Below, Mei Qingxue forgot to breathe.
Shen Lanyue's eyes narrowed.
Ning Huang's fingers tightened around her spear.
There was no ground under either sibling.
There did not need to be.
Sky Lord cultivators flew by comprehending Sky Qi deeply enough to resonate with the heavens. That was the orthodox path. That was the path sects taught, manuals recorded, elders explained.
What Long Shenyu and Long Shenyin were doing had nothing to do with orthodoxy.
Their Dao depth, absurd for Origin Core cultivators, let them step on the atmosphere itself. Each foothold was brief, exact, and invisible. To the women below, it looked as though the two siblings were tearing across hidden platforms in the sky, one black-red and merciless, the other calm and sovereign, both moving with the kind of control that made ordinary genius seem childish.
Then the clash truly began.
Long Shenyin and the demon met in a spray of black-red sparks and blood-colored moonlight.
Long Shenyu and the beast collided again with a sound like iron mountains ramming together.
Fist against claw.
Palm against blood art.
Destruction lightning against beast pressure.
Soul force against demonic malice.
The battlefield became too dense to follow cleanly. Even Ning Huang, who had just fought six Sky Lords without bending, could not track every exchange in full. She caught fragments. A killing palm that should have caved in a chest and instead got turned aside by a horn wrapped in black-gold force. The demon weaving three blood threads around Long Shenyin's neck only for her to let one cut her shoulder so she could close the distance and slam an elbow into his jaw. Long Shenyu's wrist turning by a hair's breadth and stripping the force from a claw swipe so cleanly that the beast spent power and got nothing.
For the first stretch of it, they looked even.
The demon's blood arts were vicious, each one carrying curse force and the sour intelligence of a race that enjoyed hurting things slowly. He moved like spilled ink, body techniques flickering across angles that should not have existed, fingers leaving arcs of red-black moonlight behind them.
The beast fought the opposite way—raw, imperial violence. Horn, fang, claws, storm pressure. Its bloodline belonged to the Heaven-Horn Desolation Court, and even diluted, that lineage carried the savage authority of an apex territorial predator. Every charge felt like a siege ram thrown by the sky itself.
And still the siblings did not give ground.
Long Shenyu's movements were too clean.
That was the first thing the demon noticed, and the second thing the beast hated.
There was no waste in him. No angry flourish. No extra force where less would do. Every strike landed with purpose. Every block turned into pressure. Every time the beast wanted to overpower him through reserve, Long Shenyu forced an angle change, a correction, a second expenditure. He fought like a man who had already seen ten thousand versions of this exchange and rejected nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them as inefficient.
Long Shenyin was the opposite kind of problem.
She was filthier. Meaner. Her combat instinct had none of Long Shenyu's elegance and all of his certainty. She did not merely read openings. She created them by making choices that should have been wrong and turning them into slaughter. The demon sent a slicing crescent toward her ribs. She twisted just enough to let it graze her side, used the pain like fuel, forced her way through the rest of the technique, and buried clawed fingers into his shoulder hard enough to tear straight through flesh and strip half a slab from the bone beneath.
Blood sprayed.
The demon hissed and retreated three steps through the air.
Long Shenyin licked a streak of blood from the corner of her mouth and smiled wider.
"That's all?" she asked. "For demonic blood, you're disappointingly human."
Below, Ning Huang felt something cold move through her spine.
She knew women like this existed. But seeing one in front of her was different.
And the worse realization came a heartbeat later.
The brother was even harder to read.
Long Shenyu bent under a claw, turned inside the beast's guard, and drove a palm into its chest at such short range that there was no visible wind-up at all. The palm did not explode outward. It sank inward. Dense dragon force folded into the impact, carrying a line of fused Origin Qi and soul force that hit the beast's internal circulation like a wedge driven into a gate.
The beast grunted and stumbled backward in midair.
Long Shenyu followed once, twice, not pursuing wildly, simply forcing it to pay for every inch.
The demon saw it.
The beast felt it.
Something was wrong.
They had higher cultivation. They had stronger reserves. They were using Sky Qi, real Sky Qi, not some lower imitation. Their bodies were broader, their foundations deeper, their total resource pool incomparably better.
And yet the two Origin Core siblings were not slowing.
Not meaningfully.
Not in any way that made sense.
The demon realized it first because he was the more intelligent of the two. He broke back from Long Shenyin after another vicious exchange, chest heaving once, blood crawling down his forearm in black-red threads.
"We're spending too much," he said.
The beast snarled, circling hard against Long Shenyu. "Then stop holding back."
That was the moment both of them chose to show their blood.
The change in the beast was immediate and ugly.
Its muscles swelled under its hide. Black-gold patterns ignited beneath the skin in branching lines, like ancient beast-script waking inside its flesh. Its mane thickened into storm-dark bristles. Pressure multiplied. Not gradually. Sharply. Violently. The air around it seemed to gain weight as if a second heart had opened deep in its body and begun pounding beast-source force through every limb.
The faint Heaven-Horn Desolation Court lineage in it rose toward the surface.
Its horn darkened.
Its eyes turned more ancient.
Its roar changed from sound into declaration.
The demon transformed more subtly, and somehow that made it worse.
Blood-moon marks spread along his throat and arms like old seals being unbound. His fingers lengthened. His nails darkened. His pupils narrowed into vertical slits hanging in red-black irises. The smell around him thickened—blood, moonlight, wet flesh, the stench of corrupted altars and old killings offered to wrong gods.
His Rakshasa inheritance ignited.
The next exchange was harsher.
Far harsher.
The beast hit Long Shenyin first.
It moved with the terrifying blunt speed only certain massive creatures possessed, a horned shoulder rush wrapped in multiplied storm pressure. Even Long Shenyin did not fully evade it. The impact caught her off-center and blasted her out of the air. She hit a stone outcrop hard enough to shatter it and vanished through a burst of rock and dust.
At almost the same time, the demon slipped a blood-thread slash through Long Shenyu's defense.
It was a beautiful technique in a disgusting way—thin as silk, fast as a thought, nearly invisible until it was already inside his guard. It opened a line across his side, not deep enough to cripple him but deep enough to draw blood and seed curse force into the wound.
Black-red light flashed along the cut.
Long Shenyu's eyes cooled.
Then both siblings answered.
Long Shenyin exploded back out of the shattered rock before the dust had even settled. Blood ran down the side of her face. She looked delighted. She caught the beast by half its torn ear with one hand, dragged herself up along its head in midair, and ripped a strip of flesh from its neck with the other.
The beast bellowed.
Long Shenyu stepped through the demon's follow-up as though he had been waiting for that exact sequence, entered his chest line, and drove a close-range palm into the center of his torso.
Crack.
Not bone first.
Armor of blood force.
Then bone.
Then the compressed burst inside.
The demon coughed black blood and flew backward.
Now both sides were injured.
But the difference mattered.
The beast and demon were worse off.
The siblings' injuries were lighter.
Still, the toll had started to show.
Sweat stood on Long Shenyu's brow.
Long Shenyin's breathing deepened, shoulders rising once, then settling.
The demon saw that and smiled, blood on his teeth.
The beast saw it and found courage again.
They understood at once. Whatever impossible method allowed these two Origin Core monsters to fight above realm, it cost them.
The beast laughed through blood. "Now I understand. Monsters, yes. But still too low."
The demon's voice turned cold again, confidence returning around the edges. "You can wound above your station. You cannot outlast it."
Long Shenyin wiped blood from her mouth with the back of her hand and grinned so viciously that Mei Qingxue shivered below.
Long Shenyu rolled his neck once.
"Then we stop dragging it out," he said.
Something changed.
Their pupils shifted first.
Long Shenyu's eyes sharpened into deep dragon-gold, not bright, not wild, but impossibly still, as though whole storms could vanish inside them without leaving a ripple.
Long Shenyin's became darker and more violent—black-gold slits lit from somewhere cruel, carrying blood-frenzy, ruin, and the promise of delighted massacre.
Then their aura rose.
Not separately.
Together.
A draconic pressure bloomed from both of them at once and spread through the battlefield like a second sky descending. Long Shenyu's was vast and sovereign, heavy with command, devouring depth, and the quiet certainty of rule. Long Shenyin's was murderous and catastrophic, a battle-ruin aura that made the air taste like iron and broken vows.
Where the two overlapped, the world hesitated.
Pebbles stopped rolling down cracked slopes.
Dust hung strangely in the air.
Even the wind wavered.
Everyone below froze.
Mei Qingxue's breath caught in her throat.
Shen Lanyue's composure cracked for a single instant.
Ning Huang went still.
More than still.
Pulled.
Her gaze landed on Long Shenyu and did not move.
Not because Long Shenyin was lesser. She was not. Ning Huang knew strength when she saw it. Long Shenyin's presence was pure battle calamity, the kind of woman who could walk through a war-line laughing and leave no survivors.
But Long Shenyu's aura was different.
It had command in it.
Vastness.
Protection and conquest coiled together.
It felt like the presence of a man who could crush armies underfoot and then turn, smile lazily, and place that same world-breaking strength between one woman and every danger in creation.
Ning Huang hated how clearly she felt it.
Hated that the feeling came at all.
Hated that in the middle of a battlefield, half bloodied and fully furious, some part of her recognized not just power, but a kind of frightening male gravity.
Her jaw tightened.
She did not look away.
Above them, the beast and demon felt none of that attraction.
They felt suppression.
Real suppression.
Their souls recoiled before their minds caught up. Their bloodlines recognized something older than themselves, something higher, something from a source they had no right to meet at this level. It was not merely cultivation pressure. It was origin pressure. The instinctive terror of lesser dragon-adjacent lines, beast kings, and demonic blood inheritors facing a root they could not touch.
The demon hissed, "Impossible—"
The beast took one involuntary step back in the air.
Long Shenyin saw it.
Her lip curled.
"There," she said softly. "That expression suits you better."
That was enough.
Both enemies understood.
If they kept holding anything back, they would die.
So they burned blood essence.
The beast opened its jaws wide. Black-gold force gathered between horn and fang, dense enough to warp the light around it. Storm pressure condensed inward, beast-source force folding layer over layer until a sphere the size of a carriage wheel pulsed in front of its face, dark, violent, and heavy with heaven-crushing intent.
The demon did the same in his own way.
Blood-moon essence ignited inside his veins. Red-black light poured out through his pores. He drew both hands outward and formed a giant crescent of corrupted lunar bloodlight, curse force threaded through every inch of it, death and moon and flesh-refining malice wound together into one hideous killing arc.
Their strongest attacks came together.
The battlefield darkened.
Inside the barrier below, Mei Qingxue's face paled.
Shen Lanyue's hands tightened until her knuckles whitened.
Ning Huang's eyes widened because she felt this kind of power.
That level of force could kill even 8th layer Sky Lords!
In that same instant, Long Shenyu flicked his fingers.
Layered barriers spread outward around the women below, then expanded once more to sweep over the six dead heirs nearby, sealing the corpses as well.
Then the siblings moved.
They did not exchange words.
Did not count.
Did not signal.
Some old thing between them took over—something forged before this life, before this planet, in long years of fighting side by side and against each other until instinct became language.
Long Shenyu drove forward first.
His palm strike condensed to absurd density. Dragon force, Origin Qi, and soul power fused so tightly that the air in front of his hand began to collapse inward. It was not flashy. It was terrifying in the opposite way—so compressed that even space seemed reluctant to touch it.
Long Shenyin came with him from the other side, black-red destruction force gathering along her arm in a killing blow built from battle frenzy, pain, bloodline rage, and that monstrous delight she took in violent endings.
Their attacks were different.
One sovereign.
One slaughtering.
One still.
One ruinous.
But they came from the same ancient root.
The same dragon source, twisted in two directions.
And because of that, when the two techniques met the threshold of release, they resonated to the point of a draconic collision force to be born.
Then both sides met.
The explosion swallowed the battlefield.
Light vanished into force. Force became sound. Sound became pressure.
The earth cracked open in branching lines.
Whole slabs of shattered ground lifted, flipped, and broke apart in the air.
Trees at the edge of the formation uprooted and vanished into the blast.
Stone ridges collapsed.
Deep under the battlefield, hidden formation lines burst into visibility for a single jagged instant—ancient channels running through the ground in wrong-colored light, old and damaged and secret. Then even those lines fractured under the pressure and broke apart.
Inside the barrier, the walls bent.
Cracks raced through them in sharp spiderwebs.
Mei Qingxue flinched.
Shen Lanyue stepped instinctively in front of her.
Ning Huang did not move.
She stared upward through the cracking barrier and felt something like awe sharpen into disbelief.
Because the barrier held.
Long Shenyu had fought at that level and still kept it stable enough to protect them.
That was the detail that stayed with her.
When the dust finally began to clear, it did so slowly.