High Martial Arts: Martial Soul Great Sage Equal to Heaven, crushing all races.

Xia Buxiu's roar echoed across the ravaged territory, filled with the resentment of a hero at the end of his road.

The victor is king, the loser is villain.

He attempted to use these four words to draw a tragic yet dignified conclusion to the Xia family's thousand-year-old legacy and to his own life's plans.

He wanted to define this reckoning as a simple power struggle, a failed gamble where everything was lost.

Instead of a despicable, filthy, and fundamentally rotten crime of treason.

Li Changqing looked at his frenzied appearance and slowly shook his head.

Then, he turned around, his back to Xia Buxiu in the deep pit, leaving only a broad and imposing figure behind him.

It was a complete, undisguised disregard.

It was as if even glancing at him would be an insult to himself.

You're wrong.

Li Changqing's voice remained calm, yet carried a sense of finality, as if a conclusion had been reached.

"Your Xia family was not defeated by me, nor by Feng Qingyang."

Xia Buxiu's roar came to an abrupt halt. He stared intently at Li Changqing's retreating figure, as if trying to discern any mockery or triumphant boasting in those few simple words.

But he heard nothing.

There was only a heavy, deathly silence.

Li Changqing turned his head slightly and glanced at the young figure beside him who had remained silent the whole time, simply standing quietly with his staff in hand.

"You have been defeated by arrogance."

A single sentence, like a thunderclap spanning a century, exploded in Xia Buxiu's mind!

Defeated by...arrogance?

His thoughts instantly drifted back to more than a hundred years ago.

At that time, Li Changqing emerged out of nowhere, rising from humble beginnings to become the commander-in-chief of Shanghai through his outstanding military achievements.

These powerful families, whose lineage has lasted for hundreds or even thousands of years, appear respectful on the surface, but behind the scenes, who doesn't sneer at them?

How can a peasant with no connections be on equal footing with them?

So they devised a plan, they framed him, they kicked him when he was down, and they finally succeeded in forcing the meritorious Lei Jun out of Shanghai.

They thought they had won.

Then, 126 years later, today...

Seal ink.

Both were from humble backgrounds, both had no connections, and were even younger and more arrogant than Li Changqing was back then.

Xia Yuan was crippled, and Xia Jidian was humiliated. When did the Xia family ever truly take this eighteen-year-old boy seriously?

In their eyes, this was just another lucky, arrogant, and reckless young man.

With the power of the powerful and influential, and with a little manipulation, they could easily crush him, just like crushing an ant.

They are arrogant, so they look down on him.

They look down on it from the bottom of their hearts.

Therefore, their repeated provocations and tests ultimately led to their annihilation.

Xia Buxiu was stunned.

He finally understood.

Li Changqing's words were like the sharpest knife, slicing him open and also dissecting the glamorous facade of the Xia family, revealing the rotten and foul-smelling root called "arrogance" within.

One hundred and twenty-six years ago, their arrogance and disdain for Li Changqing ultimately sowed the seeds of the Xia family's decline.

One hundred and twenty-six years later, because of their arrogance and disdain for Feng Mo, they ultimately forced this seed to ripen, resulting in the annihilation of their entire family.

History, how often it repeats itself.

How ironic, how utterly despicable.

They were not defeated by any individual, but by their own deep-rooted and unchanging pride in their aristocratic lineage.

"Heh...heh..."

Xia Buxiu made an unintelligible sound in his throat, his cloudy eyes fixed on Feng Mo.

He wanted to see clearly what made this young man, who had ended the Xia family's thousand-year fortune, so different.

However, all he saw was indifference.

Feng Mo's eyes remained completely calm and undisturbed from beginning to end.

It was as if everything he did today was not about settling scores with a prestigious family that had been passed down for five hundred years, but rather about casually stepping on a nest of unsightly insects by the roadside.

This feeling of being completely ignored was more despairing to Xia Buxiu than any humiliation or torture.

On the ruins of the Xia family's ancestral land, the deathly silence was replaced by a heavy breathing sound.

Thousands of soldiers from the Demon Slayer Division formed an iron ring, completely surrounding this land soaked in sin and blood.

Their gazes converged into a torrent, all fixed on the young figure standing with a stick.

Further away, millions of survivors of the catastrophe in Shanghai watched this historic moment through holographic screens scattered throughout the city.

Four hundred years of feuds between powerful clans, one hundred and twenty-six years of blood feuds, will all come to an end under that raised, crimson iron rod.

Xia Buxiu's half-human, half-tree mutilated body lay paralyzed among the rubble. Beneath the cracked bark, his turbid eyes stared intently at Feng Mo, a mixture of resentment, unwillingness, and fear... until finally, only a deathly silence awaited its doom.

Feng Mo's arm muscles bulged, and the crimson-gold light on the Ruyi Jingu Bang intensified, as it was about to strike.

Just a second before the judgment was about to be delivered, when everyone held their breath.

"stop!"

A sharp, piercing shout, like a poisoned awl, brutally tore apart this solemn space.

Gu Chongli.

He stepped out from behind the crowd, his black and gold-trimmed uniform from the Imperial Capital Demon Slayer Division fluttering in the wind of the ruins, like a banner of justice.

He darted forward, spreading his arms to block Xia Buxiu's twisted remains.