Martial Will beat his chest with both arms in confidence like some gorilla as he said, "If you think you can defeat me just because you have more pathways than I do, then you have another thing coming. I will show you that raw power isn’t all that there is to fighting. I’ll show you the importance of fighting skill and put you in your place."

For fear of the spat between these two Dao Lords derailing the situation, Heavenly Eye interjected to calm the situation down.

She said to Martial Body, "He meant that if we fight down there, we will damage the Blessed Heaven World far more than whatever damage the dragon could do. So it is a bad idea for all of us to go down."

She looked at everyone as she said, "It is a bad idea for us to go down there together when we can’t agree now. What we should do is pick one of us to send down to kill the dragon."

"I was willing to go when all of you hemmed and hawed. But instead of gratitude, I get suspicion and threats."

She stopped speaking at this point. No one else was saying anything, so the atmosphere lulled into a tense silence.

It seemed all of them were comfortable with letting the silence continue forever. But Heavenly Eye didn’t want Loki to continue doing what he was doing.

If she could have gotten her way by pretending not to want to go down, she would have done that. But she knew they would be too smart for that to work.

The problem was that they expect her to lie. So the best choice for her was to state her intentions clearly and negotiate a way for them to allow her to descend.

Thinking of this, she decided to break the silence. She spoke up, saying to Tepid Scholar, Martial Will, and Sword Mastero, "I have already surrendered three things. I am willing to give up the Devouring Pathway when I get it, the location of the super world when I get it, and the location of the relic. You three can pick one each and support me."

As usual, she made good points. But none of the three were willing to take this offer. The problem this time was that the offer was too good.

She was giving up so many things for the opportunity to get the dragon. Either she is a fool and is making a loss, or she is very smart and is going to make a profit from the dragon.

Either way, they want to know for sure before they can take her deal. They especially wanted to know what they are giving up before they accept this offer.

But all Heavenly Eye was willing to say about what she was hiding was, "I am not hiding anything important."

Because of her refusal to cooperate, the five of them were at an impasse. They couldn’t decide on what to do, which gave Loki all the time he needed to do whatever he was doing down in there.

As for Loki, he ignored the rifts in the sky. He couldn’t hear what they were saying anyway, so he focused on sensing the area within his external body.

He had overhauled the area around him with new instructions. Then he waited to see what would happen.

Nothing seemed to happen after five seconds. But he refused to give up just yet. He continued to wait.

He waited for a whole 10 seconds more. After ten seconds more of constant pressure, his surroundings began to ripple slightly. Space was rippling like someone had dropped a stone onto the surface of a pond.

It seemed to have crossed an invisible threshold because the rippling got bigger and bigger as time went by. Something changed in the world, and a dissonance in the area appeared in the area beneath the waves.

Everything in the area of his external body should now be permeated with the Devouring Ability from inside out. But there was one patch in the area where the Devouring Ability was only affecting the surface. This dissonance was what was causing the rippling.

The instructions he had been injecting all along had only affected this little area at skin deep. For some reason, he hadn’t noticed this phenomenon all this while.

The patch of resistance had been able to fake being overwhelmed with his instructions. But whatever method this resistant area was using failed to fool him when the magnitude of instructions became too much to fake. So the discrepancy became obvious to him.

After he noticed the patch of resistance, he swept his Insight Stat over it. His perception roamed across it and determined the resistance to be in the shape of a sphere. He also saw that the sphere covered the whole underground cave system and layered itself on it.

When he saw this, he grinned and said, "Bingo."

Then he rushed over to the invisible sphere.

The sphere was mostly invisible to his perception. The only reason he could see it was that the entire area around the sphere was under his control.

Only the area within the sphere was out of his control. This disparity made the existence of the sphere obvious to him even though he couldn’t see it directly.

When he reached the invisible sphere and tried to grab it, he realized that he couldn’t touch it directly. His hand seemed to phase through the area the sphere was in. This made him frown.

As he frowned, he mobilized the power of his Cave Heaven to encapsulate the area and displace it. This time, he finally felt feedback from the invisible sphere.

The mountain within his Cave Heaven wanted to seal the area, but the sphere was resisting it. Unfortunately for the invisible sphere, it was outnumbered and outgunned.

Loki’s power was stronger than the power output of the invisible sphere. Plus, he was pressuring the invisible sphere from outside with his external body while simultaneously pressing it from inside with his Cave Heaven.

The combination of all of these factors forced the invisible sphere to begin to crack. The pressure had become too much for it to bear, so it was falling apart.

Loki didn’t mind that the invisible sphere was breaking apart. In fact, he encouraged it, saying, "Go on. Break and let me see what you’re hiding."

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