Chapter 707: Bloodless Slaughter Domain
"No one can save you from me, boy!" Noah stood in the middle of the stone platform alone as the blood demon Chi Zu charged at him with the full brunt of the Soul Formation Level cultivation.
Everyone else on the stone platform had run away in fear or had been moved away by Noah.
Standing outside the periphery of the stone platform. Xian Mei and the others looked at Noah with a worried look on their pale faces.
"Damn it, why can't I enter?" Xu Tianhua wanted to rush back to help Noah, but there was an invisible wall preventing anyone from stepping up on the stage. Unlike the others, who were merely acting out of their moral obligation, Tianhua felt indebted to Noah and did not want to see him die.
"Junior Tianhua, there is an array formation placed on the ground; we cannot enter unless we forcefully break through the formation." Meng Shui appeared beside the young man once she was done evacuating the disciples of her sect from the area and analyzed the barrier with her sharp eyes.
"Those sinful, demonic, diabolic, iniquitous… bastards!" Xu Tianhua slammed his fist into the barrier, causing a ripple to appear in the air, throwing every slur that came to his mind into the air. "I knew it; these demonic sects cannot be trusted at all. They will stoop to any point just to get what they want."
Meng Shui, who had been analyzing the array formation from the side seriously as the blood demon stopped before Noah, shook her head. "It was not the blood demon who set this formation."
"What do you mean, senior?" Surprised, Xu Tianhua looked at her for answers, but his attention was caught by the cackling laughter of the blood demon, who stood face-to-face with Noah.
"You will pay for the sins of killing the disciples of my sect!" The blood demon declared with pride and authority as he looked down at Noah like he was some kind of ant standing before him.
Noah did not seem to be the slightest bit affected by his powerful aura. His robes fluttered in the air, but his expression was as calm as always. "Chi Zu, you call yourself a blood demon, and you still need excuses to deal with a young cultivator like me?"
Noah's abnormal behavior and his carefree laughter left the blood demon baffled. He never expected Noah to react this way and to even directly call him by his name.
He snorted coldly, thinking this was Noah's way of acting brave in the last moments of his life, but Noah's next words only gave him another shock.
"Since you want to kill me to take something from me, why come up with all the excuses?" Noah chuckled and glanced in the direction of Hemes and Liang Chen, who were engaged in their own fight. "We both know there is no such thing as resentment, Gu; you just came to me to take away the artifact I obtained from the domain on the orders of someone else, like a good little dog."
The smirk on the blood demon's face had long vanished, replaced with a solemn look of fury.
"You sure run your mouth a lot for someone who is about to die."
Noah laughed with a scoff, "You know what's even funnier…" Noah took a step forward; he covered the distance between them in one step and whispered in his ear. "I did kill your disciples."
Before the blood demon could react to his speed, a hand was pressed against his abdomen. Even Meng Shui outside the barrier was startled by the sudden burst of speed shown by Noah.
Even though she could hear their voices within the formation, she did not hear his voice; her eyes could not help but widen when a burst of power filled the room.
Whoosh!
The air around Noah swirled as the momentum of the peak Golden Core Realm filled the area. Despite his lower cultivation, his aura did not only match the blood demon; it surpassed him!
Boom!
Chi Zu's face twisted as he felt a biting chill spreading from his stomach. He lowered his gaze without moving his head and saw Noah's hand was covered in ice, which was spreading over his body.
"You dare!" His withered body suddenly inflated as the blood demon got over his shock and swung his arm down, conjuring a scythe halfway, causing Noah to take his hand back and use it to block the incoming attack.
The old man who looked like he would die at any moment suddenly swelled with energy. His skinny bones grew muscles that brimmed with power and stretched his loose skin; his loose robes tightened.
A burst of wind erupted from the attack, but Noah's hand refused to budge.
Bang!
Noah slowly raised his leg and kicked the man in his frozen stomach, sending him hurling back. He collided against the ground, and stone slabs flew in the air.
Hum!
"You want to take me on… and snatch something that is mine?" Noah whispered under his breath as his body slowly rose from the ground, his head tilted backwards and his eyes were filled with disdain, "You are in over your head."
"Cough! Splat!" Chi Zu slowly stepped up from the rubble, blood dripping from his wounded arms. The scythe in his arms had vanished. Raising his head, he looked at Noah in anger and frustration.
He had thought that Noah was merely a core formation realm cultivator since he managed to enter the domain with the restriction, but now he wondered how he managed to bypass that restriction.
Or was his strength fake? Did he use some kind of forbidden technique to gain this power?
But he shook those thoughts off as soon as they came because Noah's aura was more stable than his own, meaning this was his real cultivation. If there had been a burst of qi surrounding his body or pulsing power, that would have meant that he was using a secret technique, but Noah's aura was as calm as a still lake.
"I will make sure you pay for treating this grandpa blood demon like this." Chi Zu spat a mouthful of blood at his feet and glared at Noah in hatred.
His anger crossed its limits when Noah ignored his words like the buzzing of a fly and turned his head to the side, watching the monks' fight. Liang Chen's palm had been blocked by a dark miasma that had brushed to the side.
Woosh!
At a fast speed, it even reached their barrier only to be stopped by an invisible force.
"He is coming." Elysia, who seemed to have entered Noah's robes, peeked her head out and looked towards the blood demon, who was breathing like an enraged bull.
Noah looked back and saw the man slashing down at his own wrists.
"Is he committing suicide already? I did not even give him the greatest shock of his life." Noah muttered Elysia mockingly as he saw blood spraying from the cut and spray all around the ground.
Meng Shui and Lei Ji were busy evacuating the rest of the people and their disciples from the area; had they not been, they would have warned Noah to watch out for what's coming next.
Splurt!
"That man told me to take the chance of the distraction of the domain to deal a blow to the foundation of the three sects, and then he told me to take away some kind of artifact in your possession for him while he deals with the rest…" The blood oozed from Chi Zu's body like an endless fountain; his muscles receded like a deflating balloon. Yet the look in his bright eyes only grew fiercer. "But time and time again, you meddled with the plan."
"Not only that, man, but even I underestimated you." Suddenly the blood stopped coming out, and his wounds healed on their own, and his body had returned to its previous state. "But no more."
"I will finish you right here and now!" He bellowed as the blood pooled on the ground started to spread around, seeping into the stone slabs like they had absorbed it.
Hissssss—
A sickening, corrosive sound slithered through the air like a serpent coiled in hatred.
Crk. Crk. Crk…!
The stone beneath the blood demon began to fracture and darken, as if infected by the blood that seeped into it. A deep, menacing crimson mist billowed upward in a twenty-meter radius, moving like misty tentacles coming to life. The scent of iron, rot, and spiritual decay washed over the platform, strong enough to make anyone recoil in disgust.
Noah, who was also standing in the middle of the mist, covered himself in a thin protective layer of qi without looking away from the blood demon in front of him.
The vapors of blood surged into the sky as the bloody grin on Chi Zu's face deepened. He took a wide pose, spreading his arms in the air, spreading outwards, and snarled.
"Bloodless Slaughter Domain."