The moment Huang Yun's roar tore through the clearing, the crowd erupted in genuine panic.
Everyone could feel it.
If Huang Yun came at Mo Fan with everything he had, Mo Fan would be shredded into pieces before he could blink.
"Yellow Dog! You dare break Sect rules and go for the kill?!"
Eldest Senior Brother Wu Mang's eyes went bloodshot.
He detonated his qi-blood and charged forward with a furious roar, ready to tear his way into the arena by force.
But Huang Yun's Main Peak escorts had anticipated exactly this.
They moved as one, forming a wall...
And the man at the front crushed a high-grade formation disk between his fingers, golden spiritual energy blazing from the shards.
Hum——!
A translucent, incredibly sturdy golden barrier erupted from the ground...
Tightly sealing the entire dueling ground and cutting the crowd off completely.
"OUT OF THE WAY!"
Wu Mang and Zhao Ziwei's eyes were crimson.
They hammered the barrier with fists and flying swords, the golden light shuddering and cracking under the assault.
But it held. Even at full output, they couldn't shatter it in time.
Inside the barrier, Huang Yun had completely come apart.
"Since you want to die so badly, then this Young Master will grant your wish! DIE!"
He drove his fingers into a sword seal and screamed the command.
The sky above the wasteland answered.
Hundreds—thousands—of sword-light phantoms materialized overhead...
Each one radiating a cold, gloomy cyan-green killing light.
They hung there for one suspended moment, an airtight net of death swords, and then they fell.
The entire clearing vanished beneath a wall of churning dust and sword-qi.
Mo Fan took a deep breath. And charged directly into it!
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM—!
The sword-net hit the ground like carpet bombing.
The wasteland's center ceased to exist as flat terrain—craters, furrows, and a massive mushroom cloud of smoke and debris billowed upward into the sky.
"NO! JUNIOR BROTHER——!!!"
Wu Mang finally punched through the barrier—one fist, all his strength, the formation disk shattering in a cascade of golden sparks...
And plunged into the smoke, screaming Mo Fan's name.
THUD.
A single, extremely heavy impact sound came from somewhere inside the cloud.
Immediately after.
Under the gazes of everyone, a dust-covered figure came flying backward out of the smoke in an extremely exaggerated, incredibly miserable posture!
It traveled in a long, dramatic arc through the air—arms limp, body completely slack...
Trailing a blinding line of fresh blood from its mouth across the sky.
With a splat, it hit the mud at the edge of the clearing and stayed there, face-down, looking like a puddle of mud, utterly motionless.
"JUNIOR BROTHER!!!"
Wu Mang's eyes were bloodshot.
He crossed the distance in a heartbeat like a madman and dropped to his knees, hauling Mo Fan up from the dirt.
Mo Fan's chest was a ruin of shredded fabric. Shocking fresh blood covered his mouth.
His face was as pale as paper. His breathing was so shallow it felt like he would stop breathing in the next second.
"Junior Brother! How are you doing?! Stay with me!
"I've already sent a voice transmission to Li Banxia—she's coming right now! Just hold on!"
Wu Mang's tears were almost falling. His hands pressed against Mo Fan's chest, trying to preserve Mo Fan's life.
Mo Fan forced his heavy eyelids open with visible effort. Bloody foam seeped from the corner of his mouth.
His voice came out in broken fragments, barely above a whisper.
"Senior Brother... I'm fine... just... just feeling a little cold..."
"HUANG YUN, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF TRASH! I'LL HACK YOU TO PIECES TODAY! I SWEAR I'LL KILL YOU!!!"
Wu Mang clutched the dying Mo Fan against his chest and turned toward the settling dust, his voice cracking with blood-weeping fury.
The autumn wind moved through the clearing, pulling the smoke apart in slow drifts.
The "victor" on the field emerged. Huang Yun stood in the center of the wasteland.
However, he looked ten times worse than the man bleeding in Wu Mang's arms!
His gorgeous Inner Sect brocade robe had been reduced to hanging strips of tattered cloth.
The most terrifying thing was his arms—both of them had been punched completely through.
Two blackened, cauterized holes, deep enough to show bone. Fresh blood ran freely from his fingertips.
The pain was so intense he couldn't grip his flying sword. It lay abandoned in the mud beside him.
His legs were shaking so violently uncontrollably he looked like he might simply fold at the knees...
And his eyes held the blank, hollow look of a man who had no idea what had just happened to him.
Rewinding time slightly.
A moment earlier. The instant the sword-net fell and the dust swallowed everything from outside view...
Mo Fan, who had charged into the dust, hooked the corner of his mouth into a cold, hidden smile.
He hadn't spent his closed-door body cultivation period only training the [ Pale Wood Body Forging Art ] to minor mastery.
His Necromancer level had climbed again as well.
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Mo Fan silently activated—
"[ Bone Armament LV. 2 ]!"
A layer of skin-tight Tier-2 white bone armor instantly sealed itself around his entire body!
Coupled with the continuous, unbroken vitality of the Pale Wood Body Forging Art...
The Foundation Establishment sword-qi that looked incredibly imposing from the outside accomplished precisely nothing.
It shredded his outer robe. That was all.
And in the instant he closed the distance to Huang Yun while tanking the sword-qi, Mo Fan used his newest skill.
"[ Corpse Shackle LV. 2 ]!"
An invisible skeletal ghost claw, condensed from pure death-qi...
It erupted silently from the ground and locked around Huang Yun's ankles, forcefully rooting him to the spot!
Immediately after, Mo Fan raised both hands, almost pressed against Huang Yun's face.
"[ Death Bolt ]."
Two bolts of highly compressed black death-qi fired point-blank.
With destructive momentum, they brutally punched through both of Huang Yun's arms, instantly crippling his ability to resist!
Subsequently, under the cover of the smoke and the roaring of the sword-qi outside...
Mo Fan acted like a ruthless pile driver against the immobilized Huang Yun.
Uppercuts. Knee strikes. Elbows. Every muffled impact of fist-to-flesh was perfectly covered up by the chaos around them.
He beat Huang Yun until the man's eyes were going glassy and his legs had stopped working.
Then—at the precise moment he'd beaten him to the point of doubting his life...
Mo Fan extremely precisely withdrew the [ Bone Armament ].
He bit down on the tip of his own tongue. Let the blood pool in his mouth.
And screamed: "Ouch!"
His legs drove into the ground and launched him backward out of the smoke like a human cannonball.
He went airborne, arranged his limbs into the most convincingly broken configuration he could manage...
And spat a spectacular arc of blood across the sky on the way down.
He hit the mud and went completely still.
Academy Award. Best Performance. Unanimous.
And Huang Yun, meanwhile, was standing in the wreckage in a state of extreme bewilderment.
He fundamentally had no idea Mo Fan was acting!
In his cognition, although Mo Fan had desperately inflicted severe injuries on him in the smoke just now...
His final wave of sword-qi mangling had definitely, absolutely sent Mo Fan flying!
He'd seen it. The body. The blood. The impact.
Looking at Mo Fan lying in Wu Mang's arms in the distance—pale as a corpse, vomiting fresh blood, barely breathing—Huang Yun was scared out of his wits.
The cold sweat hit Huang Yun all at once. Did I... did I just kill someone?
"I—I killed him?!"
The implications crashed down on him like a collapsing ceiling.
A Sect Wager Battle. Witnesses everywhere.
If he was convicted of murdering a fellow disciple in front of this many people—it didn't matter whose bloodline he came from.
The Vice Sect Master couldn't save him from having his cultivation crippled and being expelled from the Sect!
"No... he can't die—he absolutely cannot die!"
Under extreme terror, ignoring the agony of the holes through both his arms...
Huang Yun fumbled open his storage bag with trembling fingers.
He pulled out a mutton-fat jade bottle, radiating a dense violet spiritual light.
Inside were two extremely precious holy medicines for saving lives: [ Purple Yang Bone-Restoration Elixirs ]!
It was a top-tier spiritual medicine capable of reshaping flesh and blood as long as the patient still had a single breath left. Worth a fortune!
Huang Yun trembled with the heartache of spending it, but he still decisively swallowed one himself first to staunch the wounds in his arms.
Then, using his last bit of strength, he hurled that jade bottle viciously toward Wu Mang in the distance.
"GIVE IT TO HIM! QUICKLY! HE CANNOT DIE!"
His voice had gone up half an octave in pure panic.
Wu Mang caught the bottle on reflex.
As a disciple who had stayed on the Main Peak, the moment he unstoppered it and took a sniff...
He instantly recognized the grade of the pill.
After confirming it was non-toxic and had miraculous effects on severe trauma, Wu Mang didn't care about face or dignity anymore.
"Junior Brother—here, quick—swallow this!"
Mo Fan, who had been perfectly content to lean in Wu Mang's arms and continue his "weak" performance for a while longer...
Instantly brightened his eyes upon smelling this extremely pure, rich medicinal fragrance.
That's... actually incredible.
He opened his blood-filled mouth with admirable cooperation.
But he did not swallow this precious pill into his stomach.
Instead, with the practiced sleight of a man who had thought this through, he extremely cunningly tucked the pill neatly under his tongue!
Then he made a very convincing swallowing motion with a gulp.
The look of pain on his face miraculously eased—just slightly. His breathing steadied—just a little.
"Senior Brother..."
Mo Fan wheezed with tremendous commitment.
"Thank you... I feel... much better..."
Seeing that Mo Fan had finally preserved his life, Wu Mang's heart dropped back out of his throat.
He set Mo Fan down gently on the ground and slowly stood up.
He wasn't the only one whose expression had changed.
Every single one of Hundred Forging Peak's chaotic, loud-mouthed, perpetually unhinged disciples had put away their smiling faces at this moment.
Regardless of how Mo Fan recovered, in their eyes, the fact was this: Huang Yun had used his Foundation Establishment cultivation to break the rules of a Wager Battle and publicly attempted to kill a junior first!
Whoosh.
Seven or eight Hundred Forging Peak disciples tightly surrounded Huang Yun and his lackeys right in the center.
Wu Mang and Zhao Ziwei cracked their knuckles—the sound sharp and tooth-aching...
And kept walking forward step by step, matching grins on their faces that contained absolutely no warmth.
"Yellow Dog."
Wu Mang's voice had gone very quiet. Very cold.
"The Wager Battle between you and my Junior Brother—we'll settle that separately."
"But breaking the rules. Bullying someone half your level. Attempting to kill a fellow disciple in front of witnesses..."
Wu Mang abruptly clenched his fists.
"Old debts and new ones. Time to pay them all!"
The air in the clearing pulled tight, conflict on the verge of exploding.
Right at this hair-raising moment—
Fwish! Fwish! Fwish!
Several hurried streaks of sword-light cut across the sky above Hundred Forging Peak in rapid succession!
And from somewhere far above—a clear voice transmitted from the distant horizon.
Urgent, and barely keeping the irrepressible panic out of it:
"XIAOQI-GE!!!"