Chapter 115
Arcturus’s mouth twitched, one wrong word and he’d bring catastrophe down on the Sky Sparrow Tribe and the whole domain with it.
"Well, uh, bovine brother, what kind of talk is that? Rules are dead, people are alive! If the Demon Ancestor likes it, we can break those rules any time, or rewrite them into whatever the Demon Ancestor prefers!"
Arcturus pledged fealty on the spot and rallied the other beast powerhouses to swear alongside him.
He wasn’t an idiot.
For one thing, once Soren and Bruce had put it in those terms, submitting meant living and refusing meant ash.
There was no second option, even if there had been, he wasn’t taking it and offending Soren.
For another, Arcturus had a good eye, for Bruce, half-human and half-beast, to break the constraints of bloodline law, reach the Emperor Realm and pick up partial beastification along the way, there was an eight-in-ten chance Soren was behind it.
The Sky Sparrow Beast Tribe had a peculiar origin.
They carried a fraction of the Kunpeng Beast Tribe’s bloodline, they were also the race the Kunpeng had cut loose and thrown away.
If their bloodline could evolve, spring had finally come for him and the Sky Sparrow Tribe.
Arcturus started to get excited, even the way he looked at Soren shifted, warmer than a man looking at his own father.
He also knew winning Soren’s trust wouldn’t be easy, that would take everything he had in the art of bootlicking.
It started with the eyes, Arcturus shut them for a second.
When they opened again, he was looking at Soren with absolute sincerity.
"The wind is strong out here, Demon Ancestor. Please, come inside." He bent at the waist, smiled, and gestured toward the palace.
That much groveling stirred immediate unhappiness among the surrounding beasts.
None said a word out loud, Bruce was standing right there, and Bruce was not a man to test.
As Arcturus led the two inside, the crowd left behind finally lifted their heads, and something changed in their faces.
They started whispering, the Beast Venerables holding human form on pills were the loudest.
Arcturus’s cowardice baffled them, and they jumped straight to guessing his motives.
"The Patriarch has always had a backbone, what’s wrong with him today?"
"No idea! When the Demon Emperors of the two neighboring domains allied up to swallow our territory, he didn’t bend an inch!"
"This isn’t the same, that man is a Demon Ancestor!"
"If he loses his temper, every beast tribe in the domain goes into the ground with us."
"So what? It’s just death, since when has the Beast race feared death?"
"Watching the Patriarch grovel like that makes me furious!"
"He’s making the whole Beast race look spineless!"
"I’d die before I surrendered!"
An older man among them smiled faintly, as though he’d read every layer of the Patriarch’s thinking, and threw a disdainful glance at a burly middle-aged one nearby.
"You’ve got so much backbone..."
"...why didn’t you say those noble words to the Demon Ancestor’s face?"
The middle-aged man choked, the tips of his ears went red.
"Uh... well, that..."
The elder shook his head, still smiling, and waved for them to listen.
They were willing, he was an Upper-Tier Beast Venerable and Grand Elder of this Sky Sparrow branch lineage, which bought him standing.
He swept the crowd, confirmed every eye was on him, and took his time.
"All of you, don’t let your tempers decide this."
"I know the Patriarch’s character better than anyone here."
"Submitting to that Demon Ancestor is a helpless choice made to keep us alive, it’s also our only real one."
"Whatever the Patriarch decides, we are his clansmen and subordinates, we trust him."
Bang!
The words had barely landed when the Lower-Tier Beast Emperor Bruce had put through the buildings shoved a boulder off himself and stood up.
Cut to pieces and soaked in his own blood, dragging one leg, his face twisted around the pain.
Half the bones in his body had gone, by the look of him, thinking back on that punch put ice down his spine and numbness across his scalp.
His name was Luminar.
The Sky Sparrow Beast Tribe called him a genius they saw once in ten thousand years, younger than the elders and further along than all of them, he was the domain’s second Lower-Tier Beast Emperor and this branch lineage’s second Emperor-level powerhouse.
He’d been arrogant since he was a child.
Getting beaten down like that left him choking on it, going back over the moment brought the cold up his chest again.
He’d always assumed that as a pure-blooded beast, however thin his bloodline had run, he could never rank below a half-human mongrel like Bruce.
And he hadn’t survived one punch, losing to anyone else, he could have swallowed, losing to a half-breed was something he couldn’t hold his head up under.
Half-beasts got claimed by neither race, the world’s outcasts, and outcasts mostly existed as punching bags whenever the mood struck.
Now it had flipped, Luminar had nowhere to put that.
The thought of bowing his head and living under the same roof as Bruce was flatly unacceptable.
"My clansmen! My brothers!"
"I, Luminar, will not be ordered around and treated like a dog by the demon race!"
"So I’m leaving the Imperial Palace, I’m leaving the Great Desolate Beast Domain!"
"Anyone who shares my ambition can come with me right now!"
"Let me wander the desolate borderlands, I will never submit to demons!"
"Beastmen never surrender!"
His cold gaze went over the crowd as he said it.
The speech landed, over twenty Beast Venerables stepped forward.
"We’ll leave with you!"
"That’s right! Beastmen take orders from beastmen!"
"That’s the backbone of our race!"
"Demon Ancestor or not, don’t dream of enslaving us!"
Twenty-odd Beast Venerables meant a considerable body of tribal subordinates coming with them, add a Lower-Tier Beast Emperor like Luminar and they had enough to hold a corner of the continent and build something new.
Luminar nodded hard, delighted. "Good!"
"Everyone who follows me today..."
"...will be a founding elder of our new empire!"
"You won’t go short on resources, I promise you that!"
"To hell with the Sky Sparrow Beast Tribe!"
"To hell with our spineless coward of a Patriarch!"
"From this day!"
"We cut every tie with the Sky Sparrow Tribe and the Great Desolate Beast Domain!"