Chapter 141
Soren, who snapped necks, punched through skulls, and wrung bodies into knots as an opening move, was crude about it.
No elegance, no art at all.
Then again, it wasn’t only Soren.
There was also whatever had chopped Trever’s tribe into pieces and eaten them.
Another brute who couldn’t spell the word.
Cecilia kept listening, and Trever kept talking.
"That was when I heard something behind me. Chewing. Flesh and bone."
"I’ll tell you honestly, it was the first time in my life my scalp went numb from fear."
"What did you see?" Cecilia pressed, out of patience.
Even now the memory sat badly on him. "I can’t say for certain, it looked human and it didn’t. Something like a half-human, half-beast thing."
"It carried a few traits of the Dwarf Demon race, too."
"It stood about a meter tall."
"It was squatting on the ground a short way off, gnawing on the dismembered corpses."
"Its hands and mouth were wet with the blood of my tribesmen."
"I was their Patriarch, of course it tore at me."
"I had to avenge them."
Cecilia was frightened and greedy for the rest of it at once, and her hands closed around one of Soren’s arms without her deciding to. "And then? You fought it to the death?"
Trever shook his head.
"I charged it, and it looked at me."
"One look, and I backed off."
His color went as he said it, his wrists shook a little.
He worked to keep the reaction down, and every time he came back to that day it climbed his spine anyway.
"The fluctuations coming off that thing were wrong."
"Not the spiritual energy humans and beasts use, not demonic energy, not the Spirit energy of my own race."
"I was an Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor and standing in front of it I had nothing left, no confidence at all."
"Completely suppressed."
"And I knew, the way you know things without being told, that if I interrupted its meal I would be in pieces inside a second."
Cecilia hadn’t expected Exalted Continent to be hiding anything like that.
She couldn’t hold the question in. "Was it stronger than Soren?"
Soren could call back the dead and grow flesh on bare bone, and his raw combat strength was monstrous on top of it, very few Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestors would get the better of him.
So which one won?
Trever smiled bitterly.
You little brat, you’re digging me a pit, that question kills people.
Seeing the old beast pull his neck in, plainly terrified of saying the wrong thing, Soren signaled him to speak freely, he wasn’t small enough to take offense.
"Yes, Master." Trever let out a breath like a weight coming off his back.
He took a second before continuing.
"Master is formidable, I don’t dispute it."
"His methods are uncanny."
"And I’m certain Master holds cards I haven’t seen."
"So I can’t put a number on the true gap between Master and that creature."
"But."
"On aura alone, on sheer oppression, master is about one percent of it."
Cecilia stood there with nothing behind her eyes.
It took her a long while to come back, her face had gone pale.
She had trouble accepting what she’d heard, there’s something in the world with a hundred times Soren’s aura?
Soren’s combat strength was already grotesque, a Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor’s realm carrying an Upper-Tier Demon Ancestor’s might.
Is the gap really that size?
If Trever was telling the truth, that creature stood outside the Ancestor Realm altogether.
Nobody had ever heard of such a thing.
Cecilia stole a look at Soren.
Where she was shaking, his face hadn’t changed at all.
She huffed internally, what am I terrified of?
Trever had died over a million years ago, all that time, and no legend or record of this thing had surfaced on the continent, no point worrying about the sky.
Working out how to kill Soren was the live problem.
Watching him summon souls and regrow skeletons at his leisure, did the poison plan look a little stupid?
Then again, aside from poison she had nothing better.
And the man’s breakthrough speed was devilish, once he reached Upper-Tier Demon Ancestor his strength would go up another hundredfold.
"It didn’t kill me," Trever went on.
"By the time I came out of the daze, it was gone, no trace."
"Uh," Cecilia said. "Could you have been hallucinating?"
"No, a hallucination doesn’t account for my tribesmen lying in pieces."
"I examined the remains after it finished with them, I kept one of the bones."
"Master, please look."
Trever opened his spatial storage and produced a section of forearm bone.
The bite marks were clear, and something faint and unpleasant still clung inside the indentations.
"Wait, this aura..."
Cecilia’s eyes went wide, she took the bone out of his hands, she stared at the marks for several seconds and her pupils shook.
She tried to look untroubled. Soren wasn’t fooled for a second.
On the panel, a line woven from foundational Dao energy came together.
[Aura of the Ancient Evil God Tribe.]
The Ancient Evil God Tribe.
No wonder she’d reacted like that.
Awakening the Ancient Evil Gods was the Heavenly Demon Alliance’s whole purpose, she’d have handled relics or signatures tied to them before.
Having never seen a living one, she wouldn’t have connected Trever’s description to the race, but feeling that residue on the bone was different, she couldn’t argue herself out of it.
Soren huffed softly and let her keep her secret.
"Terrifying," Cecilia said after a pause, producing a light smile as she handed the bone back.
Her manner reset, nothing had happened, said her face.
Inside she was reeling, the assassination remained unfinished, and she’d walked into intelligence worth a war.
Trever had met a living member of the Ancient Evil God Tribe inside an Immemorial ruin.
Where did it go afterward?
That was over a million years ago, could the coincidence run so neatly that this creature was one of the sleeping Evil Gods the Alliance was bleeding itself dry to wake?
And if so, who sealed something that strong?
If nothing external had sealed it, then it had gone to sleep by choice.
Why would anything that powerful choose to sleep?
Cecilia shook her head and made herself stop.
With Soren standing right there she didn’t dare push Trever with detailed questions about the ruin.