Chapter 827: An Unimaginable Speed and Identity

A flash of movement.

Elder Yumu was back in his original position, his bloodied right hand still pinching two eyeballs.

A faint smile touched the corner of the Redemption City Lord’s lips. He knew Yumu had a technique called the Eye Snatch — using superhuman speed to pluck an enemy’s eyeballs clean from their sockets in an instant. The remarkable thing about it was that the extracted eyes came out almost entirely undamaged — a hundred times more precise than digging them out with a blade. A master healer had once remarked that if Elder Yumu ever returned the eyeballs, it would theoretically be possible to reattach them to the blinded person’s eye sockets with no lasting effect from the removal. But that had never happened.

Because Elder Yumu had never once returned the eyeballs.

Completely expressionless, he raised the glistening orbs.

And crushed them one by one.

The crowd drew a collective breath of horror. Elder Yumu the Enforcer truly lived up to his reputation for ruthlessness.

Then the screaming started.

A prolonged, agonized wail that tore down the street.

But it wasn’t Yueyang screaming. It was one of the guards standing right beside Elder Yumu — a member of the Redemption City Lord’s personal detail who had been standing with the captain and the steward. For reasons no one could immediately explain, this man now had two empty, bleeding black holes where his eyes had been. As the realization hit him, he could no longer hold back the searing pain, and clapped both hands over his face, howling uncontrollably.

Elder Yumu saw it. His pupils dilated.

The Redemption City Lord and everyone around him went pale with expressions of absolute disbelief, as though they had witnessed something from a nightmare.

Yueyang began clapping — slow, solitary applause that cut through the screams of agony with particular cruelty, each clap like a hammer blow striking something deep in the chest.

“If you thought that crawling-turtle speed of yours was enough to gouge out my eyes,” Yueyang said, “then you were very wrong.”

He hadn’t even finished the sentence before Elder Yumu’s index and middle fingers were already at his eyelids again. This time, everyone saw it clearly — the fingers made direct contact with the young man’s eyes. Yumu’s movement was too fast to track as a whole, but the moment of impact was visible.

Pop. Pop.

Yumu was back in place, crushing the eyeballs in his hand before the enemy had any hope of reversal.

“Ow! Ow, that really hurts!” Yueyang clapped both hands over his face and cried out.

The Redemption City Lord quietly scoffed.

If the boy hadn’t been so careless, perhaps he wouldn’t have let Yumu land the Eye Snatch a second time.

The first one — some kind of damage transfer ability, presumably. The injury redirected onto someone else. But a second time? Could he dodge it again?

The City Lord scanned the area around him. None of the nearby guards appeared to have suffered eye injuries. The one covering his face and crying out was the obnoxious human boy directly in front of him. He was just about to open his mouth and deliver a suitably contemptuous comment when a guard behind him suddenly erupted in frantic screaming: “Something’s wrong — it’s my eyes — my eyes have been taken — I can’t see, I can’t see!”

Every head in the crowd swung toward the back of the City Lord’s entourage.

There, in the middle of the cluster of guards, one man was reeling with his head in his hands, his eyes reduced to the same horrifying bleeding voids.

The crowd immediately surged backward by several dozen meters, terrified of becoming the next accidental target of whatever Yueyang was doing.

Now it made sense.

That was why the boy showed no fear of Yumu’s attacks.

He could redirect the damage — and that was why someone at merely Sky-rank Level 3 had the audacity to stand there and taunt an Enforcement Elder.

“Obliterate.” Yumu’s right hand condensed a terrifying mass of energy. If released, it would reduce not only a Sky-rank Level 3 warrior to nothing — half of Redemption City might collapse with it. The crowd’s courage shattered entirely. He was going to snap —

“Wait!” The only person with the nerve to step forward and call a halt was the Minotaur, Lima.

Lima pushed to the City Lord’s side and waved his hands urgently. “It’s not damage transfer — what he’s using is pure speed. Using destructive power won’t work either, it’ll just bring the city down around us!” That got everyone’s attention, including Yumu himself, who turned to look. Lima swallowed visibly, his fingers trembling slightly as he pointed at Yueyang. “His ability isn’t injury redirection. It’s acceleration. The first guard — Lima didn’t catch it in time. But the second one, Lima saw. Before Elder Yumu’s fingers reached him, that person flew to the back of the City Lord’s retinue, grabbed a guard, dragged him forward as a substitute, and then returned the guard to his original position after Yumu finished. The speed was… truly beyond imagination.”

The Redemption City Lord went cold all over. “What?”

Lima swallowed again. “Lima isn’t wrong. Elder Yumu’s speed is famous across the entire Southern Heavenly Realm — but this person is faster.”

Elder Yumu slowly turned his head and looked at Yueyang.

For the first time, he was looking at him seriously.

In full view of everyone, this boy had slipped to his side, seized a guard, used the man to take the Eye Snatch, and then returned him to his place — and had done all of it without even Yumu’s own eyes catching the movement? What kind of speed did it take to accomplish that? Yumu found himself genuinely unable to calculate it. For the first time, he felt that this seemingly insignificant opponent was going to be difficult to handle.

The City Lord still couldn’t fully accept it. He pressed Lima: “How did you see it?”

Lima laughed bitterly. “Lima can stamp his hooves to produce a special shockwave — too high-frequency for ordinary ears to detect, like a bat’s echolocation. It spreads through the entire surrounding space, and only I can perceive the returns. Within that field, the echo-images tell me everything happening in the area. Lima can ‘see’ — but Lima has absolutely no way of stopping it. By comparison, I am a very sad little snail.”

Yumu attacked a third time.

This time, he used his maximum speed — and first hurled out a mass of strange viscous energy to bind Yueyang in place.

His right index and middle fingers drove straight at Yueyang’s eyes.

Caught in the viscous energy, the onlookers felt their bodies become like ants fallen into a shallow pond — no matter how they struggled, nothing moved. Everything slowed to a crawl, as though time itself had thickened around them.

At the core of the binding field, Yumu moved like a fish in water.

Fast as lightning.

He cut through the air toward Yueyang, two fingers aimed directly at his eyes.

And then something impossible happened.

In the instant those fingers were about to reach their target, the young man moved — and he was faster than Yumu.

Next to Yumu’s speed, even lightning seemed to freeze. The boy moved in reverse, slipping away from the two reaching fingers, gliding across to the Redemption City Lord, casually plucking a guard from the City Lord’s side, pulling back, and placing the guard directly in Yumu’s path. Yumu saw it — but his hand was already in motion and could not be stopped.

He watched, helpless, as his own fingers gouged out the guard’s eyes instead. By the time he pulled back and looked at what he had done, the injured guard had already been returned to his position ahead of Yumu’s own retreat.

The most chilling detail: because it had happened so fast, the guard himself hadn’t registered that his eyes were gone.

It wasn’t until Yumu stood there with two eyes pinched between his fingers that the guard realized he was blind — and his agonized groan broke from his throat as he crumpled to his knees.

If not for the viscous binding energy that had slowed everyone to near-stillness, none of Yueyang’s movements would have been visible at all. Not even Yumu’s attack would have been fully traceable.

But in that frozen moment, everyone saw it clearly.

Elder Yumu was fast — so fast that ordinary people beside him moved like crawling snails. But his proudest speed, measured against the young man across from him, was simply not in the same category. If Yumu was a fish darting through water, this boy was a falcon in full dive — or something faster still, closer to lightning itself. No one had ever imagined a person could move like that. Even within the binding field, with a finger already at his eyelid, he had managed to pull a guard from over ten meters away and put him there as a substitute — and return the man to his original spot in the same motion.

It was terrifying.

The impression it left wasn’t one of speed — it was something deeper, something that made the cold settle into your bones. The kind of terror that made everyone instinctively feel small, helpless, and very alone.

“Today was only the beginning.” Yumu crushed the eyeballs in his hand, left those words for Yueyang, and walked away without changing expression — vanishing in an instant.

“I’ll be waiting, you slow little green-shelled turtle!” Yueyang waved cheerfully in the direction Yumu had disappeared, as though seeing off an old friend.

The Redemption City Lord was now in a deeply awkward position.

If Yumu himself couldn’t take down this kid, the City Lord certainly wasn’t going to manage it. But he had already talked big, and three of his guards were now blind. If he didn’t do something, what kind of City Lord was he?

He cleared his throat, composed himself, and began to applaud with great enthusiasm. “Remarkable! What extraordinary speed, what magnificent footwork! This was all just a small misunderstanding between us — easily cleared up with a conversation. A bandit captain with the righteous spirit of a true hero, like Captain Lieyan, has always commanded our deepest admiration. And this young brother here — Elder Yumu himself showed his appreciation in his own way, presenting his treasured Scales of Good and Evil as a gift. I, Qian Hu, have always delighted in befriending outstanding heroes such as yourself! As for this lovely —”

The crowd along the entire street nearly keeled over from sheer disbelief.

Captain Lieyan has the righteous spirit of a true hero? You were just about to have her arrested five minutes ago!

The black scales were a gift? They were stolen! If Yumu’s speed had been any match for the boy’s, those eyeballs would have been Yueyang’s, and Yumu would never have let go so easily. The gall required to say something like that with a straight face — calling this shameless barely scratched the surface. The legendary thick-facedness of the Redemption City Lord, renowned across the Southern Heavenly Realm, had just been demonstrated live for the entire street to witness.

The City Lord had been about to pay Luohua a compliment, but she didn’t give him the opening.

She didn’t spare him so much as a sideways glance — he might as well have been invisible. She directed the Sky-rank cultivators nearby to pick up her flower pots, then turned to wave at Yueyang and Lieyan. “Let’s go. This is dreadfully boring. A Divine Temple Elder — jumping around like some kind of monkey. Utterly tedious. My dear Head Guard — why didn’t you just gouge his eyes out?”

“I was awaiting your orders,” Yueyang replied, the picture of a perfectly obedient personal guard who would absolutely not take lethal action without explicit instruction.

“Next time, blind him. I can’t stand people who overestimate themselves bouncing around in front of me.” The beautiful City Lord delivered this verdict in the most casual possible tone.

“As you wish.” Yueyang’s performance as Head Guard received top marks.

“Hand over those scales — they’re nothing special and not particularly pretty either. I’ll keep the silver feather. The black scales are yours.” Luohua took the scales for a brief look and tossed them to Yueyang, who received them with an expression of profound gratitude. “City Lord, you are the most generous master in all of the Upper Heavenly Realm.”

“Less flattery. Next time, don’t embarrass me — if anyone comes looking for trouble, just kill them immediately. I absolutely cannot stand these flea-like Divine Temple Elders. Enough — let’s go.” Luohua handed the silver feather to Lieyan, who bent to receive it with composed deference.

The entire crowd was thunderstruck by Luohua’s every offhand word.

A Central Divine Temple Elder — one of the most exalted figures in the Heavenly Realm — and she spoke of him as if he were a minor nuisance worth less than the dirt under her feet. Just who was this woman?

Could she possibly be the legendary —

The Redemption City Lord was sweating through his robes and didn’t dare wipe his face. He lowered his head as submissively as he could manage, genuinely afraid that one careless word from Luohua might see him obliterated on the spot.

As for the Minotaur Lima, who had been scheming against them not ten minutes ago — he dropped straight to his knees.

If Luohua wanted his head right now, he wouldn’t dare resist.

No wonder a young human who could outspeed Elder Yumu himself, and Captain Lieyan at the peak of Sky-rank Level 5, both walked three steps behind this woman as her attendants. No wonder she gave orders to complete strangers with the ease of someone addressing personal servants. The Sky-rank cultivators now carrying her flower pots, trailing obediently in her wake — the ones who hadn’t managed to position themselves close enough quietly cursed their own hesitation. Standing behind that woman, they now realized, would have been the opportunity of a lifetime.

Under the escort of Lieyan and Yueyang, the beautiful City Lord floated gracefully away.

The entire street bowed as one, a wave of bodies bending deep, offering the most sincere farewell they could manage. Not a single person dared hold even a trace of contempt.

The Redemption City Lord stood dripping with sweat, drenched as though hauled from a river. If Yumu hadn’t been the one to act first, he estimated that even if the beautiful woman hadn’t taken his head, he would certainly have ended up blind — like his three unfortunate guards.

“Quickly — take my finest pearls from the vault and deliver them to that distinguished great lord. And collect every scrap of information you can find — I must be the first to know her identity. If you cause any offense through neglect, I’ll take your head. And when you go — not one hair out of place, not one word of impropriety. Show absolute respect in every detail.” The Redemption City Lord felt as though ten thousand kittens were clawing at his heart — absolutely unbearable with curiosity and excitement.

He knew that due to the Tairen King’s upcoming execution, someone of extraordinary stature had arrived in his city.

But just what kind of existence was she?

Impossible to imagine.

But undoubtedly an upper-echelon figure from the Upper Heavenly Realm.

With no connection to serve as an introduction, any hope of personally calling on her was out of the question. Upper-echelon figures didn’t grant their attention to just anyone.

But if he could forge a connection with someone who treated a Central Divine Temple Elder like an insignificant insect —

He would be laughing in his dreams for years.