Bu Wentian watched the battle with interest. He took out a bag of seeds out of nowhere. "Is this all he's got? He looks like a master with the spear, but his skills aren't that strong. He's nothing compared to you—by this point in time, the beast you faced was nearing its last legs already."

Zhang Lie smiled confidently. "Keep watching. There'll be a surprise in store for you."

The nine-headed lion howled again, its black claws tearing apart the firmament.

Fang Yi went on the offensive. A chaotic storm surrounded him. A huge burst of light dissipated the mist and smoke.

This was a dangerous close-combat fight.

After the intense fighting, three wheels of time had formed on Fang Yi's back. With the support of three such wheels, Fang Yi pierced through another of the nine lion heads.

Just then, the black lion howled again. A ball of light—a miniature black lion—shot out toward Fang Yi with devastating force.

"[Stormwind Kick]!"

He kicked forward, his legs imbued with wind and storm, sending the black lion flying away.

Fang Yi was shocked by the sudden attack. The black nine-headed lion possessed fearsome combat ability, and it was clearly experienced. The fact that Zhang Lie had passed through a similar or harder trial six times was nothing less than incredible.

Furthermore, according to him, he hadn't even maxed out his peak gene fragments by the time he entered the trial. He had only done so after consuming the stone guardians. In other words, just like them, Zhang Lie had challenged the trial without any disaster gene fragments to his name.

"Our captain really is strong..."The black nine-headed lion widened its maw and shot out another ray of golden light, resplendent with energy.

Thinking about how powerful Zhang Lie was roused Fang Yi's will to fight. His goal was to catch up to Zhang Lie. If he couldn't even pass through the first trial, how could he do so?

"It's time!"

As the fighting progressed, he had accumulated five wheels of time to his back. That was sufficient to support his fivefold strike.

"[Born of Lightning, Swallowed by the Wind], [Tiger's Howl, Dragon's Bellow], [Heaven's Judgment]!"

Fang Yi broke through the constraints of time and returned to the frozen world of gray, with him the only spot of color within. In this state, he was able to simultaneously manifest different techniques at the same time.

Wind and storm combined and crackled at the tip of Fang Yi's spear, imbuing it with sharpness and penetrating strength beyond measure.

Fang Yi compressed that energy again and again, until even the space around the spear started getting sucked in. The tip of the spear punched through space as though it were nothing more than paper.

The combination of elemental, temporal, and spatial energy at the tip of the spear multiplied the strength of Fang Yi's attack beyond what should have been possible.

Chaotic energy swirled over the spear.

Fang Yi combined [Born of Lightning, Swallowed by the Wind], [Tiger's Howl, Dragon's Bellow], and [Heaven's Judgment]—elements, time, space, and chaotic energy. All these sources of energy were stacked together, like buff after buff.

A dragon of purple lightning and tiger of green wind, shielded by a barrier of time and shrouded by black spatial energy, slowly began to manifest. Storm winds were sucked into the mix.Wind and storm combined with space and time, a whole new combination.

A spatial rift began to form where Fang Yi was standing, but the frozen world prevented it from breaking out immediately.

The energy of chaos, which had the ability to destroy anything, spun amidst the howling winds.

Formless lightning flashed over the surface of Fang Yi's spear, gathering near its tip. The dragon of winds and lightning tiger prowled about the spear.

Part of the energy from the spatial rift seeped into the lightning-attuned genetic energy, turning it into void lightning.

The pitch-black lightning began to spike and sizzle.

In combination with the spatial rift that was forming, the void lightning tore apart the space around Fang Yi, causing the frozen world of gray to crumble bit by bit.

The manifold energies merged and tangled with each other, space and time, wind and storm, beginning and end.

Fang Yi sent a stream of each type of energy swirling and corkscrewing around the tip of his spear.

As the forces continued to revolve around each other, the wheels of time behind Fang Yi began rotating more and more quickly as the space around him was strained to its utmost.

Fang Yi had combined seven different forms of energy: wind and lightning; their advanced counterparts, spatial rifts and void lightning; the fundamental forces of space and time; and chaos.

Dragon-like lightning, tiger-like storm, formless time, timeless space—those four disparate energies combined into a cohesive whole, tied together by a dark gold thread. The energies revolved around each other, summoning a howling gale surrounding a spatial rift.

Part of the energy from the spatial rift seeped into the lightning-attuned genetic energy, turning it into void lightning. In combination with the spatial rift that was forming, the void lightning tore apart the space around Fang Yi, causing the frozen world of gray to crumble bit by bit.

All that energy, linked by the karmic power that Fang Yi had manifested, led to an unbelievably complex combination.

Even before the attack was released, the trial space was already shaking tremendously.

Compared to the third realm, Fang Yi's most significant improvement was his renewed understanding of chaos, which carried over to his spear of Chaos, forged by the king of chaos himself, and seeped into all his attacks.