Chapter 107
"Give it up."
"Better to hope that niece of yours is competent enough to take Soren off the board for us."
The Earth Demon Ancestor agreed that walking away was the right call.
No sense burning time and energy on something whose existence and location neither of them could confirm, they tore the void open and left.
Heavy snow, endless, swallowing the earth for a million miles.
Beside a frozen stream, a current of cold air stopped moving.
The snowflakes caught in it began to gather.
Not one was wasted, they condensed slowly into an ice sculpture.
The sculpture was lifelike enough to unsettle you, and it kept firming up, until the posture changed and what stood there was a living body giving off a cold that got into the bones.
A woman, wearing nothing at all.
Her pupils were like cut crystal, her hair a frozen waterfall. Blood-vivid lips, skin white and smooth as congealed lard.
On that delicate face the features were flawless, and calling her the most beautiful thing in the world wouldn’t be an argument.
That flat, indifferent gaze carried a desolate cold.
She reached up and touched her cheek. Her wrist. Her knee, she missed nothing. "Hmph."
"Two hundred thousand years sealed away and even the elasticity of my skin has gone."
"I really do need to condition it properly."
A light wave of her hand, and a flowing white dress settled over her.
The dress did her figure every favor, the line of the waist and hips in particular.
Dressed, she smiled, and the smile was as desolate as the rest of her, as she went back over what had happened.
In the memory, she saw herself in pure Spirit energy form, drifting out through an entrance no wider than two palms, turning into a wisp of cold mist and rising into the sky.
"To think it was the demon race that broke my seal for me."
"Those two fools..."
"...clearly have no idea what I am."
"So they wouldn’t know what I can do either."
"I have a mutated physique, I can take my Spirit beast form, and under the right conditions I can go to vapor."
"An entrance the size of two palms left me no other way out."
"Vapor costs me, though, every use takes years off my life."
"And I have to dump ninety percent of the Spirit energy in my body on the spot."
She sneered, amused, then cast her perception out, and it locked onto a direction, toward the peak of a distant snow-covered mountain.
The desolate beauty on her face shifted into something playful.
"Oh, how interesting."
"A tribe of a hundred thousand pure-blooded Spirits lives out here?"
"What a lovely smell of Spirit blood."
"And is that the fluctuation of an Upper-Tier Spirit Emperor?"
"A hundred thousand Spirits should be enough to put my body back at its peak."
She tapped the void with one bare white foot, sending ripples through space, and shot toward the Spirit tribe deep in the mountains like a dark arrow.
She arrived inside the burn of an incense stick and stopped before a transparent protective barrier.
One flick of her finger and the formation covering the tribal ground broke apart into falling snow.
Below, the Spirit cultivators started screaming.
"Oh, the Snow-Devouring Spirit Wolf Tribe."
"Hehe."
"Here’s to a pleasant meal~"
Something wild opened across that desolate face, and she dropped.
Halfway down her shape ran and changed, into a white dragon over a hundred meters long.
A devouring force tore out of her jaws.
One gulp took a whole swath of the tribe. Roughly a thousand of them.
"Hehe, a rare delicacy."
"Two hundred thousand years."
"Two hundred thousand years!"
"Those despicable demons, sealing me in a sunless Glacial Jade Coffin for two hundred full millennia."
"I’ll make the demon race pay a horrific price for it."
"This Exalted Continent isn’t the behemoth the Spirit Continent is, and its destiny runs far thinner than two hundred thousand years ago, I can feel it, there’s almost nobody left here who could threaten me."
She kept eating while she muttered, sneering to herself.
"The destiny of the Exalted Continent thins by the day, close to spent, that’ll be the blockade the other four continents put on it."
"Keep this up and the four major races here will find breaking into the Ancestor Realm harder every generation."
"It might become impossible for this place to produce another Ancestor at all."
The dragon gorged on, the whole thing went fast, and mercy never entered into it.
Then she hit resistance, an Upper-Tier Spirit Emperor, the strongest warrior the Snow-Devouring Spirit Wolf Tribe had.
Against a mysterious woman at the Upper-Tier Ancestor Realm in her true beast form, all he felt was the floor giving out under him.
The tribe’s elders came up into the sky one after another to stand with him.
"A calamity!"
"This is a heavenly calamity!"
"How does the Exalted Continent have an Ancestor Realm powerhouse?"
"An Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor, no less!"
"Tribal Leader, what... what species is that?"
"She looks like a Heaven-Robbing Black Dragon!"
"That’s not right, didn’t they vanish from the Exalted Continent ages ago?"
"And a Heaven-Robbing Black Dragon should have black scales, why is she white?"
"Hiss! A mutated dragon!"
They’d already been drowning, the word mutated finished them, scalps went numb, and whatever will to fight was left evaporated.
A mutated dragon’s combat strength ran several times that of an unmutated dragon at the same rank.
The thing before them was an Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor, and far worse than an ordinary one.
Resisting was ants trying to lift a mountain that ran up into the clouds.
The Tribal Leader’s legs shook under him.
As an Upper-Tier Spirit Emperor he counted as a real power on the Exalted Continent, more than enough to keep a hundred thousand people safe.
He had never in his life felt this small.
He shut his eyes and waited for it.
His will to fight, his Dao heart and his Spirit soul all went up as smoke in the same instant.
The white shadow swept through.
The Tribal Leader and the elders were gone, a few drops of blood came down out of the empty air.