Chapter 850: The Cloud Envoy Gets Outmaneuvered

But before the heavy mace could swing into He Lingchuan, a flash of saber light suddenly erupted from the ruins and smoke below, gleaming like mercury spilling across the ground.

Swift as lightning and graceful as a startled swan, it sliced toward Hé Jing’s abdomen in an instant.

It was another masked man, and before his saber moved, he had leaked not the slightest trace of killing intent.

This was the real He Lingchuan.

He had left his clone holding the shadow-piercing lamp to trap the lamp spirit while he donned Mountain Monarch Bo’s hide and concealed himself amid the smoke, all to catch Hé Jing completely off guard.

After conserving his strength for more than ten breaths, man and saber had become one. Before Fleeting Life itself even reached Hé Jing, an invisible blade of vigorous qi more than thirty centimeters long had already cut into his abdomen!

With He Lingchuan’s strength and Fleeting Life’s sharpness, that strike was powerful enough to sever Hé Jing’s spine!

The turn of events happened in the snap of a finger. Fu Liang and the others nearby saw only a figure flash past. Before they could even cry out a warning, He Lingchuan’s ambush had already succeeded.

Even more viciously, He Lingchuan did not stop after landing the first blow. He reversed his saber and immediately hacked at Hé Jing’s neck!

To anyone watching, it looked downright savage.

But He Lingchuan had fought through countless battles, and the moment his first slash passed through, he sensed something wrong. Hé Jing clearly had not managed to dodge, yet He Lingchuan had felt no sensation of cutting into flesh.

This world had all manner of bizarre life-saving measures. The safest course was to simply chop Hé Jing’s head off.

The second strike, however, did not go nearly as smoothly. Hé Jing reacted with astonishing speed, raising his heavy mace to forcibly block Fleeting Life while sweeping another violet-bronze mace sideways at He Lingchuan.

A finger-length doll hidden inside his robes flashed with black light, then snapped cleanly in half at the waist with a wet pop.

The death-substitution doll had taken effect.

The Panlong Secret Realm was obviously fraught with danger, so Hé Jing had naturally come prepared. Even so, he had never expected to use his ultimate life-saving treasure so soon.

The ferocious, bone-chilling saber energy passing through his body left his back drenched in cold sweat.

Death-substitution dolls were difficult to make, and another could not be used again for quite some time. From this moment onward, Hé Jing would have to gamble with his own life.

He Lingchuan had no intention of taking the heavy mace head-on. He withdrew, sprang backward, and vanished into the smoke once more.

The moment he wrapped Mountain Monarch Bo’s hide around himself again, Hé Jing could see only a faint disturbance in the haze before his enemy disappeared.

If the first strike failed, retreat immediately.

He Lingchuan only wanted to swoop in and take advantage of an opportunity. He had no intention of fighting a cloud envoy of the Heavenly Palace head-on under the very nose of the king of the que beasts.

Men like these always had hidden trump cards. Why should he risk his own life testing them?

Seeing He Lingchuan roll away and vanish, Hé Jing’s expression shifted slightly. He grabbed two large rocks from the ground and hurled them toward the brilliant beam of the shadow-piercing lamp.

Anyone capable of escaping Mount Xu after stealing its treasures had to be exceptionally slippery and difficult to catch. Hé Jing’s priority right now was not pursuing the thief, but rescuing his lamp spirit and seizing the Generous Pot.

This time, the obstruction finally worked.

The brilliant light could still shine through the boulders, but its power was greatly reduced.

Hé Jing hurriedly ordered the lamp spirit to escape, but by then only a faint golden silhouette remained inside the beam. Just as the boulders blocked the light, the lamp spirit dissolved with a soft hiss.

He was still one step too late. The eternal lamp spirit, which had required a full two hundred years of worship and nurturing on Mount Xu before finally taking shape, had been sliced away piece by piece until nothing remained.

Hé Jing reeled as though struck by a tremendous blow and coughed up several mouthfuls of blood, unable even to straighten his body for a moment.

Every cloud envoy had first risen through the ranks as a lamp guardian and had long ago formed a pact with their lamp spirit. Within the Heavenly Palace, the lamp spirit received divine grace on one hand and was nourished by its guardian’s own essence and effort on the other. Over the years, the two became intimately bound, sharing fortune and calamity alike. Now that Hé Jing’s lamp spirit had suddenly dispersed, the essence he had poured into it was lost as well, and the backlash struck him immediately.

He had nurtured his lamp spirit for even longer than Zhang Lianhai had, so the blow he suffered now was correspondingly worse.

Less than ten breaths had passed from the moment Fu Liang fired his arrows to the destruction of Hé Jing’s lamp spirit, yet the sequence of events had been almost too rapid to follow. While Hé Jing was still hunched over and unable to straighten himself, the king of the que beasts slapped him away with one palm like a small ball.

Amid the Heavenly Palace attendants’ cries of alarm, Hé Jing crashed into a pile of ruins nearby.

By now, all the Heavenly Palace attendants had regrouped and were fighting the que beasts together. Fu Liang rushed into the ruins and helped Hé Jing up. “Lord Cloud Envoy!”

Blood ran from the corner of Hé Jing’s mouth, and one of his cheeks was swollen red, but his external injuries were not severe.

His cultivation was profound. Heavy as the king of the que beasts’ blow had been, it did far less damage than the destruction of his lamp spirit.

“Where are the ghost children?” Hé Jing swallowed a pill and rapidly regulated his breathing. “This king of the que beasts is even stronger than I expected!” Its strength was already approaching that of the Giant Thunderclap Beast that had recently assaulted Lingxu City. But if he voiced that judgment aloud, it would probably damage their morale.

What infuriated him most was that the ghost children had taken so long to emerge, allowing the enemy to seize every advantage.

Fu Liang jerked his chin toward the battlefield. “We tried several times, but they refused to come out. We’ve finally managed to awaken three.”

It turned out Hé Jing had deliberately brought four special Heavenly Palace attendants on this mission, known as “child-keepers.” Each bore a tattoo shaped like an aberrant creature across their back.

When he gave the order to awaken them earlier, all four had sat cross-legged on the ground, formed hand seals, closed their eyes, and begun praying.

After repeated attempts, the skin on three of their backs began writhing. The tattoos started crawling across their bodies before rising from two dimensions into three, astonishingly transforming into living creatures!

But these things still could not completely separate from the humans’ skin. Only after tearing open their hosts’ backs at the final stage could they crawl free.

For the creatures, the process seemed almost like a butterfly breaking from its cocoon.

For the hosts, it was torment beyond endurance, the pain as though their internal organs were being ripped out.

No matter how steadfast their faith, the hosts could not withstand such inhuman agony. They rolled across the ground screaming. Two of them died from the pain before the aberrant creatures had even fully emerged!

From the backs of humans no more than two meters tall crawled aberrant creatures ranging from around sixty centimeters to over three meters in height. These creatures were called “ghost children.”

The three aberrant creatures were completely different in appearance.

The smallest resembled a praying mantis, but its head and tail tapered into sharp points. If it folded all its legs against its body, the entire insect looked like a spindle.

Despite its small size, it could leap more than a hundred meters in a single bound, moving faster than the human eye could follow. Its method of attack was like a bullet fired from a gun; it punched straight into a vital point, burrowed entirely into the enemy’s chest or abdomen, and devoured the organs from within. Within fifty breaths of being born, the creature had already leaped into the que beast herd and punched holes through three different que beasts.

The second aberrant creature transformed from a tattoo looked even stranger. When it inhaled, it swelled into a perfectly round ball, strongly resembling an inflated pufferfish. Yet a pair of bee-like wings grew from its back, vibrating at tremendous speed and allowing it to dart through the air or stop with extraordinary precision like hummingbirds.

The moment it emerged, it flew into the air and began spitting green ghost fire projectiles down at the que beasts.

Its body might have been small, but each fireball it spat was larger than a watermelon. The poisonous flames coating them automatically clung to whatever they struck and would not extinguish until the que beast had been burned into charcoal.

The que beasts immediately summoned layers of ice to cover their bodies. Yet the poisonous flames deliberately bored into vulnerable places such as the eyes, nose, and ears, invading their internal organs and leaving them writhing in agony.

The final tattoo-born aberrant creature looked considerably more ordinary.

It was a red tiger standing nearly three meters tall at the shoulder.

It was much larger than Jiao Yu.

But it had neither striped fur nor any fur at all. Instead, its entire body was covered in hard, pangolin-like scales, with sharp spikes protruding from the center of every plate. Anyone foolish enough to slap it would end up with dozens of bloody holes of every size punched through their palm.

After this third tattoo-born aberrant creature crawled out of its human host, the first thing it did was not attack the enemy; instead, it swiftly devoured its own host.

By now, He Lingchuan had already slipped far away under the cover of Mountain Monarch Bo’s hide and found a safe place from which to observe the battlefield.

Seeing these creatures, he was secretly astonished.

Monsters?

He did not recognize the other two aberrant creatures, but he had seen the flying pufferfish-like creature in an illustrated bestiary in Panlong City. It was a monster known as a Hetai. He had even studied the illustration a little longer out of curiosity, though he did not remember it possessing the ability to spit poisonous flames.

Ghost beasts?

That thought came to him because he saw the scaled red tiger pounce onto a powerfully built que beast. The latter braced against it with a sharp horn. In the next instant, however, the red tiger spat a red object from its mouth and rammed it straight into the que beast’s forehead.

A hole appeared in the que beast’s skull, blood spurting out as it collapsed.

Even with He Lingchuan’s eyesight, he only barely managed to see that what the tiger had spat was not a hidden weapon, but rather its tongue. The tip of its tongue was shaped like an ice chisel and could shoot more than a meter from its mouth.

Anyone who confronted it head-on could have their skull punched through with a single thrust!

Tiger monsters ordinarily did not possess such strange abilities. Having spent so long around Dong Rui, He Lingchuan immediately thought of ghost beasts.

The Heavenly Palace already possessed enormous ghost beasts such as Chenyuan, which was massive enough to contend directly with something like Juju. So it would not be surprising if they also possessed smaller ghost beasts that could be used in a wider range of situations.

What He Lingchuan did not know was that these ghost beasts were called “ghost children” within the Heavenly Palace and normally slept in hidden locations.

On the one hand, the Generous Pot was mysterious and unpredictable, making Hé Jing’s mission exceptionally important and dangerous. On the other hand, the gods themselves were unwilling to invoke divine descent, because losing an avatar also weakened their own power. So the Heavenly Palace had ordered Hé Jing to bring the ghost children with him, allowing them to be released as powerful combatants if danger arose.

No ghost beast was easy to command, and the ghost children were no exception.

If the Heavenly Palace wanted to transport them elsewhere for battle, the simplest method was to seal them inside human bodies—inside the child-keepers—and nourish them with the humans’ vital essence, blood, and flesh.

That allowed the creatures to remain asleep within their hosts without needing to consume large quantities of food.

Naturally, no skin-sack could possibly contain a ghost beast as enormous and powerful as Chenyuan.

To release the ghost children, they had to be awakened with medicine six hours in advance. The aberrant creatures would then remain in a dazed, half-conscious waiting state until Hé Jing issued a clear command, at which point they would tear their way out of their hosts’ bodies.

The first thing they did after emerging was devour their skin-sack to replenish their nutrients.

In that respect, they were much like many species of birds and insects.

Hé Jing threw each aberrant creature a red pellet as a nourishing supplement, which were actually blood beads, then pointed toward the king of the que beasts. “Hold it back. Retrieve the pot for me.”

The Generous Pot was still inside the tomb.

Why had the treasure thief not taken it away?

The only explanation Hé Jing could think of was that the thief still needed to keep everyone trapped here and therefore did not want the Panlong Secret Realm to close too soon.

Even knowing it was bait, Hé Jing had no choice but to grit his teeth and swallow it.

He Lingchuan, however, turned his attention toward the final child-keeper.

The other three had all died when their ghost beasts tore their way out, yet this last man remained perfectly fine.

Did the ghost beast inside him simply fall too deeply asleep?

Hé Jing struck him several times heavily across the back, trying to force the ghost beast out, but it was to no avail.