Faced with these monsters that slaughtered humans without a shred of reason, any decent person would be driven to absolute fury, and Li Ke was no exception.
Yet, this intense anger wasn't anywhere near enough to make him completely lose his analytical focus. To his surprise, Tengen Uzui—who had looked on the absolute verge of an unhinged breakdown just a microsecond ago—unexpectedly managed to maintain a remarkably cold, disciplined exterior.
"This is highly likely a calculated trap," Tengen ground out through his tightly clenched teeth, laying out his tactical deduction. The sheer, suffocating bitterness in his voice stemmed precisely from this suspicion, because if his calculus held true, the tragic weight of their reality became infinitely more depressing.
It would mean the desperate warning carved into the dirt was a deliberate piece of psychological warfare!
Those transformed Demon Slayer Corps members had already functionally turned traitor!
Even if their core souls had been forcefully rewritten against their baseline will, the undeniable fact remained that their sacred honor and unyielding sacrifices had been utterly desecrated and weaponized against humanity!
Analyzing their impending deployment through that grim lens, the probability of them marching into an ambush skyrocketed.
"Regardless of the risk, we still have to advance into the upper slopes," Li Ke stated coolly, rolling the hilt of his newly upgraded magic greatsword in his grip. He refused to believe for a single second that a massive mountain could be so thoroughly terraformed into an alien swampland in a matter of days purely by a standard pack of roaming monsters. There was mathematical certainty that some manner of interdimensional artifact, a localized focal point, or a core nexus was actively radiating this corruption—at least, that was exactly how the blueprints were laid out in every fantasy novel and comic book he had ever read.
Furthermore, the carved warning explicitly noted the presence of an entity designated as the "Black Mother." A title like that screamed it was a high-value threat that needed to be systematically executed on the spot, an objective he could carry out with absolutely zero psychological burden.
"If you don't step directly into the tiger's den, you'll never harvest the tiger's cubs," he muttered the ancient military proverb.
The exact microsecond the words left his lips, a roaring wave of Dragon Fire violently erupted across his skin, with a secondary thermal shroud instantly coiling around Tengen's frame to shield him from the airborne neurotoxins. The primordial heat delivered a stinging, intense wave of physical friction, but Tengen utilized his rigorous shinobi conditioning to completely master the pain without flinching, while Li Ke had long since grown desensitized to cellular trauma.
Transforming their kinetic output into high-speed blurs, the duo launched into a furious charge, following the exact trajectory where the translucent green horde had evaporated into the fog.
Li Ke completely stripped away any remaining restraint, aggressively unleashing a scorched-earth policy as they advanced.
Earlier, he had deliberately held back his destructive output out of concern for any surviving human slayers trapped on the slopes. But now that those scouts had been irrevocably mutated into translucent thralls, he understood with absolute clarity that there was zero possibility of them ever returning to the human paradigm.
Under those parameters, launching a massive forest fire to aggressively shrink the territory of these alien bio-forms was the absolute most logical move!
Mixing high-yield Dragon Fire alongside massive volleys of conventional elemental heat, Li Ke continuously bombarded the dense foliage, triggering a raging, apocalyptic inferno that expanded across the ridges at extreme velocity. This corrupted mountain was undoubtedly teeming with untold thousands of grotesque, hidden anomalies, but subjected to his relentless thermal bombardment, even the most abstract, nightmare entities were forcefully ignited and cooked down to ash.
Viewed from a high aerial vantage point, Li Ke's rapid ascent resembled a massive, blinding pair of flaming wings slicing a fiery path straight up the mountain. And by some miraculous stroke of universal luck, while he had provided the initial ignition, the force that truly allowed this inferno to violently consume the alien biome was a sudden, roaring wind.
A localized atmospheric gale violently coalesced around their path, yet it was masterfully channeled so that it didn't create a localized vacuum or starve Li Ke and Tengen of oxygen. Instead, the wind acted as a massive accelerant, driving the sapphire and crimson flames to aggressively purge the terraformed creep-carpet.
"Talk about an obscenely absolute, dominant methodology," Tengen muttered, casting a completely awed look at the endless torrents of fire erupting from Li Ke's position.
Granted, the various Breathing Styles practiced by the Corps possessed a myriad of mystical, reality-bending properties—with Water Breathing and Flame Breathing fully capable of manifesting spectacular, supernatural feats of martial power. But when measured against the unadulterated, apocalyptic scale of Li Ke's elemental manipulation, their sword-arts weren't even operating in the same stratosphere.
"There's no other logical way. Fighting deep inside an enemy's optimized biome is a fool's errand," Li Ke remarked, keeping his grip tight on his newly upgraded greatsword as his eyes continuously mapped the perimeter.
In his opinion, the structural threat on this mountain was exactly the kind of tactical bottleneck that should be solved by massive naval artillery bombardment or carpet-bombing. Given the baseline durability of these alien freaks, carefully rototilling the entire mountain with high explosives would wrap up the whole operation in an afternoon.
Since he lacked heavy artillery, he was entirely unapologetic about weaponizing this cataclysmic, runaway forest fire instead.
Of course, pulled out of this context, launching a wildfire of this magnitude was a one-way ticket to a lifetime in a maximum-security prison. It was an unmitigated ecological disaster that no sane human should ever attempt in a civilized society.
But within the fractured parameters of this world, absolutely no one possessed the moral authority to reprimand him. To the desperate population of this era, as long as he could systematically slaughter the entities devouring their families, he was completely authorized to do whatever it took to clean the slate.
This was an ironclad, undeniable reality, leaving Li Ke with zero psychological guilt or hesitation.
"Besides, executing a total burn aggressively shrinks the absolute pressure we have to face on the ascent."
Staring at the endless swarms of glittering golden World Energy motes flocking toward his skin from all directions, Li Ke's gaze toward the receding silhouettes of the transformed scouts turned increasingly relaxed.
Because the roaring inferno was actively doing the heavy lifting for him, the tactical situation was incredibly favorable. The cosmic horrors being cooked alive in the brush were continuously feeding a near-infinite stream of systemic energy directly into his muscles. Backed by a self-sustaining loop of this caliber, a battle of attrition stood absolutely zero mathematical chance of breaking his line. If push came to shove, he could comfortably lock into a high-intensity raid boss engagement that dragged on for days at a time!
Yet, as the fire relentlessly consumed the slopes, Li Ke perceived through his Haki that the movement patterns of the translucent green scouts had become jarringly erratic—borderlining on a hyper-speed, physics-defying glitch.
Even driving their mounts at an unyielding sprint, the horses were rapidly losing the ability to keep pace with their velocity.
Fortunately, the core hive of the anomaly didn't leave them wandering for long, breaking through the dense smoke and locking directly into their field of vision.
To put it accurately, an object of this colossal scale and blinding luminescent output was completely impossible to overlook under any universal parameters.
A golden Holy Grail.
Resting at the center of the massive clearing where the uniform-clad thralls had clustered rose a titanic, radiant golden chalice, continuously venting heavy plumes of glowing chartreuse mist and neon green light into the atmosphere.
Structurally, it was modeled perfectly after an ornate wine goblet.
But anchored right beside this mystical vessel loomed a biological nightmare that Li Ke found thoroughly challenging to articulate.
The creature possessed a flawless, beautifully sculpted jawline, but her physical features stopped entirely at her nose. Rising from the upper half of her skull were untold thousands of squirming, segmented tentacles that intricately braided themselves against the massive appendages venting from her occipital lobe, forming a colossal, writhing "hairdo" that pulsed with energy.
Her lips were remarkably elegant, an aesthetic that would have been profoundly seductive if her jaws weren't lined with concentric rings of razor-sharp, needle-like fangs.
Her silhouette was undoubtedly that of a peak, magnificent woman. Her bust was exceptionally well-developed; even stacked against the absolute top-tier beauties Li Ke had encountered across multiple dimensions, her assets easily ranked in the highest tier.
Except for one jarring structural modification: her torso—stretching continuously from her collarbones down to her lower abdomen—was entirely encrusted with rows of meticulously arranged, lactating breasts.
Her arms and hands were merely elongated, slender limbs terminating in obsidian, razor-sharp talons, a baseline layout that could almost be categorized as normal.
But her lower extremities were deeply disappointing. While her thighs featured a perfectly toned, athletic contour, her ankles violently fused into massive, cloven hooves that split the earth.
Surrounding her throne were multiple stone slabs carved with archaic, geometric patterns. Strapped flat across the central altar was a completely stripped, broad-shouldered man boasting a wild mane of bright, flame-colored hair.
His thoracic and abdominal cavities had been crudely pinned wide open, and the vast majority of the skin across his frame had been methodically flayed down to the raw muscle tissue. Yet, against all biological logic, his vital systems were actively being forced to stay alive. The exact millisecond Tengen Uzui's eyes locked onto the mutilated warrior, his pupils violently dilated into microscopic pinpricks.
"Kyojuro!!"
Tengen roared, unbalancing his footing as he ripped his twin backup blades from his sash. Every ounce of his shinobi conditioning dissolved into pure, desperate fury as he charged to hack the aberration to pieces and tear his closest comrade from the altar.
But the exact microsecond his war cry split the air, a barrage of high-intensity, violet laser beams violently erupted from the writhing mass of the monster's tentacle hair.
The projectile velocity was so incredibly high that even Li Ke's advanced sensory system failed to formulate a timely countermeasure. Under his helpless gaze, the protective thermal film of Dragon Fire he had woven around Tengen was cleanly perforated. Unable to execute a defensive maneuver, Tengen was struck by the concentrated violet energy, falling instantly with a devastating injury that knocked him from the fight!
The battlefield was stained with the consequences of the hit. Collapsed and silent, Tengen was unable to move, and within that same breath, the absolute perimeter of the laser barrage expanded to trap Li Ke right within its kill zone!
Li Ke executed a desperate, high-speed dismount, rolling clear of his saddle right as his horse was struck and overwhelmed by the violet lasers.
Yet, even while tracking his emergency landing, his arms were already aggressively executing a counter-strike, swinging the newly upgraded Blade of the Family toward the throne.
The crescent thermal wave sliced clean through the superheated air, crashing dead-center into the strange aberration. The absolute heat of his Dragon Fire instantaneously ignited her outer layers, sending a wave of blistering damage across the monster. Li Ke maximized his Observation Haki to its absolute limit, desperately trying to map out the micro-contractions of her form to predict her next mechanical shift.
But right at that exact split second, the translucent green thralls who had previously evacuated the perimeter erupted right out from the soil beneath his feet, transforming the clearing into a high-speed ambush!
Li Ke didn't dare hesitate. Activating his raw physical attributes, he utilized a burst of high-speed footwork to cleanly dodge a lunging tackle from a transformed scout. In the very next fraction of a second, the thrall detonated, unleashing a pressurized wave of caustic green fluid that sought to smother his entire position.
Without wasting a single microsecond on deliberation, Li Ke aggressively unleashed the absolute maximum parameters of his elemental reserves.
An infinite, swirling storm of true Dragon Fire erupted from his core, spinning outward in a massive thermal vortex. The blast didn't just vaporize the thralls rising from the muck; the immense physical displacement of the explosive heatwave slammed dead-center into the avatar, forcing her chassis into a heavy, unsteadily stumbling stagger that almost sent her crashing to the earth.
A torrential swarm of glittering golden World Energy motes immediately flooded into his skin, refilling his near-empty stamina reservoir. Moving through the embers like a lethal phantom, his arms channeled the raw, destructive output of his blood-qi secret technique, driving the heavy steel of his greatsword down in a monstrous, downward vertical cleave straight toward the monster's off-balance form.
Untold thousands of her writhing appendages snapped upward in a frantic defense. Yet, wrapped in a aura of blood-qi and Dragon Fire, his greatsword sheared through the bulk of the defenses, forcing a piercing, soul-shredding shriek from the creature.
The vocalization carried a powerful psychological payload, causing Li Ke's consciousness to violently fracture into a daze for a split second. Within that phantom distortion, the battlefield vanished, replaced by an overwhelming sensory overload of familiar faces and distorted memories. He saw those he cared for—Shinobu and others—calling out to him in a warm, golden haze that felt dangerously peaceful and seductive. The horrific shrieks of the monster were structurally rewritten by his own corrupted neurons to sound like voices of comfort and intense emotion.
Li Ke's cognitive processing turned deeply sluggish and confused. But the continuous, sharp stinging of the raw Dragon Fire wrapped around his own skin refused to let him drown within the illusion, shocking his central nervous system back into absolute focus!
He snapped back to reality just in time to see the goddess-like figure leap directly through the remains of his firestorm, her razor-sharp talons aligned straight with the center of his forehead.
Had his mental recovery been delayed by even a single second, the strike would have been fatal.
Acting on pure, life-or-death survival instinct, he aggressively drove his greatsword forward in a lethal, maximum-velocity thrust. Locked into an absolute clash for survival, he didn't hold back a single card, forcefully deploying every martial art, magic system, and physical empowerment in his portfolio all at once.
The raw elemental fire, the destructive blood-qi overdrive, and the crushing physical amplification of his Mana circuits fused into a singular, cataclysmic payload.
Deep within his hardwired survival memory, the forbidden archives of the Lightningbending scrolls Azula had gifted him—techniques he had previously deemed far too volatile to actively practice—reflexively unlocked under the immense pressure.
As the tip of his enchanted greatsword collided with her oncoming talons, the roaring volcanic flames wrapping the steel suddenly crackled with the first, blinding arcs of raw blue electricity!
The heavy greatsword tore clean through her chest cavity over her screeching wails, fracturing her pale, massive assets. The exact microsecond the metal shattered her anatomy, a violent, crushing wave of profound spiritual sorrow and despair exploded straight into Li Ke's mind, nearly suffocating his entire will to fight.
The pure physical durability of this creature's frame defied all standard biology. Her skin looked as soft and radiant as a young maiden's, yet it possessed a structural density and tensile strength that rivaled reinforced steel plate. Had a conventional Demon Slayer tried to trade blows with her using a standard nichirin katana, their blade would have shattered into splinters against her flesh without leaving a single mark!
Fortunately, the unrelenting, sharp sting of the Dragon Fire covering his arms broke through the mental suppressions. Driven by a surge of raw fury, he forcefully shoved his body weight forward, violently ripping his embedded greatsword sideways in a monstrous horizontal cleave that severed half her torso clean open!
"Don't you dare underestimate me!!"
Li Ke's frame continuously erupted with blistering columns of volcanic dragon flame, transforming him into a walking, apocalyptic blast furnace. Absolutely no living organism could survive stepping within his immediate perimeter. This cosmic aberration was the solitary entity capable of leveraging her distorted World Energy parameters to actively resist the raw, destructive payload of his primordial elements!
Yet, while her iron-like hide could temporarily buy her time against the exterior heat, her internal organs possessed no such structural immunity.
The moment his steel opened her midsection, her interior cavity reacted like a punctured fuel cell, violently detonating into a self-contained firestorm. Through his Observation Haki, Li Ke distinctly perceived her complex inner biology turn to fine gray ash in a single fraction of a second.
But an absolute, skin-crawling horror struck him in the next breath. Even as her vital systems disintegrated, the creature's breeding matrix forcefully accelerated its overdrive protocols, violently exploding outward to discharge untold millions of writhing parasitic maggots into the air!
The spawned maggots featured a miniature replica of her tentacle-crowned face mated with a ring of razor-sharp fangs. Judging by the sheer volume of the erupting payload, the combined mass of the parasite swarm mathematically outscaled the dimensions of the host body itself!
The flesh-eating maggots screamed as they collided head-first with Li Ke's roaring firestorm, igniting instantly. His true Dragon Fire—which completely ignored conventional laws of thermal conduction—functioned as the absolute, undisputed pinnacle of mob-clearing warfare. No matter how fast the pressurized parasites were launched from the womb, they were systematically cooked down to dust the microsecond they entered his thermal vortex!
Millions of parasites dissolved into an absolute, blinding blizzard of golden World Energy motes. Her breeding reserves completely spent, the hollowed-out avatar of the Black Mother collapsed onto the scorched earth, her alluring, curvaceous form casting a strange, lingering psychological echo. Even looking down at her athletic, sculpted hips, the absolute distortion of Li Ke's overstimulated neurons fired a chaotic, primitive impulse wondering if he should claim her flesh before the corpse went cold.
However...
The invasive delusion vanished entirely the exact second her remaining anatomy disintegrated into a massive column of golden light, scattering into the wind.
The artificially inflated lust, the suffocating cognitive brain fog, and the bizarre impulse to violate a cosmic horror completely evaporated from his consciousness.
Scanning the wider landscape through his Haki, Li Ke perceived that the thick, stubborn layer of biological creep-carpet that had resisted his standard flames—along with the entire oppressive, alien atmosphere terraforming the mountain—was rapidly dissolving into nothingness following the death of the core avatar.
An absolute torrent of golden World Energy motes aggressively surged into his body, systematically repairing the internal muscle tearing and neural fatigue caused by his chaotic, multi-system elemental burst. However, the vast majority of this monumental golden blizzard bypassed his skin, raining directly onto the scorched earth and fusing into the roaring gales of his remaining flames.
A secondary cluster of the shimmering light split away from the vortex, dynamically tracking the fallen forms of the severed Tengen Uzui and the flayed sacrificial offering, Kyojuro Rengoku.
Their severely compromised anatomies began to stitch themselves back together piece by piece under the dense, golden radiance. Yet, their baseline physical conditions manifested a stark structural contrast. Tengen fared significantly better; though his face remained completely bloodless and pale from the initial shock, his newly reattached spinal highway and core muscles possessed enough structural integrity to let him unsteadily push himself back up onto his feet.
Conversely, the Flame Hashira's flayed musculature, exposed tissue, and pinned internal organs were entirely restored to pristine condition, but the sheer physical strain of the baseline trauma forced his body to collapse straight onto the grass, completely unconscious.
The blinding blizzard of golden motes had arrived like a flash flood and evaporated just as rapidly. Before Li Ke could even fully immerse himself in the tactile sensation of the transformation, the celestial light completely vanished into the atmosphere, leaving behind an exceptionally massive, permanent enhancement woven directly into his base parameters!
This comprehensive strategic buff practically rivaled the entire systemic output he had accumulated back in the 7 Days to Die universe!
He slowly clenched his fist, feeling an absolute, boundless ocean of vital physical energy thrumming through his veins. But the upgrade didn't stop at mere physical strength. Glancing over at the panting Tengen Uzui, a sudden surge of effortless comprehension flooded his consciousness; he could instinctively track the exact mechanical frequency of the Sound Hashira's respiration, deduce the underlying anatomical principles of Sound Breathing, and instantaneously draft two separate blueprint formulas to optimize the technique—one customized to maximize Tengen's personal output, and another specifically altered to fit his own physical structure!
Furthermore, the memory of the raw electrical arcs he had reflexively unleashed during his life-or-death thrust suddenly became crystal clear. He could trace every single operational error he had committed mid-cast, mapping out exactly how to cleanly channel and release that cataclysmic, sky-shattering Lightningbending voltage with absolute precision next time.
Li Ke stared at his open palms, thoroughly awed. He tested his cognitive memory retrieval and discovered that several complex English vocabulary words he had struggled to lock down earlier could now be recalled effortlessly. It wasn't a simple case of rote memorization, either; the linguistic structures were so thoroughly integrated into his brain that he could weaponize them as naturally and fluidly as his own native mother tongue!
He could even track down his earliest childhood memories from when he was barely a toddler, mapping out every microscopic detail—even down to the random scratches and ink stains on the school textbooks he had skimmed decades ago.
"Is this... exactly what it feels like to be a true Child of Destiny?"
Li Ke harbored absolutely zero doubt that he was currently experiencing the legendary, unadulterated protagonist treatment. Formulating the cosmic data logically, this structural evolution was the direct consequence of a massive, concentrated pooling of distilled World Energy inside his cells—a systemic reward bestowed by the consciousness of this universe because he had single-handedly purged a major core nexus of corruption.
Regardless of the underlying administrative source, this development functioned as a monumental, world-ending cheat code for a man who had historically possessed utterly average martial talent!
A definitive cheat code for absolute, peak cultivation speed!
Based on his current cognitive processing metrics, all he needed to do was briefly practice a technique or skim through an archive of data to flawlessly master the mechanics on his very first attempt! Even a single casual reading of a sacred martial arts scroll would grant him total comprehension!
This was, without a shadow of a doubt, the elite treatment reserved exclusively for high-fantasy main characters!
Li Ke couldn't resist a highly satisfied, triumphant smile from spreading across his face. Armed with an evolutionary cheat of this caliber, the massive, historical talent gap that separated him from reality-bending prodigies like Rias Gremory and the true favored children of the heavens would rapidly shrink down to absolute zero.
However, as he evaluated the feedback from his system, he realized that this cognitive and sensory enhancement wasn't a permanent evolutionary state, and it undoubtedly had a strict threshold. For example...
When it came to the higher-tier, forbidden archives of his blood-qi secret techniques—specifically the conceptual theories and advanced training philosophies regarding how to advance a Berserker into a Hell Bringer or a Blood Evil he didn't instantaneously comprehend them upon a single glance.
This mechanical limitation meant one of two things: either the physical capabilities of his current blood-qi technique topped out strictly at the baseline Berserker class because he lacked the mutation of a demon hand to trigger an "Awakening," or the baseline universal laws of this Demon Slayer universe simply weren't structurally compatible with high-yield blood-qi cultivation systems.
At that exact moment, he also perceived that the surrounding topography was violently reverting.
The sinfully distorted biome was entirely snapping back to its original layout.
The grotesque ritual tables, the stone altars, and the golden Holy Grail vanished into thin air, leaving behind absolutely nothing but a single sheet of parchment fluttering to the scorched earth.
Li Ke stepped forward and scooped up the document, but the exact fraction of a second his fingers made contact, his acute tactile senses warned him that this material wasn't paper at all—it felt like tanned human skin.
Sketched across the surface was an intricate hexagram array.
The moment he raised it, one of the three active vertices lighting up the six-pointed star matrix violently dimmed and flickered out. Engraved right over that newly deactivated corner was a detailed, microscopic illustration of the tentacle-headed female deity he had just executed.
As for the remaining five vertices, they featured distinct, chilling illustrations: a colossal giant clad in tattered yellow robes whose skin glittered with the cold light of distant stars; a massive, writhing cluster of amorphous tentacles; a legendary entity whose silhouette looked practically identical to the classic descriptions of Cthulhu; a towering, pillar-like column supported by three deformed legs, featuring a massive, twisting maw splitting the upper shaft; and finally, a dynamic swarm of shimmering, iridescent cosmic bubbles.
Fortunately, only the nodes containing the Yellow-Robed King and the writhing tentacle swarm were currently illuminated with an active, pulsing energy.
Furthermore, running across the grid of these arcane circles were distinct, blue-violet connection tracking lines stretching toward one another, though they had yet to formally intersect.
The tracking lines extending out from the monster Li Ke had just slaughtered had been the longest, positioned on the absolute verge of anchoring into the territories of the other two active anomalies. Now, following the death of the female avatar, those expansion lines were completely vaporized from the map.
"So this functions as a localized distribution map for the high-tier entities? Only two core nexuses are left active in this entire world? Looking at the layout from this perspective, cleaning the rest of the board shouldn't be too mathematically impossible to execute..."
Li Ke spoke with a casual, confident nonchalance, yet deep down, he intellectually recognized that his victory tonight had been a massive stroke of universal luck. If he hadn't possessed the unique, multi-system parameters of true Dragon Fire, his tactical performance wouldn't have been significantly different from Tengen Uzui's; he would have been cleanly split in half and taken out of the fight in a single frame, completely cutting off any opportunity to launch a hyper-speed, armor-breaking stun-lock chain to smoothly deport the boss.
There was a deeper structural query to unpack—
"Is the primordial output of the Red Dragon Fire genuinely this obscenely broken? No... it's far more logical to deduce that these shard-bound monsters aren't operating at the absolute peak metrics of the original cosmic masterminds that slaughtered the 7 Days to Die world."
Li Ke understood the physics clearly. While his Dragon Fire was remarkably powerful, its absolute destructive yield couldn't compete with tactical cruise missiles or multi-megaton nuclear warheads. Since the absolute collapse of that wasteland universe was directly tied to the invasion of these cosmic entities, it proved that the variants currently filtering into this reality were either trapped in a severely weakened, transitional state, or were merely lesser proxies.
I mean, it's not like my physical anatomy is so uniquely freakish that the Dragon Fire went through a crazy biological mutation inside my cells just for me, right? Hahaha!
"Yeah, not a chance."
Li Ke gave a soft shake of his head, smoothly tossing that absurdly overconfident thought to the back of his mind. He turned his attention back to Tengen Uzui, who had collapsed the exact microsecond the raid initiated, only to be completely reconstructed and re-anchored into the land of the living during the systemic post-battle victory allocation.
By this point, the Sound Hashira had finally regained his core motor functions. Clutching his chest, he unsteadily pushed his way past the lingering dizziness, staggered onto his feet, and marched straight toward Li Ke's position.
"Li Ke... you... did you seriously put down that unholy abomination entirely on your own?"
Tengen stared at him in absolute, unadulterated shock. Analyzing the completely restored, un-mutated forest around them, a profound, heavy silence settled over his chest.
The uncomfortable truth was that under normal combat parameters, his elite ninja reaction speeds should have easily allowed him to execute an emergency evasion maneuver to clear those violet lasers. But...
He had been completely structurally paralyzed.
The exact microsecond his eyes locked onto that female avatar, his primitive biological desires had been violently hijacked. Staring at her frame, his corrupted neurons forced him to see his own wives, his mother, and every hidden, dark facet of his base carnal lust all at once. It locked his nervous system into an absolute daze, leaving him standing there like a mindless target waiting for death to claim him.
Yet, this stranger had effortlessly, completely ignored the psychological payload. The sheer contrast left him feeling deeply humbled and self-critical of his own shinobi training.
Staring at the triumphant, relaxed grin currently playing across Li Ke's face, a singular, fundamental query thrummed within his mind.
How on earth was this man so terrifyingly, boundlessly powerful?
And an entity capable of an absolute performance like this... could he truly still be classified as a mere human human?