Beastmaster of the Ages

With the existence of the Tianming Dynasty now known, Sovereign Xi felt that her plan to use Tianming for her breakthrough was foolproof. The dynasty was his greatest weakness.

“Will he really submit to you for his dynasty?” the imperial guide asked, her hand on her chin as she thought.

“Someone who’d risk his life for a friend practically has ‘sentimental’ written on his face. That’s his greatest weakness,” Sovereign Xi said. Even her mocking chuckle sounded seductive. “Lianlian, did you realize it? One shouldn’t love too many people in life, or be too tethered to the world. The more people you love, the more weaknesses you have. That’s why I’m practically parentless. I don’t consider myself to have siblings or children. Apart from you, I have no other weakness. Li Tianming is different. You can tell he feels strongly about relationships and wants the others around him to live good lives. He even treats his lifebound beasts as family. Someone like that can be a hero, but he can’t be a ruler. A ruler inevitably harms others, one way or another.”

She believed Tianming was a fool. It wasn’t even a matter of wisdom or intelligence; his nature of caring for too many people was a self-destructive one.

“Only the selfish can live long lives,” the imperial guide said, exchanging looks with the sovereign.

“Life is short enough. I only need one person to spend it with.”

“That’s right.”

“Li Tianming won’t be an issue anymore, then. However, the trouble he caused won’t just disappear overnight.”

“How many people died so far?” Sovereign Xi’s expression turned grim as rage rose in her.

“A thousand and three hundred. There’s five hundred others who are missing and unaccounted for.”

The killer had never stopped slaughtering. Even after the formation was repaired and people were asked to travel in groups to hunt down the killer, they only ended up getting killed themselves.

“The killer is really careful. Even though we set up more than a thousand traps, he didn’t fall for even a single one. He’s like a ghost. We’ve actually caught him in the act,” the imperial guide said with a worried tone. These days, she had been busy coming up with countermeasures nonstop, but all of it was for naught. The killer knew they were trying to get him and wouldn’t engage them directly as well, instead choosing to pick off the divine moonrace from the sidelines. Now, everyone in the city talked about nothing but him.

An invisible killer was the worst kind of nightmare. He could even infiltrate households that had their defensive formations up and kill the people inside while they were cultivating. The rumors grew wilder and wilder, to the point that people thought the astral killer was actually a hundred different people. Divine Moon Skycity was a ghost town, compared to what it used to be.

At that moment, a new transmission stone came flying. Sovereign Xi widened her eyes. “The killer showed up at Fengyue Manor! Two hundred and thirty-one people have been killed there, including Prince Fengyue’s wife and descendants!”

“Wasn’t there a divine formation there?” The imperial guide was shocked. For someone to be able to infiltrate a divine formation must mean that a lot of planning and effort was involved. Prince Fengyue’s recent movements were anything but subtle, so the killer definitely knew whether he was at home or not.

“Maybe he caught someone from the household and forced them to open the formation.”

They immediately rushed toward the scene of the crime. They had set many traps in Fengyue Manor, but they didn’t know if the killer would fall for them.

“By the way, didn’t your parents live with Fengyue?” the imperial guide asked.

“Yes.”

Along the way, another transmission stone came flying. The imperial guide read it and said, “Your Majesty, the moonfather and moonmother have passed away.”

Moonfather and moonmother were the titles of Sovereign Xi’s parents. Her father had never been the ruler before. News of her parents’ murder caused her to stop and her face completely twisted as she exuded a murderous aura while crushing the transmission stone. She had proclaimed herself to be practically parentless, but it could never be that simple. If even her heavily-protected parents could be killed, it was a fatal challenge to her authority. News of this spreading would cause another wave of chaos across the entire Divine Moon Realm.

Hate and unwillingness flooded into her head. The astral killer, like Tianming, had slipped right under her nose. One remained in hiding and killed with abandon, while the other was on the run and giving her trouble like never before. When they reached the manor, the killer was nowhere to be seen; it was like a high-stakes game of hide and seek. With how big the city was, it was too difficult to find a single hidden cultivator. She was being toyed with time and again. When she saw her parents’ headless corpses, she began hyperventilating and felt just like she had when she heard about Tianming destroying the city’s defensive formation. It was the second time she felt such an intense burning rage swell from her belly.

“Your Majesty, our condolences!” Countless people knelt and cried before her as she slowly approached the two bodies. She had hated them for favoring her brothers over her, due to her gender, and had cursed them to die countless times. But when they really died before their time, she felt her hands shaking.

“You two brought me into this world….” What made her feel even worse were the countless people crying with her. It was far too noisy. Even though she didn’t feel too much grief, she had to look like it now that the whole realm knew that her parents had been killed. It had only been around ten days since the killer had entered, and this was the harshest blow he had dealt yet. It was all too easy for someone that was possibly as powerful as her to make her crumble from the shadows. He had also used her parents’ blood to write something on the ground: “Don’t be impatient, this is only the beginning.”

Those words glistened under the sunlight.

“I see….” The sovereign stood up, tears of blood flowing from her eyes. “You’re holding onto my weakness in my turf, huh. Then you’d better make sure I don’t grasp yours. Otherwise, I’ll pay you back thousands of times over.”

She already had Tianming’s weakness; there was only one left to go. It was only a matter of time until she found it; there was nobody who didn’t have a single weakness.

……

Within the wondersky realm, Tianming was challenged a second time. He could only remain one more day if he defeated that day’s challenger, and the only reason he managed to stay for ten days straight the last time was a little due to luck, as challengers on the second level could be as strong as the Orderian Sky level. At that level of power, one could even fly to the sun.

During his current attempt, he had lasted a whole eight days. On the last day, he encountered an eleventh-level specter ascendant, so he lost and left the pagoda. All in all, he had trained for eighteen days on the second floor of the pagoda, which was three times as efficient as the first. That was a huge amount of time, considering he had first come to the wondersky realm no more than sixty days ago.

His Trisoul Prime was to thank for his insane rate of growth, which complemented his desire to quickly grow strong so that he could get out of his predicament. His desire to overturn his fate also fueled the growth of his Lifesbane Will. The current circumstances for his cultivation were the best anyone could ever ask for.

“There’s more than three thousand legacy lands here. The things I’ve seen are only the tip of the iceberg.”

This world was comparable to worlds with nova sources, and Tianming had only taken a little dip into the sea of benefits available to him. There were seven more floors of the pagoda, and more than ninety ancient idols left for him to challenge!

“If I can reach the peak this world has to offer, that means I’ll be powerful enough to have good foundations in Orderia.”

However, the two people who could greatly influence his fate right now were Sovereign Xi and Bodhi.