Jared shattered Sheldon''s hand with a single punch. He did not pause.


    The air rippled and, in the blink of an eye, he emerged before Sheldon, whose face still froze in stunned disbelief.


    Before that disbelief could even sharpen into fear, Jared''s hand whipped back and came forward in a blur.


    The p was so fast it outran the speed of spiritual sense. Chaos-forged celestial power intertwined with the blood of the Dragon along his palm-quiet power, mountain-breaking power-capped by the faint, terrible majesty of the dragon''s own


    will.


    Crack!


    The sound-clear as crystal, loud as thunder-detonated above the battlefield''s charred earth.


    The noise felt personal. Every onlooker flinched as though the blow hadnded on the marrow of their own souls.


    Sheldon flew sideways like a rag doll snatched by a storm.


    Half his face ballooned, bruising to indigo in an instant; a livid handprint branded his cheek. Teeth—slick with ck demon blood—sprayed from his mouth in a grisly arc. He tumbled through the smoky air, mmed into the scorched ground, and skidded to a halt inside a shallow crater while dust boiled up around him.


    Coughing up another mouthful of blood, he tried to rise. Strength deserted him. Humiliation, sudden and absolute, churned his viscera until darkness pricked at the edges of his vision. He lifted his swollen face. In those eyes swam confusion, outrage, terror—and the dead nkness of a man whose world had just crumbled around him.


    He—Sheldon Soulsby-lord of the Infinite Soul Demon Sect, a Level Seven Heavenly Immortal who had terrorized this ce for ten millennia-had just been pped.


    pped in public by a mere Level Seven Human Immortal, and in front of tens of thousands of disciples from both sects, right under the nose of his mortal enemy, Linden Cloudridge of the Mystic Sky Sword Sect.


    It was a disgrace. An unheard-of disgrace. A disgrace for the ages.


    For one scorching heartbea


    interests, ancient


    vendettas everything was drowned beneath the tidal wave of shame. His mind emptied, leaving only the sting on his cheek and the echo of that terrible p.


    Silence swallowed the battlefield. You could have heard a pin drop.


    Infinite Soul Demon Sect disciples and Mystic Sky Sword Sect cultivators alike froze where they stood, eyes wide, mouths hanging open, statues carved from shock.


    They stared first at Sheldon-groveling like a beaten cur-then at the young man floating above the crater, green robe fluttering, expression calm as though he had merely dusted off his hands.


    Linden worked his throat. An odd numbness tingled along his own cheek, a phantom echo of the blow.


    His gaze toward Jared no longer held guarded respect. Somewhere behind his eyes, a thin de of fear began to glint.


    A collective shiver rippled through the onlookers. Someone


    whispered barely daring to


    breathe that the young man before them was nothing short of monstrous His strength felto unfathomable, and his willingness to act without the faintest restraint


    made each bystander wonder


    whether any rule, any limit, could


    ever hold him back.


    Jared stood on the broken


    gstones with his hands sped loosely behind his back. His white sleeves fluttered in the mountain wind like torn banners as he looked down at Sheldon who was struggling to push himself off. ground-humiliated, shaken, eyes darting in panic. Jared''s voice slid across the air as cold as a de gliding over ice.


    "That p," he said in a tone so frosted it seemed to burn, "was delivered for the disciples of Rockhold Gorge who died defending the Myriad Beast Sect, and for every innocent soul your duct tortured, harvested, or fed to its furnaces."