Luther and Grace looked at each other, and then both of them pulled back the aura they had been using to hide themselves and hurried after him, flying toward the summit of Sacred Mountain.
Ghostly energy spread from Luther again, black as night. Against Jared’s golden celestial radiance, the contrast was sharp and striking.
Grace held a long green sword in her hand. A faint celestial glow ran along the blade, and she stayed on guard, ready for anything that might suddenly happen.
“Who goes there?!” The Celestial Palace soldiers around the altar spotted them at once. A junior captain of the Celestial Palace at the front barked out the shout, his voice packed with killing intent and caution.
More than a thousand Celestial Palace soldiers turned their heads together. Countless cold eyes swept over at once, like a forest of icy blades aimed straight at Jared and the other two.
Their killing intent exploded in the same instant. Joined together, it became a huge torrent that bore down on the three of them.
Jared ignored the shouted demand completely. He paid no attention to that massive wave of killing intent either.
He kept flying forward at the same pace, neither hurried nor slow, his face calm as if those Celestial Palace soldiers and all that killing intent had nothing to do with him.
His pace stayed steady. His gaze stayed cold. It was as if the whole world had narrowed down to him alone, the coffin in front of him, and the thing he had come here to finish. The junior captain’s face darkened, and something harsh flashed through his eyes.
Jared and the others had treated them with open contempt. They had ignored their presence and trampled the Celestial Palace’s authority, and the killing intent in he surged even harder.
He threw his hand forward and shouted, “You reckless fools! How dare you break into Sacred Mountain of the Celestial Palace? You’re asking to die! Take them down! Kill them on the spot!”
At his command, hundreds of Celestial Palace soldiers moved at once. They unleashed the Celestial Palace’s techniques together, and countless streaks of light burst from their hands, carrying immense force as they blasted toward Jared and the other two from all sides.
The attacks came so densely they covered the sky, turning it black as if they meant to swallow the three of them whole. Luther’s face changed, and he moved to block them at once, but Jared lifted a hand and stopped him.
Jared still stood there with his hands behind his back. Then, almost casually, he raised one hand. He used no complicated technique at all. He didn’t even draw much celestial energy. He only lifted it lightly.
Boom!
An invisible force burst from his palm in an instant.
It looked light. Barely there. But the power inside it felt endless, like the weight of heaven and earth crashing down with nothing that could stop it.
The spells blasting toward him exploded the moment they touched that invisible force.
They shattered all at once, broke into specks of black light, and vanished into the air without leaving behind a trace, as if they had never existed at all. And the hundreds of Celestial Palace soldiers charging in front looked like they had run straight into an invisible mountain.’
Their bodies locked up on the spot. Everything on their faces froze, and their eyes went wide with disbelief. Then the screams ripped out of them.
Their bodies flew backward like kites with their strings cut, and before they had even finished being thrown through the air, blood was already pouring from their mouths in great sprays.
It splashed red across the sky and struck the rocks along the mountain, bursting into one glaring blood flower after another.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
A string of heavy impacts followed.
By the time those hundreds of Celestial Palace soldiers hit the ground, not one of them had any breath left. Their bodies lay stiff net their eyes still open, each one. staring upward without ever getting to close them. Even at the very end, they still could not accept it.
They had thrown everything they had into those spells, and Jared had broken them with one casual move They had not even touched a finger on him before they were wiped out on the spot.
One move. Just one move. Hundreds of Celestial Palace soldiers were dead under that single casual strike from Jared.
Among them were cultivators at High Immortal Realm Level Eight, yet every one of them had been killed cleanly. Not a single survivor remained.
The soldiers left standing went completely blank. They stood there like carved wood, not moving at all, staring at Jared as if something far worse than death had just stepped out in front of them. Their bodies started shaking on their own.
Weapons slipped from their hands one after another and hit the ground with sharp, clear clatters The sound broke the stillness in the mountains and somehow made the silence afterward feel even heavier.
What kind of strength was that?
What kind of method was that?
A casual wave of his hand had slaughtered hundreds of High Immortal Realm cultivators… At the very least, that had to be the power of a Top Level High Immortal Realm Level Nine expert!
Or maybe… Someone in the True Immortal Realm?
But the Jared standing in front of them was only at High Immortal Realm Level Three.
How could he be this monstrous?
They could not make sense of it! Not one of these Celestial Palace soldiers could understand what they were looking at.
The way they looked at Jared changed completely. It was the look people gave something they could never overcome, something above them, beyond them. The killing intent and swagger from before had vanished without a trace.
They did not even have the nerve to run. They could only stand there in a daze and wait for death to come to them. Jared gave them no time to react. He gave them no chance to run either.
He stepped forward once. His figure vanished from where he had been standing, almost like he had teleported, and in the next second he was already above the altar.
