After being reborn, the villain comes with a spoiler tag.

On the martial arts stage, neither Huo Yu nor Long Yucheng held back, unleashing deadly moves with every strike.

Huo Yu summoned ten Hundred Soul Banners, and with a thought, more than a hundred living souls surged forth. Among these souls, eight were Foundation Establishment stage cultivators!

Huo Yu did not take out the Hundred Soul Banner he had refined himself; all the Hundred Soul Banners he used were obtained from the ruins of the Foundation Establishment cultivator.

At that time, Huo Yu obtained a total of twenty-seven soul banners. However, after returning to his cave to check, he found that almost all of the soul banners had exhausted their spiritual power. The living souls inside, having lost their spiritual power supply, began to instinctively devour each other, to the point that less than a quarter of the living souls remained in all the soul banners.

However, this also gave birth to several exceptionally powerful souls, namely these eight Foundation Establishment stage souls.

With these eight Foundation Establishment souls as the core, the remaining souls densely surrounded Huo Yu's body, like a dark cloud.

"Soul, eat!"

Huo Yu made a hand seal with one hand and gave a low shout.

The soul banners all pointed forward, and under their control, clouds of souls surged toward Long Yucheng, while only the eight Foundation Establishment stage souls remained to protect Huo Yu's surroundings.

Long Yucheng did not sit idly by and wait for his death; a handful of talismans had appeared in his hand without him even noticing.

As Huo Yu finished speaking, the talisman was activated and he threw it out. Instantly, a white mist enveloped Long Yucheng, and his figure disappeared into the mist.

This talisman is the very same Spirit Transformation Talisman that Long Yucheng used when he fought against the outer disciples of the Yellow Spring Sect.

The Spirit Transformation Talisman, as its name suggests, is inscribed with a spirit transformation technique that can dissolve spiritual power.

However, Long Yucheng's Spirit Transformation Talisman was only the lowest level and could not truly dissolve spiritual power, but it was enough to slow down the spiritual power of the souls rushing into the fog.

Huo Yu released too many souls, and even though Long Yucheng had thrown out all the spirit-transforming talismans in his hand, he could only hold them off for a moment.

A moment later, the white mist was completely devoured by the numerous living souls, who were only slightly slowed down before quickly recovering.

This was exactly the moment Long Yucheng needed!

As the white mist dissipated, Long Yucheng had already quietly appeared behind Huo Yu using the nameless escape technique, a cyan spirit sword in his hand, pointing directly at Huo Yu.

The Spirit Transformation Talisman could only block vision, not divine sense. Huo Yu had already noticed this when Long Yucheng left the area of ​​the white mist.

Not only him, but the eight Foundation Establishment stage souls also discovered Long Yucheng and rushed towards him with a roar, only to find that they missed him.

Long Yucheng remained motionless, yet strangely dodged all the attacks from the souls, as if the souls themselves had avoided him. His longsword moved at full speed, and in the blink of an eye, he was in front of Huo Yu.

Huo Yu had already figured out Long Yucheng's move. The cyan color flowing on the sword was not the true color of a spirit sword, but a layer of sword energy covering the blade. This sword energy contained the power to confuse the opponent's senses, even their divine sense could be deceived.

Facing the sword tip that was close to his nose, Huo Yu's eyes did not tremble in the slightest. In the next instant, he had firmly pinched the sword with two fingers.

Long Yucheng reacted quickly, immediately abandoning his sword and retreating. At the same time, the surging, powerful fire-attribute spiritual energy within the sword erupted, creating a powerful explosion that forced him back several steps.

The Spirit Silver Sword shattered into several pieces in the explosion, and the fragments, imbued with Huo Yuhuo's spiritual power, shot towards Long Yucheng like arrows.

All of this happened in the blink of an eye. Most of the audience below the stage had not yet reacted. They saw that Long Yucheng's sword was still a foot away from Huo Yu a moment ago, and then suddenly exploded the next second.

Only a few people saw through Long Yucheng's little trick and showed a hint of interest in this contest where the strengths were so disparate.

The red-robed elder sitting on the martial arts arena and the five elders watching from the First Peak both saw through everything, but neither of them moved an inch—except for Elder Gu.

Seeing the two of them actually fighting, Elder Gu was completely stunned.

Although he was too busy before and forgot to send someone to inform the two of them, weren't they familiar people who entered the sect together and called each other fellow disciples?

This deadly fighting style is more like that of enemies than fellow disciples!

If it weren't for the outer sect assessment rules that forbid anyone from interfering while the contestants are still on the training ground, Elder Gu would have really wanted to rush onto the stage and separate the two—he was afraid that Long Yucheng would be beaten to death by Huo Yu here today.

The two on the martial arts stage were completely unaware of Elder Gu's near-vomiting blood thoughts; Huo Yu only felt a slight pang of regret.

This was the first time he had ever seen a sword aura that could confuse the senses, but Long Yucheng's cultivation was too low, and he couldn't even unleash a complete sword aura. If there were thousands or tens of thousands of such sword auras, Huo Yu would really have some trouble.

This sword energy came from the "Heavenly Wind Sword Manual" that Long Yucheng obtained from the second main quest.

This sword technique was originally a foundation-building mental cultivation method, but Long Yucheng, who couldn't think of any other moves, studied it for a while as a last resort and actually came up with some results.

However, his spiritual power at the Qi Refining stage was insufficient to support him in unleashing a complete sword aura, so he had to resort to this trick. He had hoped to catch his opponent off guard, but he did not expect that Huo Yu would easily neutralize it upon first contact.

But Long Yucheng had no intention of admitting defeat.

He dodged most of the flying sword fragments, activated the defensive talisman he had prepared beforehand, and withstood the impact of the remaining fragments, but still felt a metallic taste in his throat under the powerful impact.

Before he could even cough up blood, Long Yucheng pulled out a handful of talismans from his storage bag and threw them at Huo Yu.

This pile of talismans contained everything imaginable, and in an instant, a barrage of fireballs, water spells, and ground spikes flew towards Huo Yu.

Huo Yu didn't even need to lift a finger; all these low-level spells were cast on the soul clouds surrounding him, creating a lively scene, but without harming Huo Yu in the center whatsoever.

Long Yucheng hadn't expected these things to be of any use. Instead, he used the explosion of low-level spells as cover to close in again, while simultaneously activating several mid-level talismans in his hand.

Instantly, Long Yucheng's speed increased exponentially, and several layers of white shields shimmering with spiritual light appeared in front of him.

After enduring several attacks from a Foundation Establishment stage soul, he once again passed through the soul cloud and faced Huo Yu face to face.

At this moment, the last talisman in Long Yucheng's hand was also activated.

"boom!"

With a deafening explosion, a deep red flame suddenly erupted between Long Yucheng and Huo Yu.

Although the large number of living souls around Huo Yu absorbed most of the power, the shockwave from the explosion still affected the spectators closest to the arena.

The two people at the center of the explosion were engulfed by the flames and only reappeared in everyone's sight after a long time.

Huo Yu himself was unharmed; the violent spiritual energy generated by the explosion was neutralized before it could even get close to him. However, the soul cloud surrounding him was not so lucky.

As for Long Yucheng, after being subjected to such a powerful spiritual energy explosion at close range, despite having layered shields on his body beforehand, the result was still tragic. He was lying on the ground, unconscious.

He captured the last fragment of the talisman from afar. In the rapidly spreading explosion of spiritual energy, the talisman didn't even have time to completely burn. Huo Yu reconstructed the talisman's original form from the remaining traces of spiritual energy.

This is a high-level spirit-gathering talisman.

This kind of talisman has no other use besides gathering a large amount of spiritual energy in a short period of time. Because the duration is too short, this spiritual energy will dissipate again before the cultivator has a chance to absorb it, making it extremely useless.

Long Yucheng, however, used this useless talisman as a near-suicidal attack method.

The principle is simple: Long Yucheng simply added his own fire-attribute spiritual power as a detonator when the spirit-gathering talisman was collecting spiritual energy. After the spiritual energy cluster became incredibly large, Long Yucheng activated the fire spiritual power he had left behind, and the entire cluster exploded with a "bang".

By employing this method of inflicting eight hundred casualties on the enemy while losing a thousand of his own, Long Yucheng, with his Qi Refining stage cultivation, was able to launch an attack powerful enough to threaten a Foundation Establishment stage cultivator.

Seeing that Long Yucheng was only exhaling and not inhaling, Huo Yu's eyes flickered slightly. He was about to feed Long Yucheng some pills when he was pulled by the hem of his robe.

"Brother Huo...?"

Long Yucheng coughed up a mouthful of blood after saying only a few words. But he only paused briefly before continuing.

"This...is mine..."

Before he could finish speaking, he completely fainted.

Huo Yu looked down and realized that a yellow talisman had been pasted on his chest at some point.

An unactivated fireball spell could only have been applied by Long Yucheng at the moment of the explosion.

Huo Yu tore off the yellow paper and couldn't help but chuckle.

Of all the talismans, Long Yucheng chose the fireball spell.

After examining the talisman in his hand for a moment, Huo Yu stuffed it into Long Yucheng's hand, which was tugging at his clothes, and freed his own garment.

He then picked up the unconscious youth, nodded to the red-robed elder in mid-air, and flew straight back to his cave.