“What do you want to show…?” The Wolf Immortal casually began to ask a question, but the end of his sentence was cut off by the loud retort of a gun being fired at his back.

  The Wolf Immortal turned and saw the Spider Immortal pointing the new firearm in his direction. He walked toward the firearm, and he saw the bullet leave the barrel at close range. The bullet was shaped differently from those the Spider Immortal fired at him previously. The previous bullets were shaped like spheres, but this one was in the shape of a cone. At a sedate pace, the Wolf Immortal followed the bullet from the firearm to its final resting place in the side of a cliff on the other side of the island. The bullet was certainly faster than other bullets the Wolf Immortal had seen, but it had no chance of hurting an Immortal like him.

  An instant after the bullet struck the cliff, another projectile impacted next to it. The Wolf Immortal had to step out of the way as the third bullet almost struck him. He recalled how often the Spider Immortal complained that his firearms could only fire once before they had to be reloaded. Evidently, the engineers in the Xiahou Empire had solved that problem.

  The Wolf Immortal carefully caught the fourth bullet between his fingers and was surprised to find that it kept spinning even after it was caught. Thinking it might have been a fluke, he plucked the next two bullets out of the air. Each one spun in place as if it desperately wanted to escape from his hand.

  Once the sixth shot had spun to a stop in the Wolf Immortal’s hand, the Spider Immortal asked, “What do you think?”

  The Wolf Immortal thought for a second before saying, “With a weapon like this, a mortal could defeat a Zhouji. How do you make the bullet spin?”

  With an excited look on her face, the Rabbit Immortal said, “It’s called rifling. There’s grooves in the…”

  The Wolf Immortal zoned out as the Rabbit Immortal began explaining the specifics of the metallurgy required to make a bullet spin as it exited the gun. He smiled and nodded to make it look like he had any understanding what she was talking about. Her marriage to the Spider Immortal must have made her forget that most people on their planet didn’t have encyclopedic knowledge of science and engineering.

  With his eyes glossed over and staring out at the horizon, the Wolf Immortal was the first one to notice a large unnatural cloud flying down toward them. He blinked and saw more than a dozen golden spears careening in his direction at speeds much greater than the Spider Immortal’s bullet.

  The Wolf Immortal shot forward, barely able to move fast enough to intercept one of the golden spears before it struck the Rabbit Immortal. He caught the spear in one hand, and the momentum almost threw him off his feet. Terror gripped the Wolf Immortal’s heart as he realized that only an Immortal could possibly throw a spear with such force, and more than a dozen of those golden spears had been thrown simultaneously.

  An instant after the Wolf Immortal caught the golden spear, the rest struck the island with enough force to destroy it completely. The three Immortals were almost knocked off their feet, and such a barrage would have been enough to kill weaker cultivators.

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  The island was instantly rendered into a crater that would naturally fall under sea level, but the spears landed with enough force to push the tides back several hundred cun. It would take nearly a minute for them to return and crash over the heads of the three Immortals.

  “Ren! Cloud Razor!” The Wolf Immortal shouted a second after he realized the caliber of their assailants. There should have only been six other Immortals on the planet, but this force was greater than all of them combined.

  The Spider Immortal, knowing that the Wolf Immortal was not one to make such a request without thinking, used his ring to summon the legendary katana, Cloud Razor. The sword emanated a powerful entropic aura, sucking any nearby ki into itself. A normal cultivator would die after swinging the sword once, and even an Immortal would find it difficult to use the blade without running out of ki. Anyone who could bypass Cloud Razor’s significant drawback found that it could be used to cut the sky itself.

  Before the Wolf Immortal had time to draw his sword, four warriors dressed in shining golden armor and wielding jade one-handed swords appeared in the air above the three Immortals. In a second, the fight split into three separate directions, and the Wolf Immortal found himself with his back to a roiling mass of water.

  The golden warrior’s blade had almost reached the Wolf Immortal’s throat when he finally managed to draw his sword. Blade clashed against blade, and the Wolf Immortal met his attacker’s assault blow-for-blow. Their blades made contact a hundred times, and the Wolf Immortal slowly gained the upper hand. After nearly three seconds of pitched battle, the Wolf Immortal found the smallest gap in his opponent’s defense. Cloud Razor crashed against golden armor, and the golden warrior was instantly cut in half.

  The Wolf Immortal knew that such a blow would be insufficient to kill an Immortal, so he followed that blow with another severing cut to the neck, removing the golden warrior’s head before he had time to fall to the ground. The golden warrior’s beheaded torso barely had time to hit the ground before the Wolf Immortal plunged his hand through the golden armor and into his opponent’s chest cavity. With an unholy sound, he tore the golden warrior’s heart out of his chest, finally dealing enough damage to assure that the Immortal could not survive the assault.

  With massive walls of water surrounding him on all sides, the Wolf Immortal looked down at the metallic heart he held in his hand. Even the heart of the golden warrior had the color and texture of gold.

  He took half a second to see how the other two Zodiac Immortals were faring in their fights against the Golden Immortals, and he did like what he saw. The Spider Immortal had been impaled with a golden spear, and the Rabbit Immortal had lost an arm. Looking down at the golden heart, the Wolf Immortal realized what he had to do.

  He brought the golden heart up to his mouth and bit into it. For the first time in his life, the Wolf Immortal committed the grave sin of cannibalism and finally became a true demonic cultivator. He almost fell to his knees as the ki of an Immortal filled his body, filling his ki channels with renewed vigor. If not for Cloud Razor, he might not have been able to contain all of it. Luckily for the Wolf Immortal, Cloud Razor hungered endlessly for ki.

  Instantly, the Wolf Immortal reached the wet sand where the Spider Immortal was being assailed by two golden warriors. With Cloud Razor in hand, he cut deeply into a golden warrior’s back. The attack was enough to sever the warrior’s spine, and he began to fall slowly to the ground. With ferocious intensity, the Wolf Immortal plucked out the golden warrior’s heart and consumed it like a wild animal.