In the moment the great stone tipped over, Ye Tianxie saw the entrance behind it… and an entrance was all it could be called. Because in the wall there was only a square hole, barely thirty centimeters on a side, and out of that hole a white light shone faintly… Ahead of him, for once, was not a world of darkness.

“Meow…”

Xiaobei landed, rolled to its feet, rushed to the great stone and braced its cat’s paws high against it. At once the stone’s fall stopped completely.

Ye Tianxie let go with both hands, testing it — and found the great stone did not go on falling… Xiaobei alone was holding the whole of it up.

“Good… Xiaobei, hold on!”

Ye Tianxie turned and looked at the thing in the wall that could only just be called an exit… A size like that was nowhere near enough for a man to get through. He thought quietly for three seconds, and in the end set his teeth and took out something grey… Xiaobei was holding on at the limit of its strength, and he could not afford to go on hesitating.

“I am a goat.” Cupping that goatskin in both hands, Ye Tianxie forced the words of that spell out in a badly strained voice.

The spell’s effect was startling. He had barely finished saying it before the grey goatskin lifted off Ye Tianxie’s hands and flew onto his back, and at the same moment he grew shorter and smaller inside a ball of dim grey light. By the time he had taken in what had happened to his own body… Xiaobei beside him was a head taller than he was.

“Yee-yaa! It’s here! It’s here! The super big bad Grey Goat is here… the Grey Goat that Master turned into is here!”

Guoguo’s shrieking came from above his head, because Ye Tianxie was now a Grey Goat… exactly the same as the one he had met before, without the least difference at first glance.

Ye Tianxie ignored Guoguo’s voice entirely, judged the size of his body as it now was, fixed on his line, and sprang — his body went whoosh through that square hole in the wall… and landed steadily. In the instant he landed he could not even wait long enough to look at what was ahead of him, and shouted in a voice full of resentment, “I am not a goat!”

In the blink of an eye Ye Tianxie changed back to his original shape, and that grey hide reappeared in his hands.

Grey Goat’s Goatskin. This really was an item that could not possibly have been stranger — stranger than anything Ye Tianxie had met in the game worlds over all these years… But turning into a tough man, or a fierce tiger, or a dragon… he could have accepted any of those. Turning into a grey goat, though…

What a rip-off!

Back in his “true body,” Ye Tianxie withdrew Xiaobei at once, and the great stone came down hard, with a heavy sound that seemed to make the ground itself tremble.

Only then did Ye Tianxie turn and look at this new space — and visibly freeze.

Guoguo’s small body passed through the wall and drifted down onto Ye Tianxie’s shoulder. Her little nose twitched, as though hunting the scent of Orange Fang, and then a soft “eh?” came out of her. “Yee-yaa! Master, what is that?”

This was another hall, but no longer an empty one. Directly in front of Ye Tianxie a snow-white glowing sphere floated quietly. It was about a meter across, with white mist drifting inside it. Faintly, there seemed to be something in there, but under the cover of the mist it was impossible to make out at all.

Ye Tianxie’s eyes flicked left and right, and then he walked forward, watching that mist-filled sphere in silence and trying to see what was inside it, while he asked in a low voice, “Guoguo, are you certain Orange Fang is here?”

“Of course. Guoguo is a good child who never tells lies.” Guoguo pushed her lips out, thoroughly indignant, then looked around and lifted her head without thinking, biting her finger. “Ooo… but it’s strange, why has it gone again… it was plainly right here a moment ago… Could it — could it have run away when it heard Master’s voice?”

“Even Blood Feather attacked me of its own accord, and I am the one carrying the Hour of Fate — so how much more would Orange Fang, which is stronger than Blood Feather.” Ye Tianxie shook his head, and as he did his brows drew slowly tighter, his nerves winding up to the point where a touch would set them off.

That was danger. Danger felt beyond all measure… a warning of something he had absolutely no way to resist. In the ordinary way, a pressure of that degree coming out of his own mind would have had him fleeing with a Return Scroll at the first instant without hesitating. But something else, something he could not name, was drawing him on, making him want to see what it was that lay hidden inside that ball of light…

He held his nerves taut and walked toward the sphere throwing out its dreamlike white glow. And then, when he had come to less than a meter from it, his steps stopped dead and his body went rigid on the instant, as though an unbelievably heavy mountain had come down out of the sky and pressed hard onto his body, onto his heart…

Cold sweat soaked Ye Tianxie from head to foot in one moment.

This… what was this power… just what kind of power could possibly be terrible to this degree? To take away his body’s ability to move on nothing but the pressure of its presence.

Ye Tianxie’s body was shaking, shaking violently, as though he were standing in a frozen waste in the bitterest cold, and his heart was beating unbelievably fast, so hard it seemed ready to come out of his chest.

From the moment he walked in here, he had felt a pair of eyes watching him silently from somewhere unseen. That terrible feeling was there, quite distinctly, and yet he could not truly locate where it was coming from. And just as he had been about to come close to that strange sphere of light, the presence that had been following him all along turned cold and dark on the instant, and that black chill dropped him as though into an ice pit, his whole body shaking beyond his control. In that one instant he understood how terrible the other’s strength was… the gap between them was as wide as heaven from earth.

“Heh heh heh heh heh… This King thought some great personage had the power to break the Phantom Beast race’s barrier and come here. And it turns out to be nothing but a feeble, insignificant human! Heh heh heh heh… How very amusing. A hundred years sealed away, three years hidden out of sight — it has been a long while since This King last tasted killing and the pleasure of fresh blood… Heh heh heh heh… Hahahaha!”

A voice grating past all bearing rose abruptly at Ye Tianxie’s ear, and in that dim, silent place it sounded still more sinister and dreadful. His heart gave several violent beats along with the laughter, and in the depths of a man who had never known what fear was, fear had begun to grow… the shudder of the soul that comes of itself under the weight of absolute power.

“Wah… wah… M-m-m-master, did you hear that horrible voice… so horrible… Master, did you hear it… Eh? Master, why has your neck gone so cold…”

If that terrible presence could raise fear even in Ye Tianxie, how much more in Guoguo. Her teeth were chattering, and the small body standing on Ye Tianxie’s shoulder pressed tight against his neck, all but trying to knead itself into him.

And just then a ball of black light, dense past all belief, formed ten meters ahead of him. It was a pure black, black without a single impurity in it, black enough to crush and drive off the light in that place outright. Inside the black light a tall, pitch-black body slowly took on solid form. His body stood a full three meters high, hidden all over beneath a broad black cloak, with nothing of him showing but two eyes shining green, and the light in them scattering a terrible excitement and a cold darkness. In his hand he held a long staff set with a green skull — a figure that made Ye Tianxie think, without wanting to, of the terrible evil wizards in films and cartoons.

One of the Demon race’s Eight Demon Kings — the Dark Nether Ghost King!!

He had prepared himself mentally for meeting the Dark Nether Ghost King from the moment he entered these Phantom Beast Ruins, but only now, with the demon really standing in front of him, did he truly understand how terribly strong those Eight Demon Kings sealed on the Tower of Fate were…

In the real world and in game worlds both, he had met strong enemies and strong opponents of every kind. He liked a challenge, and enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that comes of beating an enemy stronger than himself… but never once before had anything made him shake like this.

In the World of Fate, the strongest beings he had met were beyond question the Blood Phoenix that Blood Feather became, the great blue wolf that the Blue Soul became, and the mysterious blue-haired man the blue wolf followed. But not even from them had Ye Tianxie ever felt a pressure like this, one that seemed ready to grind the soul itself to powder.

His strength had to be at least Divine Mystery grade!

This was an enemy he could not stand against at all, not by the smallest fraction. Locked down by the Dark Nether Ghost King’s presence, he kept his mind clear and nothing else; his body seemed to have lost all feeling, frighteningly rigid. If he had not had one last means of escape, an enemy like this could have driven him to despair outright.

“Dark Nether Ghost King!” He set his teeth and called out the name of this terrible enemy. The news that had come from the City of the Lost was not wrong in the slightest. He really had hidden himself north of the City of Heaven’s Sun… in this ground the Phantom Beast race had left behind them all those years ago.

At the same moment he spoke the Dark Nether Ghost King’s name, a Return Scroll for the City of Stars was already quietly in his hand… Locked down now by that presence, he could not flee — but the moment he loosed the Soul of the Evil Dragon, he could leave in safety.

“Oh?” The Dark Nether Ghost King’s head came up, and those eyes threw out a green glow that raised the hairs on the arms. “So you know This King’s name… Heh. Can it be that you came here for This King’s sake? Then this is amusing indeed… Since you have found where This King is, you may stop dreaming of getting out again… Humans really are stupid creatures, delivering themselves to This King’s feet without the wit to know they are dead…”

“Heh. If I had not come in of my own accord, would you dare go out? You are nothing but a pitiful demon who fled a sealing in disgrace and hid himself away in a place nobody else can enter, where the sun never reaches all year round.” Ye Tianxie forced out a cold smile and said it in mockery. The one thing he could least endure was another man swaggering in front of him… even where the other had every bit of the strength and the standing for it. The Dark Nether Ghost King… beyond any question, this was the most terrible enemy Ye Tianxie had met from the day he was born until now. And his own mind and spirit had never shaken as they were shaking now.

(End of Chapter 240)