Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Ryu turned to Elena, his gaze practically tearing a pair of holes through her own. He didn't even seem to notice Elder Vermo's change at all. Instead, his entire focus was on his wife.

Elena felt like she wanted to look away. The intensity of his gaze was too much and it weighed on her heart so heavily that she found it difficult to breathe. But as much as she wanted to, she couldn't pry her eyes away, almost as though there was some invisible hold on her very psyche.

Ryu was absolutely furious right now. He wanted to say something, but even with his speed of thought, even with his usual intelligence, he couldn't find the right combination of words.

The longer he spent silent, the more furious he seemed to become until a towering aura tore into the skies.

Elder Vermo slowly rose from his seat, a gloominess in his eyes.

It had been a very long time since anyone dared to disrespect him in this way, he couldn't even remember the last. He had been able to sit on his recliner, in perfect peace for thousands of years at the very least. Just his presence alone was enough for others to stay in line.

But to think that this would happen even after he had spoken.

There were, on the surface, two categories of Sky Gods, the first being those that could keep up with the pace of the genius stream, and the latter of which could not.

However, in practice, there were many more layers than this. There were those that sped by the genius stream with such pace that they could only be in a category of their own, and there were those that just barely missed out on keeping up with the genius stream.

Even deeper than this, though... there were those that made it all the way through the genius stream but failed to ever become Dao Lords, and then there were those that might have missed out the genius stream, but with their diligence managed to become Dao Lords anyway.

And then there were those like Elder Vermo... a middling cultivator by every metric, but a man who had managed to take slow and diligent steps to his current realm.

Every one of his steps was firm, his foundation was wide and vast, and compared to even geniuses of the genius stream who made it all the way to the Omniscient Sky God Realm within the allotted time frame, he stacked up favorably simply by virtue of the sheer length of time he had spent in his current Realm.

There were plenty of geniuses of the genius stream that came to this pavilion, but did any of them disrespect him?

No. None of them did.

And yet, this outsider without even Martial God aura dared to do so?

He took a step and the air rumbled. He could see Ryu's back, and even now, the young man wasn't paying him any mind, looking at his wife as though she was the only one in the world...

And that only infuriated him more.

It had been a while since he soaked his hands in blood. It seemed that others had forgotten how the Blood Soaked Palm Sky God had gotten his name.

BANG!

Just as Elder Vermo was about to move, Ryu did so first.

A furious roar caused the skies to swirl with a menacing vortex of dark, rumbling clouds.

Blue lightning fell like the rain and both Heaven's and Earth's Gate appeared high in the skies along with a Birthed Phenomena that seemed to dwarf the Dome of Heaven itself.

"Ryu!" Elena called out, her eyes widening.

But Ryu had already appeared before the old man, his horns raising up proudly upon his forehead and white scales adorning his body like milky, shimmering pearls.

Elder Vermo struck out with a palm on instinct, his heart shuddering as he suddenly felt a great amount of danger.

However, at that moment, his body seemed to slow to a crawl. Time passed in ages, and a second became two, and then four, and then eight.

Dragon's Claw descended, streaks of lightning and an eruption of flames following Ryu's five claws.

At that moment, the vortex of black cumulonimbus clouds split into six and a harrowing legend filled everyone's mind, a tale of a Dragon's descent.

The claw ripped into Elder Vermo's chest and he was sent flying backward, spurts of blood flying from his mouth. It truly felt as though an entire world had descended upon him, and he felt like his Omniscient Control had been shredded to pieces.

He barely registered the fact that Ryu had somehow stacked Earth and Heaven Gate, using the former to raise his Qi Realm cultivation to the True Realm, and then the latter to raise everything up by yet another Realm, allowing him to exude the aura of the Perfect Realm.

"Who the fuck are you?" Ryu growled, the skies rumbling with the tone of his voice. "Who the fuck are you to make my wife feel fear?"

The bass of Ryu's voice caused his throat to tremble, the scales layering it separating slightly to reveal lines of molten skin beneath as a furious heat rose up from his chest.

Dragon's Breath.

Ryu's chest suddenly shook with a boom, sparks of lightning descending from the skies and connecting with his horns as though they were lightning rods themselves.

A ball of fire.

A sparking bundle of blue lightning.

The two expanded suddenly and then shot out in a torrent, fusing into one as though forced to do so beneath Ryu's mighty will.

A pillar of black-red surrounded by a swirling mass of stark blue tore through what felt like the bounds of reality. In fact, time around it seemed to speed up as though Ryu was working with an entirely different set of laws.

It appeared before the flailing Elder Vermo with such speed that the latter barely had time to brace himself and block with his arms and a surge of qi.

To Elder Vermo, it felt like the world was ending. It wasn't just the relentless attack on his body, but also his mind.

His eyes went red and blood began to seep out from his pores, dying his skin and hair an eerie crimson. After taking the brunt of Ryu's attack, he flickered and his body lost its shape and form.

Blood Spiritual Body.

He snaked through the cracks in reality, closing the distance on Ryu with a fury building up in his gut, however Ryu was even faster.

His body suddenly became a streak of violet, a bolt that was somehow both a piercing lightning and flickering flame at the same time.

He clashed with Elder Vermo, their amorphous bodies rebounding against one another once, then twice, then hundreds of times in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

The stormy skies above continued to shake and quake until a silvery star appeared high within it.

In that moment, the world seemed to be forcefully stabilized, the rumbling might of a Founding Dao filling up the space, reaching into the bounds of time and the fabric of reality, before chaining them down.

The projection of a world seemed to overlay with their own, and in that moment, Elder Vermo who thought he was finally getting a foothold in the battle once more, found himself meeting a fist with the weight of a Heaven from up above.

The moment he saw it, he felt that he had lost all right to resist, even his bloody form seemingly being drained of all color in an instant.

BOOM!

The world collapsed as the elder was driven into the ground. It didn't even seem like he flew at all. His descent was so fast that in one moment, he was clashing with Ryu's half lightning-fire form, and in the next he was in a crater down below, every bone in his body broken.

Ryu stood high in the skies, one eight trigram diagram spinning above him and another spinning in the opposite direction below him.

The once rumbling, now stabilized skies split beneath a raise of his hand, and in that moment, it felt like all the lightning in the Ninth Heaven suddenly converged onto his palm, a solid bolt of blue forming a javelin in his hand beneath his Lightning God Talent. It condensed so densely that it no longer even looked as though lightning had formed it at all. Instead, it looked like an enormous blue steel needle, one that even his large hands could only just barely wrap all the way around.

Ryu raised the javelin up high, his eyes blazing with a slit fury as his torso flexed. Wisps of flames and lightning danced across his white scales, and as though it wasn't enough, the blue steel suddenly shuddered, an array of sharp angled, icy blue Ice Phoenix Heavenly Patterns appearing around it.

BANG!

The javelin was finally pulled back far enough and Ryu's torso uncorked like a thick, steel spring. It shot out of his hand like a canon, the world exploding and collapsing around its descent.

An icy aura froze over the cracks in space, and at that moment, it looked as though the world had become a thin film of shattered blue ice.

BOOM!

The javelin pierced through Elder Vermo's chest, exploding in what must have been a rain of blood, but was unfortunately not witnessed due to the fact everything seemed to become nothing more than ash in an instant of time.

A pillar of lightning and ice shot into the skies, piercing the veil of Heaven.

It was a sight that could be seen for tens of thousands of miles, and it would be accompanied by an unimaginable tale... One that told of a False Sky God slaughtering an Omniscient one.