Hippo Meteor Fist!
In the middle of the Young Lord of Dawn’s laughter, the middle-aged scholar heard that shout come down like a thunderclap.
He did not understand why there should be a fist technique in this world called the Hippo Meteor Fist. Nor was he alone in that — the man using the technique did not understand it very well either, since the person who invented it was a certain transmigrator with a taste for the ridiculous. But not understanding it did not matter. That did nothing to reduce its power… when the middle-aged scholar heard that shout, he felt every bone in his body pounded through by countless heavy hammers and broken to powder, with not one whole bone left anywhere in him. He even felt his internal organs burst into pulp and drive straight up his throat.
It came up his throat.
And a palm cold enough to freeze a soul solid pressed against his face.
There was no pain. The middle-aged scholar simply felt himself frozen through, soul included — and the pain frozen along with the rest of him.
The middle-aged scholar went down… and then shattered into fragments across the floor. His body and his soul turned into countless pieces, and the pieces were annihilated under the Golden Arena’s rule for the defeated, and in the end they came to nothing at all, as though he had never been in this world.
And not only him. Every war beast he had contracted burst and died at the same moment.
A gold-tier grimoire blew out of the void.
And it fell.
By the time it struck the Golden Arena, it had already become a dull, discarded grimoire, with none of the dazzling brilliance a gold-tier grimoire had before.
The Young Lord of Dawn’s laughter cut off as though a blade had gone through it. He stared at everything in front of him, baffled and dumbstruck, and for a moment he could not react at all. This was a battle he had calculated in every particular, a battle in which nothing whatsoever could go wrong — so how had he lost, in one stroke, an able assistant who was his own left and right arm? What in the world had happened?
Could that fellow Yue Titan have come here and turned the battle around?
No. With the Golden Arena set up, nobody else should be able to join at all, and if anyone had broken in he should have known about it the moment it happened.
And if it was not that Yue Titan the legends credited with reversals, then what in the world was this? Everything had been laid out, the whole battlefield was a certainty with no room for failure. How could an accident happen?
“Die.” As the war beasts pinning him down burst apart, Ye Kong, who had been building his strength on the arena floor for a long time, sprang up like a Vajra Giant Ape and took the black-robed old man — the one who had blown Shuntian’s head open with a punch — entirely into his hands. The huge hands twisted the black robe into a rope, and finally, with savage violence, wrenched the black-robed old man’s body apart into two pieces. Blood-light sprayed out of the severed corpse, and the Tianra Prince, who had been beaten about badly enough a moment ago, turned into a sheet of heavenly fire and burned every drop of that blood-light away.
Inside the burning heavenly fire, a black spherical spirit-body showed in the blood-light.
It shot away.
It went like lightning.
Shuntian and Xue Tanglang were within arm’s reach and could not stop it in time, and the barefoot girl and Ye Kong both failed to intercept it.
But at that moment, an arm — larger and far uglier than the several meters of a Ye Kong shaped like a Vajra Giant Ape — reached across and, nimbly and with the greatest ease, caught the black spirit-body fleeing the black-robed old man’s remains.
A second later the ugly giant arm drew back.
And a terrible giant beast, ugly enough to stop a child crying and give a man nightmares for the rest of his life, stood in the middle of the Golden Arena like a small mountain. An enormous, hideous mouth opened, and the terrible creature swallowed the black spirit-body in its palm without difficulty — and then belched, thoroughly coarsely, as though it had eaten a very satisfying meal.
The black spirit-body was eaten.
Every one of the puppet war beasts burst and died, and rotted bones scattered across the floor.
Wave after wave of corpse-stench turned into streams of black smoke that curled up off the Golden Arena, and under the heavenly fire coming off the Tianra Prince and the cold wind spreading out from Xue Tanglang in waves, the bones and the black smoke steadily faded and turned to ash, until nothing was left but patches of filth that could not be scrubbed away.
“It’s time for me to go too.” Shuntian’s golden body dimmed rapidly, the energy in it disappearing like fireflies.
“To have fought beside you is an honor for us.” Ye Kong had once found this Shuntian creature about as disgusting as a man could be. Now there was a rare sincerity on his face. He raised a fist and made a martial salute, grave and formal. That salute is generally given by a junior to a senior — which is to say that he no longer counted the man in front of him an enemy, but a senior he genuinely respected.
“Ha. I’m glad too. I never thought there would be a day like this. Perhaps heaven took pity and let a madman like me wake out of his confusion and put a little strength into guarding his home…” On Shuntian’s normally severe face there was the warmth and the smile of an uncle from next door.
His gaze was no longer heavy.
And it no longer held any killing intent.
What it held instead was a release past describing… Shuntian — this ruler who had fought Yue Yang and Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and the rest of those juniors again and again, this proud genius who had gone mad from defeat — was nothing at all like the man they normally saw. He was more like an elder of the family about to set out on a long journey, looking at Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang and the Tianra Prince with a little pride in his eyes, and a little contentment.
Finally he looked at the one who was shedding the ugly monster’s form and reverting into a thoroughly disreputable-looking Sea Fatty.
The look in his eyes now was not the old disgust and hatred.
It was affection.
The affection a man has for a nephew of his own.
“I’ll remember you forever, uncle. You were our enemy before, but today my impression of you has changed completely. Well done. I, Sea Fatty, am trash and not worth mentioning, but in my heart I will never forget the proud ruler who once gave me a hard fight — and still less will I forget the senior, the uncle, who moved even a heartless idiot like me today.” Sea Fatty walked up to a Shuntian whose light was steadily scattering and bowed deeply, and put out two trembling hands as though he wanted to embrace this old life-and-death opponent.
“Ha. You gave me quite a lesson, boy… I took one wrong step in the old days and nobody corrected me, so I went on being wrong to the end, sinking deeper and deeper. Luckily you gave me a blow over the head. Otherwise I would not be the uncle I am today.” Shuntian embraced Sea Fatty on his own initiative, and doing it accelerated his body’s collapse and the scattering of his energy. If his life-guardian war beast, the Golden King, had not been holding it together with everything it had, Shuntian would presumably not have lasted even one more second.
“Go well, uncle. You’re the pride of us juniors. With men like you watching over us, with your example, we’ll guard the Sky Tower and guard our home. The Sky Tower will absolutely never fall. We can’t promise you any more than that. Our ability is limited and there’s nothing we can do for you. This is the only thing we can promise you.” Sea Fatty was still speaking when two lines of hot tears came pouring out of him.
The hot tears passed through Shuntian’s steadily thinning body.
And they fell onto the arena floor.
But Shuntian, holding Sea Fatty, laughed out loud. “I died long ago. I should have died at your hands that day. Heaven was simply generous and gave me a chance to atone. Ha. I’ve come out well ahead. Why hold on so hard to living and dying… I’ve come to understand it. Death is only another kind of beginning… before I set out on that road, I want to give the last of what I feel to you — my old opponent, a little fellow I looked down on from the bottom of my heart, who had in fact long since grown so far past me that this senior can’t even look up that high… boy, for the sake of your calling me uncle, I’ll give you my most precious treasure… it’s the one thing I comprehended in a whole lifetime, and there is nothing else like it…”
Before his body scattered entirely, Shuntian turned the summoning grimoire’s talent and the Golden King together into a ball of golden light.
And he drove it into Sea Fatty’s forehead.
Then he turned entirely into golden light and dispersed into points of glimmering, one point at a time, and was annihilated.
The summoning grimoire, having lost its master, crashed to the floor. Sea Fatty, his whole face lit gold, bent down, and as great golden tears fell one after another onto that dulled grimoire, he reached out and picked it up, and put it away with particular care, and wiped it gently — though there was not one speck of dust or dirt on it anywhere.
“I’ll find it the best master there is.” Sea Fatty lifted his face to the sky and muttered to himself. “Its next master will certainly give off a light more brilliant than yours. Watch and see, up there…”
Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang both patted Sea Fatty on the shoulder, and neither of them said a word to comfort him.
The Tianra Prince did not speak either.
Instead he and the barefoot girl — who had at some point already betrayed her master and broken free of the contract — exchanged a smile, and the girl went further and looked with a face full of smiles at a Young Lord of Dawn so angry that smoke was coming out of every opening in his head and the veins were standing out on him.
Apart from the Liqie brothers, who were still standing quietly on the arena and knew nothing of what had changed outside them, the two camps on the field were still as sharply divided as ever. Only, unlike before, the Young Lord of Dawn, who had had the numbers and the momentum, was now a solitary man with nobody left — while on Ye Kong and Sea Fatty’s side there had not been a single loss, and a powerful barefoot girl had been added.
“Fatty. So you were pretending.” The Young Lord of Dawn’s hatred came out like a curse. At that moment he would have liked to bite a piece of flesh out of this specimen Sea Fatty, and nothing less would have eased it.
The Young Lord of Dawn had never in his life taken a loss, never been fooled, and never once misjudged what he was looking at.
And he had been taken in by a disreputable, stupid, dead fat man.
This was simply the greatest humiliation of his life.
Even having an enemy strike him hard across the face would not have made the Young Lord of Dawn this angry or this humiliated… because this was a defeat of intelligence. It was a defeat in the one thing he was proudest of. Because he had underestimated this dead fat man, he had been reversed inside a flawless arrangement, and had lost his most capable left and right arm in a single battle.
“I was wrong, Father. I was wrong. Your criticism was right. I really do underestimate other people’s intelligence far too much. I’ll change. I’ll certainly change.” The Young Lord of Dawn drew a deep breath and pressed the anger and the humiliation down. Now was not the time for anger. It was the time to wash the humiliation away.
“Too late.” Ye Kong spat the words out coldly.
“…” Xue Tanglang did not speak, but the way he looked at the Young Lord of Dawn was the way a man looks at a corpse.
“Very angry, are you? Really want to bite a piece of flesh out of me and eat it, do you?” Sea Fatty’s face was open like a flower, and the fat on him shook with laughing. “Honestly, I sympathize with you, and I understand you, because we’re the same kind of person. Both of us are fools, and both of us are blind men with our eyes open. Only I’m a little bit better off than you, and it’s this: I never treat my own judgment as the absolute standard. I know I’m trash, so I’ve always used other people’s judgment as the standard instead. Take that Yue Titan you dream of surpassing and envy from the bottom of your heart… being a boss with no little brothers who have any judgment is a tragedy. Look at you, you’re the example. This young master gets on well, gets on wonderfully — and how? Because this young master has a good little brother. No — because this young master has a lot of little brothers. Monkey, and the ice-block, and the prince… ow. Who hit me?”
Sea Fatty did not get to finish showing off before Ye Kong dragged him aside and buried him alive.
The Young Lord of Dawn’s face twisted badly.
But he held on to the last of his pride with everything he had. “On the Golden Arena, in front of my several hundred treasures, in front of my several hundred Sky-rank war beasts, however many tricks you play, it is nothing but the struggling of the dying.”
Buried in gold bricks up past his waist, with nothing left but a mouth, Sea Fatty struggled up enough to shout. “We know you’ve got a lot of treasures. But forget the Golden Arena — because those two idiots Liqie and Ligua, do you think they’re actually stupid? They’re just the quiet type. They keep it bottled up and don’t say anything. Look, they’ve nearly gnawed your Golden Arena away with Gold-Devouring Ants. You’d better bring out something a bit more powerful — something on the level of that Golden Flame Divine Banner, say… ow. Monkey, are you really burying me? I’m your boss. How dare you offend a superior… help. Help.”
(End of Chapter 1238)