The solar storm had not yet subsided. According to Xiao's calculations, the power of the great lightning array unleashed by Gu Xiechen was so immense that the energy anomalies on the sun would likely persist for another month before truly settling down. This meant Gu Xiechen's plundering activities still had at least twenty days of a safe window.

After a brief respite, Gu Xiechen forced his spirit to rally, leading Peng Hua and the others to continue their "migration" from Planet Nine. Fearing that the captured Romans, once awakened in the transport vessels, might cause trouble, Gu Xiechen ordered the mercenaries to administer another dose of hibernation agent to each of them—enough to keep them asleep for another month.

Another twenty days passed. The total number of Romans inside the transport vessels had reached approximately 1.2 billion, which was more than half of the entire Roman population.

Gu Xiechen paused his plundering, considering the need to maintain a balance of power between the First Roman Kingdom and the Second Roman Kingdom, ensuring neither side overwhelmed the other. However, having tasted success, and with nearly all the Romans on the entire planet in a coma, Gu Xiechen couldn't resist looting the various mines and factory facilities on Planet Nine. He possessed countless storage artifacts, and these high-grade engineering machines were desperately needed by the Earth Federation to boost production.

"Ah, managing one's own forces is truly not easy. Even the tools of labor must be prepared for them," Gu Xiechen remarked to Miao Hua with deep feeling. Peng Hua, however, barely paid him any mind. He was completely absorbed in gazing at the beautiful, young noble Roman maidens lying on the ground, mentally calculating whether the Corpse Emperor would directly expel him from the sect if he were to become romantically entangled with any of them.

Tormented, Peng Hua was deeply conflicted. He looked at the fair skin and near-perfect faces of the Roman girls, his heart, yearning for universal affection, twisted into a knot.

On one side was his master, protective yet intensely traditional and conservative; on the other, incredibly alluring and breathtakingly beautiful Roman maidens. For Peng Hua, this was agonizingly difficult.

Besides Miao Hua, one other person was watching the Romans with a troubled expression. Siren frowned, staring blankly at the rows of prone Roman girls, his face cycling rapidly between flushed red and ashen white. "Oh, no. I can't betray Aredia... but she isn't my wife yet. This doesn't count as cheating, right? Still, we were definitely planning to marry..."

"However, don't men get a bachelor night before marriage? A man as exceptional as myself, well..."

Siren, too, watched the beautiful, ethereal Roman maidens with great inner conflict, his soul seeming to drift into some profound and subtle state of being.

Gu Xiechen glared angrily at these two who seemed to know no shame, ordering all vessels to return immediately at maximum speed. He sensed two extraordinarily powerful presences rapidly approaching their location. One was filled with the overwhelming killing intent of Buddhist Zen power, while the other was saturated with a dark, swamp-like, bizarrely viscous energy. They had been tracking Gu Xiechen's movements for seven days, but thanks to Gu Xiechen's innate divine sense perfectly merging with the cosmos, he had managed to evade them multiple times, causing the two pursuers to rush around fruitlessly without even glimpsing his wake.

This time, however, the pair seemed to have suddenly gained insight. They were closing in with a curved trajectory, flanking him from left and right, and expected to arrive in about fifteen minutes.

Patting the Zhenyi Xuan Shui Venerable resting inside the transport vessel, Gu Xiechen frowned. The consumption of Zhenyi Xuan Shui from the Venerable over the past month had been excessive, causing him real pain. After a moment's thought, Gu Xiechen dispelled the black mist formed by the Zhenyi Xuan Shui and urgently commanded the ships to accelerate their departure again.

Just as the black mist dissipated, Gu Xiechen suddenly felt an incredibly strange divine thought flash over the fleet like lightning. Before he could react, beautiful cyan light spots began to drift slowly down from the sky. Countless cyan spots covered an area spanning thousands of miles, enveloping the entire fleet.

Gu Xiechen peered intently. These cyan spots were nothing more than plant spores the size of mung beans. Each spore contained an exhilarating surge of pure Yang energy and a subtle, veiled current of pure Yin energy. The bizarre divine thought swept over the fleet once more. Suddenly, all the spores expanded to the size of a fist and then detonated with a deafening explosion, turning the sky for thousands of miles into a gigantic fire cloud. The sheer noise caused Gu Xiechen's eardrums to ache intensely, his mind reeling, and his body went weak, forcing him to sit down.

The power of each spore was equivalent to a large-yield fuel-air bomb. Streaks of cyan lightning howled out from within the flames. This lightning did not belong to the five elements of Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, or Earth; instead, it carried a profound power born from the harmonious generation and transformation of the world's Yin and Yang energies. Billions of cyan lightning bolts twisted and snaked through the air. Tendrils of electric light merged and converged, gradually coalescing from threads the thickness of a thumb into several monstrous arcs of lightning yards wide, descending upon the three motherships at the center of the fleet with suffocating, terrifying pressure.

Xiao and Ducart, responsible for piloting the three motherships, were almost merged with their respective craft, allowing for extremely rapid reactions.

Almost the instant the explosions erupted, the motherships activated their energy shields to full capacity and swiftly launched hundreds of small energy shield generators outward in all directions. Hundreds of spherical energy masses, each several kilometers in diameter, rapidly expanded within the violently churning fire cloud, forcing the intense, turbulent flames to the periphery.

The cyan lightning roared down. The motherships' light shields shuddered violently, accompanied by muffled rupturing sounds. Several massive cracks split the surface of the motherships, with faint fire and smoke beginning to spew from within.

After a massive detonation subsided, the cyan lightning slowly dispersed. The two individuals Gu Xiechen had sensed earlier suddenly accelerated. With just a few blurs of movement, they traversed hundreds of kilometers to arrive nearby. From a distance, a voice filled with murderous intent thundered, "Leave our kin, or face total war!"

Gu Xiechen smiled faintly. He called out in a clear voice, "I am merely a mercenary, invited by His Majesty King Nanket of your nation to relocate a portion of his people to his territory. Is King Nanket not your sovereign?"

The rapidly approaching Red Dragon King and Night Stalker froze, staring blankly at Gu Xiechen. After a long pause, neither could utter a word. Nanket was indeed the king of the Romans. According to traditional Roman law, the authority of the Nanjie Continent extended over the citizens of every Roman principality, and no citizen could disregard Nanket's royal decree.

However, Nanket was the king of the First Roman Kingdom, while the Red Dragon King and the Night Stalker were loyalists of the Second Roman Kingdom. Nanket issuing an order for Romans to migrate to his territory? Legally, this was sound; there were no loopholes. The issue was that the Roman people should have responded to Nanket’s decree voluntarily, choosing to migrate to the First Roman Kingdom. To forcibly abduct them—what was that? Did a king abduct his own kinsmen?

The Red Dragon King disdained arguing with Gu Xiechen. He roared and swung a string of prayer beads, each bead as large as a human head and the string nearly two meters long, directly at Gu Xiechen’s head. The entire essence of Nirvana Zen power accumulated over hundreds of years of bitter cultivation by the Red Dragon King was condensed into these beads. As soon as he struck, the surrounding space was instantly permeated with a scorching killing aura. The ground thousands of meters beneath their feet suddenly collapsed into a vast pit several kilometers in diameter and hundreds of meters deep, with meter-thick fissures spreading outward, instantly covering an area of several hundred square kilometers.

Gu Xiechen fixed his gaze on the prayer beads hurtling toward him. He let out a cold laugh, tapped the three Taiyin Thorns nestled in his topknot, and sent forth three streaks of profound white cold light, accompanied by countless thumb-sized, iron-hard, razor-sharp Xuan Bing shards, hurtling to meet the Red Dragon King's beads. The three cold lights were only a few meters thick but stretched over a thousand meters long, like three white rainbows spanning the sky. A profound chill erupted, causing the Night Stalker, watching from the side, to shiver uncomfortably.

A continuous, immense roar erupted. Sheets of water, carrying bone-chilling cold, surged toward the massive string of prayer beads layer by layer. Countless Xuan Bing shards struck the beads thrown by the Red Dragon King, making them tremble incessantly and kicking up showers of ice fragments and sparks. Gu Xiechen hovered in the air, completely unmoving, manipulating a hand seal with a composed expression, while the Red Dragon King's body vibrated continuously as if struck by lightning. Each Xuan Bing shard contained immense force equivalent to tens of tons. One or two might not matter to the Red Dragon King, but tens of thousands of shards hammering down proved too much for him to handle.

With a resounding clang, the string of prayer beads held by the Red Dragon King suddenly snapped. The eighteen beads burst open, scattering countless pieces of shattered iron and ice shards everywhere, forcing the Red Dragon King to stumble backward repeatedly.

The three white rainbows swept forward and, in the blink of an eye, engulfed the Red Dragon King in boundless waves of water and countless furiously colliding Xuan Bing. It was like grinding a steel blade cast of gold with a grinding wheel. No matter how physically robust the Red Dragon King’s body was, the continuous stream of fine Xuan Bing particles and mountain-sized ice blocks impacted him tens of thousands of times per second, causing him to let out sharp cries of pain as countless shallow and deep gashes appeared on his body.

The Red Dragon King raged, roaring, "Little brat, let me go so I can fight you head-on!"

Gu Xiechen just shook his head and smiled. Was he an idiot? This Red Dragon King genuinely possessed strength equivalent to the Void Realm. Even though the cultivation method was bizarre, his power was undeniable. However, this fellow seemed to have a screw loose, trying to fight a Daoist practitioner with brute force, especially when his cultivation wasn't a standard body-refining technique. It was no wonder he was suffering!

After chuckling a few times, Gu Xiechen rubbed his hands together and released them. Innumerable streams of Yin Water Thunder suddenly appeared within the glacial mountain range conjured by the Taiyin Thorns. Seeing ten thousand threads of Yin Thunder about to descend and pulverize the Red Dragon King, Siren let out a cry of alarm.

The Night Stalker shrieked and transformed into a ball of dark, fierce flame, rushing toward Gu Xiechen. But before he reached even ten miles away, several thousand voluptuous, seductive women blocked his path, pouting and making alluring gestures. They whispered in tantalizingly suggestive voices, "Mister, stay and rest a while!"

The Night Stalker was momentarily stunned. In that instant, several thousand women shrieked, crying out, "Long live the Master!" Thousands of beauties rushed toward the Night Stalker, each carrying explosive packages about a meter in height, width, and depth, and detonated their bombs simultaneously.

Boom! A mushroom cloud expanded in the void. The Night Stalker was blasted senseless, his clothes burned to ash, and dozens of ragged holes appeared in his flesh. A section of the ground spanning over ten kilometers beneath him sank entirely, the surface melted into glass by the instantaneous high temperatures generated by the explosion. Heat continuously steamed from the Night Stalker’s body, and the black flames swirling around him dimmed considerably.

Siren had already sneakily maneuvered beneath the Night Stalker. A black flame condensed into a sharp sword, silently stabbing toward the Night Stalker's vital lower region.

Siren's attack was insidious and vicious, but the attack launched by Miao Hua, who cooperated with him, was incomparably fierce and mighty.

Peng Hua simply spread his fleshy wings, the insignia of his identity as a Flying Night-Devil, and then let out a sharp cry toward the sky: "Ancestral Great-Aunt, someone is trying to kill me!"

A stream of flames rushed out from Peng Hua's brow. Within the flames, a delicate, pure white, exquisitely beautiful small hand could vaguely be seen slowly opening, lightly pressing down toward the Night Stalker from afar.

The Night Stalker stiffened, and suddenly a section of his chest caved in. A bolt of scarlet lightning erupted from within his body, blowing apart his right shoulder and nearly half his torso into dust. A supremely foul, evil energy surged into the Night Stalker’s body, rapidly corroding his flesh and soul, almost extinguishing his life force in the blink of an eye.

Siren's silent stab, capitalizing on the noise of the corpse-god execution lightning erupting, pierced deep into the Night Stalker's lower body. The three-foot-long sword made of black flame burst within the Night Stalker's body, and fine black flames simultaneously erupted from his pores.

The Night Stalker let out a miserable howl. His physical body instantly turned into a puff of ash that drifted away, and a mass of viscous, glue-like black flame roared out from within him, instantly fleeing dozens of miles away.

Gu Xiechen snorted coldly. He had no time to pursue the Night Stalker’s escaping primordial spirit. He could only angrily wave the Five Water Dragon Whisker Fan, aiming a final blow at the heavily wounded Red Dragon King.

The Five-Colored True Water rose from the ground, transforming into a wall of water that surged toward the Red Dragon King.

Just as the Red Dragon King was about to be obliterated into ash, a tiny figure clad in cyan suddenly materialized in front of the Five-Colored True Water. Even with Gu Xiechen's sharp vision, he couldn't discern how this person had appeared.