The sky above the Abyssal Front was a catastrophic rupture of reality...
One half of the firmament was a suffocating maelstrom of toxic, necrotic ash, while the opposing horizon blazed with a searing, golden holy light that explicitly burned the corneas of anyone foolish enough to stare directly into it.
Grand Elder Shen He stood upon the elevated, rune-carved prow of the massive bone-ship, his voice magically amplified by a localized blood-array to echo across the weeping trenches below.
"The Vanguard accepts no retreat!" Shen He’s voice ground against the eardrums of the thousands of gathered demonic cultists.
"Every soul standing upon this scorched earth is now bound by the Soul-Tethered Death Pact! You will hold this quarantine zone against the Orthodox crusade for one full lunar cycle, or your physical vessels will be detonated remotely to fuel the Sect’s defensive barriers!"
Shen He’s cold, aged eyes swept over the terrified ranks of slaughter-captains and elite disciples.
"The Vanguard is not entirely devoid of mercy," the Grand Elder continued, his tone dripping with cruel pragmatism.
"Scattered across this wasteland are several ancient Cursed Reliquaries. These are massive, subterranean bunkers forged from petrified leviathan marrow. The extreme Yang-Fire of the Orthodox Paladins cannot pierce their hull. However, they are completely barren of dark essence. You may cower within them to save your own skin, but your fiends will explicitly starve to death in the sterile environment. How you choose to survive this meat-grinder is entirely up to your own wretched cunning."
Shen He offered a final, horrifying caveat. "The tracking runes burned into your clavicles are absolute. If you are cleansed by the holy light, we will know. Do not disappoint the Sect Master."
The massive bone-ramps violently retracted with a deafening sequence of metallic clangs. The fleet of heavy bone-ships instantly engaged their kinetic thrusters, ascending rapidly into the ash-clouds, completely abandoning the demonic army in the center of the apocalyptic battlefield.
Sunny stood perfectly rigid in the blood-soaked mud. His pale, aristocratic features were locked into a flawless mask of chilling, calculated apathy. His crimson eyes glowed with an unnatural, predatory light.
Internally, however, Sunny was experiencing a catastrophic spiral of civilian exhaustion and profound panic. He had explicitly never received any formal combat training. He was a modern teenager violently thrust into an active warzone between god-like cultivators. His uncultivated legs ached from the heavy, oppressive gravity of the Abyssal Front, and he explicitly desired nothing more than to curl up inside one of those impenetrable bunkers and sleep until the war ended.
Several prominent warlords, explicitly recognizing the apocalyptic power of Sunny’s Sovereign-tier Ghoul Ape, immediately approached him to propose battlefield alliances.
"Supreme Flesh-Crafter," Warlord Kraven grunted, offering a formal demonic salute.
"Our combined cohorts could effortlessly secure the eastern—"
"..."
Sunny explicitly offered absolute, freezing silence. He did not even turn his head to acknowledge the towering executioner.
He merely projected his innate, world-breaking villainous aura, letting a suffocating wave of heavy dark Qi wash over the warlords.
Sunny explicitly rejected them because he knew that traveling with veteran killers would inevitably expose his complete lack of martial arts.
Furthermore, large groups attracted the explosive, long-range artillery of the Orthodox Paladins. He intended to survive entirely through stealth and evasion.
Warlord Kraven flinched, his scarred face twisting with a mixture of profound humiliation and deep-seated terror.
He explicitly interpreted Sunny’s mute rejection as an absolute, supreme insult. Kraven firmly believed the Young Master viewed them as pathetic, clumsy burdens who would only hinder his divine slaughter. The warlords quickly backed away, terrified of provoking his wrath.
Sunny turned and began walking into the dense, swirling fog of toxic smoke.
Trailing a half-step behind him was Krax, the rat-faced Vanguard scout. Krax had been officially assigned as Sunny’s territorial guide.
Krax was explicitly vibrating with sheer, unadulterated mortal dread. He was not terrified of the Orthodox Paladins; he was absolutely paralyzed by the entity he was forced to guide.
In the Demonic Sect, scouts assigned to Elite Commanders were universally treated as disposable, walking blood-bags.
Krax was entirely convinced that the Supreme Flesh-Crafter had rejected the warlords because Sunny intended to slowly cannibalize Krax’s organs for dark-ritual fuel whenever his fiends grew hungry.
"S-Supreme One," Krax stammered, his teeth chattering so violently he could barely speak. "The... the optimal path to avoid the radiant-artillery patrols is through the sunken marrow-valleys."
Sunny maintained his cold, apathetic facade. He slowly shifted his crimson gaze toward the trembling scout.
"..."
Sunny offered nothing but a heavy, unblinking stare. He explicitly chose not to speak because his throat was agonizingly dry from the sulfurous air, and he feared his voice would crack.
To Krax, this unbroken, terrifying silence was the ultimate psychological execution. He explicitly concluded that the Young Master was meticulously calculating the spiritual density of Krax’s liver, debating whether to harvest it now or wait until nightfall. Krax swallowed a sob, explicitly resolving to never speak unbidden again, lest he accelerate his own vivisection.
The bizarre procession moved deeper into the desolate wasteland.
Hovering directly above Sunny’s crown was the Abyssal Void-Sac, acting as a fleshy, pulsating parasol against the searing flashes of holy light illuminating the sky above. Coiled comfortably inside the Void-Sac’s dimensional pocket was the Sanguine Void-Leech, safely hidden from the chaos. Trailing silently in Sunny’s elongated shadow was the Phantom Ash Scorpion. Looming ten paces behind them, shrouded entirely in a heavy, light-absorbing cloak, was the massive Sovereign Ghoul Ape.
As they traversed a scorched ravine, the oppressive atmosphere suddenly shifted. The ambient dark Qi violently dispersed, replaced by a suffocating, searing wave of purified solar energy.
Krax immediately dropped to his knees, his face pale with horror. He pointed a trembling finger toward the ridge ahead.
A massive, glowing monstrosity crested the jagged rocks. It was a Seraphic Sun-Hound, a horrific amalgamation of mutated lupine muscle and fused, golden Paladin armor. It stood ten feet tall at the shoulder, its jaws dripping with liquid, white-hot holy fire. The beast was explicitly engineered by the Orthodox sects to hunt and incinerate high-tier demonic targets.
Sunny felt his civilian heart plummet into his stomach. The beast explicitly radiated a heat so intense that the mud beneath its paws instantly baked into cracked ceramic. Sunny was entirely exhausted, and the thought of initiating a complex, high-speed battle made him want to weep.
He casually activated the Supreme Merge System, focusing his gaze on the glowing terror.
[Target Identified: Seraphic Sun-Hound]
[Monster Level]: Tier 4 (Peak Commander)
[Monster Grade]: Perfect
[Monster Attribute]: Radiant / Fire
[Special Characteristic]: Zealot’s Focus (The Hound’s biological logic-array is blind to physical forms. It tracks and attacks exclusively by locking onto hostile emotional Qi, specifically murderous intent or intense fear. If it encounters a target entirely devoid of emotional resonance, its cognitive matrix will violently crash, rendering it docile.)
Sunny stared at the floating blue text. He explicitly marveled at the rigid, easily exploitable mechanics of this world’s biology. The holy beast was essentially a heat-seeking missile that only targeted feelings.
The Seraphic Sun-Hound let out a deafening, metallic roar. It locked its burning, eyeless helm directly onto Krax, explicitly sensing the scout’s massive, radiating aura of absolute mortal panic.
The hound charged, its heavy golden paws shattering the stone beneath it.
"Supreme One! Save me! I offer my soul!" Krax shrieked, pressing his face into the dirt, entirely paralyzed by fear.
Sunny explicitly did not deploy the Sovereign Ghoul Ape. He did not issue a single combat incantation. He simply stood perfectly still in the path of the charging behemoth.
Sunny explicitly shut down his innate villainous aura. Because he was so profoundly exhausted and physically drained by the march, achieving a state of absolute, dead apathy was incredibly easy. He completely detached his mind from the battlefield, explicitly thinking about how much he missed the comfortable mattress in his old apartment. He projected an emotional void so absolute it rivaled a cold stone.
The Seraphic Sun-Hound closed the distance in a blur of golden light, its jaws opening to incinerate Sunny’s head.
However, the moment the hound entered Sunny’s immediate vicinity, its tracking logic-array encountered a sudden, absolute vacuum of emotional Qi. Sunny was explicitly projecting nothing.
The hound’s biological matrix violently crashed.
The massive beast abruptly aborted its charge, its heavy paws skidding through the mud, coming to a halt mere inches from Sunny’s unmoving boots. The holy fire dripping from its jaws instantly fizzled out. The hound tilted its heavy, armored head, letting out a confused, high-pitched whine that sounded bizarrely like a lost puppy.
Its brain had explicitly short-circuited. Lacking any hostile or fearful emotional input to process, the beast entirely forgot what it was doing. It turned away from Sunny, began happily chasing its own armored tail for several seconds, and then casually trotted off into the ash-fog, sniffing at a burnt log.
Sunny explicitly maintained his dead-eyed stare until the beast vanished.
Krax slowly lifted his head from the mud. The scout stared at the retreating holy beast, and then looked up at Sunny in absolute, paralyzed disbelief.
The scout explicitly believed that Sunny had just utilized a supreme, unfathomable curse of mind-shattering dark arts. Krax firmly concluded that the Young Master’s spiritual pressure was so god-like that he had instantaneously lobotomized a Perfect-grade Orthodox war-beast simply by looking at it, stripping the creature of its violent nature without lifting a single finger.
"Your... your psychological domination is absolute, Supreme Patriarch," Krax whispered, weeping tears of profound, terrifying awe.
Sunny explicitly sighed internally, ignoring the groveling scout. He pointed his pale finger toward the distant horizon, where the jagged, petrified silhouette of a Cursed Reliquary broke through the toxic clouds.
"The vault. Move," Sunny commanded, his voice a flat, exhausted rasp.
Krax scrambled to his feet, explicitly determined to guide the Young Master flawlessly.
He realized with certainty that as long as he remained useful to the Supreme Flesh-Crafter, not even the holy crusade could touch him.