The words of the Skyborne Yaksha left all the other ghosts flabbergasted.
All the ghosts were seeking to fight their way into the city, after which they could have their fill of human flesh and blood.
So where did this guy come from, saying such things?
Confusion filled everyone’s heads.
One ghost ship came over, the Ghost King atop it saying, “Yaksha! Do you know what you’re saying?”
The Yaksha put on an arrogant expression. “I know what I’m saying, while you have no idea what you’re dealing with.”
This rude answer thoroughly enraged all the ghosts.
A Ghost King shouted, “Get out of here! No Yakshas are permitted where the ghosts of myriad evils tread!”
“You are not welcome here!”
All the ghosts roared.
A smile appeared on the Yaksha’s savage face. “You want to fight? So do I.”
He flew toward one of the ghost ships.
The Ghost King of this ship was a doom shadow, and when it saw the Yaksha approaching, it shrieked and summoned a storm of frost. But Yakshas had innately tough bodies, so it simply barged through this freezing extreme Yin doom energy. The doom energy simply made it shiver, and then the Yaksha was next to the Ghost King, jabbing its fork into its body.
This deceptively simple jab was packed with a terrifying energy, and the doom shadow Ghost King instantly put up a barrier to protect itself. The fork slammed into the barrier with a burst of light, and then it pierced through and stabbed into the Ghost King.
The Ghost King screeched, but as it tried to fight back, it saw the Yaksha stabbing the fork again, its eyes chilled.
That chilling gaze seemed wrong to the Ghost King. Earlier, the Yaksha had simply seemed arrogant, yet this gaze communicated not arrogance, but resolve.
An ill foreboding came over it, and it instinctively unleashed all its power, covering itself in a black fog as its body began to turn transparent.
In its view, Yakshas were only physically strong and were not skilled in attacking the ethereal. But a moment later, the Yaksha charged over and punched.
It was an unremarkable punch, but the Ghost King felt it to be extremely dangerous.
This unprecedented sense of danger spurred it to shout on instinct, “NO!”
This was its last cry, and as the word left its mouth, the Yaksha’s fist crashed into its etherealized body, a righteous energy blasting through it. The Ghost King found that it was powerless to resist, instantly devoured by the white light.
Whoosh!
Melted away!
To the other ghosts, things were even simpler.
This Yaksha had come out of nowhere and killed a Ghost King in just two strikes, so fast that the other ghosts on the ghost ship didn’t have time to react.
The death of the Ghost King made the other ghosts on the ship scatter, having lost all will to fight.
This Yaksha was naturally Tang Jie. After advancing to Celestial Heart, he had taken another large stride forward in strength. The Ghost King just now had been of the lowest level, an early-phase Ghost King, and Tang Jie could have defeated it while still at Mortal Shedding. With Tang Jie being at Celestial Heart, it was impressive enough that it could block one attack, and being killed in two was completely normal.
But what was normal in Tang Jie’s eyes was flabbergasting to the ghosts.
The remaining five ghost ships almost simultaneously began to converge on Tang Jie. Three of the five Ghost Kings were early-phase, and two were middle-phase, and as they moved, their five armies of ghost soldiers moved with them. Such a massive force moving together could even take down a peak Soul Transformation cultivator.
But Tang Jie simply laughed. “Come, then! Let me show you why the Yakshas are so feared!”
He pointed the fork, and three streams of energy surged out, one from each tine, each one aimed at a Ghost King. At the same time, Tang Jie thrust his palm out at another, and as for the last ghost ship, he kicked twice, sending two waves of energy at the last Ghost King.
He was challenging five Ghost Kings at once!
The five Ghost Kings attacked in unison along with their generals and soldiers, their attacks covering the skies and threatening to tear apart the heavens.
Tang Jie laughed and raised his arms to meet this terrifying tide.
One stream of energy after another erupted from his arms, forming a wall of vortices. As the spell arts crashed into the vortices, they created a storm of energy, but Tang Jie stood tall in the air, bellowing until his face was red. He sent out even more streams of energy, somehow holding off the assault all by himself.
This was simply absurd. To be an early-phase Ghost King yet somehow hold off several hundred times one’s number just didn’t make sense.
As the ghosts reeled in shock, Tang Jie laughed. “Again!”
He waved his arms, turning the vortices back into a giant ball of energy that he threw over at his foes.
The ghosts were forced to focus their attention on him.
This was what Tang Jie wanted, to use the power of his opponents to temper himself.
This was because the Dao of the Martial Lord tempered the body through tough battles. The tougher the battle, the more stimulated one’s potential was. Moreover, one attribute of his perfect body was that his spiritual power was perfectly merged with his physical strength, which allowed his ordinary punches to possess far more power than they seemed. This fusion needed further training to strengthen. Finally, he had just entered Celestial Heart and was bursting with energy, so it was the perfect time to hone this power.
These three points caused Tang Jie to choose this sort of head-on confrontation, fearlessly taking on five whole ghost ships.
The streams of energy he was blasting out of his fists seemed like the brute force of a body cultivator, but they were actually brimming with spiritual power, allowing for greater variation and transformation that made them more than just blasts of power.
While the five ghost ships had the absolute advantage in numbers, Tang Jie had the absolute advantage in quality.
The never-before-seen perfect body created an unstoppable current that spurred him to greater heights.
A Yaksha floated in the sky, constantly punching at its enemies down below.
Such simple attacks contained an absurd amount of power, obliterating large groups of ghost soldiers like they were stalks of wheat.
The human cultivators on the city walls were dumbfounded by the sight.
One cultivator stammered, “Senior… Senior Brother… this… Is this the power of Violet Palace?”
Senior Brother Li shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like it. The power of Violet Palace is wide-reaching, one art able to destroy half a city. While that Yaksha is powerful, each of its punches only covers a small area of several dozen square feet. And based on the energy waves, it should only be at the Spirit Ring level. But…”
While the range was limited, why did it seem so powerful?
While Senior Brother Li wasn’t there in the thick of combat, he could still feel the strength of those distant attacks. The wind unleashed by those punches mostly stayed in the area of the attack, but any existence within the area would have little chance of surviving.
Those blasts of energy would test the survival abilities of anyone in the region, and even the protective barriers of the five ghost ships flickered and shuddered under the assault. The punches were a true manifestation of unstoppable brute force, and it left all the onlookers speechless.
One cultivator asked, “Senior… Senior Brother, who do you think will win?”
Senior Brother Li answered, “In terms of strength, while that Yaksha is domineering, it can’t last forever. If the five ghost ships fight to the end, the Yaksha probably won’t win. But…”
“‘But’ what?” everyone asked.
“But that Yaksha isn’t actually alone,” Senior Brother Li said.
His eyes turned to that ghost ship in the rear.
Ever since that Yaksha had gone to battle, that ghost ship had stopped moving. There was no question that it belonged to the Yaksha. Like the Yaksha, it exuded a strength and power that the other ghost ships did not possess, and behind it was a massive army of ghost soldiers.
If the Yaksha was fighting alone, the Yaksha might run out of strength, but if that abnormally powerful ghost ship were added into the mix, the victor was obvious.
“Then what are we waiting for?” someone urgently said. “Let’s get going! It’ll be too late if we don’t go now!”
“‘Go’? And where can we go?” Senior Brother Li said, glancing into the distance.
Everyone froze.
Yes, where could they go? The entire Flame Yang Domain was being invaded by the ghosts of the Nether Domain, so there was no choice but to fight to the death. And that Yaksha was so strong that, to be honest, what did it matter if they could get a headstart?
Nobody believed that they could outrun the Yaksha.
The battle continued!
The defeat of the five ghost ships was inevitable.
Things ended up even more extreme than what Senior Brother Li had predicted. The five ghost ships began to break before the Ghost March Ship had even joined.
This wasn’t to say that the combined power of the five ghost ships wasn’t enough to hold out against Tang Jie’s attacks. After all, Tang Jie had only entered Celestial Heart, and while he was able to hold them at first, it came at great cost. As he exhausted more and more of his energy, his onslaught would gradually wane.
The fatal problem was that the five ghost ships weren’t actually united.
When Tang Jie displayed his strength, all five ghost ships started to have second thoughts.
One of the ghost ships started to retreat.
Another ghost ship then retreated. Tang Jie’s strength had made them start to acknowledge Tang Jie’s claim, and they sought to give him the city.
But Tang Jie clearly didn’t plan to let them go.
Two of the five ghost ships retreating greatly reduced the pressure on Tang Jie, allowing him to focus his attacks. The remaining three Ghost Kings had no more opportunity to retreat, and Tang Jie blasted them to bits, one after the other.
After destroying the three Ghost Kings, Tang Jie looked in the direction that the other two had fled and snorted. “If you had left at the start, this king would have let you go, but it’s too late now!”
He chased after the two Ghost Kings.
The cultivators on the wall had been waiting for their death, so they were shocked to see the ghosts fighting among themselves such that they had even given up on the city.
They thought that the Yaksha would return after chasing down the two Ghost Kings, but the Yaksha never returned. Much to their confusion, they had inexplicably escaped this calamity.