Desolate ground. Freezing air. A stench fit to turn the stomach.

The moment the air of the place so much as touched him, Ye Tianxie very nearly turned and fled outright.

When his vision cleared and he saw, exactly as he had expected, a dense black mass of people, the admiration that surged up in him rolled on like a flood that would not stop. An environment like this, a stench like this… and these people have stood guard here a solid day just to fight over getting into the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins!!

Even as Ye Tianxie was looking at them, his own arrival had caught the notice of everyone around. Those who had merely glanced at him in passing took in his gear and changed color as one; a stir spread rapidly outward from where Ye Tianxie stood, and more and more eyes fixed on him.

Ye Tianxie saw at once the enormous split in the valley to the north. On the rock beside the fissure, four large characters were written in dark red: Ten Thousand Bone Ruins. But a gray magic array blocked the valley mouth, stopping everyone there where they stood. A dense press of people had crammed themselves bodily up against that array, waiting for the instant it vanished so they could be first through… Today, one last chance to enter remained. And so long as a single member of a party got in, the whole party could follow in after. Only one party could enter at all.

Which meant that whichever party’s player got in first would be the last group to enter the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins quest map today. Small wonder they were this frantic… Once the attributes of the “Mercenary King’s Badge of Glory,” which Xietian had obtained by completing the Mercenary System quest the day before, were made public, their enthusiasm had begun burning like mad under that terrible accelerant, desire.

Just as Master Whoremonger had said, more than three hundred parties were still waiting at the entrance to the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins, unwilling to leave. Apart from those crushed up against the mouth of it fighting over the right to enter, each party stood clustered on its own small patch of ground. Ye Tianxie had made no attempt to disguise his gear, and after yesterday’s video there were vanishingly few people left in the world who did not know him on sight. In moments, more and more eyes converged on him, and what those eyes carried was not all the same. Surprise. Alarm. Interest. Wariness. Hostility…

And it was his arrival, too, that turned the crowd keeping watch here from a brief clamor into an eerie calm.

He paid no attention to any of the looks; the sensation of being stared at from every direction was something he had grown used to a very long time ago. He shot one glance at the ground ahead of him, and then, as pupils contracted all around him, summoned the Hour of Fate — and simply walked, dragging the Hour of Fate along behind him, toward the magic array that sealed the entrance to the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins.

Perhaps it was Xietian himself, or perhaps the sheer menace of that terrible shape in his hand; either way, everywhere Ye Tianxie went the players he came near would take several steps back on reflex to keep their distance from him.

“You’re doing this quest?”

A man had planted himself in Ye Tianxie’s path — a man with the eyes of an eagle. Cloud-Piercing Sword. He watched Ye Tianxie with his brows drawn together and put the question in one short sentence.

Ye Tianxie’s arrival had set nearly everyone here on edge, because yesterday he had completed the Mercenary System quest “Relic of the Mercenary King” by himself. With strength like that, if he went into the Ten Thousand Bone Ruins there was every chance he would complete this Alliance-Guild System quest as well… and then the rewards, the Renown and the honor would have nothing to do with any of them.

That was something a great many of them, teeth clenched, would not permit. Imagine it: if the Battle Region Honor Ranking, visible to the entire world, showed such-and-such a Huaxia squad completing such-and-such a System Quest, no advertising on earth would serve a guild alliance better… How could they be willing to let a chance like that slip away so easily?

“Yes.” Ye Tianxie stopped and answered him with a single word, sizing the young man up with some interest as he did… eighteen or nineteen, but with a resolute face and a fierceness in the eyes that had no business belonging to a man that age. Cloud-Piercing Sword held his gaze for three seconds, then turned away without a word and said, low, “We’re going!”

That said, he gave Ye Tianxie one last look like the edge of a blade, took out a Town Portal Scroll ahead of the rest, and vanished from everyone’s sight. After him, the eleven who had been standing at his side all took out Town Portal Scrolls and went, without a moment’s hesitation. There was not a moment’s wavering, not a flicker of expression, and it gave away exactly how far from ordinary and how well drilled they were.

Cloud-Piercing Sword’s outright withdrawal quieted a great many people. Ye Tianxie smiled faintly and walked on toward the magic array. Ahead of him, the black press of people jammed in there, none of them willing to give ground, blocked his way. He spoke in a voice neither heavy nor light, and every person on that ground heard it.

“You can all go home. This quest — I’ll be the one to finish it!”

A perfectly flat, perfectly plain sentence. It dropped that stretch of ground and the several thousand people standing on it into dead silence, and drained the color from a great many faces.

To face this many players with that expression, that bearing, that voice, and stay cold all the way through… how many people in all Huaxia could do it? How many in all the world?

So arrogant. So utterly self-assured. Barely counting the several thousand powerful players here as worth a glance… and yet, if one absolutely had to name a single person in all Huaxia with the standing to be that insufferable, it could only be Xietian.

Ye Tianxie rarely had contact with people outside his own circle, and rarely wanted it, so giving offense did not worry him in the least. Those two short, near-commanding sentences of his had been quite enough to offend every single person present. Only, after a brief silence, no one left, and no one spoke either.

Had Ye Tianxie not said those two sentences, leaving outright as Cloud-Piercing Sword had would have been nothing at all — it would even have counted, unspoken, as doing Ye Tianxie a small favor. But now that the words were out, any party that left would plainly be showing wariness of Ye Tianxie, or even fear of him: a display of cowardice fit to be sneered at. And yet, given how strong Ye Tianxie was and the Renown he currently carried, no sensible person would choose to offend him. So they all held their silence… and waited for someone to stick his head up.

They did not have to wait long. The head went up immediately.

“Xietian, you’re too damned arrogant!”

Not far off to Ye Tianxie’s right, a man of about thirty in Assassin’s gear was watching him with his brows knit, a cold smile at the corner of his mouth that was there and not there.

“Because I’ve earned the right to be arrogant, and you haven’t. Which is why all you can do is huddle over there and wait, without the standing or the nerve to say what I just said.” Ye Tianxie looked at him sidelong and produced a cold smile every bit as faint as the other man’s… At the back of that party, Thunderstorm, with half his body screened behind someone else, told him in an instant whose party this was. And the name of the man speaking to him stood out starkly: Thunderbolt!

The eldest of the Lei family’s three young masters… Thunderbolt, Hall Master of Battle Soul Hall, a name that shook the virtual gaming world!

Anyone in the habit of losing himself in virtual game worlds would know the name of Battle Soul Hall. Nor was Ye Tianxie without a history with this Battle Soul Hall. Back in the game Skyholder, he had once been passing through a piece of Red Leaf Pact territory and had happened on a siege between the Red Leaf Pact and Battle Soul Hall over the ground. The Red Leaf Pact, on defense, was being driven back step by step and was on the verge of losing the place — and so, bored and wanting something to liven things up, he had raised his shield and gone in, and with the sword and shield in his hands and that terrifyingly agile movement technique of his had smashed Battle Soul Hall’s formations to pieces. The Red Leaf Pact counterattacked on that momentum and drove Battle Soul Hall off before long.

In those days he was called Tian Moxie. Afterward, Battle Soul Hall’s people never once came looking to make trouble for him. To hold up an organization as loud and as vast as Battle Soul Hall, Thunderbolt was nothing like that useless little rich boy Thunderstorm; he had a considerable head on him, and knew which people were worth offending and which were better left untouched.

And now, in front of this many people, Thunderbolt had volunteered to be the one to stick his head up. For no other reason than a sentence of Ye Tianxie’s the day before: “…I won’t mind… destroying the whole of Battle Soul Hall!”

A sentence with real force to it, real nerve — but a sentence like that, landing in Thunderbolt’s ears… landing in the ears of any leader who had toiled to hold an alliance together, would provoke fury. And the recording of Ye Tianxie wiping out thirty-odd of his Battle Soul Hall members had already gone tearing across the world, which naturally included the things he had said… The entire world had heard the three words Battle Soul Hall in that sentence, perfectly clearly. If they did not hit back after that, an organization as large as Battle Soul Hall would end up as nothing but a pitiful stepping-stone in one player’s rise to fame.

To take their dignity back, the most direct method was to kill Xietian — and best of all to kill him from that lofty first place on the rankings all the way back down to level zero!

Today Battle Soul Hall had only twelve people here, every one of them the elite of Battle Soul Hall’s elite, all for the sake of a System Quest that held enormous appeal for any team. Twelve people… set against Ye Tianxie wiping out thirty-odd in the blink of an eye the day before without taking a scratch, Thunderbolt naturally did not believe the twelve of them had any possibility of beating him. Because his attack power and his movement technique alike could be described in only two words — utterly broken — and had already gone far beyond anything an ordinary player could reach at this stage. He could not help but acknowledge it.

But with Xietian mouthing off like this again today, he had to put his head up. There was no choice about it.

Faced with words that went straight for the vitals, Thunderbolt did not lose his temper. He smiled faintly and coldly. “True enough — what you just said, I really don’t have the nerve to say. Rumor has it Xietian’s ability is extremely high and his strength formidable. Seeing you today, I find your arrogance outstrips your strength by a good margin. All you’ve done is get hold of a somewhat stronger class and better equipment than the rest of us by some method that won’t bear looking at, and you’re arrogant enough to have forgotten every last trace of the way of humility our Huaxia has kept for thousands of years. Do you feel no shame at all?”

What a formidable mouth on him… Not one person present failed to marvel at it privately. Then they turned cold eyes on Ye Tianxie to see how he would react. In truth everyone could feel it: Ye Tianxie really was excessively arrogant, and that speech of his, which counted no one here as worth a glance, had quietly lit anger in the heart of every player on the ground. Everyone has pride, and the strong have more of it than most; anyone hearing that contemptuous, commanding tone would feel the anger come up. Even the exalted emperors of old had understood how to treat worthy men with courtesy and gather the hearts of the people… whereas Xietian plainly had not the faintest hint of a low profile or a humble bearing about him.

Different circumstances and different pasts are what give each person his own way of seeing the world and his own way of dealing with others. Ye Tianxie had struggled his way down every step of his road, and what he had seen most of was the cold and ugly side of people. Because too many people had wronged him in the past, he had sworn, after his life finally steadied, that he would never allow anyone to wrong him again. And so, though arrogance was never his intention, he would not put on the smallest show of humility or deference in front of anyone at all. When he did the things he wanted to do, he never once considered whether they would affect anyone else; only himself, and as he pleased.

And so what he showed had become, in outsiders’ eyes, sheer conceit and self-importance. A man with no one at all in his eyes.

(End of Chapter 183)