“Yulith... get the hell out here! I know you’re here,” Gu Xichen coughed violently, struggling to pull himself free from the tree trunk. He slid down the bark clumsily to the ground. With legs weak, Gu Xichen stumbled and fell to his knees, bracing himself with his hands on the earth. His head lolled weakly from side to side, great gouts of saliva and blood spurting from his mouth, quickly pooling into a small puddle before him.

“Heh heh heh, you think you can escape this time?” A voice dripping with suggestive allure drifted from the dense woods in the distance. Accompanied by the faint hiss of plasma engines, three hemispherical aircraft emerged from the thicket ahead, escorting Yulith. Yulith was dressed exactly as she had been the first time Gu Xichen saw her. He spared her a brief glance before looking past her to the figures accompanying her.

The three hemispherical craft were each over three meters in diameter. Inside each sat a figure small and withered, resembling a seven or eight-year-old child, yet possessing a head grotesquely oversized, nearly the size of a small water vat. These three deformed beings, wearing vacant, foolish grins, were fitted with metallic helmets. Embedded precisely at the center of the brow on each helmet was a sharp, spear-shaped crystal spire, through which a faint, ethereal blue halo could be seen flickering and weaving.

Several transparent, soft tubes connected the rear of the metal helmets to the aircraft, within which a pale violet viscous solution churned.

Gu Xichen sighed, shaking his head forcefully. He managed a bitter smile. “It’s you again?”

Yulith looked at Gu Xichen with excitement. She swayed her shapely limbs, letting out a grating, hideous cackle.

“It is I! Hmm, quite surprising, isn't it? You never expected me to dare attack people from the Asian Dao Alliance, did you? Astonished?”

Yulith laughed smugly. “But what do I have to fear? As long as everyone is silenced, what is there to be afraid of?”

Gu Xichen spat a mouthful of blood, laughing wryly. “Are you sure you can kill everyone present?”

Yulith shrugged, her ample bosom trembling with the movement. She grinned coquettishly at Gu Xichen. “A small-scale artificial earthquake alone can kill at least half the people down there, and the rest will be heavily wounded at best. To test the combat effectiveness of the ‘Ghost Squad,’ I brought these three little darlings along. They are all Earth-grade psionicists, and with the auxiliary mental wave focusing device, the power they can unleash is astonishing! Who can possibly stand against me?”

Shaking his head, Gu Xichen painfully straightened his body. He looked at Yulith and asked, puzzled, “But why are you targeting the Asian Dao Alliance?”

Yulith slowly produced a lady’s cigar. One of the deformed beings beside her eyes flashed, and the crystal spire on its brow shot out an extremely fine, ethereal blue filament, lighting the cigar for Yulith. After taking a few deep puffs, Yulith declared proudly, “For the specimens! I have an extremely strong interest in those cultivators from the Asian Dao Alliance. I desperately want some live subjects for experimentation. But I never had the opportunity to act on Earth; frankly, I didn't dare face the fury of those old fossils in the Dao Alliance!”

Exhaling a long plume of smoke, Yulith wriggled her waist and laughed. “But these little guys have arrived on Paradise Star—what a golden opportunity! Why shouldn't I take advantage and snatch a few young members of the Dao Alliance for my experiments? Their so-called Qi Cores, Golden Cores, and all those bizarre essences and primordial spirits—I am intensely curious about them all. With such excellent test subjects, if my little treasures can thoroughly study them, their abilities will advance even further, and my contribution to the Federation will be even greater!”

Gu Xichen held up a thumb towards Yulith, chuckling dryly. “You certainly have guts!”

Yulith puffed out her chest forcefully, laughing proudly. “Of course. I am the youngest female academician in the Federal Academy of Sciences!”

Spitting a thick glob of phlegm onto the ground, Gu Xichen asked, genuinely curious, “Then why didn’t you go after Daoist Zhang and the others? There’s no need to waste time on me, is there? Aren't you afraid they’ll escape?”

Several streaks of purple light shot out from beside Yulith, and several Three-Tailed Scorpions zipped rapidly around her.

Yulith lightly plucked one of the scorpions onto her fingertip, chuckling softly. “Escape? How could they escape? My little darlings have blanketed the forest for over a hundred kilometers. They are my most reliable eyes and ears. Their sensory perception is more than ten times that of an ordinary person. Who could possibly slip past them?”

“That little Daoist and his companions were quite lucky; it seems only about thirty people were severely injured, while the others are mostly fine… Hmm, they are currently five kilometers behind me, urgently treating their wounded comrades. When would they have time to flee?” Yulith’s smile grew more triumphant. “You cornered yourselves by running underground; you can’t blame me for being too ruthless!”

Gu Xichen let out a soft chuckle, nodding very seriously. “Then I understand why you came here. I sincerely admire your courage in daring to challenge the Asian Dao Alliance. Well... I wish you good luck!”

“Huh?” Yulith looked at Gu Xichen strangely, but just then, a flash of purple light erupted beside Gu Xichen, and a burly man over two meters tall strode out of the glow. This giant man abruptly seized Gu Xichen, hoisted him onto his shoulder, and then a beam of clear light enveloped them both. The giant then plunged with Gu Xichen into the great tree behind them, and in an instant, the two vanished without a trace!

“What is this! The Asian Dao Alliance’s... Yimu Dun Fa (Ethereal Wood Escape Technique)?” Yulith muttered to herself dazedly. “How do you know such a strange... Heavens above! Damn it!”

Yulith suddenly heard a bizarre whistle echoing from the sky. She snapped her head up, her face instantly draining of color, and she let out a curse.

A colossal stone, over a hundred meters in diameter, was screaming down from high altitude. Its surface was already glowing a fierce red from the intense heat generated by its rapid friction with the air. The stone’s descent speed was terrifying; judging by its trajectory, this massive rock must have been dropped from outside the atmosphere with a tremendous initial velocity, otherwise, it couldn't possess such ferocious momentum!

The air beneath the stone was compressed into a shield of white energy, and the deafening roar of the object echoed continuously. The stone was descending at a speed of at least Mach 20. Even though the giant rock was still nearly a thousand meters above the ground, the violently surging air shockwaves were enough to turn Yulith’s face ashen.

Yulith could use her mysterious powers to flee quickly, but the hemispherical aircraft carrying her three deformed companions were not built for speed. Their primary function was to assist the three in maximizing their psionic output by 200 percent; the maximum speed of the craft was comparable to a person riding a bicycle. Yulith darted a glance at the three vacant-eyed figures. These three, just like Dulu, were the heart and soul that represented her painstaking effort!

“Attack!” Yulith gritted her teeth, and thousands of fine purple beams shot from her body, rocketing towards the massive stone in the sky.

The blue light in the eyes of the three deformed beings flared intensely. They simultaneously looked up. The thick veins beneath the skin of their misshapen heads bulged, and the crystals on their brows began to pulse with blinding blue light. As Yulith gave the command, three blue beams, no thicker than a thumb when leaving the spires, roared out! The blue light instantly expanded to tens of meters in width as it left the crystals, and the three blue light pillars converged into a single, intensely bright beam over two hundred meters in diameter, aiming straight for the descending giant rock.

CRACK! With a thunderous sound, the colossal rock in the sky was blasted into countless pieces the size of human heads by the ferocious psychic impact, scattering shards in all directions. The blue psychic shockwave also violently fractured and dispersed. The veins on the heads of the three deformed beings burst, splattering them head to toe in sticky, purplish-red blood. The thousands of Three-Tailed Scorpions Yulith had unleashed were instantly vaporized by the shockwave of the giant stone. Yulith’s body shook violently, and a trickle of blood seeped from the corner of her mouth.

Yet, what Yulith could never have anticipated was that behind this screaming, descending giant stone, there was a tiered human tower built of at least twenty thousand tightly clad young women!

The front half of this human tower—the girls closer to the stone—had already been incinerated to ash and bone by the heat, silver light continually scattering outward and slowly drifting back towards the sky. But the nearly ten thousand girls behind them were still screaming battle cries like, “Long live our Master!” and “Kill the vile sorceress Yulith!” as they plummeted from the heavens. These girls were densely packed with heavy magnetic oscillation bombs strapped to their bodies. As they neared the ground, the girls simultaneously detonated the explosives strapped to them. “No! My precious children!”

Yulith shrieked a mournful wail!

The psychic power of the three deformed beings was immense, but their physical bodies were terribly frail. Their powerful psychic energy had just sustained a massive blow from the falling rock, leaving them severely damaged, and they were utterly defenseless in that sudden chaos! Nearly ten thousand girls, each carrying at least one hundred kilograms of magnetic oscillation bombs! When all the bombs detonated at once, a blinding mushroom cloud erupted once more over the forest! Yulith fled in a streak of purple light, ragged and desperate, while the three deformed beings were reduced to ashes with shrill screams amidst the conflagration!

“Gu Xichen! I am not finished with you!” Yulith’s piercing lament echoed throughout the dense woods.

Gu Xichen stood casually on the treetop, hands clasped behind his back, watching a transport ship slowly descending overhead.

Siren, spitting blood in great gulps, stood by the open hatch of the transport ship, grinning menacingly at Gu Xichen! All the world-puppets he had summoned had been annihilated simultaneously; the massive, instant loss of psychic power had also left him severely wounded. But to have taught Yulith such a harsh lesson, Siren felt every drop of blood he spat was worth it!

Gu Xichen gently brushed his sleeve, speaking indifferently. “In strategy, despise your enemy. In tactics... I always despise my enemy! Heh, daring to fight me? You’d better be prepared to spill your own blood just to take my life!”

“Wagley, who’s next?”

Squinting into the distance, Gu Xichen faced the wind, a sudden wave of soaring heroism swelling in his chest.

Bring people up high with a battleship, and then crush them with a technique that moves mountains and displaces seas...

How about that move? It certainly saves the trouble of finding suitable projectiles throughout space...