Chapter 85: The Evil God Clan

The instant the two supersonic humanoid monsters burst from beneath the ground, every instrument that could see them—satellites, remote sensing arrays, high-altitude drones, and even human scouts—was inexorably drawn to the brawl they had unleashed. In that moment, every practitioner of the energy arts across the globe who had authority, access, or even a rumor in time was silently watching this place.

Watching—

Measured against the old ages, this was nothing less than two true gods of humanity trading blows in pure flesh-and-blood combat.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Blue Yi and Golden Lion twisted and tangled together as they shot upward; in that instant, the air shocks from their supersonic forms became like invisible iron brooms beating the already shattered ground into chaos. Pale-white air waves roared back and forth, slicing and splitting the soil into yet more deep cracks.

The ground camp that had been built as a decoy for sound and distance, already ruined when the two beastlike bodies fought beneath it, was now flattened outright. Anything man-made in their wake was turned into gray dust, leaving only heat-heavy air that could ignite dry grass.

Their cataclysmic clash could be heard clearly from thousands of meters away.

Ji Ning and Zhang Shouzheng had withdrawn early, watching from afar this cruel spectacle of the two greatest energy warriors on Earth tearing into each other in the middle of this hour. They were all shaken.

Had they stayed on the spot, as soon as Golden Lion and Blue Yi burst forth from the soil they would have been caught in the blast and wounded. The Black Corps they had only just managed to cultivate with such care would likely have been wiped out in a blink. It was unthinkable to intervene unless absolutely necessary.

No one, it seemed, wanted to step into this combat.

Even certain members of the Oceanic Civilization who had triggered this disaster were suddenly swallowing hard, cold sweat beading on them without permission.

They had once believed Golden Lion was already strong enough—powerful enough to level nations and crush armies. With his altered form and force, he should have been a true god of this age, and on his back alone they expected he could eliminate the future world-breaker. Under the old timeline, a practitioner of Golden Lion’s level would not have appeared before the Third Trial.

Yet here, Lan Yi stood like an unyielding pillar and answered their assumptions with a savage, ringing counterblow.

Invincible.

The word seemed written on his face. Even when facing a rival whose power exceeded the age, he showed not the slightest sign of backing down; he met him with the most unbending, the most ferocious violence.

A thousand exchanges passed in an instant of impact. To the senses, those thousand blows felt like one single strike. By then the battle had become beyond the imaginable.

Lan Yi had already pushed his energy output to full overload. Colorless lightning flashed from his eyes, and under the strain of his supersonic body, demon-subduing chains and palm-lightning wrapped around him, dragging impossible serpentine arcs of electricity through the sky.

He looked like a thunder champion descended from heaven.

In the screaming air he grappled and refined the roaring Golden Lion. The lion, all burning gold, had fused roar, impact blows, slaps, and rams into one continuous storm; each supersonic collision sprayed wide sheets of gold and silver-blue light like liquid fire through the air.

No one could approach. No one dared.

If any outsider tried to get near, he’d be grabbed and annihilated in an instant.

Whether it was Lan Yi’s electromagnetic martial art or Golden Lion’s berserk mass, both had already crossed beyond ordinary thresholds into true savagery.

Five minutes after they rose from the ground, Golden Lion could no longer remember how many times he had hammered out blows, how many times he had smothered Blue Yi’s old warface in blazing gold, trying to pin him down. None of it worked.

The reason was simple.

Even at supersonic speed, Golden Lion could only shatter chunks of air and loiter in it; he had no way to truly fly.

Lan Yi, however, had learned to hover in the Artificial God World. After gaining Earth-Bane and joining his vital-cluster combinations, his speed of aerial drift improved dramatically. With strong electromagnetic field projection, he could even stay supersonic for sustained intervals without sustaining damage.

When he and Golden Lion brawled through the air, Lan Yi always seemed light—almost unweighted.

When Golden Lion’s fist landed, when the two crashed together, Lan Yi would drift far away, shedding much of the ruinous force, forcing Golden Lion to waste even more energy simply to stay close.

That was why, with preset commands embedded in the Azure Radiance network and body-speed techniques beyond one-and-a-half times ordinary supersonic range, Lan Yi could block and counter without a flaw, matching the four-times-supersonic beast with astonishing rhythm.

Without flight, raw power eventually ran out.

Visibly, in the rolling thunder of silver-white lightning, Lan Yi pressed Golden Lion’s blazing gold flashes downward, slowly and relentlessly. The demon-subduing chains and palm-lightning, under the Thunder-Soldier Field, drove the caged giant toward the ground as if a god of thunder were driving stakes to hammer him back beneath it.

Golden Lion felt it keenly.

His instant path-techniques only made him flinch. They hurt, but could not truly wound him.

Still he was frustrated.

Obviously something in the very fabric of the moment had shifted. Golden Lion still could not take Lan Yi quickly down, while Lan Yi was preparing to fulfill his promise and end this Oceanic-beast in one breath.

“Roar!”

At last, pressed to the ground, Golden Lion planted both feet and struck. What followed was a catastrophic quake stomp, scattering stones in every direction.

The next moment his four-times-supersonic surge erupted with terrifying force. A fist, a skull-sized impact, even boulders the size of a man flew in dense arrays after another, each one hurled at Lan Yi wrapped in gold light and supersonic force.

It was not a bullet, but it was more frightening than bullets and cannon shot together. You could not control it with field effects; only hard resistance or dodging could endure it.

“You can fly, can’t you?
Then fly!

I’m four times faster than you.
You fly? I’ll take aim from the ground and pick you apart as a moving target!”

What Golden Lion unleashed now was a stone cannon. The larger its mass, the more lethal it became to Lan Yi. The gold sheen on it was his inner state made weaponized: a trick of perception that made each incoming mass of rock seem as huge as the sky-breaker it was.

Lan Yi had no room to store energy for a major release.

He went down like a pillar of weight falling, dragging lightning traces, tearing through a dozen layers of screaming debris, and crashing once more into Golden Lion from among the shattered stones.

The impact sounded like a mountain breaking.

To onlookers it appeared as if he had abruptly teleported to earth.

After that titanic exchange, both warriors finally had a breath to recover and think. Their bare upper bodies, on both sides, showed uneven but unmistakable injuries.

Lan Yi had fewer wounds. Yet he looked less than human. Across his upper torso were several centimeter-wide rips. From those tears leaked not blood or fractured bone, but broken, disordered white filaments. Beneath them, one could faintly see a flowing, luminous Azure Radiance mesh.

For all its theoretical endurance—designed to absorb hundreds of tons of wild impact through pre-set overclocking—even this body now suffered unavoidable damage. Damage taken in combat could not be mended there and then; it demanded calm, still space in which to be rewoven.

The Azure Radiance stirred and contracted.

Cracked wounds drew shut as if stitched by invisible hands.

It was only a surface recovery. Leave it to open again and the propulsion lattice might trigger chain reactions, collapsing in cascading failure.

Golden Lion appeared to be better off on the surface. He had no torn flesh wounds. Instead, he carried broad blackened scars, many of them burned deep.

Even though his war-body could absorb technique damage by brute force, under Lan Yi’s needle-precise Dao-style coordination he still suffered unavoidable necrotic deterioration. Lan Yi had tried several times to bait him into a self-detonation of thunder and scored genuine internal damage.

Still, as burning gold light enveloped him, Golden Lion’s wounds—blue and his own—were rapidly mended.

Whether it was true mending or only temporary concealment, only he knew.

From the roar of their clash—like a supersonic fighter screaming through low altitude—to the sudden quiet, the scene shifted from wild violence to oppressive silence. The air itself had turned heavy. It was no longer mere noise; it was a field of dread waiting to split open.

There were no insects here, no wild animals.

Only the air spoke of danger, as if a mountain of knives and seas of fire were ready to erupt between them at any instant.

“Lan Yi, it seems you cannot kill me in one breath,” Golden Lion taunted, though he knew he knew the answer too. Even in his own mind, he admitted his greater speed still failed him.

To stop a disciplined master, a practitioner with full Dao-theory can still awaken near-mutant force even in sudden battle.

“The state of your Heart-vision is exposed. Still have an ace card?”

It was no concern at all to him if Golden Lion sought to buy time. That pause was enough for Lan Yi to repair his preset network.

“I do. But if I use it, I may destroy the Prime World. That was never my purpose.”

“Your Dao arts now—are they the prerequisite for the Titan Warframe? Is it mass attraction, or Iron-Bone Metamorphosis?”

Lan Yi remembered: Golden Lion never truly relied on vital-cluster powers. His clusters were mostly reinforcement and muscle support.

To expect stupidity or a gaping weakness was naive. He had ways hidden too.

By contrast, Lan Yi seemed to have exposed all his trumps. Whatever remained would not suit this ferocious supersonic melee.

What a headache, then. Even an old fiend like Lan Yi would curse at a foe who insisted on pure bodily force. If Golden Lion truly drew on Dao arts now, Lan Yi would surely force him to stop acting like such a fool.

“Do you really think you cannot destroy this Prime World?”

For the first time, a rare curve of humor crossed that severe, fierce face.

He looked almost delighted.

To finally fight without restraint, to trade blows with a world-breaker—that was ecstasy.

So he would finish this battle swiftly. This was a fight to save the future. Even if the Prime World had to be lost in the exchange, he did not care; at least the endless hosts of the Artificial God World might still endure.

If it were possible, he truly did admire Lan Yi. He would have liked to keep fighting him on equal terms. But for the sake of the future, Lan Yi had to die.

“May glory ever rest upon my soil; may sacrifice preserve humanity without end.”

A split opened in Golden Lion’s palm. A red strip shot out, vanished into his mouth.

‘What is that?’

For the first time, Lan Yi showed surprise beyond expectation. If he had not misread it, that strip was flesh from an evil-god bloodline tied to the Artificial God World—
not simply from Golden Lion’s own passage there. Another top-tier energy adept must have made a major sacrifice, returning with this flesh and gifting it to Golden Lion to stop this impending extinction.

To keep the world from ending—

They are madder than even we imagined.

Even a patch of evil-god tissue, once implanted, could instantly convert a human life into an evil-god life. Such a life was ravenous, ferocious, and unnaturally powerful, and relished feeding on humans. Compared with that lineage, the Hundred-Eyed Giant was merely a roadside nuisance.

“Lan…!”

Two lines of blood tears streamed down his chiseled, axe-cut face. The first half of Golden Lion’s voice was human; the second was no longer human at all.

He was furious.

Furious that Lan Yi had not spoken to stop the extinction. Furious at the ruin of ten thousand living things. Furious that he once failed to hold Lan Yi back. Furious, too, that this warrior would not become a friend.

“Come then, unspoken friend, the purest warrior-practitioner this world has ever known.
If I cannot save this world from your hand, then let it burn. Let it burn me and him alike, and with its flames I will send you to endless hell.”

“Fight, then!”

No longer Golden Lion now—the Blood Lion.

His body ran crimson, as if dipped in blood. His eyes were no longer human eyes, but the evil-god signature: vertical red pupils, and between them hung a hunger for human flesh so ancient it felt predatory by nature. They are a dominant caste by birth.

If they devour a human, they devour soul and will together, as surely as food and digestion.

At the mere sight of those blood-colored demonic forms, human-kind shivers all over, compelled by instinctive terror; not even skilled energy masters are exempt.

The evil-god race—an ancient, bloodthirsty species that had already engineered disasters and destroyed many houses—had arrived in this Prime World earlier than the old timeline allowed.

Everyone with eyes on the field was stunned, especially the spiritual warriors of the River Civilization.

“The Oceanic white devils! To kill Lan Yi, they’ve brought the cursed evil-gods into this world?”

Ordinarily this would be an outrage against the compact of the human race itself; in later ages, it would draw universal retribution.

No. They could not let Lan Yi fight alone now.

Most minds made the same choice instantly:

Help Lan Yi.
Kill this evil-god first.

If Lan Yi could not hold it, the creature would devour nearly all humans in this Prime World. At least after five trials, humanity might still have a chance to return.

No matter how loud the curses, no more words could touch him now.

In the instant Golden Lion became Blood Lion, Lan Yi was swallowed by a blood-red pillar of force. At the moment the evil-god species that excels at tearing through humans took over, it instantly identified who among the assembled elites was hardest to deal with, and without hesitation loosed a red high-energy particle stream straight at him.

One strike could crack a fifty-meter wall, raze more than ten city blocks, and flood the air with temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees.

It was like a scene from science fiction.

A single red shaft in Lan Yi’s direction, and the sky shifted in color for an instant. The stream pierced beyond him, and far above, a blazing mushroom cloud rose at once.

The firelight of that cloud slowly swallowed the red radiance, turning everything black.

That was the evil-god’s signature method: high-energy impact combining momentum and thermal force, scalable from street-level ruin to star-level burn. In their tongue it is called the True Red Divine Wave. Among energy masters, it is better known as the God-Ending Severance, for many who claimed dominion over gods in the Artificial God World had been butchered by it.

And yet this was only one of the ways an evil-god ends humans.

Its real terror is elsewhere: a near-flawless blend of force, speed, destruction, and defense that only rises, layer upon layer, as blood-colored fury grows.

Behind Blood Lion now pushed out blood-tinged wings; horns broke through the brow; a spiked tail swung in the dark like a whip.

From his ever-shifting red eyes, greedy malice scanned all directions.

Where is that tender morsel?

It must be satisfying to chew.

It would never simply vanish in the True Red Divine Wave so easily.

Eat him, and I will be stronger.
Then I can eat more human flesh.

Its memory was incomplete, yet instinct ruled. Even with incomplete memory, the transformed evil-god body moved with terrifying will. It snapped its head up and glanced at the sky, where many eyes watched. It could not yet indulge this banquet too far.

This body needed nourishment: flesh and souls from the strong. Only those can truly reshape an evil-god vessel and convert raw tissue power into electromagnetic and deep-core force. With those, the material integrity of its form would harden to levels that make humans despair.

Now it had already tracked the scent of a delicious bite.

“Human—let me eat you!”

The evil-god vanished from where it stood.

Those still observing shivered. What was its speed now? It no longer mattered. It had crossed the boundary of ordinary physics. Its disappearance left no track to read, no quake signature, no burning air wake. It was a living nightmare.

With impossible motion, its vast jaws arrived at Lan Yi’s head as if distance meant nothing.

CLANG!

Teeth struck steel, and the impact produced soundwaves sharp enough to tear entrails.

In the shadow of distant rising fire, the red mouth flashed to a new position near Lan Yi again, chewing with obscene ease. Then, before everyone’s eyes, it swallowed a chunk of steel shield with a gulp, accepting it as pre-meal filler. Even a demon may enjoy a hint of trace elements before the main course.

Lan Yi watched, almost speechless, as the temporary iron barrier he had controlled was torn away in one bite.

“Human, you carry a strange taste.”

Like a tall, clawed wolf in human shape, this evil-god scratched the blazing grit with its hooked claws.

It now stood five meters tall.

Before it, Lan Yi—struck by the God-Ending Severance head-on—looked like a rag doll.

“What is it, exactly?”

“Damn it… I can’t remember.”

“I’m still too weak. My memory and power are gone too much. But it doesn’t matter—you are surely delicious. Do not resist. Stay still, and let me eat you, one bite at a time. I’ll grind you down into my own nourishment, with gratitude and fury both.”

When they play with humans, evil-gods love it.

To them, human flesh with no emotional movement is inferior stock—flat, flavorless. That is their nature, their cruelty to the marrow.

It is the kind of predator humans have always had to survive in the sea of dimensions.

“If you want it, you must take it yourself.”

Lan Yi’s emotion did not shift. He had bled with these creatures before. He knew how to use their nature.

If a human stays numb of feeling, these red man-eating fiends rarely rush to serious combat. They toy, they mock, they tease until your emotion breaks. Only then do they begin their fine feast.

Lan Yi’s condition was far from good.

Though the God-Ending Severance’s impact was ninety percent transferred away and absorbed, its high-energy particles still pierced the outer layer of Azure Radiance’s energy defense, damaging many of his vital clusters and, especially, corrupting the structure of the Azure Radiance itself.

The enemy, for its part, had already grown stronger by more than threefold. Red amplification was its normal state.

Heh. You seem to know better than most how to deal with me.

With razored claws scraping his chin, the bat-faced demon, now fully beast-thrown, examined Lan Yi as if he were a strip of spiced meat. It needed to warm that meat before he could properly savor it.

At that very moment, the blood-red evil-god stopped abruptly and shook his head once, his motion betraying the interference from Golden Lion’s fading consciousness. It could not be allowed to remain wholly comfortable in controlling the body.

“Hmm… I think I should swallow you first. Then that annoying little snack will no longer chatter.”

There was no warning. As the first word left its mouth, the creature was already at Lan Yi’s front. Its monstrous mouth stretched to its limit, and the cruel inner hook-mouth bits drove straight into Lan Yi’s body in one clean thrust, drawing him in with a wet, final sound.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, it did not pause. In greed, it immediately searched for its next target.

It had just swallowed someone, and that someone—

That could not have been the world’s strongest human in this age.

Lan Yi had been eaten alive.

The future that was to end the world was now stopped.

Yet the gathered energy masters did not cheer.

A terrible pity settled over them. The two currently strongest in battle—Lan Yi and Golden Lion—were now both food in an evil-god mouth. How were they to answer this calamity?

If they did nothing, within a month

the creature would have enough time to chase down the first wave of top-tier practitioners one by one and eat them in eager procession.