Everyone was rendered speechless by Yue Yang’s little maneuver.
When a hostage is being taken, everyone recoils and gives ground — but not this kid. He couldn’t wait to get himself fully involved. Could you not just stand off to one side and watch quietly like a normal bystander?
Even the black-cloaked Raven, watching Yue Yang’s performance, couldn’t help being taken aback — and then burst into laughter. “Not bad! Whatever a man does, never mind for the moment whether it’s professional — at the very least his attitude ought to be correct. I apologize to you all: I did indeed harbor a little contempt, a little playfulness, before. No longer. From this moment on, I’ve decided to be a professional star bandit with a proper attitude!”
The burly man — one hand gripping Guoguo, the other holding a blade to Yue Yang — recovered from his bewilderment. “Raven, I don’t care what these two are to you, and I don’t care what scheme you’re plotting. Release my people at once, or I really will butcher them!”
Guoguo nearly wet himself in terror.
The injustice of it! He was plainly an innocent passenger. Being seized as a human shield was wretched luck enough — how had he now been reclassified as a companion of the star bandits?
The black-cloaked Raven laughed up at the sky, then cut the laughter short: “Kill them. Killing those two isn’t enough — feel free to grab a few more from the crowd. Go on, open the floodgates of slaughter. Feeding this many people is a waste of rice anyway; I was about to drag a few batches out onto the deck and toss them overboard. If you’re willing to help me with the work, so much the better!”
“You — you think I don’t dare kill them?” The burly man trembled with rage.
“Kill whomever you like.” Raven didn’t spare him so much as a glance.
“You piece of human filth!” Not waiting for Guoguo to beg, the burly man furiously slammed his human shield down onto the floor with a tremendous crash. Guoguo shrieked over and over, certain every bone in his body had been pulverized — but after howling for a good while he suddenly noticed he felt no pain at all, and was entirely unharmed. As he blinked in astonishment and looked up, he saw that the burly man had already sprung into the air like a tiger charging down a mountain, hurling himself at the black-cloaked Raven.
“Failure,” Yue Yang said, shaking his head — an assessment no one understood.
Tall as the burly man was, he was anything but clumsy; he moved as nimbly as a leopard. In midair he adroitly dodged the interception and encirclement of several star bandits, and with a series of incredible aerial flickers squeezed a path clean through their ring, then dove straight down at the black-cloaked Raven below.
Raven appeared not to have anticipated that the burly man could break out of an aerial encirclement, and reacted a hair too slowly. Just as he was preparing to raise a hand and attack, the burly man’s fist had already slammed savagely into his face.
Thud!
The sound of the blow was dull as a drum.
That powerful fist carried a fierce fist-force with it, and the shockwave blasted every person within a dozen meters of Raven clean off their feet. Star bandits, crewmen with hands clasped over their heads, merchants who’d crowded in for a good view of the show — all of them were flung into the air, the scene dissolving into chaos. Nearly a hundred people were piled atop one another like a human pyramid; others went cartwheeling off into the distance, crashing down into the crowd and touching off waves of disorder. The shockwave became a raging gale that spread outward, halting entirely the star bandits rushing in from afar to help; those nearer couldn’t even open their eyes…
And yet the burly man, who had thought to blast his opponent apart with a single punch, discovered to his shock, still hanging in midair—
That this black-clad Raven had blocked his mountain-shaking, stone-splitting iron fist with his bare face.
Raven had taken the punch full in the face and seemed not to feel it in the slightest; there was even a strange little smile at the corner of his lips. With one hand he pressed lightly down on the hat that the shockwave had nearly blown away. With the other, he slowly raised his arm, reached over the burly man’s arm, and returned the compliment with a savage punch square to the face.
Bam!
The burly man was flung away like a man struck by a cannonball. He smashed with a thunderous crash into the vaulted ceiling of the Gladiators’ Plaza, hundreds of meters up — and that colossal impact refracted and rebounded him downward, so that he plummeted to the floor like a meteor.
Momentarily senseless, the burly man crashed down head-first and feet-up, heavily, right in front of the black-cloaked Raven.
The entire Gladiators’ Plaza shuddered with the impact.
Raven raised both hands high and danced lightly, for all the world like a conductor leading an orchestra through some exquisite movement — and beneath his feet lay the unconscious burly man, a challenger who had given everything and met with utter defeat.
As the victor, Raven was in no hurry. He waited quietly. He waited for the burly man to wake.
“Agh…” After who knows how long, a groan of pain escaped the burly man’s lips. His eyes hadn’t opened yet, but the return of consciousness plunged him at once into agony, and his whole face twisted with the stabbing pain of it. Sprawled on the floor, the burly man shook his great head hard, straining to clear it, straining to reclaim control of his body so that he might stand at once. But his wish came to nothing: struggle as he might, his strengthless arms could not support that heavy, blood-drenched body.
“Mad Bull Wuba — if I couldn’t even beat you, how would I, Raven, ever dare come here to seize a sky-hanging mothership? Consider: this ship carries two powerhouses of divine-general rank alone. If I couldn’t even take down a mere divine-attendant-rank guard captain like you, wouldn’t coming here be nothing but suicide?”
Raven shook his head, waved a hand, and produced a smile of the utmost sincerity. “Perhaps you’re still unwilling to accept it, so let me tell you the plain truth. Apart from the ship’s two strongest divine generals — the Gannet‘s First Captain, Marshal Griffin, and the border army’s First Commander on rotation, the Great General Thunder Eagle — there is not a single man aboard who is my match. That includes those men you all think so highly of: Thunder Beast, Blood Leopard, and Ulna.”
Shocked and disbelieving, the burly man forced words out through clenched teeth: “Impossible. I don’t believe it for a moment!”
Raven smiled, and his smile was that of a man with the whole plan already laid out in his chest. “What I say is fact.”
The burly man, called Mad Bull Wuba, roared: “You’re spouting nonsense to deceive the crowd! Raven, other men may not know your strength, but do you imagine I don’t? You’re the same as me — divine-attendant-rank strength, and beneath me at that! I hunted you and fought you for the better part of ten years; don’t I know exactly what you weigh? You must have used some contemptible method again — ambushed me by treachery — and fabricated this strength of yours!”
Raven did not deny it.
He flicked the cloak behind him with a debonair sweep, sending it snapping and flying. “You’re quite right — but that was before. The man I am now is no longer the man I was. Mad Bull Wuba, to defeat you now, a single finger would be enough.”
Hearing this, Mad Bull Wuba’s face suddenly changed color, and he asked in a trembling voice: “You — you obtained the forbidden power? Heavens. You’re a dead man. You’re a dead man!”
Raven roared with laughter. “That’s right. Used improperly, the forbidden power does indeed mean certain death. But I have already learned how to use it rationally, and I won’t be subject to the god’s curse. Besides — as you well know, with a certain something on one’s person to protect one, it doesn’t matter in the least how the forbidden power is used!”
To most people this was so much gibberish.
But Yue Yang, possessed of the Heaven’s Eye of Wisdom, noticed something: inside Raven’s black clothing, at the spot where the cloak fastened at his neck, hung a pendant of deep purple.
In form it was like stone yet not stone, like metal yet not metal — a wholly new thing Yue Yang had never seen before. On the surface it was utterly ordinary; anyone who didn’t know better would take it for a decoration on the cloak’s fastening. But in Yue Yang’s eyes, that shard-like pendant held an immense divine power stored within it — a divine power that was comparatively serene, without aggression, exerting a ceaseless, formless, soundless benign reinforcement upon a living body.
It was precisely because of this little thing that Raven could use the “forbidden power” Mad Bull Wuba spoke of without the slightest scruple.
And in Yue Yang’s observation, Raven was extremely clever: he had not placed the forbidden power inside his own body at all. Instead, by some unknown method, he had affixed it to his black clothing and his cloak. If Raven were to strip off the black clothes and the cloak, his combat strength would surely be cut a hundredfold at once — but as things stood, he was effectively wearing the finest armor and wielding the finest weapon… And it was that shard-like pendant, capable of serenely suppressing the forbidden power in the clothes and cloak and rendering it usable, that stirred Yue Yang’s curiosity most of all.
What on earth was that fragment of a pendant?
An ancient relic!
Almost without thinking, the phrase flashed through Yue Yang’s mind.
Only such an explanation could satisfy him. Otherwise, even here in Earth Valley’s Mountain Beyond the Mountain, there was no way a divine power so vast and so serene could be stored inside a little shard of a pendant.
And if that pendant truly was an ancient relic, then judging by the fragment, the relic’s main body must be very large. At the very least, it would not be some small piece.
Why would Raven — a star bandit — have an ancient relic? What’s more, Raven was not the foremost figure among the star bandits; he was merely the number-two man in one particular band. If even he had a fragment of the ancient relic, then his boss Winged Tiger, and that other man, Wind Hawk — and every chieftain-rank star bandit boss — surely had one as well!
Who, exactly, had been secretly handing these star bandits fragments of an ancient relic?
Who would bankroll a pack of thieves from behind the scenes?
And to what end?
Judging by Raven’s exchange with Mad Bull, he could not have obtained his fragment very long ago — otherwise there’d be no reason for Mad Bull not to know of the change in him. And the fact that the star bandits are only now invading and plundering a sky-hanging mothership likewise proves that the star bandit chieftains obtained their relic fragments and forbidden power quite recently… Besides these star bandits, who else possessed an ancient relic?
Countless questions surged up in Yue Yang’s mind, and for the moment there was no untangling them.
Still, amid his confusion, Yue Yang felt a certain thankfulness.
Fortunate indeed that he’d run into the star bandits right at the outset and learned the whereabouts of this ancient relic — otherwise he’d have had no idea where to even begin looking! Now it was perfect: the star bandits had delivered themselves to his door, and if he simply followed the vine to find the melon, the truth would come out in the end.
As for now — there was no need to act just yet. He’d wait quietly and see how things developed.
Perhaps, in the end, there’d be even more surprises still to come!
(End of Chapter 1141)
Translator’s Notes
A note on the name: From this chapter forward, the protagonist’s name 岳阳 is rendered Yue Yang (two words) rather than “Yue Yang.” This is at the request of readers, and it brings him in line with the rest of his family — Yue Yu, Yue Bing, Yue Shuang — making the shared surname 岳 (Yue) visible on the page. Earlier chapters retain the old spelling.