The sky above the Southern Cloud Mountains curdled into a boiling, pitch-black ocean of clotted blood.
High above the cloud deck, standing at the dragon-bone prow of the three-hundred-foot **Nether-Dragon Flagship**, Patriarch Nether-Ghost raised his two-handed bone staff toward the darkened heavens. His sunken sockets flared with emerald corpse-fire, his cracked lips moving in a feverish, guttural demonic incantation that made the mountain air vibrate like a drumhead:
*"From the nine nether-depths, through the river of severed souls... DISSOLVE THE HEAVENS! CORRUPT THE EARTH! NINE-NETHER BLOOD RIVER ANNIHILATION CANNON, FIRE!"*
*RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMBLE.*
Deep in the iron belly of the flagship, ten thousand blood-refined spirit stones combusted simultaneously in the furnace core. Hundreds of demonic stokers frantically shoveled blackened marrow into the roaring fireboxes, cranking bronze pressure wheels until the boiler rivets squealed. Runes carved from flayed bone blazed across the hull, funneling millions of units of necrotic spiritual filth through the vessel's primary keel conduits.
The colossal fossilized dragon skull forming the prow unhinged its lower jaw with an ear-splitting metallic shriek.
A torrential, mile-wide deluge of necrotic blood erupted from the cannon's throat. Thick as hot roofing pitch, heavy as lead, carrying the screaming faces of a hundred thousand tortured souls, the cataract plunged downward at terminal velocity.
The stench hit the valley first—a suffocating reek of spoiled abattoir runoff, rancid tallow, and ancient swamp rot. The sheer acidity of the sludge dissolved the surrounding cloud banks into choking yellow sulfur smoke. The massive red column fell straight toward the quiet plateau of Sunset Peak, aimed squarely at Austin's cabin, his newly graded garden beds, and every living soul huddled on the ridge.
"The Nether Blood River..." Sect Master Gu Qing dropped flat on his stomach in the clover, clawing at the dirt, his voice hollow with total despair. "The ancestral soul-corrupting deluge... It melts spiritual weapons into sludge. It rots the golden core in the chest. Even a True Nascent Soul sovereign caught under that torrent would have the meat stripped from his ribs in ten breaths... We're dead. The sect is gone..."
Beside him in the weeds, two hundred disciples and sixty Foundation elders huddled into a shivering knot. Many shut their eyes, pressing their noses into the moss, frantically muttering their final death sutras as the mile-wide sky of boiling gore rushed down to bury them. Disciples were clutching each other's blood-soaked sleeves, weeping in the dirt, waiting for the acidic tide to melt their flesh to bone.
Down in the courtyard, Austin stood beside his porch railing, leaning his elbow on the handle of his hearth broom.
He tilted his head back, squinting up through the haze.
He watched the mile-wide red cataract dropping out of the clouds, blotting out the midday sun in a greasy, pulsing shadow that smelled worse than a backed-up grease trap behind a cheap diner.
Austin’s nose wrinkled in deep, visceral disgust.
"What kind of garbage texture mapping is that?" Austin muttered, shifting his weight with a grimace. "Looks like a municipal sewer main blew out at forty pounds of pressure. Viscous, untextured red bio-sludge. Disgusting. If that biohazard filth splashes across my obsidian courtyard, it's going to strip the reflection gloss, soak right into the perimeter drainage gravel, and permanently wreck my site rating down to F-tier. Getting an oil-based biological contaminant out of porous gravel without a four-thousand-PSI hot-water pressure washer is an absolute nightmare. Who approved this raid mechanic? There's no secondary containment berm! It’s a straight-up EPA violation."
A sharp golden chime rang behind his eyes, snapping up a red-bordered console window:
Austin felt an uncomfortable, fiery, pressurized tightness backing up behind his collarbone. It was the exact thermodynamic indigestion that came from jumping five levels in three seconds without cycling the manifold down. His solar plexus felt like an unvented water heater with a welded pressure relief valve.
"Yeah, perfect timing," Austin grunted, rolling his shoulders and loosening his canvas apron strings. "The exhaust manifold is way overpressure anyway. Need to vent the lines before I blow a gasket."
He strolled out to the exact geometric center of coordinate `[X: 08, Y: 08]` on the obsidian plaza.
He didn't draw a celestial blade. He didn't drop into a low martial stance. He didn't bother planting his feet or squaring his hips.
Austin simply tilted his chin straight up at ninety degrees, looked directly into the maw of the falling mile-wide ocean of blood, opened his mouth, and let loose a deep, relaxed, post-meal burp.
*FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!*
A full-scale, unshielded Solar Prominence erupted from his throat.
A vertical pillar of sapphire-blue thermonuclear plasma forty yards across roared into the sky!
The beam tore upward at the speed of light with the deafening thunder of a stellar coronal ejection. The unyielding ultraviolet glare was so immense that the entire province of Canglan—stretching across a thousand miles of jagged mountains, river basins, and imperial cities—lit up in brilliant sapphire daylight! Shadow vanished from the face of the province. Every gully and grotto within three hundred leagues flared with blinding, noon-bright sapphire radiance.
The plasma pillar struck the center of the mile-wide Nether Blood River head-on.
At fifty thousand Kelvin, chemistry yields to basic physics.
Atomic structures broke down on impact. The necrotic venom, the boiling blood, the tens of thousands of gallons of swamp sludge had no time to boil or vaporize. In less than two hundredths of a second, the entire mile-wide river dissociated subatomically into raw elemental hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen plasma, erased from physical reality as though someone had hit the delete key on the server rack.
The solar pillar didn't even slow down.
*SKYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY-CRACK!*
The sapphire beam punched clean through the upper thunderheads, striking the three-hundred-foot Nether-Dragon Flagship dead center from stem to stern!
The ancient dreadnought—hewn from petrified abyssal dragon bone that had turned aside lightning tribulations and mountain-cleaving swords for three centuries—parted like warm tallow under an industrial laser torch.
The two halves of the flagship split down the keel, tumbling through the sky in blinding, disintegrating sheets of white-hot plasma and molten bronze armor plating!
The remaining forty-seven war skiffs, loitering half a mile out in perimeter support, caught the expanding coronal shockwave across their bows.
Their flayed-skin battle sails flared into ash in a microsecond. Their cedar hulls charred to glowing cherry-red embers. Their pressurized corpse-coal boilers popped and seized with squealing shrieks of dying brass. All forty-seven skiffs broke formation in blind, hysterical panic, scattering across the burning sky like roaches when a boiler room hatch is thrown wide! Demonic captains cut their anchor lines, jettisoned their cargo, and whipped their oars, scrambling in raw terror to put whole mountain ranges between themselves and the western ridge.
Up on the melting command bridge of the splitting flagship, Patriarch Nether-Ghost stood paralyzed. His scarlet silks had burned away to smoking tatters, and radiation blisters were already swelling across his grey face.
His prized skull staff slipped from his numb fingers, clattering onto the white-hot deck and dissolving into a puddle of bronze slag.
His bloodshot eyes stared down through the colossal, circular hole burned clean through the clouds—down at the skinny kid in the canvas apron standing on the black porch of a four-room cabin.
Cosmic terror, pure and unhinged, broke Nether-Ghost’s mind:
**"HE... HE VAPORIZED MY ANCESTRAL BLOOD RIVER WITH A SINGLE YAWN?!"** Nether-Ghost shrieked into the wind, his voice cracking into high, sobbing shrieks. **"HE CUT MY FLAGSHIP IN TWO WITH A CASUAL BREATH! HE IS NO CULTIVATOR! HE IS AN AWAKENED, LIVING SUN!"**
Nether-Ghost didn't wait to watch the keel hit the rocks. He bit his own tongue in half, crushed his ancestral **Nine-Nether Soul-Escape Talisman** against his palm, and burned three centuries of his own core cultivation blood in a single desperate pop.
*BANG.*
A shrieking streak of crimson light rocketed toward the northern horizon at ten times the speed of sound, wailing like a scalded dog as the demonic patriarch fled back toward the safety of his swamp.
Ten miles to the north, the two burning halves of the Nether-Dragon Flagship crashed into an uninhabited wilderness ravine with an earth-shaking rumble, sending a mushroom cloud of white steam into the quiet afternoon.
The sky above the Southern Cloud Mountains cleared completely.
The warm, golden sun poured over the ridges once more. The crisp mountain air carried the sharp tang of sweet ozone, toasted pine needles, and fresh morning dew.
Down on Sunset Peak, Austin let out a soft, satisfied burp.
*Puff.*
A little curl of pale blue smoke drifted from between his lips. He tapped his belly with the back of his hand, letting out a long, easy sigh:
"Ahhh. Much better. Core exhaust manifold vented. Internal pressure right back to nominal operating spec. Nothing like a good burp to clear out the pipes."
He turned around on his straw sandals, strolled back toward the porch steps, and tossed the hearth broom over to Li Xiaoyao.
Austin paused on the second step, glancing toward the southern dirt line where two hundred Clear Sky cultivators were still frozen flat on their bellies, staring at him like he was an ancient titan who had just swallowed the sky whole.
Austin rubbed his chin, frowning at the crowd.
"Look at these raid spectators," Austin muttered under his breath. "The world boss event despawned, the skybox cleared up, and they're still sitting around AFK waiting for a server reboot."
He raised his voice, calling over the yard toward Gu Qing and the elders:
"Hey! You folks from down the hill! If you're done watching the fireworks show, remember to pack out what you packed in! Don't leave your broken sword scrap, cracked wooden shields, or torn rags on my lawn! Jobsite cleanliness is non-negotiable! If I find litter in the perimeter drainage trench, I'm filing a complaint with the town hall!"
Sect Master Gu Qing and Elder Mu Chen scrambled upright like startled barn fowl, dropping to their knees in frantic, trembling synchronization until their foreheads hit the dirt.
"WE HEAR AND OBEY THE ANCESTOR'S SACRED DECREE!" Gu Qing yelled hoarsely, his hands shaking violently as he began frantically plucking loose pine needles out of the wild clover. "EVERY LAST SPECK OF DUST SHALL BE PURGED FROM THE SACRED HORIZON!"
Disciples scrambled on all fours, desperately stuffing dropped crossbow bolts, shredded robes, and broken bamboo twigs into their pockets.
Austin shook his head with a tired smirk. "Good. Glad to see some people still respect basic property lines."
He glanced back at his apprentice. "Put the broom back in the shed, Xiaoyao. The server lag cleared up, and that annoying battle drum loop finally died down. I'm heading inside to open the crafting menu and look over the blueprints for that new subterranean plasma pickaxe."