Archfiend

Chapter 55: Emperor Armament (3)

Vermilion Snow didn’t have a sliver of time to react. This was because her opponent had immediately vanished again!

“Where are you?!” Her entire body was emitting black smoke, her hoarse voice screeching, “Come out! Get the hell out here!”

Boundless golden light illuminated every crevice of the Unrivaled Beneath the Heavens Arena. At this moment, she and Xu Yangyi seemed to be like Ye Gucheng and Ximen Chuixue locked in contest at the Forbidden City’s summit.

“Receive your death!” Vermilion Snow shrieked, her left hand madly grabbing out towards her left side. Just as she extended her hand, inches of it enlarged and finally transformed into a giant fox claw!

Her body leaned sideways, and as she leaned, she dredged up flights of audience stands. 

“Damn you!” Her voice was incomparably mournful, and she exhausted all of her strength to claw out five several-meter-deep scars that immediately appeared on the audience stands! “Junior!!!” On her right hand, her five fingers condensed five black plate-sized spirit pearls that detonated with a bang!

Boom boom boom! No less than a greater half of the Unrivaled Beneath the Heavens Arena was destroyed! Countless gravel stones surged and fell about. This was a frightened madness, a berserking used to conceal the extreme fear in her heart! At this time, the corner of her eye suddenly flickered, and a silhouette interweaved with golden light suddenly moved.

Crack! She saw Xu Yangyi, yet even she was incapable of reacting now!

With a leg, Xu Yangyi jumped up and used his knee cap to slam his opponent into the ground from behind. The rumbling sound of shattering stones roared and fractured apart without interruption. Countless rivulets of blood gushed out from the ground. The sound of breaking bones could be heard from Vermilion Snow’s back. Xu Yangyi could hear it quite clearly, yet it didn’t stir his emotions one bit.

“This one is for the thousands of human lives here.” It wasn’t enough… It still wasn’t enough! The blood in his heart was boiling, and there was a voice shouting that these several punches were simply inadequate!

A cultivator’s integrity. A cultivator’s responsibility. A cultivator’s burden. On this day, with the cost of 7,000 lives as the price, he had learned these things. Now was the time for payback. 

Where this strength had come from wasn’t important. Important was that he had to realize his promise to Firecloud right now and put this demon to a blade’s edge! Afterwards, he would take her head and set it in the Unrivaled Beneath the Heavens Arena, in consolation to the true cultivators.

“Hehe… Hehehe…” A wretched laugh came from Vermilion Snow’s mouth, her head pressed down upon by Xu Yangyi. Her hair had long since fell into disarray, and the veins of both her hands were exposed. Clawing at the ground, she broke apart layer upon layer of broken stone through her hands! All of a sudden, she denounced, “Junior! On this day, I shall not rest until you meet your end!”

Her condition made her resemble a devil, and her full head of black hair loosely draped over her shoulders. Even now, she was dyed unbearably filthy with blood. Her bewitchingly beautiful face was completely smeared in mud and blood. Not only that, her left side was bulging outwards and her right side was sunken inwards. She was essentially not of human form!

“This one’s for…” Just as Xu Yangyi was about to punch a third time, he abruptly discovered a tremendous crack had materialized in his surroundings!

A spatial crack!

The feeling of this pure-black spatial crack was quite odd. If said that the surrounding air was paper, then this paper had currently split apart. The air seemed to turn viscous, and this viscosity formed a strange black crack. Xu Yangyi was in the center of this black crack, and a bizarre attractive force was dragging him towards the inside of it.

He didn’t know where this spatial crack would lead, and he didn’t know what was inside.

At the same time, all his spiritual force, a spiritual force that was just frighteningly abundant, ebbed away like a tide. Vermilion Snow sensed the pressure on her whole body ease up, and already in her mind she was planning to exert every fiber of her being. Standing up, she discovered an astonishing scene.

“Heh… Hehehe! Hahahahaha!” She faced upwards and began to roar in laughter like a madman. “You still can’t kill me! You’re still can’t kill me!”

“Little mongrel! This is your last chance! Next time we meet, I shall pull out your tendons and flay your skin!” Her luxurious cascade of ebony hair danced in chaos, and blood flowed from her seven apertures. The present her was just like a berserk demon.

Xu Yangyi’s entire form was slowly sucked into spatial crack.

Crack crack crack… Time seemed to have reverse, and his wounds of three seconds prior all returned. A pain that caused his internal organs to shift made him unable to restrain himself from vomiting a mouthful of blood.

What the hell was this object? It could reverse time? Supply spiritual force? It appeared to do all these things, but in his heart, Xu Yangyi kept on feeling it wasn’t so simple. His wounds became increasingly greater and more severe until he felt that all his bones seemed to break. He released a heavy groan. 

“Remember…” Vermilion Snow said hoarsely, ten-odd meters away from Xu Yangyi. Her body appeared inhuman, and blood spilled out from her seven apertures. “Dreg… you best pray you don’t meet me again…”

Xu Yangyi repressed the sharp surging pain within his body. Before all his spiritual force was drained barren, he suddenly pointed out with his finger and a golden brilliance formed a tiny snake, which fluttered towards Vermilion Snow. 

Vermilion Snow’s laughter immediately died, and she screeched as she used both her arms to protect her head. However, there was nothing. No… she had carefully seen something as the spatial tear was about to join seamlessly. But… 

The jade chest containing an arcane effort that she was holding… had disappeared! Furthermore… the unconscious man who was just at the side had vanished, as well!

“Solution Eighty-One… Stealing Heavens, Swapping Sun…” At the center of the spatial crack, Xu Yangyi and Chu Zhaonan were glued together, and his hand that was dragging the jade chest was trembling. He laughed bitterly, “Fuck…”

Afterwards, he blacked out, too. His wounds had returned, reversed to when Vermilion Snow had slapped the spiritual-forceless him down into the ground by tens of meters. He had already lost the ability to support himself.

If it weren’t for the hot heart-like blood sustaining him, perhaps he would’ve collapsed earlier. Merely, his hand still clutched onto the jade box. This was the establishment source of his cultivation path.

Vermilion stood dazed in place, looking at the spatial crack in the air that ultimately vanished. The crook of her mouth suddenly raised strangely. 

“Ahahaha…” Gentle laughter rang out a couple times, and soon after, she turned to the sky and convulsed with laughed, “Go… Go well, go very well! Hehehehe!” Her heart finally eased, and her gaze turned absolutely icy again. “Little mongrel… just wait…” She sneered, “For you to actually be in possession of such an item… even if you don’t find me to settle the score, I will search for you…”

Vermilion Snow sucked in deeply and fiercely clenched her teeth. Her loss this time was great, and her blood sacrifice was incomplete. Ultimately, that nameless junior’s explosive strike had brought her foundation to nigh instability. She would have to recuperate for at least a decade to slowly mend it.

She didn’t expect that these damned human Foundation Establishment cultivators would be so fearless of death… It was out of her calculations that Chu Tianyi would have Immortal Intoxication at hand.

But her error above all errors was that she didn’t foresee that there would still be two other people within the qi walls! And among one of them, he could actually injure she, who was at half-step Core Formation! In the end, all these threads had completely come together to form a whole necklace.

If the situation was normal, she would be able to kill such cultivators with a breath of air!

This was her humiliation. She, a magnificent half-step Core Formation demon, only below ten people and above myriad masses, had been beaten into such disgrace by a Qi Condensation cultivator! More importantly, her breakthrough to Core Formation was unsuccessful. The kill order of China’s human cultivators was bound to follow! This major incident was enough to sentence her to a death of a thousand cuts a hundred times! With her present situation, if a couple of humanity’s true geniuses made a move, she would be unable to force an escape as well!

“Mongrel…”

Inhaling deeply, she transformed into tendrils of black smoke, fading away at the center of the arena stage.

It wasn’t known how long it had been, but the desolate arena stage was quiet without a soul. In a flash, all the stones on the floor all began to lightly tremble!

Clatter clatter clatter… It seemed like the charge of a ten million-strong cavalry. Subsequently, all shattered stones flew back to their original positions like magic! Crack crack crack! It appeared that an invisible hand was manipulating these blocks as if time had turned back again. Less than thirty seconds later, the entire Unrivaled Beneath the Heavens Arena had already returned to its original state!

Swoooosh… An illusory silhouette gradually took shape and form. If there was anyone here, they would definitely be awed in shock. This was because… this person was clearly standing in the open, yet his appearance was unable to be clearly seen. It was to the extent that as long as one tilted their head, they would be unable to recall his height or external appearance! 

He appeared like a foreign being isolated from this space. He didn’t exist in the world and perhaps he had surpassed it, transcending above all living things. 

In the ravaged landscape all around, he seemed to suddenly hear something. His indistinct hand gently grabbed at the wind, and a voice uncertain as to whether it was even man or woman fluttered in the air. “Emperor Ming?”

After several seconds of silence, the silhouette faintly swayed. “So it turns out you’ve already reached half-step Core Formation, eh… In order to prevent our perception, you went so far as to arrange a formation that covered the entire sky. You have indeed given it much thought… For Core Formation, you have already walked upon an evil path. What a pity…”

……

At the tip of his nose a fragrant scent arrived. It was the aroma of flowers. 

Xu Yangyi’s nose faintly stirred. He wasn’t certain what flower this was, but it was rather clean and new, causing one who smelled it to feel their mind and senses to be refreshed. His body was like a block of wood, slightly unstable. A familiar feeling revolved around his body, cool and moist. It was water.

His bear upper torso, especially some wounds that were itching, seemed to have something constantly sucking on it. According to his deductions, what he should’ve been feeling was fish. 

It was like creek water in summer. His sweat carried a salty nature and after it fell into the water, it kept on drawing in little finger-sized fishes that were sucking on his toes. It was the privilege only a carefree person with mountains on one side and water at the other could have. 

It was unfortunate he wasn’t privy to this.

Swish… His eyes cracked opened, and his body surprisingly felt not a sliver of pain. He opened his eyes and gazed at the sky, sorrow arising without warning. This graduation ceremony, he had experience far too many things… In the end, the only person left behind was him.

That was incorrect… There was also Chu Zhaonan.

Thinking about this, Xu Yangyi discovered that the bullet lodged in his chest had already vanished at some time. Subconsciously, he revolved the Hundred Solutions to absorb spiritual force, yet he found… that there wasn’t a scrap of spiritual force here! There were no birds in the sky, nor were there clouds. All that existed was a dark-blue sky. He looked all around him and was soon incredibly stunned. At this moment, he was actually soaking in the center of a tremendous lotus pond!

He couldn’t see the sides of the pond, and he couldn’t see its end. The pond water’s depth was simply unknown. The pond appeared clear, but the bottom also couldn’t be seen.

Lotus flowers swayed gently in the wind, as if their pink-snowy color even reached the ends of the sky. Below, clusters of lotus leaves calmly drifted on the water’s surface. It truly should’ve been heaven’s welcome of the boundless jade of lotus leaves, a classical poem of the different reds of lotuses cast by the reflecting sun.

Chu Zhaonan’s figure that he had pulled in couldn’t be seen in sight. Within this vast, limitless lotus pond, there were no frog croaks nor bird cries. It was if this corner had been forgotten by the world.

However, he was the only one here! It wasn’t limited to this. In the next second, his hand subconsciously grabbed at something, and his gaze suddenly sunk. The jade chest had vanished! The arcane effort he had risked his life for… An arcane effort that would lead straight to Core Formation wasn’t in his hand right now!

“Fuck!” He didn’t give a second more of thought and sucked in fiercely, immediately diving beneath the water. He couldn’t lose it!

This was his take-off point; losing wasn’t an option here! How many cultivators could only beseech a glimpse at its exterior? Because of this arcane effort, how many cultivators had raised up an astronomical price during the segment to recruit him?

He had refused Daomaster Floatingcloud’s recruitment. This item was his lifeline! How could he possibly lose it here?!