The place looked like an abandoned hall, but if you studied it closely you could still imagine its former splendor from the fittings and the layout — old now, but still carrying their grandeur.

The space in front of him was empty and utterly silent — silent without a single sound in it. Ye Tianxie looked around him and noticed at once that this hall had a stone figure standing at each of its four points, east, west, south and north. The four were not alike, but every one of them stood with the same commanding air. The figures they were carved from had all been tall as well… their height alone ran to something like five meters.

In front of him, which was to say the south, stood a man in a suit of heroic armor with an enormous sword planted beside him. The years had worn the man’s face past making out, but that sword standing at his side… it was a sword of unbelievable size, its length running some way above even that tall man’s head, and its breadth broader still. This was a greatsword in the truest sense of the word… and it took very little imagination to see that a sword like that, raised in a warrior’s hands, could make corpses by the field with a single careless sweep.

Ye Tianxie found himself walking forward without meaning to, until he stood before the statue. And there, at the foot of it, four words were stamped… four words standing for this man’s title.

Holy Sword War God.

And on that enormously oversized blade a name was stamped, plain and large — Elsidion.

Elsidion. The name of that terrible sword.

To the north stood a figure whose body and half whose face were hidden inside a pitch-black cloak. Statue though it was, a mystery that quickened the heart still came off it faintly. He was also the only one of the four without a weapon… he held a book in his hands. Coming closer, Ye Tianxie made out the four words stamped on the book’s cover:

The Ninth Heaven!

And at this statue’s feet, his title was stamped… the Azure Demon Emperor.

The statue to the west… the first thing anyone would notice on seeing it was the pitch-black spear, so savage in shape that it raised the hairs on your arms. The spear’s name: Ragnarok.

And the man’s name: the Annihilation Asura.

To the east stood a figure wrapped from head to foot in heavy armor, holding an enormous shield. Man or woman, there was no telling. The armor was so thick that the body inside it looked several sizes larger than it could be. Standing before this statue, a weight came off it that made the heart sink at once.

Stamped on the shield was its name: Eternity’s End.

And at the statue’s feet, likewise stamped, was his name — the Abyss Knight.

Four statues, set east, west, south and north like the four legs of a tripod, in a perfectly regular arrangement of the four quarters. The ruins of the Phantom Beast race, far underground, a dark space… Holy Sword War God, Azure Demon Emperor, Annihilation Asura, Abyss Knight… four titles that shook a man to read them. Were all four of them of the Phantom Beast race… and what was it they stood for?

He walked about that strange hall for a long while, and when nothing else turned up he pushed open the one door it had. Ahead of him was a dim passage running off to somewhere unknown. Ye Tianxie raised his guard and went forward without a sound.

At the same time.

A man with deep blue hair came drifting slowly down out of the air and landed before the gate of the Phantom Beast Ruins. He looked ahead of him in silence for a while, then set off forward.

But he had gone no more than two steps before his body met an invisible obstruction. In the same instant a vast force came at him. The blue-haired man frowned and stepped back without effort, landed steadily, and stood looking ahead of him without a word. After a moment he raised his right hand. A stroke of pitch-black lightning flashed across the sky above and came down, condensing between his fingers into a short black sword. His hand rose and the sword fell, and the blade, ringed in lightning, cut hard at the space in front of him…

Zzzt~~~

After a tearing sound that was extremely hard on the eardrums, a white crack appeared for an instant in the transparent space ahead — but it lasted less than a second before closing again. The blue-haired man did not try a second time. His face darkened. He stepped back a few paces and called quietly, “Blue Soul!”

At his call, a wolf appeared behind him, blue over its whole body and enormous in shape. As it came, a surging field of force pushed the surrounding air aside at speed, and space warped for a moment.

“Blue Soul, can you break this barrier?” the blue-haired man asked, frowning, his eyes on what lay ahead.

The blue wolf fixed its pale blue eyes on the empty space in front of them. After a few seconds it shook its head, cleanly and without hesitation. “No. They were the strongest race of their age, and it shows. The disaster wiped them out years ago, and the power they left behind is still this terrible.”

“Then how certain are you of beating Orange Fang?” the blue-haired man went on.

“Completely.”

“Then how did Orange Fang get inside? Did it use some special method?” A little bafflement showed on the blue-haired man’s still face.

The blue wolf was silent, and then said slowly, “Orange Fang is inside, beyond any doubt… but the manner of its existence puzzles me. Orange Fang’s power takes the form of a giant orange tiger, which not only has a consciousness of its own but can bring its strength to bear in full. Yet what I feel from Orange Fang now is plainly its first form, with the power still folded up inside it.”

The blue-haired man nodded and said nothing… He did not know that a few minutes before he arrived, someone had passed with no obstruction at all through the screen his Sword of Sanction had not been able to cut open.

The Phantom Beast Ruins, deep underground in the dark.

As a rule, a dark and damp place that has gone years without light and without living things is bound to breed one thing above all: the undead of the death element.

The group now blocking Ye Tianxie’s way, for instance.

Dark Undead: Level 25. HP 1,500. Floating undead-type creatures bred in an environment of extreme darkness; they can survive only in the dark.

Talent — Undead Body: immune to death-attribute attacks. Their drifting bodies have a 10% chance of being immune to physical attacks.

Skill — Breath of Darkness: sends out a ball of dark mist holding the power of death, to attack an enemy.

Weakness: fears light and life-attribute attacks.

Come to think of it, since entering the World of Fate, the monsters Ye Tianxie had dealt with most were undead creatures. The Skeleton Cavern, the Heaven Soul Graveyard, the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins… and now the Phantom Beast Ruins. Ordinary players generally never got the chance to enter an undead environment at all, and Ye Tianxie had done it again and again.

The Dark Undead were not like the ones he had met before. They had no real bodies, only a hazy ball of black mist, and in this pitch-dark place they blended perfectly into the darkness around them. If Ye Tianxie had not had the Eye of the Evil Dragon, there would have been no chance of spotting them at all.

One, two… as far as the eye could see, only two Dark Undead drifted about the open space in front of him. This was another place resembling an abandoned hall, which Ye Tianxie had reached after a long dark passage. By all accounts the Phantom Beast race had been extinct a very long time, and with that much time and an absolutely dark environment, it would have been normal for a great many undead creatures to have bred here, and strong ones. Yet after walking so far he had met only these two simple things.

And the most effective thing against undead creatures was, naturally, Yaoyao’s healing. But at its present ability Yaoyao fell just short of killing these two strange undead outright. Ye Tianxie called Xiaobei out as well and said, “Xiaobei, go… one each!”

The words were barely out before Xiaobei had raced across, and Ye Tianxie ran at the other one at the same time… but for sheer speed, how was Ye Tianxie ever to be Xiaobei’s match? He was left a long way behind at once. Xiaobei bounced left and right, dodging with easy agility the Breath of Darkness the Dark Undead spat out, then sprang onto it, and its two white, razor-sharp cat’s claws went slash, slash, slash…

−730, −722, −731, −729.

Killed outright, without question.

And on the other side, Ye Tianxie, half a beat behind, brought a Dragon Rend Slash down…

−1613!

Killed outright in one blow, the same as the other.

The two balls of Dark Undead had their life emptied out — but unexpectedly, they did not disperse with it. They stayed two hazy clouds. Ye Tianxie frowned, and was about to ignore them and go on… when those two clouds of grey smoke, which ought by rights to have dispersed, suddenly began to gather into two different shapes. One took the shape of a dark-colored tiger; the other, the outline of something like a rhinoceros, a strange beast with a single sharp horn on its head.

Phantom Beast Undead — Sabertooth Tiger: Level 25 one-star elite. HP 3,200. The undead bred from a sabertooth tiger’s death by way of the breath of death. Talent: Undead Body. Skills: Fang Rend, Tiger Pounce. Weakness: fears light and life.

Phantom Beast Undead — Unicorn: Level 25 one-star elite. HP 3,180. The undead bred from a unicorn’s death by way of the breath of death. Talent: Undead Body. Skills: Horn Bore, Savage Charge. Weakness: fears light and life.

The two undead creatures, dropped on him as if out of the sky, had barely taken shape before they threw themselves at Ye Tianxie. He turned back quickly and put the undead sabertooth tiger down with two Dragon Rend Slashes, while on the other side the unicorn had not even got its first strike out before Xiaobei’s powerful Meow-Meow Fist knocked it down in the blink of an eye.

What was going on? Looking at the two undead creatures lying on the ground, unable to move now, Ye Tianxie frowned, not understanding. Dead and risen again? No — not only were the shapes completely different, the strength had doubled as well. They had gone from ordinary monsters to one-star elites.

He put it aside and began looking over the hall… The place was strangely empty. Apart from himself, Yaoyao and Xiaobei, and the two corpses lying on the ground, there was no other living or dead thing to be found. The floor was very even and the walls were smooth as well… and apart from the passage he had come in by, there was nothing anywhere around — no door, nothing of the kind — by which to get out.

Ye Tianxie walked the place round several times and still found no way out at all… and he had come the whole way from that first hall with its four statues without meeting a single branching path, so there ought not to be any other passage… Why was this a dead end!?

And just then, a ball of black smoke rose in that pitch-black world… and inside the black smoke, the corpses of the undead sabertooth tiger and the undead unicorn stood slowly up off the ground. At the same time their bodies were shaking, twisting, and in that violent twisting they were growing larger by degrees… and changing shape…

(End of Chapter 236)