The world held its breath.

For a single, terrifying moment after the bizarre phantoms of light and steel vanished, there was only silence. The Great Lord stood suspended in the sky, his form a vortex of non-light, a hole in reality itself. The prismatic wounds that had marred his being were gone, but a deeper, more profound injury remained: humiliation.

He, a Devourer of Worlds, an entity whose slumber was the stuff of cosmic nightmares, had been forced to dodge, to weave, to be pelted by… toys. Childish, nonsensical pranks that defied the laws of Dao and physics as he understood them.

The silence stretched, taut and brittle. Below, on the battered grounds of the Dao Xuan Sect, every cultivator, from the mightiest Ancestor to the newest disciple, felt the weight of that silence. They had witnessed the strange battle, the inexplicable defenses that had sprung from nowhere and vanished just as quickly, and they had felt a flicker of impossible hope.