The execution of the plan required a level of concentration Li Yu had rarely needed since he embarked on his journey towards the laws. He was not merely opening a door; he was surgically removing a massive volume of reality and transplanting it into another dimension.

  Hovering high above the slumbering Sky-Iron Dreadnought in the real world, Li Yu’s hands continued to move in blurring and complex patterns. Sweat beaded on his forehead and evaporated instantly from the heat rising off the beast below. The silver and black runes of the Void Law he was weaving were incredibly dense. They were forming a colossal and intangible cylinder that encompassed the entire crater.

  "Steady," he whispered to himself, his Ocean of Qi churning as vast amounts of Qi were converted into spatial energy.

  He could feel the resistance of the material world. The laws of the realm did not want to let go of such a massive area of space. There was also the resistance from trying to pull such a powerful entity. The Dreadnought’s own passive aura acted like an anchor, rooting it to the natural plane.

  Li Yu gritted his teeth, his eyes glowing with intense silver light. "Move!"

  He forced the spatial hole he had created to slide downwards and over the beast.

  To any outside observer, it would have simply looked like the beast just vanished from sight in an instant. There was an instant burst of qi and then everything went quiet once again. One moment the massive beast was sleeping and snoring. The next moment, the air shimmered violently around it and in an instant a distortion wave rippled downwards. And then… nothing.

  The beast was gone.

  The air rushed in with a deafening thunderclap to fill the sudden vacuum. The rush of air was so violent that it snapped nearby ironwood trees like twigs and kicked up a massive cloud of dust. The ground where the beast had lain was smooth, scorched and empty.

  Simultaneously, in the First Layer of the Void, chaos erupted.

  The grey, silent and desaturated world was violently disturbed as the massive Divine Transformation beast crashed into existence.

  BOOM!

  The impact shook the entire dimensional layer, sending ripples through the grey atmosphere that would have torn a lesser cultivator apart. Li Yu wasn’t completely sure what would have happened bringing it here but was happy to see that it held.

  The Sky-Iron Dreadnought awoke instantly.

  It didn't wake up groggy and slow. It woke up with the immediate, primal fury of an apex predator that had been wronged. Its eyes snapped open, radiating a terrifying light that pierced the grey gloom.

  It let out a loud and furious roar.

  In the real world, that roar would have flattened forests and caused all kinds of destruction. Here, in this layer of the void, it was a muffled bone-vibrating thrum that felt like the end of the world. The space began to shake once again and looked like it was going to break any moment now but it still continued to hold.

  The beast scrambled to its many feet. Its massive segmented armored plates clanging together like crashing tectonic plates. It immediately reached out with its senses, trying to connect to the elements it ruled over. It found nothing. It was cut off from their source and isolated in a dead world.

  Panic mixed with its rage and a bit of confusion. It must have been wondering about how it got here. Even though it was sleeping, its senses were always probing around for any kind of threat or danger. Yet even with that, it detected nothing and somehow ended up here in an instant.

  Its gaze finally snapped up when it detected Li Yu, locking onto the only other living thing in this desolate place. The small floating human figure looking down at it. Li Yu had been quiet this entire time and hadn’t spoken a word.

  The Dreadnought’s aura exploded outwards in another wave of fury and became even more intense. The pressure was the unadulterated pressure of the Divine Transformation realm. A force that Li Yu had only felt one time before. He never got

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  ‘This must be the thing that disrupted my sleep and brought me here. Just what is this strange place?’ it thought to itself.

  The grey space around it twisted and warped again. Gravity intensified where Li Yu was. The Dreadnought was trying to crush the intruder, smash it out of the sky like it did with so many others that tried to challenge it. It had been unstoppable for so long it didn’t view anything as a real threat to it. It didn’t sense anything dangerous from that little boy in the sky either. Only anger and curiosity on why the boy would be so stupid

  Li Yu felt the pressure hit him. His robes whipped violently around him and his bones creaked under the sudden gravitational assault. He was already prepared for such a pressure and was actually a bit surprised when it wasn’t as much as he thought it would be.

  ‘That damn ugly old man Zephyr was just freakishly strong. It makes sense, he was in the upper levels of Divine Transformation after all and this one is just starting its journey in it.’

  A wide savage grin then spread across Li Yu’s face.

  “Good!” Li Yu laughed, his voice echoing strangely in the void. “You’re awake. And you’re angry. Don’t disappoint me, big guy. I went through a lot of trouble to bring you here so we can have a nice battle. No one can interfere here, we can go all out!”

  Li Yu had no intention of holding back anything here. This was a test of his limits. A test of the new heights he had reached, a test against a being that also began to touch the very laws of the world. He had been utterly crushed by Zephyr before without being able to fight back at all. He needed to know where he stood now.

  “Let me show you what real pressure feels like!”

  Li Yu closed his eyes for half a second and then snapped them open. The pupils were gone, replaced by swirling vortices of black and white in his right eye and purple in his left.

  BOOM!

  If the beast’s aura was a mountain falling, Li Yu’s aura was the ocean rising to swallow the world.

  His killing Intent burst forth and it was no longer just red as it once was when he first revealed its existence. It was thick, heavy and interwoven with other laws now. The two most prominent were the pitch-black threads of the Void Laws and purple threads of the Destruction Law.

  The grey void around Li Yu turned red, purple and abyssal black. The very space seemingly decaying, being destroyed just by being near him. It felt like nothing could possibly reach him, he was there, yet he felt like he was beyond reach.

  The Dreadnought below froze for a fraction of a second, its primal instincts screaming that something was terribly wrong.

  But Li Yu was far from finished.

  At the same time as his killing intent aura exploded, behind him the air shimmered and an opalescent ocean manifested in the void. Out of the phantom water rose a figure, the Fisherman Soul. It seemed like it towered over the battlefield even though it was the same size as Li Yu. Its straw hat casting a shadow over the Dreadnought, its aura of destruction unfathomable to the beast below.

  Then a circular and golden portal appeared to the side of the ocean. Out came his Koi Soul. This was the first time he was able to summon it on command, having made progress in his soul arts and Soul Law.

  The Koi Soul then was swimming around the Fisherman and added a layer of ancient and time bending mystical pressure to the mix. It felt like the Koi had existed since time itself and yet it also felt like it was newly born. A complex and weird mix of feelings that would hit anyone watching it, unexplainable to themselves.

  The Dreadnought took an involuntary step back, its hundreds of massive claws clicking nervously on the invisible floor. The combined pressure of the killing Intent, Destruction Law, and the Soul manifestations was beginning to crack its own Divine Transformation aura.

  ‘That boy has two Nascent Souls?! What the hell is this? Did he think one wasn’t enough and somehow went and got another? I don’t even have one! Those things are not normal either, I feel like just one of them is enough to rip out my own soul and destroy it.’ Thought the Dreadnought in panic. It’s confidence that it carried with it since reaching the Divine Transformation was for the first time failing it. Fear and hopelessness settled in.

  Li Yu was still not done.

  He performed a hand seal as the two souls appeared. His body blurred and a surge of vibrant green energy—the Law of Life—mixed with his own Koi Qi.

  From his body, a second figure split away. It was identical to Li Yu in every way, formed from pure compressed Qi but stabilized and made semi-permanent by the Life Law. It was the progress he had made on what was his Sentry technique, controlled perfectly by his second mind.

  It didn’t make sense to call it his Sentry technique any longer. It had evolved well beyond that but he hadn’t had time to name it yet. Using his understanding of the Life Laws, he was able to make it consume less Qi but it was even more powerful now as it could also wield the same laws he could.

  Now, there were two Li Yus floating above the beast and both were radiating world-ending power. Add his two souls to this as well and there were four figures above the Dreadnought that it felt could take its life.

  ‘What in all the Daos are you!?!?’ The Dreadnought screamed internally