Faced with the assault of five Corpse Puppet Kings, King Azurefin's eyes flashed with regret and venom. If only he hadn't been so careless, he wouldn't have walked into an ambush.
But now it's too late for regrets—his only option is to fight desperately to break out.
"Kill!"
King Azurefin let out a thunderous roar. Suddenly, a world appeared in the void behind him—mountains, rivers, seas, and fierce beasts could be vaguely seen within.
"Boom boom boom boom boom!"
With this world summoned, King Azurefin's power surged and he actually forced the five Corpse Puppet Kings aside, seizing a path to escape.
"Rumble rumble rumble rumble rumble!"
Just then, a series of deafening crashes echoed out—the void behind the five Corpse Puppet Kings also manifested a world, but theirs was filled with deathly stillness, toxic miasma, and poisonous gas.
Next, the bodies of the five Corpse Puppet Kings turned into black streaks of light, chasing after King Azurefin and blasting attacks at him.
With no choice left, King Azurefin could only turn and face his enemies head-on.
"Boom boom boom!"
Both sides clashed violently in the void—even the Misty Forbidden Land itself began to crack. Yet Ian Song noticed that the world behind King Azurefin was gradually fading.
God-Kings cultivate the Dao; God Emperors cultivate the origin.
Watching the fierce battle, Ian Song vaguely grasped some insights.
The so-called Dao is actually the evolution of a world, but the worlds behind these combatants aren't truly complete worlds—they can't self-evolve or self-improve yet, and still require their God-King masters to supply energy.
When such a world evolves far enough, its master can become a God Emperor, then draw on origin to further perfect their world. If the nurtured world can finally take root in chaos itself, the cultivator transcends and becomes a Creator.
The Godfall World he'd visited earlier was the remnant left behind by a God Emperor who failed to transcend.
The battle raged on.
King Azurefin was driven into an absolute disadvantage, but he persisted—unleashing powerful secret arts and wielding one God-King weapon after another. Yet with the numbers against him, it was nothing but a dying struggle.
Half an hour later.
The world phantom behind King Azurefin was riddled with massive cracks, as if on the brink of collapse. Blood streamed from his wounds, dyeing his green robes a ghastly red.
"Ah—Ian Song! May you die a miserable death!"
King Azurefin let out a final, wretched scream as his body was shattered to pieces. Yet his Divine Soul transformed into a streak of golden light, shooting straight into Ian Song’s sea of consciousness.
Ian blinked in surprise, then burst out laughing: "King Azurefin, you really are a clown!"
Just as expected.
The next instant, King Azurefin’s Divine Soul screamed in agony within Ian’s sea of consciousness—instantly wiped clean of thought by the System, leaving only a mass of pure soul energy.
"Heh, lucky me!"
Ian chuckled again, condensing his Divine Soul into a sword and slicing off a small portion of Azurefin’s soul, then tossing it into his inner chaos vortex. Before long, that fragment was refined into pure soul power.
With a thought, Ian guided the soul power into his own Divine Soul, which absorbed it eagerly.
"Nice! Not bad at all!"
Ian was quite satisfied—even that small portion had boosted his Divine Soul considerably.
Once the battlefield was cleared—
Lito, the Little Corpse Puppet, fetched King Azurefin’s storage God-ring and several shattered God-King weapons. The battle had been so fierce that even those artifacts were broken, but even damaged God-King weapons were worth a fortune.
"We have no use for these. They're all yours!"
Lito handed everything over to Ian Song.
"Then I won’t be shy about it!"
Ian grinned and stashed the loot, then produced twenty drops of blood and handed them to Lito.
At the same time, he revised his earlier guess—Lito clearly wasn’t just a Corpse Puppet King, since even those five Corpse Puppet Kings obeyed his commands.
Afterward, Ian remained in the Misty Forbidden Land, slowly refining King Azurefin’s Divine Soul. He had a strong hunch that even without fully refining the soul, his own Divine Soul would undergo its thirteenth metamorphosis.
And sure enough—