The Man-Faced Demon Spider—this discovery instantly invigorated Tang San. The Blue Silver Domain, which had been radiating outward in a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc, quietly contracted, narrowing its focus and locking firmly onto the direction of the spider. This one-directional spiritual lock meant that no matter how exceptional the Man-Faced Demon Spider's concealment abilities were, it could not possibly escape Tang San's detection.
Though this Man-Faced Demon Spider's cultivation is only just past the fifty-thousand-year mark, for a Soul Beast of its tier, reaching such a level was an unimaginably arduous feat. As for this Soul Ring, Tang San was absolutely determined to claim it.
He closed in rapidly. When he was still roughly a thousand meters from the target, Tang San's body suddenly grew translucent. A layer of pale blue ripples spread outward from his forehead, enveloping his entire form in an instant. After advancing another ten meters, he had completely vanished from the air along with the Sea God's Trident. It was the Oceanic Guardian Shield's invisibility effect—the skill born from the fusion of the Sea God's Heart with his head soul bone.
Having learned his lesson from the battle against the Evil Spirit Tiger, Tang San decided to go all-out in his subsequent Soul Beast hunts, ending each fight as quickly as possible. So from the very start, he deployed his invisibility skill. A fifty-thousand-year Man-Faced Demon Spider was formidable, but its spiritual power was no match for his—there was no way it could detect his concealed state.
The distance shrank ever further. Tang San retracted the Blue Silver Domain, lest its energy be too powerful and give away his position to the Man-Faced Demon Spider.
Night had deepened. The Star Dou Great Forest was utterly silent, with even insect chirps and bird calls becoming exceedingly rare.
Creeping forward stealthily, Tang San finally laid eyes on his target.
The fifty-thousand-year Man-Faced Demon Spider looked far smaller than he had expected—not even as large as the ten-thousand-year one he had encountered previously. But its body was highly unusual. Overall, its diameter was only about three meters. It lay motionless against the ground, its eight long legs tucked close to its body. Its entire carapace was an eerie dark gold that, without careful observation, could easily be mistaken for black. There were no visible markings or patterns whatsoever. Crouched on the forest floor in the dead of night, it was virtually invisible. Surrounding it were more than a dozen pitch-black webs strung densely through the trees—Tang San could sense their extraordinary toughness without even touching them.
Having broken through the fifty-thousand-year threshold, this Man-Faced Demon Spider could now be called a Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor. Compared to the Earth Abyss Demon Spider Emperor he had once hunted, it was clearly far more dangerous, for the Man-Faced Demon Spider was a significantly more aggressive species.
Tang San halted fifty meters behind the Spider Emperor and gently planted the Sea God's Trident in the ground. For this fight, he did not intend to use his divine weapon. Instead, he wanted to drill the combo chain he had been pondering. With his growing strength and the subtle, unknown evolution his head soul bone was undergoing, the Oceanic Guardian Shield still revealed his position whenever he used an offensive Soul Skill, but certain auxiliary skills would not compromise his concealment—flight, for instance, or the release of his Martial Soul.
His first Martial Soul, the Blue Silver Emperor, was silently released within the cloak of invisibility. Nine Soul Rings shimmered in brilliant succession. Strands of Blue Silver Emperor began circling around Tang San's body, pulsing with power that gradually drew his hands upward.
Combo chain. Combo chain. Tang San repeated the two words over and over in his mind. His figure darted forward with feline agility.
Mid-air, he executed a deft somersault, and his attack began. His left leg was instantly enveloped in crimson light. As his body flipped, that leg descended like a colossal war axe. Amid a piercing shriek of air, a dark red arc of light the shape of an axe blade erupted forth. The crimson radiance, trailing a chain of afterimages, shattered one of the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor's black webs in an instant and hurtled directly at its body. It was Tang San's left leg soul bone skill—the Evil Orca Devil Axe, a devastating single-target attack.
The Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor's reaction was astonishingly fast. Tang San's attack was utterly abrupt, but its three-meter-wide body still launched itself into the air with explosive speed. Its entire form spun like a millstone, ventral side exposed, facing the direction Tang San was hurtling in.
Tang San could see with perfect clarity that the spider's underside was nothing like the black carapace on its back. Its belly was completely white—or rather, it was a single pale, human-like face, complete with every feature. But the expression was hideously savage, and those ghastly white eyes in particular sent a chill straight to the core of one's soul.
Twin beams of white light shot from those eyes like lightning, streaking toward the Evil Orca Devil Axe. Simultaneously, the spider's mouth opened and spat vast quantities of black webbing, frantically blanketing the space between itself and Tang San.
Those two white eyes were not the Man-Faced Demon Spider's true eyes—they were a special ability. Its actual eyes were located beneath its head: six small, ghostly blue eyes that radiated cold light and unmistakable shock.
A thunderous boom. The twin white beams were torn apart within the grinding vortex of the Evil Orca Devil Axe. At the same moment, countless Blue Silver Emperor strands surged forward like a tide, entangling the black webbing the Spider Emperor had sprayed.
The Man-Faced Demon Spider's silk was undeniably tough, but compared to Tang San's Blue Silver Emperor empowered by nine powerful Soul Rings, it still fell far short. The Blue Silver Emperor strands activated the first Soul Skill's binding effect—each strand swept away great clumps of black webbing, forcibly carving open a passage. The Spider Emperor, which had been counting on its silk to buy breathing room, was once again laid bare before Tang San.
Tang San's third Soul Skill was already being unleashed. The Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor felt a sudden surge of violent energy pulsing from beneath it. Sixteen thick Blue Silver Emperor stalks burst from the ground in an instant, skillfully prying apart its eight spider lances and forming a cage three meters in diameter that clamped around its body. It was Tang San's Blue Silver Emperor's fourth Soul Skill—the Blue Silver Prison.
He had used these three skills in flawless succession without a single pause: one soul bone skill, two Soul Ring skills.
His assault was not over. On his right arm, azure-gold radiance mingled with the energy pulse from the fifth-ring crimson halo's expansion. Tang San's right arm took on a blood-red hue, while his left hand swept forward, casting a layer of yellow light over the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor. The Titan Giant Monkey left arm bone soul skill—Gravity Control—activated. The Spider Emperor, which had just begun to struggle, felt its entire body grow leaden. The power it had been gathering to burst free stuttered for a split second. Yet its back carapace still cracked apart at tremendous speed, splitting into six enormous black blades that spun violently, ravenously shredding the Blue Silver Prison that held it. At the same time, the two foremost spider lances on its body reared up and fired twin beams of pitch-black light directly at Tang San—thin as needles, they reached him in the blink of an eye. In the darkness of night, attacks of this color were terrifyingly hard to detect: blisteringly fast, precision strikes cloaked in a camouflage hue. A single moment of inattention meant getting hit.
Unfortunately for the spider, Tang San had been in a state of absolute concentration from the moment his attack began, attuned to every faintest fluctuation in his surroundings. Responding to the spider's counterattack, he activated Gravity Control while his body executed a phantom-like midair rotation. He slipped between the two black beams as though they were not even there—not only avoiding them entirely but actually closing even further on the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor.
Right then, the first layer of Blue Silver Prison shattered under the vicious grinding of the Spider Emperor's back carapace. Just as the spider, defying the crushing pressure of Gravity Control, was about to launch itself upward and create distance from Tang San, a massive array of Blue Silver Emperor stalks erupted from the ground like lances. In the instant before it could break free of the earth, they pierced its body.
The Blue Silver Prison's variant skill—Blue Silver Thrust Array—had activated. This was the fifth skill Tang San used. The Blue Silver Thrust Array's raw damage was of course insufficient to penetrate the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor's formidable carapace, but its attached effect—one second of forced stun—successfully triggered. The spider's plan to take flight was shattered mid-execution; its skill was interrupted, and the enormous creature plummeted back to the ground. By now, Tang San had closed to within ten meters. In his right hand, a spear had taken shape—modest in size, but inscribed with strange, glowing runes.
His fifth Soul Skill had evolved. After reaching the hundred-thousand-year level, the Blue Silver Overlord Lance had undergone a transformation—its name had changed to the Blue Silver Sovereign Lance. A single-target, hundred-thousand-year Soul Skill. And because it concentrated all its power into a single point of attack, this fifth Soul Skill was actually the most devastating offensive technique among all of Tang San's abilities. Even with his level of cultivation, Tang San needed a moment to condense sufficient Soul Power before unleashing it—a testament to its overwhelming force.
The Blue Silver Sovereign Lance differed from the old Blue Silver Overlord Lance. It was no longer entirely golden but entirely blood-red, with streaks of golden runes woven through the crimson—a dazzling, almost hypnotic sight. Around the spear's body, all energy was perfectly contained, not a trace leaking outward. The instant the scarlet radiance solidified in Tang San's hand was the exact instant the Spider Emperor was paralyzed by the Blue Silver Thrust Array's one-second stun.
One second was an impossibly brief window, but it was more than enough for Tang San to unleash his hundred-thousand-year fifth Soul Skill.
Like a roaring dragon, accompanied by a piercing shriek that seemed to split the heavens, within a ten-meter radius there was only a flash of crimson light—then nothing. A violent red radiance erupted in the air, but what was truly terrifying was that its devastating force was concentrated entirely on a single point.
When the Spider Emperor emerged from that one second of paralysis, the first thing it sensed was the reek of death. Its massive body lurched backward in a frenzy, bringing all eight spider lances up before itself, crossed in a desperate interlocking guard. To its credit, with over fifty thousand years of cultivation, its instinct for danger was extraordinarily sharp—or perhaps the aura locked on by the Blue Silver Sovereign Lance was simply too overwhelming. The point where its eight lances crossed happened to be precisely the point the spear was aimed at. In other words, when that speck of red light struck the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor, it collided directly with the crossed lattice of its eight lances.
BOOM— In a devastating explosion, a ring of red light rippled outward from the Spider Emperor's entire body. A piercing shriek shattered the silent night sky. In the fury of the detonation, the tips of its eight spider lances—the part where they crossed—were almost instantly blasted into fragments.
It must be noted that the Spider Emperor's lances were the hardest part of its entire body, over ten times tougher than refined iron. Eight of them crossed together—the defensive power that represented was immense. Yet against the piercing, single-point strike of the Blue Silver Sovereign Lance, it still proved insufficient. The instantaneous collision annihilated its defense completely. The Spider Emperor's colossal body was launched spinning through the air, hurtling backward and crashing heavily into the ground. At that moment, it felt a piercingly sharp energy stimulating every inch of its body—it could no longer control itself at all.
For Soul Beasts, as long as their main body survived, losing a limb was not the end—regeneration was always possible. What mattered was preserving one's life at all costs. So even as the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor tumbled backward, though the face on its underside was twisted beyond recognition, it still managed to spit out a thick plume of dense white mist to shield its retreat. Its back carapace cracked open once more—not this time for cutting, but spinning frantically to serve as makeshift wings, stabilizing its plummeting body.
The white mist was without doubt the Spider Emperor's ultimate survival tool. The moment it spewed into the air, even the atmosphere seemed to corrode, emitting sputtering hissing sounds. The mist spread outward at terrifying speed, and anything it touched was dissolved into a puddle of white liquid in an instant. The toxicity was staggering.
Yet Tang San was now immersed in a wondrous state of flow. From the Evil Orca Devil Axe that opened the assault, to the Binding skill that cut through the webbing, to the Blue Silver Prison that pinned the Spider Emperor, to Gravity Control that restricted the time it could break free, to the one second earned by the Blue Silver Thrust Array that allowed the Blue Silver Sovereign Lance's terrifying power to be unleashed—every link in the chain flowed into the next like water down a mountainside.
In total, he had used two soul bone skills and four Soul Ring skills, with not a single gap or hesitation in the transitions. The result was extraordinary. From the start of the battle to the moment the Blue Silver Sovereign Lance obliterated all eight of the Spider Emperor's lances, a mere ten seconds had elapsed. The explosive power was absolutely terrifying. From frontal assault to crowd control and back to frontal assault, he had seized complete initiative, never once giving the Man-Faced Demon Spider Emperor a chance to recover—burying it under an absolute disadvantage from the very first exchange.