The wait lasted three whole days. Some spectators, impatient, turned to leave; others returned to the dimensional world and stayed, sensing no danger. Some even braved his directives and died as a lesson to the others.

Suddenly, the Galewind Lake began to froth even more violently than before, and a frightening aura could be sensed through these bubbles.

"Leave!" Zhang Lie shouted. "You've had the excitement you wanted, haven't you? I won't protect you if you stay!"

He shielded his own body, hovering above the lake. However, those spectators who had camped out at the lake for three whole days surely weren't going to turn back now. The tragedy that he had predicted was, indeed, about to take place.

A crystalline lifeform suddenly burst out of the surface of the lake. It took the form of an inverted anchor, with a gigantic eye where the bottom of the anchor would be. It looked rather shocking, but not particularly dangerous. Zhang Lie estimated that its body was about dozens of meters wide, though much of it lay obscured beneath the lake.

The moment it appeared, Zhang Lie felt the genetic energy that sustained his body begin to tremble, as though, sensing some unknown directive, the energy was trying to escape from his body. 

Fortunately, his peak gene fragments and limit fragments protected his body from this assault, but those spectators by the edge of the lake weren't so lucky. He saw the spectators' bodies fall like stalks of wheat, with blood-colored lifeforce flying out of their bodies.

Almost instantly, their bodies turned into parched, desiccated corpses.

The battlefield turned silent. The blood-red genetic energy that the disaster-grade lifeform had extracted from their bodies floated to the anchor, causing its gigantic eye to blink a few times, as though in enjoyment.

The next moment, a primordial aura began to spread out all around the creature, and it released a few high-pitched cries.

Subsequently, the mountains and forests all around responded with cries of their own.

Most sounded like superior-grade lifeforms, having been summoned by the disaster-grade lifeform's cry.

Just then, however, its anchor-like body suddenly stumbled, and a strand of blood appeared on the surface of the massive anchor. The blood-colored water of the lake began to froth once more, and even more strands of blood began to appear on the anchor's body.

It was then that the disaster-grade lifeform noticed the only unusual living creature remaining nearby: Zhang Lie. 

It felt a mysterious power which it grossly disliked seeping into its body through the lakewater. The mysterious power was rapidly weakening its body and decreasing the rate at which it could obtain energy from the environment.

The disaster-grade lifeform screeched; despite the fact that Zhang Lie was prepared, his eardrums were pierced almost immediately, and blood began leaking out of his ears. Even then, Zhang Lie didn't give up what he was doing. Circulating more and more genetic energy around him, he manipulated the thousands of threads of blood around the disaster-grade lifeform's anchor-like body, causing it to crack and splinter.

The anchor began to revolve more and more rapidly in an attempt to dislodge the bloody threads, and its eye began to release rays of annihilation.

A red beam of light struck the land, releasing a mushroom cloud of smoke and dust in the air. Hundreds of kilometers away, the redmaple forest abutting the Blacksteel settlement vanished into thin air.

Just one beam of light possessed such incredible energy—Zhang Lie didn't want to think about what would have happened if the anchor had targeted a human settlement instead. He was very glad he had ordered Zhou Ying to reach out to Commanders Su Feng and Yan Long.

Another beam of red light shot toward the nearest human settlement, the Galewind settlement. The settlement's core shields materialized into existence, but they lasted only a brief moment before being pierced by the beam.

Those hunters who had refused to leave the Galewind settlement had perished, just like that.

The anchor continued to rotate as it loosed beams all around itself. When it realized that neither approach was working, it even began to screech. Huge sound waves roiled toward Zhang Lie and agitated the lifeforms all around it, leading to a cacophony of cries, squeaks, roars, howls, chirps, squawks, and clicks thousands of kilometers away from the lake.

These lifeforms began to rampage, destroying all that lay around them. Human settlements and hunters, all those living creatures they despised, had become their targets. 

Because of the anchor's screeching, Zhang Lie was also in deep trouble— the first wave of lifeforms summoned by the anchor had arrived at the Galewind Lake: a flaming chimpanzee, a red-and-jade-green-striped snake, three galewolves, and four other superior-grade lifeforms besides.

Under ordinary circumstances, it would be straightforward for Zhang Lie to deal with them all, but at present, his entire attention was focused on manipulating the water in the Galewind Lake to seep into the disaster-grade lifeform's anchor-like body.

The most Zhang Lie was able to do in the meantime was to avoid the anchor's rays of annihilation; he wouldn't be able to fend off the superior-grade lifeforms surrounding him as well.

The flaming chimpanzee was the first to cause a problem. It had found a huge boulder from somewhere, which it hurled from hundreds of meters away. The flaming rock fell toward Zhang Lie as though it were a bomb.

"[Eclipse]!" Zhang Lie yelled out.

As a bloody moon rose into the air, space froze around Zhang Lie, and the huge boulder that the flaming chimpanzee had tossed was quickly broken down into small pebbles. Then, Zhang Lie canceled [Eclipse]'s domain almost as quickly as it had formed.  As the snake and galewolves approached him, Zhang Lie activated his domain again, destroying the snake's jaws and crippling the two galewolves.

The fight dragged on. Because of what Zhang Lie had done to the lakewater, the disaster-grade lifeform's body was slowly corroding away, but that only made it struggle all the harder. As it continued to screech, Zhang Lie found himself surrounded by no fewer than ten superior-grade lifeforms.

Although these superior-grade lifeforms were often damaged by the anchor's undifferentiated attacks, there were more and more reinforcements trickling in from the nearby mountains and forests.

As a result, Zhang Lie became more and more fatigued, and he dodged a few of its attacks only at the very last moment. If Zhang Lie didn't have a method for dealing with these superior-grade lifeforms, he wouldn't be able to fight for much longer.