The first shape to appear was Long Shenyin.
Still standing.
Blood on her sleeve. Cuts across her arms. Hair wild. Breathing heavier. Smiling.
The second was Long Shenyu.
Still standing.
His clothes were torn at the side. Blood marked more than one line across his skin. His chest rose and fell harder than before. But he was upright, calm, and looking forward as if this result had been inevitable from the beginning.
The beast and demon were not.
They were alive.
Barely.
The beast had been driven into the ground hard enough to create a fresh crater. One horn was broken halfway down. Its chest had caved in visibly on one side. Blood poured from its mouth in heavy dark sheets, and every breath came wet.
The demon looked worse in a cleaner way.
One arm was gone below the elbow. Half his torso had been torn open. Black blood soaked the broken earth around him. The blood-moon marks across his body flickered weakly, rising and collapsing, rising and collapsing, like dying lamps.
Mei Qingxue finally released the breath she had been holding and nearly went weak with relief.
Shen Lanyue kept her cold eyes fixed on Long Shenyu for a long second before quietly steadying herself again.
And Ning Huang—
Ning Huang could not suppress her awe.
She had earned her pride. Earned it in blood, training, and sect discipline so severe it would have broken ordinary geniuses. She was Heaven's Edict Thunder Palace's youngest war-heiress, a 1st-layer Sky Lord with mutated lightning law and a spear strong enough to kill peers above her station.
But what she had just witnessed widened her world in a single violent step.
These really were monsters capable of stepping outside the ordinary frame of realm progression and treating it like a guideline instead of a prison.
Her gaze drifted to Long Shenyu.
Stayed there.
He turned slightly.
Caught her looking.
Only then did she realize she had been staring.
She looked away at once.
Too late.
Of course he noticed.
His mouth moved just enough to become the beginning of a smile.
Ning Huang's ears burned.
And at this moment, Long Shenyin clicked her tongue.
"That took too long."
Her voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It carried cleanly across the broken field, sharp as a blade edge.
Mei Qingxue heard it.
Shen Lanyue heard it.
Ning Huang heard it most clearly of all.
Her eyes narrowed at once.
To her, what had just happened already belonged in the realm of the absurd. Two Origin Core monsters had just dragged down enemies who should have crushed them by every normal law of combat. Not weak Sky Lords. Not hollow ones with stolen breakthroughs and rotten foundations. True Sky Lords with bloodlines, inheritances, and backgrounds heavy enough to suppress entire regions.
And this black-clad woman in the air was dissatisfied with the time it had taken.
Long Shenyin turned her head toward her brother, lips curved in a sneer that looked too vicious to be called a smile.
"You let them make a fight out of it."
Long Shenyu rolled one shoulder. He glanced once at the demon coughing blood on one side of the cratered field, then at the beast-man slumped on the other.
"We're at the 2nd and 4th layers of Origin Core," he said. His tone was so casual it was almost insulting. "They were 7th layer Sky Lords with bloodlines and inheritances strong enough to fight a minor realm above their base. Back where we come from, that kind of gap is still near-suicidal to cross head-on. This result was already fast."
Long Shenyin gave a cold snort.
But Long Shenyu's eyes had already shifted inward.
His expression did not change. From the outside, he still looked lazily amused, as if this were only another piece of battlefield cleanup. Inside, his thoughts were colder.
Their combat prowess really was greater than it had been in the God Realms when they were in the early mortal realms of cultivation.
That would have sounded ridiculous to most lower-realm cultivators.
In places like this, people loved simple lies. They thought richer inheritances meant easier dominance. Better weapons, better arts, stronger bloodlines, better physiques, better sect resources—surely all of that made crossing realms easier.
It was the opposite.
In the God Realms, a genius did not rise against mediocrity. He rose against other geniuses, all armed with terrifying inheritances, all standing on deeper foundations, all born into worlds where even the air punished weakness. Stronger resources did not make realm-crossing easy. They made every realm more complete. More stable. Harder to overturn.
Crossing one minor realm against a true genius was difficult.
Crossing two was even harder.
Crossing several was for the top geniuses.
A major realm?
That was where cultivation stopped being a staircase and became a cliff.
Even the greatest monsters of the God Realms struggled there. Even those who could touch that gap usually could not suppress the higher-realm enemy cleanly, much less kill them outright. That was why fear always followed real monsters. Why clans guarded or hunted them early. Why the Shen Family had never known what to do with him. Why Ironflame Pavilion and Moonveil Chamber had tried to immediately move against him before he finished growing.
Why Ning Huang—disciplined, proud, impossible Ning Huang—could not stop looking at him now.
Because what he was doing did not belong to her world.
It did not belong to this planet at all.
Below the siblings, the beast coughed up another mouthful of dark blood and laughed through it, harsh and ugly.
"You think this ends here?"
The demon's smile was still on his face, but thinner now, more poisonous for the strain it took to hold there.
"Our deaths won't disappear," he said. "You've only bought yourselves a shorter life."
Long Shenyin raised a hand at once. There was no hesitation in her. To her, this was obvious. Crush their heads. Strip their bodies. Move on.
Before her strike fell, Long Shenyu reached over and caught her wrist.
That alone made her expression darken.
She turned her head. "Move."
He did not. Instead he looked at her and asked, "Can you fight a Sage Ruler right now?"
The question cut straight through her killing rhythm.
Her eyes cooled.
He continued before she could answer with an insult.
"Can you fight an Emperor?"
She sneered. "No one on this broken planet is worth that question."
"That wasn't the question."
The air changed.
Mei Qingxue felt it first as a subtle tightening across her skin. Shen Lanyue's arms folded more tightly beneath her chest. Ning Huang, injured as she was, watched with sharpened focus.
Long Shenyu continues to speak, "These two have ways to pass information back. Bloodline echoes. Death talismans. Clan-soul links. Command imprints. If you kill them the obvious way, you give their home bases the cleanest trail possible. Right now they know their people came here. They do not yet know who finished them."
Long Shenyin's lip curled. She hated few things more than being right too slowly.
He went on, voice mild, precise. "If they conclude a Noble Domain power moved first for the map fragment, they'll turn their attention upward. If they conclude two unknown Origin Cores did it, every hunt in this region changes."
Her fingers flexed once inside his grip. She jerked her wrist, wanting to pull free on principle alone. Then she stopped herself, the irritation plain on her face.
"Then do it your way," she said. "Quickly."
The beast spat blood and bared his fangs. "You're still dead."
The demon laughed softly. "When the Dominion learns what happened here, you will be left without a corpse."
That almost did it.
For one hard instant, Long Shenyin's eyes flashed with pure destruction. Her aura shifted. The black-red lightning around her hand thickened. Even half-ruined and bleeding, the demon had somehow found the exact words most likely to get himself torn apart without strategy, without restraint, without even the dignity of a complete corpse.
Long Shenyu's voice dropped half a note."Enough."
Long Shenyin gave him a look full of naked disdain and murderous impatience.
Then she lowered her hand.
Long Shenyu released her wrist and turned.
The six corpses lay scattered across the broken field, preserved only because he had chosen to preserve them. Their sect robes were torn, their bloodline auras dimmed, their faces fixed in the disbelief of heirs who had died too far beneath the level their names promised.
His dragon soul spread over them in a smooth invisible sweep.
Not searching aimlessly.
Finding.
He touched Han Yuekong's remains first, then Pei Wusheng's, then the others in sequence. Spatial rings, inner seals, hidden sleeve compartments, soul-bound storage knots, talisman sheaths built into armor lining—his perception slipped through all of it like a knife through wet paper.
In a few breaths, six talismans rested in his palm.
Ning Huang's gaze sharpened again.
Long Shenyu was not worried about those sects tracing him.
Pei Wusheng had died to Long Shenyin before he could properly alert anyone. Han Yuekong had died to Long Shenyu before the thought could finish becoming a signal. As for the other four, they had been swallowed by the now-destroyed formation field under the ground. Any fractured trace sent back through their death channels would tell their sects only that they had perished in the trap or in the chaos surrounding it.
He turned back toward the beast and the demon with the talismans resting against his fingers.
The demon sensed danger first. Its pupils shrank. "What are you doing?"
Long Shenyu smiled. "Cleaning the field."
He flicked his wrist.
The six talismans shot out in six different lines, not toward the sky, not toward the trees, but inward—converging on the exact center where the demon and beast had been forced closest together by injury, crater walls, and ruined terrain.
The beast's eyes widened.
The demon tried to move.
Too late.
Long Shenyu's Qi ignited the talismans all at once.
The explosion was vicious.
ix sect-grade talismans detonated inside a space already torn apart by prior combat. Sword force, frost force, war-flame, blood-command Qi, shadow-void shredding, mountain pressure—different powers slammed together and found release in the bodies of two already broken Sky Lords.
Light swallowed the crater.
Then fire.
Then cutting force.
Then silence.
When the blast finished rolling outward, there was nothing left of the beast and demon but drifting ash and a deeper wound bitten into the earth.
Long Shenyu faintly smiled.
For now, the trouble was done.