The experience an Immortal Spirit Beast handed out was enormous — enough to carry Ye Tianxie straight from Level 15 to Level 16 in one leap. And this fresh jump on the Level Ranking sent a wave of disbelief rippling through every player in the Huaxia region. The day before yesterday, Ye Tianxie had been Level 14. Yesterday, to the utter disbelief of countless players, he’d cleared Level 15. And today… barely a single day later, he’d rocketed all the way up to Level 16!
Shock. That was all they had left — pure, unfiltered shock. A leveling pace like this had blown so far past anything they could make sense of that “exaggerated” didn’t begin to cover it. Sitting at second place on the Level Ranking was still “Tian Moxie,” steady at Level 14. In the days before this, Ye Tianxie had only put in a few scattered hours of grinding here and there — and the near two full days spent racing to Guping Town had left him no time to level at all, which was the only reason the gap behind him hadn’t widened further. Two straight days of double level-ups, and in that short a span, he’d already pulled a full two-level lead over second place.
As for little Yaoyao, the Snow Fox, she’d happily rocketed straight up to Level 12. As a pet, after all, she ate up more experience than Ye Tianxie did himself, and leveling came that much easier for her.
The glow of leveling up lit over Su Feifei, Zuo Pojun, and Murong Qiushui’s heads at the same moment, bumping each of them up a full level. Since almost all of the damage dealt to the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion had come from Ye Tianxie, he alone claimed 50% of the total experience, while the other three split the remaining half evenly between them. Watching their experience bars fill with a satisfying whoosh, then stretch out again in a long fresh bar on the new level — that was the first time any of them realized just how easy leveling could actually be.
Ye Tianxie had done it. Right in front of them, under their wide, disbelieving eyes — eyes that kept shifting between shock and outright terror — he had pulled off something that should have been flatly impossible: alone, at Level 15, he had killed a Level 15 Immortal Spirit Beast that even a thousand players working together could never have brought down.
The spinning hurricane dispersed, revealing Ye Tianxie’s silhouette still wrapped entirely in that crimson glow — light so blinding now that they could barely stand to look straight at him. From the moment he’d charged the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion to the moment he struck it down for good… the whole thing had taken less than twenty seconds!!
That stunning, dazzling sequence of moments would carve itself deep into their memories, keeping them wrapped up in this exact rush of adrenaline for a long time to come. Because, once again, they had just watched an impossible legend unfold with their own eyes.
“Second Brother, you did it…” Zuo Pojun stood with both fists clenched, a tangled mess of blankness, excitement, shock, disbelief all fighting across his face at once, his emotions surging so hard he could barely keep control of his own expression.
“That crimson light stained the storm of despair red, and painted a legend that had no business existing… Oh! I so badly wish someone had recorded all of that just now, so it could spread to every corner of the world — imagine the storm of excitement that would kick up. Oh, I really do regret forgetting to film it, because by that point I’d completely forgotten everything else existed.” Murong Qiushui sighed with genuine regret, his hands absently running over the Steel-grade bow in his grip.
“Xietian, that was amazing, so amazing…” Su Feifei had kept a hand pressed to her lips the entire time, her eyes locked onto Ye Tianxie’s body from the moment he charged the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion all the way through to the moment it collapsed under that crimson hurricane, without a single blink. Even as someone who knew nothing about the game, she still understood exactly what those staggering damage numbers Ye Tianxie had just put up meant… numbers that should have been utterly impossible, utterly unreachable, for a player at this early stage. Astronomical numbers!
And under the weight of those astronomical numbers, he had pulled off an impossible miracle!
Excitement, eagerness, pride, and something bordering on feverish, boiling admiration — she kept realizing, more and more, just what an extraordinary man this was. Everything about him, in this short stretch of time she’d spent by his side, had carved itself into her heart, deeper and deeper… Even if she never saw him again after this moment, she knew she would never be able to forget him for the rest of her life.
Ye Tianxie was smiling. The moment Dragon Tornado Sevenfold Rend landed, the violent, boiling fury that had built up inside him under the stacked effects of the Blood Sacrifice of Fate and Frenzied Battle Intent finally settled. He pulled out a potion and drank it down, his HP climbing back to 405 — and at the same moment, the Blood Feather set into the Hour of Eternal Fate stopped its flickering, and the crimson light it had cast disappeared without a trace.
Holding the Hour of Eternal Fate — the weapon that had stayed at his side from the very first day she left him, that accompanied him every single day in the World of Fate — Ye Tianxie lifted it, gazing at it in silence… He knew perfectly well that it wasn’t him who’d pulled off the miracle of killing the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion. It was this weapon — the Hour of Eternal Fate. Today, guided by Ye Tianxie’s calculation and will, the Hour of Eternal Fate had finally, for the first time, bared just a hint of its true, terrifying fangs — through the Blood Sacrifice of Fate, granting him a burst of power beyond all reason.
With only one of its seven Fate Cores restored, the Hour of Eternal Fate was already this terrifying. If all seven Fate Cores were ever returned to it, just how monstrous could the weapon’s true, complete form become? He murmured the question quietly to himself, and the hunger to find the remaining Fate Cores swelled inside him again, quietly, insistently.
Finding the Fate Cores — for her, and for his own hunger for power… Since the age of four, he had craved strength with a kind of desperation. In this world, that hadn’t changed one bit.
“Oh my god, oh my god, holy shit! Second Brother, you did it! You solo-killed an Immortal Beast, all by yourself!!” Zuo Pojun came trotting over, shouting his lungs out from a good distance away, his face doing something wildly exaggerated. Even now, he still hadn’t fully snapped out of his shock — there was still a lingering sense of unreality clinging to him, as if he couldn’t quite trust what he’d just watched.
“If anyone else had pulled this off, I’d only be able to call it a miracle — but coming from Second Brother… oh, why does it feel so completely natural to me?” Murong Qiushui said mildly, trailing after Zuo Pojun without any particular hurry.
Zuo Pojun shot him a look. “Fourth Brother, your gift for buttering people up without them even noticing puts mine to shame.”
“Thank you for the kind words, Third Brother.” Murong Qiushui arched a delicate brow and shot Zuo Pojun a flirtatious, positively smoldering look, dripping with charm for just a moment. Zuo Pojun felt a chill crawl up his spine and had to fight down the urge to plant a kick square into him and send him flying.
“Tianxie, are you all right?” Su Feifei stepped closer, watching him with a hazy, unfocused look in her eyes. The moment his body had been wrapped in that crimson light, that violent, storm-like fury rolling off him had genuinely terrified her.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” In a thoroughly good mood, Ye Tianxie gave a small smile and turned his gaze to the corpse of the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion. Before all this, even he hadn’t imagined he could actually kill an Immortal Spirit Beast — he hadn’t even imagined he’d ever run into one at all. Level 15 or not, if word of this got out, it would already be more than enough to shake the entire world.
Su Feifei cast her Novice Heal on him, working to bring his HP back up. But because his HP pool was so absurdly large, she found — to her considerable frustration — that a single cast of the spell only filled back the tiniest sliver of his health bar. (Novice Heal’s healing output equals the caster’s own Spirit stat ×2 — pathetic next to the busted ×3 magic-attack multiplier Yaoyao got, weaker by who-knows-how-many times over.)
Gold coins lay scattered across the ground around the little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion’s corpse — over a hundred of them. It was the first time Ye Tianxie had ever learned that monsters could be carrying a small fortune on them. But compared to the gold, it was the handful of equipment pieces scattered among the coins that really caught the eye… at the very least, Zuo Pojun’s eyeballs looked ready to pop clean out of his head, his expression barely holding back the urge to lunge forward and start scooping everything up himself.
“Second Brother, that — that —” Zuo Pojun swallowed hard, pointing at the long sword lying on the ground, releasing a light woven from white and violet. “That color… and that feeling — don’t tell me that’s… an Immortal Spirit-grade artifact.”
Just saying the words “Immortal Spirit-grade artifact” out loud, he could hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.
For players at this stage of the world, those four words carried a weight and a shock value that was almost too much to process.
The little Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion had dropped four pieces of equipment in total. Three of them glowed with a golden light. But the long sword alone gave off something else entirely — a strange light of white shot through with violet, standing proudly apart from the golden glow surrounding it, the first thing anyone’s eye would land on, easily eclipsing the gold pieces around it.
Setting everything else aside, they all knew perfectly well that three Gold-grade pieces of equipment alone already represented an enormous fortune.
Ye Tianxie stepped forward and picked up the long sword. The instant it touched his hand, a faint crackle of electricity ran up his arm.
Violet Reaper Sword (Two-Handed Sword): Immortal Spirit-grade artifact. Requirement: Level 15 Warrior-class. Unidentified — cannot be used.
“Hm. An Immortal Spirit-grade artifact, and usable as early as Level 15.” Ye Tianxie turned the sword over a few times, studying it, his voice perfectly calm.
“Wha— seriously… that’s it! Second Brother, if this sword ever hits the open market—”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Ye Tianxie gave his wrist a flick, tucking the Violet Reaper Sword back into his inventory, an expression of genuine regret on his face. “It’s a two-handed sword. You can’t use it.”
Zuo Pojun burst into silent tears.
“Qiushui, looks like you’re the lucky one here.” Ye Tianxie stepped forward and gathered up the remaining three golden pieces. One of them turned out to be a golden bow… with a name about as straightforward as it gets — simply the Golden Bow.
Golden Bow: Gold-grade artifact. Requirement: Level 15 Archer-class, Strength 20+. Unidentified — cannot be used.
An archer’s primary attribute was Agility — not only did it govern their accuracy and evasion, it also played a heavy role in their attack power. But Strength mattered just as much for an archer, because without enough Strength, they couldn’t even draw the increasingly powerful bows they picked up along the way. Archers typically split their attribute points four-to-one, Agility to Strength, sometimes sparing a few points for Constitution as well.
“Second Brother, you really are… the most beautiful sun in my fate.” Murong Qiushui said, practically dripping with tenderness.
A chill ran through Ye Tianxie. “I’ll hold onto it for now. You can have it once it’s identified.”
(End of Chapter 154)