Blazing Fist — Nine Palaces!
*"How...? He broke through in a situation like this??"* Jiang Yi's mind reeled.
Even the most daring mages in their unit would never dare attempt something like this in the middle of a Demon-Beast horde. A cultivation breakthrough couldn't tolerate the slightest disturbance — it demanded absolute, undivided focus.
Around him stood over a hundred Lizard-Skull Giant Demons, every one of them capable of ending his life at any moment.
Wasn't he afraid the Swift Star Wolf might slip in its defense and let a Lizard-Skull Giant Demon through? As he pushed toward Star Nebula, was he truly not the least bit shaken by the near-certain death surrounding him?
Crimson flames raged across the ruins, engulfing Mo Fan from head to toe. His figure — forged as if from molten rock — stood utterly resolute, fiercer and more blazing than the fire itself.
"Swift Star Wolf, you've done well. Leave the rest to me!" Mo Fan grinned, his smile carrying a wild edge amid the flames.
The Swift Star Wolf quickly fell back to his side.
Under Mo Fan's Mental Intent, the raging flames suddenly contracted all at once. Every crashing wave of fire, every lashing tongue of flame — all pulled inward simultaneously and condensed at his right wrist.
Flames wreathed tight around his wrist. The outermost layer of the blaze, burning at its most intense, slowed to an almost imperceptible crawl.
"Rose Flame!"
"Blazing Fist!"
Mo Fan's hair stood on end in the surge of power, fire burning even in his pupils.
His fist drove hard into the ground beneath the ruins, and the enormous energy concentrated at his forearm plunged straight into the earth.
The energy poured in with frightening speed. Across a wide swath of ground, the surface began to buckle as if something were about to burst through — great cracks splitting open.
"Nine Palaces!!!!!"
The power hit its breaking point. With a fierce roar from Mo Fan, massive pillars of flame erupted one after another across an area spanning over a hundred meters in every direction!
The pillars blasted upward from beneath the earth — not only blooming into awe-inspiring Earth Fiend conflagrations, but erupting as thick, towering columns of fire.
The first erupted on Mo Fan himself. The flames wreathing his body blazed straight to the sky.
The second burst further ahead, directly in front of him. The two pillars stood roughly thirty meters apart, yet every inch of that stretch felt utterly annihilated.
The third rose directly behind him, forming a straight line with the one on Mo Fan and the one ahead.
"AHHHHH!!!!" He roared again.
The earth on both sides of the three aligned pillars cracked open a second time, and six more identical columns of raging fire shot skyward.
Those first three pillars alone — front, center, and back — had already obliterated every Lizard-Skull Giant Demon within nearly a hundred meters. Eight, nine, perhaps a full ten of them, gone.
But when the six pillars erupted in their wake, the destruction swept everything away. Swaths of Lizard-Skull Giant Demons were reduced to black ash beneath the columns of flame — not even the piled corpses from earlier were spared.
Nine Palaces!!
Nine pillars in total, blazing in the unmistakable formation of the Nine Palaces!
Every pillar burned with Rose Flame's vivid crimson — blinding and searing. Every Lizard-Skull Giant Demon within the blast radius, living or already dead, was incinerated to ash. The columns surged to the height of five or six stories, and the sight they composed was so awe-inspiring that the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons seemed utterly small and pathetic by comparison.
Jiang Yi was herself a mage with third-tier mid-grade magic — yet she had no Spirit Seed.
Mo Fan's Spirit Seed drove the power of Blazing Fist — Nine Palaces to overwhelming extremity. An entire Nest's worth of Lizard-Skull Giant Demons had likely been wiped out completely.
Everyone else was still surrounded on all sides — yet around Mo Fan there was now open space. No flesh. No remains. Only black powder.
Worth noting: somewhere in that pack had been a Battle-General-class Colossal Death Lizard. Moments ago it had been swaggering toward them with imposing arrogance. But after Blazing Fist — Nine Palaces, it had been charred completely black and fled with its tail between its legs.
Even a Colossal Death Lizard with its formidable defenses couldn't withstand Blazing Fist — Nine Palaces. Had it not run, it too would have been burned to ash.
The pack besieging Mo Fan had clearly been under that Colossal Death Lizard's command. The moment the Battle-General-class beast turned and fled, the ones farther back were left dumbstruck, momentarily too frightened to charge forward to their deaths.
"Now's our chance — fall back!" Mo Fan seized the moment while the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons stood frozen and leaped onto the Swift Star Wolf's back.
There was open space around the Swift Star Wolf, giving it room to build momentum. Its speed erupted in an instant — using the fire-scorched ruins as a launching pad, it leaped with powerful grace onto a low, flat building nearby…
It sprinted the full length of the rooftop. Below, Lizard-Skull Giant Demons still pressed together like a surging tide — yet the Swift Star Wolf, with the boldness of a seasoned hunter, simply ran straight across their backs, covering the distance over their writhing carpet of bodies.
Row upon row of teeth flashed like white crests as the demons twisted their heads to snap at them. Several times Mo Fan was certain the Swift Star Wolf's tail was about to be caught — but in the end, its speed utterly outpaced the sluggish beasts. Every biting snap found nothing but air and a few stray tail hairs.
The whole mad dash across their backs lasted barely over three seconds — but the terror and thrill of it had every cell in Mo Fan's body involuntarily tucking his legs in.
*Brother Wolf, can we please never do that again — you nearly scared the soul right out of me.*
The Swift Star Wolf rounded the corner onto a street where the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons were not quite so densely packed, and a naturally cast shadow stretched across the road…
Mo Fan immediately recalled the Swift Star Wolf into the Dimensional Plane and pressed himself into a blind corner of the street, activating Shadow Fade.
He had been watching the sky earlier — not as some dramatic final gesture before death, but waiting for sunlight to break through the wretched clouds.
Sunlight was what gave buildings their shadows.
Mo Fan had activated Shadow Fade in the dead corner of the turn. When the Lizard-Skull Giant Demons behind him swung around to give chase, both man and wolf had vanished entirely.
The demons already on this street had been tracking the battle by sound alone and hadn't seen Mo Fan or the Swift Star Wolf at all. They paid no heed to a shadow slipping from one building's shade to another — they kept charging blindly forward until they spilled out onto the wide avenue, where they found the human soldiers busy cutting down their kin.
Jiang Yi had watched Mo Fan turn down the other street. But by the time she cut through the parallel ruined road to follow, there was no sign of him…
Mo Fan had simply vanished into thin air.
One corner — that was all it took. There were still Lizard-Skull Giant Demons everywhere, yet they were all now charging straight toward the soldiers, with no sign that anyone had just slipped through their midst.
"He's gone??" Jiang Yi stared at the Lizard-Skull Giant Demon-infested district in disbelief.
She had always thought there was an element of luck in him saving Bo City and fighting the Black Church forces in Magic City — but now she was beginning to believe it.
She couldn't find Mo Fan anywhere.
Her instincts told her he likely had some hidden ability. If she used a tracking beast, she might be able to find him — but the problem was, they were completely swamped by Lizard-Skull Giant Demons themselves. Whether she could even get out alive was the real question.