Chapter 687 Don't Waste Your Life on a Mere Scout Dog

With every step that ghastly figure took, the hard black rock beneath his feet seemed to have its years drained away. Like deadwood, it crumbled into a heap of gray-white dust that scattered to the ground.

He was clad in thick purple-black bone armor. The armor was no dead thing: the bone spikes covering it opened and closed faintly as if breathing, constantly spewing out nauseating, viscous death energy.

Su Ming was like a weightless dead leaf, pressed into the shadow of the thickest aerial root on the outskirts of the ancient sleeping hall. Ruo Shui spiritual energy had suppressed his breathing until it was almost still. Only the knuckles of the hand gripping his lifebound formation plate beneath his sleeve had turned faintly white from the strain.

A faint blue glow of observation micro vision silently swirled in his eyes.

“Master.” Su Ming rapidly calculated in the Consciousness Sea. “The death runes on this man’s bone armor aren’t meant for killing. They’re geared toward large-scale seepage and corrosion.”

Lin Yu’s Soul Body stirred slightly deep within the Xuantian ring. A glimmer of dark gold flickered as he lowered his voice. “You’re right. That beast isn’t here to fight to the death. The death energy on his bone armor is exceedingly sinister, designed to corrode the very foundations of life. If he pours it into the root chamber of the ancient sleeping hall, even a touch of it will send those newly awakened remnant souls back into slumber, or even scatter their souls to the winds.”

Three calculations flashed through Su Ming’s mind.

If he turned and fled now, the three old formation cores already linked to his lifebound formation plate gave him a seventy percent chance of retreating through the underground river. But the price would be losing Greenwood Court as a refuge for good, and he would certainly die when the Dark Current Sect’s forces surrounded him from the outskirts. If he tried to meet Manifestation head-on with his Golden Core Perfection cultivation, it would be like an egg striking a rock, with nothing to gain. His only chance of survival was to stay where he was, rely on the remnants of the formation in the ancient sleeping hall and the thousand-year-old elders, and use the smallest movements to leverage the greatest laws.

He had already worked out his escape route. Su Ming flicked his fingertip, quietly pressing his lifebound formation plate more firmly against the wooden wall behind him.

In the center of the hall, the red-haired elder Chiyan could no longer hold himself back. In the palm of his one remaining hand, dazzling red vitality surged wildly, bathing the dim space around him in blood-red light.

“You vermin sent to scout the way dare to run wild before the Qiming Royal Court!” Chiyan roared. Cyan formation lines flared beneath his feet, and he was about to force his way out of the encirclement.

“Stand down!”

A thin, withered hand rested firmly on Chiyan’s shoulder.

Leaning on his cracked walking stick, Qingheng calmly watched the bone-armored Manifestation cultivator approach step by step.

“Elder! Let me go kill him!” Veins bulged on Chiyan’s forehead, his eyes filled with unwillingness.

“With your ruined body and depleted vitality, you can only manage three full-powered strikes.” Qingheng’s fingers tightened slightly, forcing Chiyan back into the formation core. “Don’t waste your life on a mere scout dog. Your opponent is above us.”

Chiyan clenched his teeth. A harsh, heavy rasp came from his throat, but in the end, he did not take that step.

Lin Yu gave a soft snort from inside the ring, his Soul Body slowly hovering in midair. “These old pieces of wood are at least clearheaded. If that hothead rushed out and plunged straight into the corrosive trap they’d prepared, we’d be the ones dragged down with him.”

Su Ming paid no heed to the argument in the hall. His eyes were fixed on the ground beneath the bone-armored Manifestation cultivator.

“Boom!”

The bone-armored cultivator suddenly raised his right foot and stamped hard against the outer rock wall of the ancient sleeping hall. The solid barrier, condensed from fossilized roots thousands of years old, cracked in an instant. A dense mass of purple-black death energy, almost tangible, poured frantically downward through the ruptured root chamber like a venomous black snake.

Wherever the death energy passed, no one was harmed. Yet the delicate life-threads connecting to the soul cocoons began to tremble violently, their surfaces frosting over with gray-white ice.

“He’s trying to sever the root veins.” Su Ming’s gaze turned cold.

Without the slightest hesitation, Su Ming took the last two grains of Void Condensation Sand from his storage pouch. Their edges were still rough, but at this moment, they had become his most decisive bargaining chips.

“Master, lend me a wisp of soul power to hold the formation!”

“Steady your Spiritual Platform.” Lin Yu barked. A vast, pure stream of dark-gold soul power surged along Su Ming’s meridians and into the space between his brows, pinning his divine sense in place just as the pressure of the laws nearly shook it loose.

Su Ming’s hands moved like lightning. Ruo Shui spiritual energy became strands of transparent thread, forcibly breaking down the two grains of Void Condensation Sand and driving them precisely into several blank nodes at the very edge of his lifebound formation plate.

All he needed was a Minor Void Spirit Attraction Formation the size of a needle’s eye.

The formation was complete.

In midair, a Void Rift so faint it was almost impossible to see silently opened, then snapped shut under the powerful rejection of the laws of heaven and earth.

At the instant the rift closed, an invisible pressure from the depths of the Void crashed down!

It did not fall anywhere else. Instead, it landed squarely on the head of the death-energy tide surging through the root chamber.

That arrogant purple-black “venomous snake” seemed to have been stomped hard on its vulnerable point by an invisible giant foot.

“Skree!”

Crushed under the pressure, the head of the death-energy tide let out a piercing shriek and collapsed back upon itself. It did not advance an inch. Instead, the irresistible force drove it backward, sending it plunging straight into the corrosive pit beneath the bone-armored cultivator’s own feet.

The eyes beneath the bone-armored cultivator’s mask contracted sharply. He had never imagined that the sinister strike he had schemed over for so long would be forced back by a spatial pressure that seemed almost like child’s play.

“What rat dares!”

He roared, raising his right palm, blackened by the backlash of the death energy, and shattered the pit beneath his feet with a single strike. Hundreds of purple-black armor plates fell from his bone armor like a rainstorm. They tore through the air with shrill whistling sounds, sweeping toward the soul cocoons inside the ancient sleeping hall.

Su Ming still did not reveal himself. He simply flipped over the lifebound formation plate pressed against the wall.

“Rise!”

The lingering vitality he had deliberately stored in the root-vein nodes to prevent the death energy from seeping in was drawn out in full by Ruo Shui spiritual energy. It became three continuous layers of deep-blue water curtains stretching across the front of the ancient hall.

“Pfft, pfft, pfft!”

The purple-black armor plates were like red-hot brands plunged into icy water. They pierced through the first two layers of water curtains one after another. But with every layer they breached, the flowing water wore away most of the laws of deathly stillness on their surfaces.

By the time they struggled to reach the third layer of water curtains, they had already spent their force.

At that moment, a dark-green figure flashed past like a serpent.

“Shatter!”

The vine whip in Elder Qingluo’s hand swept through the air, curling into a dazzling wooden flower. It caught the few remaining armor plates and ground them to powder. The toxic fluid that splashed out was precisely enclosed by the water vapor Su Ming had prepared in advance, sealed completely in the cracks of the surrounding dead rock. Not a single drop landed on the fragile soul cocoons.

The series of exchanges had unfolded with startling speed, like a hare darting up and a falcon swooping down.

Only then did Elder Panshi’s mountain-like body thunder sideways, blocking the ruptured root chamber.

The lingering death energy from the bone-armored cultivator burned his stone armor with crackling sounds. One shocking fissure after another spread across its surface, but he gritted his teeth and did not retreat by so much as a step.

Hidden in the shadows, Su Ming saw through his observation technique that the auxiliary root on Elder Panshi’s left, the one originally supporting the ceiling, was under too much pressure and had begun to crack faintly.

“Elder Panshi.” Su Ming’s voice traveled into the elder’s ear through Ruo Shui spiritual energy, as faint as a mosquito’s buzz. “Retreat half a zhang, and press down with your right foot on the ground hollow.”

Elder Panshi paused. His instinct was to rebuke this suggestion to retreat in the middle of battle, but then the corner of his eye caught sight of the swaying auxiliary root.

Before he could speak, he saw Su Ming flick his fingertip from the shadows.

A cold mist rose from the underground river below, flowing upward through the cracks in the rock. It filled, with perfect precision, the defensive gap that would be left if Elder Panshi retreated half a zhang. The moment the mist touched the death energy, it solidified into hard Profound Ice, even sturdier than rock.