The moment that catastrophic pillar of world-destroying thunder collided with the shattered iron head of Severed Head, the downpour hanging over the mountain pass did not merely fall—it instantly vaporized.
A blinding, expand-and-collapse bubble of superheated atmospheric pressure erupted at the point of impact. Millions of falling raindrops within a three-hundred-foot radius were converted in a fraction of a millisecond into a roaring wall of pure, blinding white steam. The sound that followed was not a thunderclap; it was a localized spatial rupture, a terrifying, dry, metallic screech that tore through the eardrums of every mortal kneeling in the mud.
CRACK—!
The bedrock beneath Gu Yao’s boots surrendered first. Unable to sustain the astronomical kinetic tonnage descending from the heavens, the jagged mountain stone exploded outward in a violent spray of pulverized shrapnel. Gu Yao’s legs were driven straight down into the earth, sinking past his shins, past his calves, until he was buried to the knees in the fractured crust of the mountain pass.
Across his exposed torso, the skin stretched to its absolute structural limits. The violent shockwave sent a crimson wave of atomized blood spraying from his pores, painting his chest and shoulders in a glistening, boiling mist. But deep inside his spinal column, something far more horrifying was taking place.
The second Immortal-Locking Nail—the Ju-Que Nail, the ancient cosmic spike designed specifically to seal the raw, explosive limits of his physical frame—began to emit a high-pitched, metallic whine. It was a sound like rusted steel being twisted by an irresistible force, a sound of divine malice screaming in protest against human defiance.
"FALL... BACK—!!!"
Gu Yao’s voice tore from his throat like the roar of a wounded dragon rising from the abyss. It was a sound stripped of all mortal weakness, carrying a raw, primal vibration that shook the very foundations of the valley.
He was no longer attempting to suppress the cursed spike buried in his back. In an act of supreme, suicidal madness, Gu Yao channeled the violent, annihilating kinetic energy of Lei Zhen’s descending lightning down his arms, through his shoulders, and smashed it directly backward into his own central nervous system. He was using the heavy, crushing weight of heavenly punishment as an anvil, and his own spinal column as the hammer, striking backward against the nail!
BOOM—!
A sickening, wet sound of rending cartilage, tearing flesh, and fracturing bone echoed within the depths of his thoracic cavity—a sound audible only to Gu Yao himself.
Driven by the irresistible, inward-focused blast of the thunder-strike, the second Immortal-Locking Nail was violently shaken loose. Accompanied by a spray of black, stagnant blood that hissed as it struck the air, the Ju-Que Nail was forced outward from his vertebrae by a full five-tenths of its length!
VRUMMM—!
In that miraculous, terrifying microsecond, a tide of ancient, long-forbidden vitality—a dormant ocean of dark-red blood-qi that had been entombed for fifty long, agonizing years beneath layers of rust, mud, and degradation—was instantly resuscitated within his withered meridians.
The effect was instantaneous and shocking.
His hair, which had been turned a stark, snowy white from the ruinous over-exertion of his vitality moments prior, was suddenly re-dyed in that blinding flash of light. A deep, sinister, dark-crimson hue rippled through every strand, flowing from root to tip like liquid fire. His shriveled, atrophied muscles swelled, hardening once more into slabs of dark, granite-like power. The dark-red veins across his neck and arms bulged violently, throbbing like angry, buried serpents.
Gu Yao straightened his back.
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He did not merely lift his shoulders by an inch. He did not merely adjust his stance. He stood upright—completely, flawlessly, impeccably straight! For the first time in half a century, the crippled, slouched blacksmith of Qingzhou was gone. In his place stood the unyielding pillar that had once held up the fallen sky of the Great Desolation.
"BREAK!!!"
Gu Yao unleashed a single-handed sweep of the six-hundred-pound Severed Head.
The horizontal blow carried no spiritual qi, no delicate immortal runes, and no complex elemental law. It carried only the terrifying, unadulterated weight of a resurrected titan. As the blunt, rusted iron swept through the air, it formed a tangible, crimson arc of compressed atmosphere—a shockwave of pure physical force that struck the descending pillar of purple lightning head-on.
BOOM—!!!!!!
The pillar of world-destroying thunder, capable of annihilating a Golden Core master into fine ash, was smashed into millions of harmless, drifting fragments of purple light. They scattered across the night sky like a tragic rain of dying fireflies.
High above the clouds, hovering at the center of the silver formation, First Seat Lei Zhen let out a strangled, bloody shriek.
The sudden, brutal destruction of his natal strike triggered a violent backlash through his soul-bound Thunder-God Chisel. A fountain of dark-red, organ-speckled blood burst from Lei Zhen’s mouth, painting his pristine, purple silk robes in crimson filth. He staggered backward atop his hovering platform, his face turning as white as parched paper as his spiritual aura flickered violently.
"Impossible! IMPOSSIBLE!" Lei Zhen shrieked, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, hysterical pitch. "You have been sealed for fifty years! Your blood-qi should have been completely dried up, turned to dust and slag! How can you... how can a discarded cripple still possess such monstrous power?!"
Gu Yao did not waste his breath answering the dead man’s questions.
He stomped his lead boot down into the shattered stone. The ground beneath his feet pulverized instantly into fine dust, and his body transformed into a streak of inverse red lightning. Defying gravity, defying the weight of the heavens, he shot straight into the stormy sky, tearing clean through the lightning net formed by the twelve Disciplinary Guards.
He materialized instantly before the first Disciplinary Guard. The man, possessing late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivation, stood frozen on his silver flying sword, his eyes wide with absolute, paralyzing terror.
Gu Yao’s voice rasped in his ear, sounding like the grinding of tectonic plates:
"The first strike—is to settle the debt of the three thousand living sacrifices of Qingzhou!"
BOOM!
The six-hundred-pound hammer swept horizontally. The guard had no time to channel a protective spell, no time to raise his sword, and no breath to scream. The strike hit him and his silver weapon simultaneously. Under the crushing kinetic impact, his high-grade spiritual armor buckled, his ribcage collapsed inward, and his entire physical vessel was pulverized into a blur of mangled, unrecognizable flesh and bone that rained down into the dark valley below.
Gu Yao did not pause for even a fraction of a heartbeat. Utilizing the massive recoil of the impact, he forcibly twisted his waist in mid-air, spinning his body into a blood-stained tornado of pure destruction as he locked his bloodshot eyes onto a second guard.
"The second strike—is to return the Mortal Rhyme you stole from this world!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
For the span of ten frantic heartbeats, the sky above the Watershed became a slaughterhouse.
Silver sword-light shattered continuously, falling like a tragic, bloody rain. Before the dark-red, relentless trajectory of Severed Head, the so-called elite executioners of the Disciplinary Hall were as fragile and brittle as sun-dried clay dolls before a sledgehammer. They were crushed, snapped, and blasted into bloody mist one by one, their proud flying swords reduced to bent, useless scraps of iron.
"Gu Yao! You are incinerating your own soul!" Lei Zhen screamed like a madman, retreating frantically deeper into the clouds, clutching his bleeding chest. The arrogance of a high-ranking judge had evaporated, replaced by a cold, primal terror he had forgotten for fifty years—the same terror that had dominated the Cloud-Soothed Sect when this white-haired monster reigned supreme as the First Disciple. "You will die! Pulling that nail by even another fraction... your lifespan will not last the day!"
"And so what?" Gu Yao’s voice resonated through the churning clouds, cold, heavy, and grand.
With a final, thunderous impact, the last of the twelve Disciplinary Guards was hammered clean out of the sky. Gu Yao descended from the upper air like a falling meteor, his boots slamming heavily into the muddy earth at the entrance of the mountain pass, kicking up a thirty-foot shroud of dirt and steam.
He stood tall before the three thousand mortals, his body covered in a mixture of his own fresh blood, scorched black marks, and the crimson mist of his enemies. He held Severed Head horizontally in his right hand, his white-and-crimson hair whipping in the freezing mountain gale.
Slowly, he turned his head, looking back up toward the swirling clouds.