Dragged out by force all of a sudden, Xing Jun's face still bore its full measure of arrogance, yet deep within his eyes there was plainly an unconcealable panic.

Three hundred years imprisoned in the Academy of the Sin God—even for a vicious criminal of his caliber, it was a horrifying experience he would never wish to relive.

Tao Zhibai frowned. "Why is there only a head? Where is your body? Where has it been hidden?"

Xing Jun laughed in fury. "You're asking me that? I'd like to ask you the same thing!"

Though there was a wondrous resonance between his head and his body, what he could actually sense was exceedingly vague; even he could not work out what precisely had gone wrong on the body's end.

The one thing he could be certain of was that this headless body of his had most definitely run into trouble.

At first he had assumed he had fallen into one of Wei Zhao's traps.

But now, seeing Tao Zhibai, he immediately concluded that all of this was Tao Zhibai's doing; with what little strength Wei Zhao possessed, he was hardly capable of pinning down his physical body.

"Don't play games with me!"

Tao Zhibai rebuked him in a low, heavy voice. His five fingers spread wide, and he stepped forward and clamped the other's head in his hand. "You have three breaths. Hand over your body, or do not blame me for invoking the heaven-grade punishment!"

At the words "heaven-grade punishment," Xing Jun's scalp prickled instinctively.

When it came to dealing with criminals like them, the Academy of the Sin God was in a class of its own across the entire open zone of the Divine Domain. Never mind the heaven-grade punishment—even the earth-grade punishment one tier below it was something Xing Jun, in his present state, could absolutely not withstand.

"Don't do anything rash! My body really is gone!"

Xing Jun shouted hastily. "I am a key specimen of the criminal rehabilitation program, personally appointed by your new Chief—you have no right to torture me!"

Tao Zhibai's face darkened. "The criminal rehabilitation program was a mistake from the start. I have come today precisely to correct that mistake."

As he spoke, power abruptly surged through his fingers.

"A monster devoid of all humanity like you will never truly repent. If you do not die, your sins will never be canceled out!"

Five streams of black energy, the emblem of the heaven-grade punishment, immediately poured from Tao Zhibai's five fingers into Xing Jun's head.

Xing Jun let out a shrill, agonized scream.

So wretched was that cry that even the fiends of the eighteen levels of hell would have felt their scalps go numb to hear it.

At Xing Jun's level, ordinary torture visited upon his head would not have made him so much as blink, yet at the appearance of the heaven-grade punishment, this peerless fiend truly wept and wailed, tears and snot streaming down.

"Still not going to confess?"

Tao Zhibai frowned.

No one could withstand the heaven-grade punishment; by all reason, Xing Jun should long since have confessed by now.

"Could it be that his body has already fled Tianjun?"

The possibility that it had fallen into Wei Zhao's hands never once crossed Tao Zhibai's mind.

In his eyes, never mind a single Wei Zhao—even if every capable fighter in all of Tianjun were gathered together, they would be good only to be run over by Xing Jun like speed bumps. There was no chance at all they could get the better of him.

Just then, Tao Zhibai's heart lurched.

The heaven-grade punishment he had inflicted upon Xing Jun's head receded of its own accord, without the slightest warning.

Nor was that all. Even the Sin Token in Tao Zhibai's hand began to quietly fade, reduced in the space of a single breath to a piece of plain scrap iron.

Tao Zhibai jerked his head up, the color draining from his face. "Impossible... how could this be..."

The Sin Token was not merely the most powerful instrument of punishment in his possession; it was also the core proof that he had been acknowledged by the Sin God.

With the token in hand, no matter how marginalized his standing in the Academy of the Sin God had become, no one had ever truly dared to underestimate him—because he held the authority of the Sin God.

But now the Sin Token was defunct, and that could mean only one thing.

He had been abandoned by the Sin God he worshipped.

That alone was enough to shatter his entire spirit.

"Hahaha! So even you have come to this!"

Xing Jun's head, recovering from the heaven-grade punishment, burst into wild laughter.

And in the very next second, seizing the moment when Tao Zhibai's faith had collapsed, a burst of black qi shot from Xing Jun's mouth and struck Tao Zhibai square in the face, every wisp of it.

Tao Zhibai raised a hand instinctively to block it.

But the black qi penetrated everywhere; swift as his subconscious reaction was, he could not fend it off at all.

In an instant the black qi had slipped through his seven orifices and burrowed into his body.

At the same time, Tao Zhibai discovered to his horror that he could not shake off Xing Jun's head.

Xing Jun's head did the very opposite: rather than break free, it clung fast to Tao Zhibai's right hand.

Nor was that all.

In mere moments, Xing Jun's head had fused with Tao Zhibai's right hand, so that at first glance it looked as though it had grown there naturally.

Then Xing Jun's head began to writhe its way upward, little by little, along his right arm.

A profoundly ominous foreboding seized Tao Zhibai.

Everywhere the other's head passed, he lost all control.

His right hand would not obey him, and his right arm began to disobey him as well.

If he let Xing Jun's head crawl onto his shoulder, what would happen next was simply unimaginable.

Gritting his heart, Tao Zhibai suddenly produced a long saber in his left hand.

Without a moment's hesitation, he brought it down in a single slash at the place where Xing Jun's head clung.

Bizarrely, after the blade swept past, Xing Jun's head did not stir in the slightest.

Only in the instant the blade passed did a thin layer of black qi rise; after that, utterly unaffected, it went on climbing.

Compared with before, its speed had not slowed in the least—it had even quickened somewhat.

Xing Jun's head leered savagely. "You single-minded fool, even now you cannot see reality? You have been abandoned by your great Sin God—no one can save you now!"

As the words fell, he had already crawled to Tao Zhibai's throat.

From the outside, Tao Zhibai was now a thoroughgoing two-headed demon!

Tao Zhibai's whole body went rigid.

At this very moment.

Xing Jun's head was contending with him for control of his body.

As a core higher-up of the Academy of the Sin God, Tao Zhibai was not only outstanding in strength but far surpassed ordinary experts in willpower as well.

Under normal circumstances, he would have possessed an extremely strong resistance to a body-seizing technique of this kind.

No matter how powerful the other party, it would have been very hard to shake him in the slightest.

But the present was not normal.

From the moment the Sin Token failed, his entire mental defense had been completely breached—this was, after all, the collapse of a worldview on the scale of the destruction of faith.

For Xing Jun to exploit the opening at such a time—the consequences could well be imagined.

"Never!"

Tao Zhibai bit down hard on his tongue, forcing himself to steady his mind and fight back against Xing Jun's consciousness, which had already invaded his sea of awareness.

For a time he actually managed to hold his ground.

Xing Jun laughed wildly. "A stray dog his master has thrown away, and you still put on a show of toughness before me? Without the halo the Sin God gave you, what are you worth?"

So he said aloud, but inwardly he was secretly shocked.

This time, with heaven's favor granted him, he had already strained every ounce of his strength to take the other's body.