In the grip of life and death, Zhu Zhuqing mustered her last bit of strength, forcefully breaking free from the chains of ice and snow and staggering backward. The center of her brows was still grazed by the Snow Empress's fingertip; a blue, icy divine power invaded her soul, dimming her vision and causing severe damage to her consciousness. Yet, at the very least, she avoided the fate of being crushed outright.
"Zhuqing!"
Dai Mubai saw Zhu Zhuqing thrown back, her pale face and the icy blue line now between her brows wounding his heart.
"Go... quickly..." Zhu Zhuqing said weakly, her soul eroded by the divine power of ice and snow, her consciousness beginning to blur.
The Snow Empress and Demon Empress had already blocked their retreat one after the other.
The Snow Empress was surrounded by nine rings of ice, each emitting air close to absolute zero. The Demon Empress's Magnetic Thunder Hell opened once more, a storm of iron sand and purple lightning filling the sky.
Dai Mubai held Zhu Zhuqing in his arms, glancing at the formidable enemies before and behind. Then, he looked at Huo Yuhao, still breathing with his eyes closed, and at the white-haired youth in the distance, arms crossed, watching as if it were a play... He felt that today, he might really fall here.
But he was Dai Mubai, the God of War, boss of the Shrek Seven Devils, and brother to Tang San.
"Zhuqing."
Dai Mubai lowered his head, looking at his dazed wife in his arms. His gaze was full of gentleness, and then, determination.
"Do you remember the first time we used the Nether White Tiger?"
With effort, Zhu Zhuqing opened her eyes, staring into her husband's familiar crazed gaze, understanding something.
"You..."
"Hmm."
Dai Mubai nodded, blood staining his smile.
"Anyway, we're not getting out today. Let's show these juniors of the new era that us old folks aren't just pushovers."
He gently set Zhu Zhuqing down, leaning her against an icy boulder, then turned to face the Snow Empress and Demon Empress. Golden flames burned even fiercer upon him.
"I never thought that setting foot here again would be a death sentence. Even if I'm born and die, I never thought the end would be like this."
With each word, his aura surged. By the time he finished speaking, his aura had stabilized at the level of a First-Class God, and was still rising.
But the price was great—cracks appeared like spiderwebs across his divine body, golden god-blood gushing out like magma, evaporating in the flames. His hair turned white at a speed visible to the naked eye, the origin of his life dwindling rapidly.
"You're crazy... Completely crazy."
The Demon Empress's face was solemn. She could feel Dai Mubai burning everything for one last burst of power. No matter the outcome, he would surely die after this battle—his soul destroyed, not even a chance at reincarnation.
The Snow Empress also dropped all disdain, her icy blue eyes filled with gravity.
This was a noble resolve.
"Zhuqing."
Dai Mubai ignored them, speaking quietly to Zhu Zhuqing behind him.
"This is our final move."
Zhu Zhuqing struggled to her feet, soul traumatized and divine power exhausted, but still walked to Dai Mubai's side. She reached out and clasped his hand.
The moment their hands joined, an invisible resonance was born between them.
It was a resonance of bloodline, soul, and bond.
"Martial souls... fusion!"
Dai Mubai and Zhu Zhuqing spoke in unison.
Their bodies began to emit a chaotic gray-white light, neither golden nor black, encompassing and rejecting all. In that light, their figures fused and transformed. The roar of a white tiger and the cry of a ghostly cat rang out together, perfectly merging at a singularity into a new, soul-shaking roar.
The Snow Empress and Demon Empress retreated at once, feeling a fatal threat.
"Stop them!"
The Demon Empress took the lead, her Magnetic Thunder Prison splitting into billions of thunder spears that rained down upon the gray-white sphere of light. At the same time, the nine ice rings of the Snow Empress merged into a pillar of icy blue light, piercing the heavens and directly striking the center of the sphere.
Yet, within a hundred meters of the sphere, all attacks eerily disappeared. They were neither resisted nor offset, like a clay ox entering the sea—dissolving into nothing.
Inside the sphere, a qualitative change was occurring, one that defied their understanding.
"Rooaaar——!!!"
At last, a thunderous roar echoed across the wilderness, spreading across half of the Douluo Continent. The gray-white sphere exploded.
What appeared was no longer the humanoid forms of Dai Mubai and Zhu Zhuqing, but a giant beast over a hundred zhang tall and three hundred zhang long. Its form was somewhere between tiger and cat, covered in gray and white fur, which flowed with divine, galaxy-like patterns.
Its eyes—left a blazing golden sun, right a cold, dark moon.
On its forehead, the "king" character pierced its skull, the fusion of the laws of the God of War and God of Speed.
Most terrifying of all was the aura emanating from its body—a true First-Class God's coercion, not a newly advanced one, but a terrifying existence with more than 130 divine powers, comparable to the ancient First-Class Gods.
The Netherworld White Tiger.
But this was not the Netherworld White Tiger of ten thousand years ago—it was the ultimate fusion of two Second-Class Gods, burning everything, sacrificing their lives to display this, a God-level Netherworld White Tiger.
"Trouble..."
The Demon Empress's expression changed completely.
She could sense this Netherworld White Tiger's strength was beyond what she could handle. Even with infinite core energy, faced with such absolute power, she could only hold on for a while.
The Snow Empress also felt immense pressure.
The laws of ice and snow were powerful, but before such pure force, they might not be able to restrain it at all.
The Netherworld White Tiger raised its head and roared at the sky, the sound waves transforming into a gray-white halo that swept outwards. Wherever the aura passed, space froze, time slowed, and even the Snow Empress's domain and Demon Empress's Magnetic Thunder Prison were forcibly compressed and suppressed.
Lowering its head, its sun-and-moon eyes fixed on the Demon Empress.
"ROOAAAR—!"
The Netherworld White Tiger moved.
Its five-hundred-meter body moved faster than physical law, not running but leaping through space, appearing hundreds of meters away in a moment, as if teleporting.
In just three strides, it crossed a kilometer and appeared before the Demon Empress.
A single forepaw swung down.
It was a simple, terrifying swipe.
At the moment the paw descended, the Demon Empress's Magnetic Thunder Prison shattered like paper, the iron sand storm blown away, the purple lightning vanishing, the gravity singularity crushed.
The Demon Empress barely had time to conjure twelve electromagnetic shields before the tiger's paw struck.
CRACK—!
All twelve shields shattered at once.
The Demon Empress was sent flying as if struck by a star, drawing a bloody arc thousands of meters through the air before crashing into a mountain at the edge of the wilderness.
BOOM—!
The entire mountain collapsed, burying the Demon Empress under millions of tons of rock.
A single blow heavily damaged the laws of thunder.
The Netherworld White Tiger turned, its sun-and-moon eyes fixing on the Snow Empress.
The Snow Empress drew a deep breath, both hands crossing her chest in a seal, the core of the Ice Domain running at full power, pouring the collapse of her conceptual space into her divine body.
"Absolute Zero—Eternal Ice Coffin!"
She wanted to use her strongest defense to withstand this strike.
But the Netherworld White Tiger gave her no time.
Its second forepaw struck, faster than the first, stronger than the first.
Even before the paw arrived, the terrifying pressure had already formed spiderweb cracks around the Snow Empress.
Her Eternal Ice Coffin was only half-formed before the tiger's paw was already atop her head.
The Snow Empress closed her eyes.
She knew that if this paw landed, at best she would be gravely injured, at worst, killed.
But the expected destruction never came.
CLANG—!!!
A tremendous metallic sound battered the Snow Empress's eardrums.
She opened her eyes, seeing a scene she would never forget.
A pale, slender hand gripped a pitch-black spear, its tip pressing against the tiger's paw, holding back a force capable of smashing mountains.
The wielder of that hand had appeared in front of her at some point—a white-haired young man.
Lu Jingming.
He held the spear in one hand, his body not trembling at all, lightly blocking the full-force attack of the Netherworld White Tiger.
"Have you had enough fun?"
Lu Jingming raised his head, looking up at the hundred-meter-tall Netherworld White Tiger. His tone was calm, as if merely asking whether you'd already eaten.
A hint of doubt flashed in the sun-and-moon eyes of the Netherworld White Tiger.
At the moment it touched the black spear, it felt its power strangely dissolve.
It was not offset or countered; rather, it dissipated quietly, like ice and snow melting under the sun.
"ROOAAAR—!"
The Netherworld White Tiger roared in fury, swinging its other paw sideways, its claws tracing the edge of the gray-white wound.
Lu Jingming didn't even turn his face.
He kept his left hand and the black spear pressed into the first paw, while his right hand rose, a white-flowered lance appearing lightly in his palm.
A gentle white light passed through, and the Netherworld White Tiger's second paw suddenly halted three meters away.
At the tip of its claw, an edge sharp enough to slice space itself was erased like a pencil mark by an eraser.
Not only that—a thin wound opened on the white tiger's leg, but instead of bleeding, the flesh around the wound began to grow and proliferate uncontrollably, swelling into a massive tumor several meters wide in an instant.
The tumor twisted and writhed, a contorted face appearing on its surface, letting out a silent roar.
This was the creative power of the white flower—granting life, but used against an enemy, it caused their cells to multiply infinitely, becoming cancer, ultimately leading to self-destruction.
The Netherworld White Tiger roared in pain, suddenly pulling back its paw and retreating hundreds of meters.
Looking down, the tumor was still growing rapidly, invading its forearm.
It tried to suppress it with divine power, but was powerless—the creative power was alive, rooting and spreading in its body.
The black abyss disintegrated all, the white flower was uncontrollable.
One spear governed the end of death, the other the loss of control over life.
Together, they were the supreme power that ruled life and death.
Lu Jingming withdrew the white flower, holding the black abyss in one hand, and walked step by step toward the Netherworld White Tiger.
His steps were not fast, but with each one, the wilderness shook.
"You truly surprised me."
Lu Jingming stopped a hundred meters before the Netherworld White Tiger, looking up at the giant beast with rare appreciation in his eyes.
"Burning your godhood, your martial souls, your divine soul, trading everything for a power that temporarily surpasses a First-Class God, and this limit-breaking martial soul fusion... If I weren't here, you might have truly changed the course of this war."
He paused, spinning the Black Abyss spear in his hand.
"But unfortunately, your opponent is me."
As his words fell, Lu Jingming moved.
It wasn't teleportation, but something stranger—his body melted like a reflection in water, reappearing above the Netherworld White Tiger's head.
The Abyss spear thrust down from above, piercing through.
The moment the spear tip penetrated the Netherworld White Tiger's skull, black and red ripples spread outward from the wound.
Where the ripples passed, the gray-white fur withered and decayed, turning to ash as if it had undergone billions of years of erosion in an instant.
"ROOAAAR—!!!"
The Netherworld White Tiger let out a furious roar, shaking the four wilds.
Under mortal threat, it unleashed terrifying power, First-Class God force surging across the Douluo Continent.
Under the white tiger's roar, gravity within thousands of miles became chaotic, magnetic fields went out of control.
The earth groaned under its heavy breathing, bottomless fissures spiderwebbing outward.
The clouds in the sky were swept away by invisible pressure, revealing the deep, dark backdrop of the universe, with only distant, trembling stars visible.
This region was no longer part of the mortal world, but had become a domain belonging to the gods.
The shockwave knocked Lu Jingming back, but he stood firm in the void.
The Netherworld White Tiger's four paws split space, its massive golden pupils fixing on Lu Jingming, who floated in midair.
Compared to the world-destroying beast, Lu Jingming's figure seemed as small as a lone boat in a raging sea.
He wore a simple black robe, his white hair unmoved by the divine storm, his red eyes calm as they reflected the giant tiger's hideous form.
He was a newly ascended god, but the Netherworld White Tiger dared not look down on him.
Because at this moment, the entire Douluo plane resonated with and cheered for his existence.
He was now the new master of this planet's will.
"Is this your enlightenment?"
Lu Jingming spoke, his voice not loud, but overwhelming the thunder of heaven and earth, resonating directly in the depths of Dai Mubai and Zhu Zhuqing's souls.
"To burn everything for a battle you're destined to lose?"
"Shut up!"
The only answer was the Netherworld White Tiger's roar, shattering the sky.