In a trance, he had entered an extraordinarily peculiar state. He raised one hand slightly and gently pushed it forward. It was merely a subconscious gesture, and when the palm strike landed, there was not the slightest disturbance in his surroundings.
He continued striking endlessly — sometimes shifting from palm to fist, sometimes spreading all five fingers wide, sometimes transitioning from fist back to palm. His movements were free and unbounded, following no discernible pattern whatsoever, yet they possessed a strange, ineffable rhythm.
A hundred li away, three Sacred Masters were streaking through the sky when they suddenly halted atop a stretch of tree canopy.
Luan Feng frowned. "The Stone Puppet clan's territory lies just ahead. I don't know whether that brat is there or not."
"Let's hope he is." Fan Wu wore the expression of a man utterly weary of life. Three Sacred Masters setting out together, all to deliver a small package to that brat and send him packing — if word ever got out, people would die laughing.
Cang Gou suddenly sniffed the air, his expression turning strange. "Do you feel that?"
"Feel what?" Luan Feng turned her head to look at him.
Cang Gou frowned. "I can't quite describe it — just — watch out!" His face changed abruptly, and he pointed behind Luan Feng with a sharp shout.
Luan Feng sensed it too. A sudden crisis surged from behind her, carrying an enormous pulling force, as though something were trying to swallow her into some unknown place. In desperation, a pair of magnificent wings unfurled behind her back, and with a mighty beat she shot skyward.
Glancing back, she saw that behind where she had been standing, a massive black void had appeared from nowhere. When her divine sense swept over it, the interior was nothing but empty chaos. The surrounding space was dissolving and shattering, and from it emanated a bizarre oscillating force.
She actually felt a lethal threat emanating from that black void. Had she truly been swallowed in just now, the outcome would likely not have been pretty.
"Space Laws!" Fan Wu's face darkened. Before the words had even left his mouth, ripples spread across the void before him. That strange oscillating force struck again, using the fabric of space as a medium, and crashed toward him head-on.
Fan Wu's expression twisted violently. He threw himself backward, lying flat in midair. Visible to the naked eye, a wave of ripples swept over the space where he had just been, slicing clean through a lock of his hair and extending a full hundred li onward. Everything in its path — massive tree crowns one after another — was pulverized into fine dust.
Black void after black void erupted. Wave after wave of oscillating force propagated from every direction, weaving together across an enormous expanse of space into a killing ground that enveloped all three Sacred Masters.
All three were shaken. They scrambled to deploy their abilities, dodging and weaving to evade the invisible lethal strikes that came one after another.
Fortunately, they were no ordinary cultivators — their own strength was formidable. Otherwise, the very first volley of attacks would have been enough to claim their lives.
From high above, the space within several hundred li was utter chaos. The three Sacred Masters found themselves caught within it, unable to tell north from south or east from west. They ran in opposite directions, yet inexplicably collided with each other.
The entire world seemed to have transformed into a prison, locking the three of them inside. No matter how hard they struggled, they could not break through that invisible seal. All three wore expressions of shock tinged with disbelief.
It wasn't as though no one in this world was stronger than they were. But they were Sacred Spirits, after all. For someone to toy with the three of them without even showing their face — it was simply too incredible to believe.
"Did he do this?" Cang Gou dodged another invisible killing strike and glared as he demanded.
Space Laws were not something just anyone could command. Yang Kai had appeared in the Barbarian Wastes only yesterday, and now someone was using spatial divine abilities against them. Cang Gou couldn't think of who else could be pulling this off.
He suddenly realized that brat had grown far stronger than he'd been over a decade ago. If Yang Kai had possessed abilities like these back then, the beating Shi Huo had given him probably wouldn't have been so one-sided.
"Where is he?!" Luan Feng seethed with frustration. Two feathers had been plucked from the magnificent wings behind her — torn away by the invisible spatial forces she hadn't been able to avoid in time.
The situation, while dangerous, wasn't yet a life-or-death crisis for them. What Luan Feng couldn't understand was why Yang Kai had launched an attack without saying a single word. Had that brat gone mad? Even if his strength had improved over the past decade or so, that was no reason to pick a fight with three Sacred Masters.
Besides, the three of them hadn't provoked him this time. If this was about the spatial teleportation formation, it was a massive overreaction.
Fan Wu remained silent, his expression grim. He suddenly extended two fingers and swept them across his own eyes, murmuring a low command: "Open!"
With a shift in perception, he observed from an entirely different angle — and his face changed. "This is bad. This space is about to collapse."
He possessed the Divine Eye, an ability that allowed him to see the true nature of things invisible to others. Under his Divine Eye's observation, this entire vast expanse of void was vibrating violently. The space appeared intact on the surface, but in reality it was riddled with spatial rifts so fine that even divine sense couldn't detect them. If one compared this space to a flatbread, then that flatbread had already fractured into countless tiny fragments — it just didn't look that way from the outside.
Cang Gou and Luan Feng's expressions changed upon hearing this, the gravity of the situation sinking in. Without further hesitation, both revealed their true forms.
With a great rustle of wings, a magnificent bird resembling a phoenix soared into the sky, spewing black flame to carve a path as it fought desperately to break free from the spatial constraints and flee outward. Cang Gou transformed into a towering beast several zhang in height, following close behind Luan Feng. Fan Wu relied on his Divine Eye to navigate through the countless spatial rifts.
After a short while, all three finally escaped the danger zone.