The mysterious man had taken half a day of Duoduo’s punches without once going down. Then the Qilin girl headbutted him flat, and he lay there holding his back, unable to get up for a long time.
That headbutt of hers was seriously insane.
Yue Yang, for his part, watched with his mouth hanging open.
A pity the girl was so lazy and wouldn’t join the fight. Otherwise the old ghost would have gotten a good deal more than he bargained for.
Duoduo used the opening to recover the divine power she had badly overdrawn. Without Qilin Girl Bingyin’s headbutt just now, she would probably have lost. The two of them were close to level in realm, but the old man was an old monster who had lived tens of thousands of years, and the divine rank and divine power he had condensed were beyond imagining. Duoduo had risen to the divine tier only recently, and the fight was getting harder for her by the minute. She had already been pushed onto the back foot, and without help it would be very hard to turn the battle around.
“So it was you. You’re the one who’s been hiding that little immortal beast…” The mysterious man straightened his back again. His eyes had changed. They were full of killing intent, and buried very deep under that killing intent was a greed that said: I wore out iron shoes looking for this and never found it, and here it is handed to me for nothing.
In his god form, he waved a hand and turned a page of the Sacred Codex.
He layered a ghost-eye beast onto himself.
A ghost-eye beast was a particular sort of thing.
It had no combat power at all, but it had one special skill worth a fortune: Ghost Eye Weeps Blood.
The ghost-eye beast, now an ornamental beast riding on his shoulder armor, shed two lines of bloody tears, and a wail of terrible grief rang out inside Yue Yang’s chest. A moment later Yue Yang found that his clothes had been stained at some point with the beast’s bloody tears, and were dripping with them. He looked down at the ground under his feet and found it soaked, as though some coward had wet himself on the spot. Yue Yang jumped clear in a hurry. In midair nothing strange happened at all, but the moment his feet touched the ground it soaked through in a wide patch, as though a few hundred crybabies had clung to his legs and sobbed.
The Ghost Eye Weeps Blood skill was a tracking ability.
Wherever the enemy ran, so long as the ghost-eye beast was still weeping, the enemy got no peace. His whole body stayed stained with the bloody tears, and the beast’s master always knew where he was. Nobody could hide his trail.
That skill was why a ghost-eye beast was worth a hundred times what it looked worth, and why so many of the very strong contracted one.
To rattle an enemy’s mind.
To lock onto an enemy’s trail.
Yue Yang lit the Nirvana Flame across his whole body, and the bloody tears vanished on the instant.
But the moment the Nirvana Flame went out, the disgusting tears were back. He tried the White Frost Bloom sword, which purifies everything, and that didn’t work either.
An ordinary ghost-eye beast couldn’t have touched Yue Yang at all, not even a Sky-rank one. But with the mysterious man’s will guiding it and his divine power sheltering it, the skill simply kept running and there was no shaking it off. It was not something Yue Yang could clear away with force. The mysterious man had to die, or the ghost-eye beast’s skill would go on forever.
In a word, the deciding factor was the old man himself. The ghost-eye beast was only the medium that supplied the skill.
“Cry, cry, cry — cry your sister! You’re driving me out of my mind!” Yue Yang, for his part, had a head three times its normal size from that wailing. It was working on his mind, which meant Duoduo, linked to him by telepathy, was having a very bad time of it too.
“Hm.” That was exactly the effect the mysterious man wanted.
He had worked out that the plant-type war beast in front of him was a life-guardian war beast that could never truly die. Never mind whether she could be killed at all; even killing her with everything he had would accomplish nothing. The best line of attack was to finish that loathsome Yue Titan. No — better to catch him first and seal him, and then take his time making him give up the whereabouts of the divine artifacts and the immortal beast.
Pin down this extremely slippery boy, and that would be that.
No road up to heaven for him.
No door down into the earth.
Then the fight could be declared over.
He hadn’t wanted to use the ghost-eye beast. A war beast that wept without stopping damaged the holy, magnificent, radiant image he had of himself. But to win quickly and force the immortal beast’s location out into the open, he had to reach the goal at any cost, before the delay could breed more trouble.
Yue Yang, for his part, was thoroughly rattled by the beast’s crying, and to get out of the miserable business of standing in piss-mud as fast as possible, he forgot everything else and charged the mysterious man.
Xiao Wenli stayed tight at his side, and her soul-harvesting twin blades got there a step ahead of him and came down on the enemy.
The main weight of the fight, of course, was still on Duoduo the Flower Goddess.
The melee went on.
Ji Wuri, who had pretended to be crushed by the divine pressure and had sunk himself deep below the ground, curved one corner of his mouth into an unreadable smile.
He summoned a Burrowing Sand Worm King and fused man and worm into one body — faster than soaring through the sky, defter than swimming through the sea — splitting the earth as it went, and in the blink of an eye he was fifty kilometers out. While Yue Yang and the mysterious man traded blows, Ji Wuri went deeper and further, until he was five hundred kilometers away and well beyond the range of the mysterious man’s divine mind, or Yue Yang’s.
Only when he was certain it was safe did Ji Wuri drill up out of the soil.
The body that had been run through front to back had long since healed.
He opened his Sacred Codex, drew a divine soldier out of it, tore space open by force, and together with Liuguang and Jingbu, his two great war beasts, went straight into the void and teleported toward a destination nobody knew.
Ji Wuri had gotten clear of the Divine War’s killing ground, the first lucky man to escape it.
Not in Ji Wuri’s class, but lucky enough to get out as well, was Western Divine Sovereign Hei Zhou, who had already lost the great bulk of his divine power.
Hei Zhou was at this moment running for it in a thoroughly undignified state. He had fooled everyone using several of the divine-power shock waves that swept the field — pretending each time to be knocked flying because he couldn’t take the impact, and each time landing a little further out toward the edge.
Only when he had been blown tens of kilometers out and felt safe enough did he spring to his feet.
Then he ran for the Western Divine Nation with everything he had.
Whatever the Divine War finally came to, Hei Zhou had decided to disappear from the world for good.
Old and crafty as he was, he was also laying down a false trail toward the Western Divine Nation, to mislead God-Slayer, Zhaoxi and Shuanghan if any of them were left at the end. Whichever of them survived would certainly hunt him, and Hei Zhou judged that simply going into hiding was not safe enough. He had to build a false picture to lead his enemies wrong before his life was secure.
He was a ruthless warlord of his generation, and though his plan had failed, he still had every scheme in him.
His nerve and his will were beyond ordinary men as well.
At a moment this tense, with the risk of being spotted or run down, nobody else could have faked an escape route the whole way.
God-Slayer, Zhaoxi and Shuanghan had no attention to spare for Hei Zhou. It took the three of them a great deal of effort to dig Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun — weak and close to death — out of the earth he was buried under…
“What are you three still dawdling around here for? Get lost! This isn’t a gathering of boyfriends. Don’t tell me you’re going to stand there hugging each other and bawling. Move it, I can’t hold this much longer!” Yue Yang took one look and lost his temper. If Qingyun wasn’t going to die, they could come back and dig him up later. Look at what was happening — every man who got out was one man out. Chrysanthemum friendship and brotherly loyalty at a time like this? All he had was heartburn, all right?
“Going or staying, it doesn’t matter anymore. We can’t be bothered to move.” Shuanghan shook his head. If they couldn’t kill the mysterious man, Mountain Beyond the Mountain was finished, and then going or staying made no difference. They were dead either way, and being killed was only a question of when.
That being so, they might as well stay.
And they could see how the Divine War came out.
At least this way they would go with their brothers at the end, walk the road with some grace, and not have wasted a life. Running from the battle line got you nothing but the nickname “Little Fleeing Turtle.”
Yue Yang was angry enough to smoke from every opening in his head. He had never met idiots this pigheaded, and there was more than one of them, and no amount of complaining was going to cover it… And right then, with the transmigrator nearly at the end of what he could hold, with a punch from the mysterious man sending him flying and his life hanging by a thread, a shaft of divine light beat both Duoduo and Xiao Wenli to the rescue. It became a chi-dragon soaring across the sky, wound around Yue Yang’s body and carried him straight up into the heavens, riding cloud and mist, driving lightning and thunder. It climbed to the very top of the sky, gave one dragon’s cry and turned back down. Yue Yang, for his part, sat dizzily on the dragon’s spine, spun through the nine heavens without quite noticing it, and slowly came back to himself. He found that loathsome mysterious man right in front of him, sprang up at once, condensed the Wheel of Apocalypse in both hands like a pearl at a dragon’s head, brilliant and blazing, and brought it straight down.
The mysterious man put out a hand.
A matchless will stopped Yue Yang dead in empty air, and with a slight shift of his body he slipped past the edge of the Wheel of Apocalypse.
What he had not expected was that the hornless strange dragon — which he had taken for a mount with no fighting power at all — suddenly changed into a woman warrior clothed in purple lightning and belted with thunderbolts, carrying a supreme divine power that could destroy heaven and earth. Her long legs came together like a pair of dragon shears and took the god-form wing off the mysterious man’s left side.
The divine wing came apart into feathers flying across the whole sky.
He put a hand to his shoulder and found that not only was the divine wing broken off, the ghost-eye beast he had been using to lock onto Yue Titan had been killed outright in the same instant.
The armor on his shoulder was shattered, split open in a bloody wound with the flesh curled back.
Deep enough to show bone.
The mysterious man realized with a shock that, apart from that little immortal beast a moment ago, who could not be measured by ordinary standards, this was the first time in his life anyone had opened a wound this serious in him with a single move.
“How do you have the Dragon God Supreme’s divine power?” The mysterious man looked hard at the woman warrior again and very nearly doubted his own eyes.
“Such a pity…” The one who had come down onto the battlefield in dragon form to rescue Yue Yang, and wounded the mysterious man with a single move, was of course Chi-Dragon Woman Jiangying, who had been cultivating inside the Sacred Grimoire all this time. She carried the Dragon God Supreme’s divine power as an inheritance, and once she acted the force of it had no limit. She had not received much of that power, but an inheritance from the Dragon God Supreme was still an inheritance from the Dragon God Supreme — consider that even Molong, who swept the whole Heavenly Realm and was about as formidable as they came, was reduced to a pitiful, pants-wetting wretch by that power. Jiangying’s own cultivation was far below Duoduo’s. She had risen to the divine realm as well, but she had set foot in it only recently, and her own divine power was not enough to stand against the mysterious man. The dragon god’s power she had fused with, though, was an absolute monster of a weapon. If only her will had been able to overpower his, that one move would have been enough to put him on the ground badly wounded.
“Girl, you are unbelievable — mwah!” Yue Yang, for his part, threw his arms around the Chi-Dragon Woman and hollered with excitement.
There was no way not to be excited.
She had gone into the Sacred Grimoire to cultivate for a while, and what she had just done was completely beyond anything Yue Yang had expected. It was a wonderful shock. If someone had told him beforehand that Jiangying could wound the mysterious man, Yue Yang, her own master, wouldn’t have believed it — he’d have had doubts about her wounding Ji Wuri. To have her come out this strong all at once made him want to kiss her half a dozen times.
Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and God-Slayer, meanwhile, came very close to hugging each other and weeping.
Just how many life-guardian war beasts did this kid have? And the most outrageous part was that every one of them was a beauty. There was no justice in the world!
The mysterious man saw Duoduo, Xiao Wenli and Chi-Dragon Woman Jiangying closing a triangle around him, and saw that that most loathsome Yue Titan — freed now from the Ghost Eye Weeps Blood lock — looked to be gathering that nameless sword-qi again. His face went cold. “You want to surround me and kill me? Don’t make me laugh. However hard you try, it’s nothing but useless struggling. You’re still ants. Slightly larger ants than usual, granted. But ants are ants.”
He turned a page of the Sacred Codex, and a magnificent divine bell — pouring out radiance, inscribed all over with strange and profound ancient runes — appeared hanging in the air and settled in the middle of the field.
The bell did not ring.
And still a divine sound that had existed since the beginning of time resonated in the bottom of every heart. Nobody could resist it, and in an instant it had the whole field cowed.
This time it was Yue Yang’s turn to have tears running down his face. Your sister — is there no justice in this world? Is there no law? It’s bad enough that this old ghost has the Three Divine Mirror. How does he also have the Five Divine Bell, one of the six divine artifacts? The player can’t use cheats and the boss can? Isn’t that screwing with people? I want to file a complaint!
(End of Chapter 1203)