Chapter 128
Six claw manifestations ripped the air apart, leaving spatial fissures where they passed.
Then he landed and stood there, blank.
Huh? Where is she?
"Hahaha! Genuinely stupid."
A sweet voice chimed down from a mountaintop several hundred yards behind him and to his left.
Arcturus’s eyes nearly split their sockets, his teeth ground audibly, his fists turned a bruised purple.
He reached up and wrenched the needle out of his eye socket, he’d been played again, all the way through.
Cecilia snapped her fingers, her figure flickered and dropped out of his vision entirely.
Her movement made no sense, she traveled like a ghost.
No afterimages, not a ripple of demonic energy.
Before his brain caught up, she was standing behind him.
A short dagger spun across her fingers in a blur.
One casual swipe opened a shallow gash across the muscle of his back.
"Son of a bitch! That hurts!"
Arcturus sucked air through his teeth.
He stamped a foot into the earth and his aura went off.
Spiritual energy detonated outward with him at the center, a localized volcano blowing its top.
The concussion ground several mountains into powder across a hundred miles.
Dust and rock choked the sky and came down in a heavy blanket.
Cecilia had already materialized high above him.
Her voice came down through the dust, thick with amusement.
"They say the beasts have the lowest intelligence of the four races."
"Seeing it firsthand rather exceeds the rumors."
"You really aren’t bright~"
"You little brat, you’re courting death!" Arcturus roared, his chest swelled with such fury his vision blacked out for a second.
She smiled through it.
"Assassination is what I do."
"And you tried to play dead in front of me."
"Isn’t that embarrassing?"
"Let me explain something simple, every technique I own was refined through millions of trials."
"The needles most of all, I’ve thrown them well over a hundred million times."
"My personal record is one million two hundred thousand consecutive throws without a miss."
"So my confidence in my own precision is absolute."
"Did you honestly think a shot of mine would go wide?"
"If I want to cut one hair off your head from a hundred miles out, my needle doesn’t stray a millimeter."
"You knew I was avoiding your vitals on purpose, and you dropped down to play corpse anyway."
"You’re stupid past saving."
Arcturus felt his lungs about to rupture, so the needle in the buttock, and the eyeball, all of it for nothing?
A sick taste climbed his throat, and blood surged up from his chest before he could clamp down, je spat dark red onto the dirt, wiped his mouth on his forearm, then glared up with his one bloodshot eye, furious and out of options.
"This old man doesn’t know who you are."
"But believe me."
"Your end is going to be ugly."
"Because you let the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor go."
"He was a prisoner Demon Ancestor Soren set aside personally."
Cecilia huffed, the starlit eyes above the veil went flat with contempt.
"Demon Ancestor Soren?"
"Tsk"
"Never mind that he isn’t here."
"Even if he were standing right where you are, what exactly could he do to me?"
"I told you already."
"Every technique I own was tempered through millions of trials, that’s precisely why my confidence in surviving is absolute."
"His combat strength beats mine, obviously. I’m not stupid enough to meet him head-on."
"Ancestor or not, if I decide to leave, don’t dream about keeping me."
"You’re trying to scare me with his name?"
"Hehe, save the threats until your precious Demon Ancestor Soren actually catches me"
"As for you."
"I have a rule, I never kill idiots."
"Because I’d hate to get an idiot’s blood on my hands and catch it"
Arcturus was dizzy from her tongue alone.
Cecilia gave a playful little wave and laughed.
She turned to go, and in that split second, a demonic pressure came down over the region like the end of the world.
The air went cold enough to burn.
Everything under the sky froze where it stood.
Black clouds rolled in across the horizon and pressed toward the earth.
In under a second the sky was gone, total dark.
Columns of catastrophe ringed the region beneath the churning cloud, thick as an Ancestor Tribulation.
Every bolt ran a hundred meters across, some reached a thousand.
Black lightning tore down without pause, howling as it hit the ground, some came as roaring dragons, some as pouncing tigers, others as swords and spears and halberds of raw destruction.
The blasts shook the land until it cracked.
Arcturus stood with his mouth open.
The lazy contempt dropped off Cecilia’s face.
What replaced it was grave.
"What is this?"
"Some kind of anomaly?"
"No, that’s an Ancestor Tribulation, and nothing like a standard one."
Cecilia had once witnessed an Ancestor Tribulation from a safe distance.
That one hadn’t carried half the power in these black bolts.
And that tribulation had belonged to a Lower-Tier Demon Ancestor breaking into the Middle Tier.
So, who is breaking into Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor right now?
And doing it here?
Space tore open.
A figure in flowing black robes stepped out of the rift.
Soren’s black hair moved around his shoulders like dark fire.
Every stir of his garments released a visible ripple of foundational energy.
The ripples spread through the air.
The void shuddered.
Space fractured by inches under nothing but his presence.
The raging tribulation seemed to lower its head as he appeared.
High in the heavens, the thunder dragons and lightning tigers bowed to him, performing the highest reverence the laws of the world knew.
Soren hung in the sky like a black sun.
Heaven and earth had one focal point and it was him.
Under that dark radiance, every living thing in range wanted to drop to its knees.
Watching him, something cold and final settled in Cecilia’s chest.
"Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor!"
She couldn’t trust her own eyes or senses.
Barely an hour ago the man had been Lower-Tier.
How does anyone cross into Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor at that speed?
No, this speed is absurd.
Where did he get the destiny for it?
The ambient destiny of Exalted Continent had been thinning for millennia.
There shouldn’t be enough left in the whole continent to carry one Lower-Tier Demon Ancestor into the Middle Tier.