black out.

Houtu defeated too?!

In his mind rang Dustin’s sword that had shattered his Silence Thunder — the cold, precise gaze that had found the core regardless of his thousand vines.

This man is no ordinary swordsman!

And Xuanming, whose soul and source were now tightly bound by the “Xuanqing Seal,” although unable to move or speak, still felt tumultuous waves from his heart as water-born ruler.

He could “hear” the roar of the stone dragons breaking, feel the sudden stilling of the earth-vein power.

Houtu’s “immovable as a mountain” had actually been broken?!

He recalled how his near-immortal water body had, under that strange single finger, been instantaneously severed from the world-water source — a horror beyond imagining.

What kind of seal is that? One that can lock and isolate one’s origin?

He had thought Dustin merely a consummate swordsman; now he realized the other’s grasp of law, spirit, and the essence of energy likely far exceeded their expectations.

Atop the dais, Aokun finally moved.

He did not use any dazzling footwork — simply, like a mortal, he stepped down the white-jade stairs one step at a time.

Yet with each footfall, the impossibly hard, spirit-imbued white-jade tiles beneath his feet did not crack but were as if erased by an invisible force, reduced to the finest dust and vanishing without sound.

It was not a display — it was the materialization of his fury and the boiling killing intent. That terror had become an annihilating field: wherever he trod, all things returned to ruin.

He stopped in the center of the hall, ten zhang from Dustin.

To him, that distance was the thin line separating life and death.

Aokun’s eyes were like an ancient, unthawing black ice with a ghostly fire burning within — cold as bone, yet aflame with the desire to destroy.

That gaze swept over Dustin’s paper-white, blood-splattered face, over the hand trembling slightly from exhaustion yet gripping the sword like a rock, and finally fixed on those eyes that in the face of doom remained clear, deep, without a hint of fear or confusion.

Shock and fury — a fury unlike anything before.

Qingmu’s arrogance and recklessness, Xuanming’s unfathomable trickery, Houtu’s mountain-like weight — these three had been Aokun’s carefully chosen and trained right-hand pillars across his long years, the foundation maintaining Penglai Palace’s order and power.

Now, a kid of uncertain origin — obviously weaker in cultivation — had, single-handedly, toppled them one after another.

This was no longer mere provocation; it was trampling Aokun’s absolute authority, the cruel unveiling of the long-cherished immortality dream they had built upon the Xulong (ruin-dragon) power!

This man must die!

His pure power, unreal for mortals; his uncanny swordsmanship; that unheard-of sealing technique — none of it could be left.

But if, before his death, Aokun could peel away and devour his origin, perhaps he could ascend yet higher.

A sliver of ultimate greed, like a serpent, coiled around the towering killing intent and crystallized into a soul-freezing cold.

“Dustin!” Aokun spoke. His voice no longer summoned the roar of law; instead it carried a silence that swallowed all other sound. “I will grant you one last grace.”

He extended a hand, palm upward. In it appeared a coil of dark-golden flame and a blade of platinum-white radiance, twisting and clashing, emitting a hair-raising hiss.

The dark-golden flame seemed able to burn away the soul; the white-platinum blade seemed able to slice through law.

“Kneel and offer your soul-mark, swear an eternal servitude. For your past rebellions I will show mercy — even grant you a thread of true dragon-origin, so you may enjoy our undying bliss.”

He paused; the icy tone in his voice seemed to freeze the very space. “Otherwise, body and spirit will be annihilated; your true soul will shatter and sink into void forever.”

This was the final judgment.

Aokun’s unhidden killing intent — like ten thousand fathoms of black ice crushing down — was enough to break any whose mind was not iron. - Marinien