I'll make you the furnace and the cauldron, so you can refine Yin and Yang and prove the Great

Seven or eight streaks of light landed around the plaza, completely surrounding the central open space.

The leader, dressed in a grey robe with wide sleeves and a sinister face, was none other than the Ninth Elder. Behind him, several deacons from the Enforcement Hall stood in a line, exuding a chilling aura.

"Ye Shuanghua," the Ninth Elder's voice was as cold as poison, "Get out of the way."

"This boy colluded with the Immortal Alliance, invited wolves into the house, destroyed the Heavenly Demon Sect, and severed the lineage of the Demonic Path—each and every one of these acts constitutes treason and the extermination of one's clan! Today, the Enforcement Hall will arrest him and bring him to justice!"

Ye Shuanghua did not allow it.

She stepped in front of Li Hanshan, her sword, Jinghong, flashing as it was drawn. A line of silvery light spread out before her, and her clear, cold eyes burned with an unyielding fire.

"What are you doing?!"

"Rumors!" Her voice wasn't loud, but every word was clear. "They're just rumors circulating outside! Without any evidence, you want to arrest my sect leader's disciple—the Ninth Elder—right in front of the mountain gate with just the word 'traitor'? When did the rules of the Enforcement Hall become so lenient?!"

"Without any evidence?"

The Ninth Elder, enraged, laughed coldly and was about to speak—

The sky suddenly darkened for a moment.

A streak of blood-red light staggered from the distant horizon. The light flew extremely low, sometimes rising and sometimes falling, like a large blood-red bird with broken wings. Every few dozen miles it flew, it left a trail of dark red blood mist in the air.

In the square, everyone looked up.

The beam of light finally gave way and crashed to the ground at the edge of the square, creating a shallow crater about ten feet deep.

The smoke and dust cleared.

A person was standing in the pit.

No—it was hard to call him human anymore. The man's once magnificent black elder's robe was now tattered, his left arm severed at the elbow, the cut covered with a layer of charred scabs; a hideous wound ran from front to back on his chest, the edges of which were curled with dark purple flesh, and with each breath, fine blood foam spilled from the corner of his mouth.

His aura was unstable and extremely weak, yet he still managed to maintain the basic strength of a Void Refinement cultivator, like a flickering lamp in a raging storm.

Even so, when he raised his face, many seasoned old deacons in the square gasped in surprise.

"The Heavenly Demon Sect... Grand Elder?!"

The newcomer was none other than the Grand Elder of the Heavenly Demon Sect.

That night, the Heavenly Demon Sect broke through the mountain, and he was nearly killed by Silver Bell's sword. He barely survived by enduring the chaotic void currents that caused the sect leader to flee, burning his own life force. For the past few months, he had been hiding and running like a stray dog, fleeing from the Northern Wilderness all the way to the heart of the Central Continent, enduring countless cold stares and humiliations.

His only thought now is revenge.

"rumor?"

The elder grinned, revealing a mouthful of blood-soaked black teeth. He stepped out of the shallow pit, and with each step, a spiderweb-like crack appeared in the bluestone beneath his feet.

"Without any evidence?"

"Then I, this old man, will serve as 'proof' for you little brats of the Joyous Union Sect!"

He suddenly raised his hand, and a withered, claw-like finger pointed straight at the center of the crowd—the man who stood with his hands behind his back, smiling at him the whole time.

"That's him!"

"Li Hanshan!"

"The one who destroyed the Heavenly Demon Sect is Li Hanshan!"

The Grand Elder's voice suddenly rose, his hoarse tone like sandpaper scraping against an iron plate, grazing the ears of every disciple:

"A few months ago, it was this man who colluded with that vile woman Yin Yue to infiltrate the territory of my Heavenly Demon Sect! He surveyed the terrain and personally set up an inter-domain teleportation array in the heart of my sect; he tipped off the Immortal Alliance and lured their hundreds of thousands of troops to my sect's gate overnight!"

"The mountain-protecting formation was breached from the inside!"

"On the day the Immortal Alliance army arrived, half of my Heavenly Demon Sect's 30,000 disciples were still dreaming!"

"The sect leader was surrounded and attacked by the three of them. He lost an arm, his life force was burned, and he fell into the void turbulence. His fate is unknown! The thirteen peaks of the inner sect were burned for seven days and seven nights! Thousands of years of foundation, thousands of years of lineage—"

His voice trembled violently, and tears of blood streamed down his gaunt face.

"One night, gone."

"It's all gone."

The square was deathly silent.

Thousands of disciples were stunned into silence.

Some people stared with their mouths agape, forgetting to close them; some dropped their ritual implements with a clatter; and many more mechanically and slowly turned their heads to look at the man in black robes standing calmly with his hands behind his back, his eyes churning with turbulent emotions—

Set up a teleportation array?

A single person set up an inter-domain teleportation array in the heart of the Heavenly Demon Sect?

Led the Immortal Alliance army to break through the Heavenly Demon Mountain gate?

The Heavenly Demon Sect... What kind of concept is the Heavenly Demon Sect? The leader of the three demonic sects, its strength was even slightly stronger than the Joyful Union Sect, and its protective mountain formation was something that even Dao Integration Realm cultivators had to avoid—and just like that, it's gone?

"Impossible..." someone murmured absentmindedly in the crowd, "How could one person have done this..."

"Setting up an inter-domain teleportation array requires a thorough understanding of the principles of space..."

"How old is he? How many years has he been a member of the sect?!"

Yan Qingsong stood in the crowd, his blood running cold, inch by inch.

He suddenly remembered the rock platform in the Myriad Spirits Secret Realm, and the man who, despite only having the cultivation of a Nascent Soul cultivator, could speak eloquently in front of all the geniuses of the three sects; he remembered the near-fatal wound on Zhao Shoudao's chest when he returned.

It turns out that from that time on... no, from even earlier, none of them had the right to stand before him anymore.

Huo Yuan's lips trembled, and he couldn't utter a single word. For the first time, a strange emotion welled up in Yu Mengjia's watery eyes—fear? Regret? Or something else entirely?

Zhao Shoudao felt the old wound in his chest begin to ache again.

In the arena, Ye Shuanghua's grip on her sword tightened little by little.

She already knew that Li Hanshan had gone towards the Heavenly Demon Sect. She even vaguely guessed that he would do something big. But she never expected that he would actually go this far.

With his own strength, he mobilized the Immortal Alliance's army of 100,000 and destroyed the leader of the three major demonic sects.

She understood the significance of this battle better than anyone. It meant a complete rewriting of the landscape of Central Continent, and that the Immortal Alliance would henceforth hold absolute dominance.

Ye Shuanghua slowly turned her head, looking at the smiling man behind her. Her heart was churning, and she couldn't utter a single word for a long time.

Li Hanshan, from beginning to end, didn't even lift his eyelids.

He merely watched the Grand Elder of the Heavenly Demon Sect with interest, but what he was thinking about was something else entirely—

Grand Elder of the Heavenly Demon Sect.

A critically injured and dying cultivator at the Refinement stage actually dared to travel all the way to the territory of the Joyful Union Sect and appear in front of the entire sect to testify against them.

Isn't he afraid that the Hehuan Sect might seize him and use him as a furnace to refine human pills?

The business of using furnaces as alchemy vessels by demonic cultivators is not limited to any particular sect.

However, upon further reflection, Li Hanshan felt relieved.

This old man is now a fugitive, hunted down by the Immortal Alliance, unwelcome by the Demonic Path, and the remaining members of the Heavenly Demon Sect are eager to trade his head for their own future. The only places in the world he can seek justice from, the only places he can use as a scapegoat, are truly only the Joyful Union Sect and the Yin Spring Sect.

Compared to being refined into a corpse by the Yinquan Sect, one might be able to negotiate better terms with the Hehuan Sect.

in other words.

It's not that he's not afraid.

He had nowhere else to go but here.

Looking at the elder's blood-red eyes, Li Hanshan suddenly felt a little sorry for him, but also a little amused.

On the outermost edge of the crowd, "Yan'er," with her veil hanging down, kept her head extremely low.

Her fingernails dug deeply into her palms.