Inside the Taotie Bone Box, silence returned. It was so quiet that not a single sound could be heard—not even the faintest breath.
Yet in this darkness, Quinn Shepherd moved freely—utterly silent, as if he made no sound at all. A single bead of sweat fell from someone, splashing into a pool of blood with the faintest noise.
The owner of that sweat instantly shifted their footing—only to feel a sharp pain in their chest as a bamboo staff pierced straight through their heart.
Quinn drew his bamboo staff from behind the corpse, moving forward without a sound. Behind him, the body collapsed with a dull thud.
That sound instantly triggered chaos. All around, the outer‑domain demons erupted, unleashing divine arts and flashes of spirit weapons toward the source of the noise.
In the flicker of divine arts and spirit weapons, Quinn darted through the box like a ghost, felling one expert after another. When the light faded and darkness returned, the divine arts practitioners staggered and collapsed to the ground.
Once again, calm settled over the box.
The Taotie Bone Box’s interior spanned a hundred zhang across—not small at all, nearly a hundred and thirty mu in area.
With hundreds of people scattered in such a space, it shouldn’t have felt crowded—even with Bruno the Dragon‑Qilin’s massive frame. But for these divine arts practitioners, the space felt suffocatingly tight.
To them, any divine art could reach its target in an instant—and the most powerful ones could sweep through every corner of the box.
When Quinn brought them into the box, everyone panicked and immediately began fighting, causing the box to shake violently at first.
That was the darkest, most chaotic moment. Everyone attacked in every direction to protect themselves, and many strong practitioners died at the hands of their own allies.
The chaos did not last long. An expert of the Heaven-Man realm quickly spoke up, telling everyone not to panic.
That Heaven-Man realm expert was clever, but in the next moment, Quinn killed him, plunging the box into chaos again. In the confusion, Quinn killed with his staff—even the Heaven-Man experts could not escape his close-quarters combat.
After the chaos subsided, someone tried to open the box and let light in, only to be killed by Quinn with a single thrust of his staff.
During this time, several deadly battles took place. Now, everyone in the box is on edge, suppressing their heartbeat and holding their breath. Even their wounds are kept from bleeding, lest they attract Quinn's attention.
They even had to close their eyes—eyes would betray their position in the darkness.
Most of these divine arts practitioners had cultivated eye techniques, causing their eyes to emit light. That made them the best targets for Quinn.
Quinn was like a bat in the dark, moving unpredictably. Any sound could alert him and bring deadly danger.
This suffocating darkness was home to a demon king ready to claim their lives at any moment.
As the box opened and closed, it spat out several more corpses. In the instant it opened, light shone down from above, making everyone inside shudder and scramble to move. After a moment of chaos, the sounds of divine arts clashing and bodies falling returned—more people died in the confusion.
"I can't take it anymore!"
One of the outer-domain demons finally cracked under the unbearable terror, losing his mind and wildly unleashing divine arts and spirit weapons in all directions, screaming: "No one come near me! Die! You all die!"
His divine arts were powerful, easily piercing the hundred-zhang space, and his spirit weapons were exceptionally sharp, sweeping in all directions and forcing those hiding in the dark to defend themselves.
A great chaos erupted inside the box, with shouts and killing everywhere, spirit weapons and divine arts blasting in confusion.
After a long time, the crazed divine arts practitioner stopped, panting heavily. There was no sound around him—only his own breathing.
"Dead?"
The crazed practitioner was stunned, then both shocked and delighted. He laughed loudly, "You're all dead! All dead! I survived, I'm the only one left!"
Pff—
A bamboo staff pierced through his mouth and out the back of his head.
The box opened, its sides falling away as light poured in. The hundred-zhang space remained, but inside, only Quinn, the pale-faced Ben Coates, and Bruno the Dragon-Qilin, trembling in a corner, were left.
Bruno had shrunk himself to just over a zhang long, hiding behind a pile of racks. His thick hide kept him alive, but his body was riddled with spirit weapons—some were Quinn's flying swords, showing he'd been hit more than once in the chaos.
Even with his head shrunk as much as possible, Bruno still couldn't avoid all the attacks.
Corpses lay everywhere, twisted and broken—some stabbed by bamboo staff, some with their skulls cleaved open, some hung up in paintings with their heads erased, a few were cattle and sheep, and some divine arts practitioners had been skewered like porcupines. Others were crushed by sword formations or shattered by the True Dragon Nest.
But most people died at the hands of their own side.
The situation then was utter chaos. For self-preservation, everyone had to kill each other. Those slain by Quinn, Ben Coates, or Bruno were actually the minority—at most thirty percent.
Ben Coates wiped the blood from his face, still shaken to the core.
In the pitch-black space, Quinn had collided with him more than once. If he hadn't displayed Golden Palace techniques and caught Quinn's attention, he might have been killed too.
In the chaos, Ben suffered many wounds and took down more than a few enemies, but the closest brush with death was still Quinn's close-quarters assault.