The female Ink Clan Lord had a figure indistinguishable from that of a normal human woman. She wore revealing attire, and strange, intricate black patterns streaked across every inch of exposed skin, giving her an air that was profoundly sinister and seductive.
Her icy eyes were fixed on Yang Kai. That earlier sneak attack had failed to do anything to this human, which had genuinely surprised her.
The two races had been at war for ages, and each knew the other's strength inside and out. Hidden within the mass of Ink Clan soldiers, she had long since identified Yang Kai as a Sixth-Order Open Heaven Realm cultivator. She herself was a Lord equivalent to the Seventh Order. A ghostly ambush like that should have slain this human on the spot.
But before long she smiled, extending a long crimson tongue that curved all the way up to lick the tip of her own nose. The tongue forked at its end, like a serpent's.
In the next instant, her form flickered, dissolving into a wisp of pale green smoke.
Yang Kai's instincts screamed a warning. Without thinking, he thrust his spear forward.
The female Lord's silhouette materialized once more, dodging the devastating strike and appearing directly at Yang Kai's left side. What looked like a delicate, almost limp hand descended in a casual pat, yet it carried the force to rend heaven and earth.
Yang Kai swung his spear to block.
Boom, boom, boom—three consecutive palm strikes. Yang Kai was driven back thirty zhang before barely managing to stabilize himself. He felt the blood and energy in his chest churn violently. A sweet taste rose in his throat, and blood nearly spurted from his mouth, but he forced it back down.
The female Lord was genuinely shocked this time. She didn't press the advantage with a follow-up attack. Instead, she stared at Yang Kai with a mixture of wariness and disbelief.
If the earlier sneak attack could be written off as this human getting lucky and narrowly avoiding death, then these three head-on exchanges had conveyed something else entirely. This human was different from all the others. Though he was at the Sixth Order, he was far more powerful than any Sixth-Order cultivator she had ever encountered.
Across from her, Yang Kai swept his spear in a wide arc, cutting down the surrounding Ink Clan soldiers who had been trying to take advantage of the situation. Their bodies burst apart into clouds of ink. Yang Kai leveled the spear at the female Lord, tilted his head to spit out a mouthful of blood, and grinned savagely. "You really are pathetically weak."
He'd confirmed it now. At the same order of cultivation, the Ink Clan were indeed weaker than humans. He hadn't been entirely sure before—the Ink Clan he'd killed so far hadn't included any Lords—but after exchanging blows with this female Lord, the conclusion was solid.
After a moment's thought, he understood the key reason.
Humans who cultivated in the Open Heaven Realm needed long ages of accumulation and tempering, with no shortcuts possible. Advancing from one order to the next required vast amounts of time and effort, so every Open Heaven Realm cultivator possessed an incredibly solid foundation.
The Ink Clan were different. They were born from Ink Nests, and their advancement relied on Ink Nests as well. They grew up in far less time than humans, so even at an equivalent rank, their strength fell short.
That said, the Ink Clan's Ink Force posed a tremendous threat to humans in combat. It was often enough to tie their hands and feet, which went some way toward compensating for their relative weakness.
All things considered, even if they were slightly weaker, a direct one-on-one fight between a human Seventh-Order Open Heaven cultivator and an Ink Clan Lord could go either way.
Of course, that was before Yang Kai came along.
After his arrival, humans now had a means to purge and cleanse Ink Force. They no longer had to worry about its corruption. Even if they accidentally let it seep into their Small Worlds, it didn't matter—as long as they made it back to the Ink-Purging Ships before being fully converted and losing their sanity, they were perfectly safe.
This was why Zhong Liang and all the Corps Commanders valued Yang Kai so highly, and why they had even issued a full-scale offensive order, sparing no effort to bring him back from the battlefield. The ability to purge and cleanse Ink Force didn't just boost morale—it effectively amplified the humans' combat power by letting them fight without restraint.
But even the weakest Ink Clan Lord was still a Lord, equivalent to a Seventh-Order Open Heaven cultivator. That gap in rank was enough to strip away any trace of complacency from Yang Kai.
His words were provocative, but his expression was deadly serious.
The provocation worked perfectly. The female Lord was thoroughly enraged—perhaps because she had personally attacked and not only failed to kill Yang Kai, but hadn't even left a mark on him. She let out a piercing shriek and lunged at him with her entire body.
Mid-charge, she opened her mouth and vomited forth a massive torrent of pitch-black Ink Force. The Ink Force was dense enough to seem almost solid, and in the blink of an eye it coalesced into an enormous ink cloud that engulfed Yang Yang entirely.
For a human who dared look down on her, death would have been letting him off easy. She had decided to convert him into her Ink Servant, to torment and train him at her leisure from now on.
Deep within the ink cloud, Yang Kai wore a peculiar expression. He knew exactly what the enemy intended, but turning him into an Ink Servant? The woman was being rather naive.
Within the ink cloud, the female Lord glided through the darkness with the ease of a fish in water, her movements ghostlike and unpredictable. She was certain that the human must be panicking by now—no human who found themselves wrapped in an ink cloud ever performed well.