Realm Walker

Li Xianzong stopped in his tracks. One glance was all it took to identify the young man leading the Lawful team as his very quarry.

"Yuanshi Tianzun?"

On the other side, Zhang Yuanqing blurted out, "Li Xianzong?!"

It was Li Xianzong of all people, matched into the same dungeon as him. The world truly was too small for old enemies.

"Yuanshi Tianzun?" The gaunt middle-aged man exclaimed, his voice climbing sharply. "The Yuanshi Tianzun from the Songhai Branch? Number five on the underground black market bounty list?"

His three companions exchanged looks of astonishment.

"That's the one!" Li Xianzong confirmed as he bared his teeth in a grin. "Interesting. So you're in Yin Yang Town too. I was planning to finish this dungeon, then go collect your head for the bounty. This saves me the trip."

"Oh, right. I heard this kid nearly got killed by Li Xianzong not long ago," the gaunt man said with a sneer. "Small world indeed."

"Small world?" The man in the tailored suit rolled his eyes and raised his voice deliberately. "This brat thinks he's worthy of being Li Xianzong's rival? You'd need to be in the same league for that. All this kid's good for is kneeling at Li Xianzong's feet and begging for mercy. Every last one of you on the Lawful side is dead."

The gaunt man immediately grasped his companion's intent. Whether it came to petty brawls or the clash of great armies, psychological warfare was always paramount.

"The Five Elements Alliance really has fallen on hard times," he mused aloud, taking over the baton from the man in the tailored suit. "Their celebrated prodigy is nothing more than prey for our captain here. Hey, kid, do your legs go weak at the sight of Li Xianzong? Get on your knees and call him grandpa a few times, and maybe we'll leave your corpse in one piece."

The gaunt man put extra emphasis on Li Xianzong's name, and the other Evil Walkers cackled.

Li Xianzong... The expressions on the Lawful side darkened considerably. They knew the enemy was deliberately trying to shatter their morale, but knowing it and being unaffected were two very different things. Of all opponents, they had been pitted against Li Xianzong, a notorious killer who ranked among the top names on the official bounty list. Even Yuanshi Tianzun was no match for him.

Queen's face drained of color, and she turned instinctively to glance at the captain beside her. She remembered how quickly the news had spread about Li Xianzong's terror attack in Songhai, and how he had nearly killed Yuanshi Tianzun. She had even joined the discussion at the time. The consensus was unanimous: Yuanshi Tianzun was significantly weaker than Li Xianzong.

She hadn't expected he would be unable to escape this "fate." And it wasn't just him. She was in danger too now.

Grass Upon the Plains was a freelance Walker, and not particularly attuned to outside news. But the name Li Xianzong triggered a memory of something Queen had mentioned when introducing Yuanshi Tianzun, and the young Wood Specter's heart seized up. This Li Xianzong is the captain's nemesis? And the captain lost to him before?

Only Fire Virtue reacted differently. While his teammates all felt their hearts sink, his temper flared when he heard the enemy mock his captain.

At that moment, the sorcerer standing between the two factions swept his gaze left and right and let out a cold snort. "The court's lapdogs. So you've finally found your way here."

Before anyone could respond, the man who had already decided both teams were government agents tilted his head back and spewed torrents of emerald green gas from his mouth. It spread like thick smoke, billowing rapidly in every direction. The wind carried it, driving the green clouds toward both sides at once.

"Get back!" the gaunt middle aged man barked to his teammates as he wrenched open his Inventory, pulling out a white jade toad and thrusting it skyward.

The emerald gas rushed eagerly into the toad's gaping mouth. In the blink of an eye, the pale jade turned a deep, sickly green.

On the Lawful side, Queen stepped in front of her teammates and raised both palms as though lifting something. With a great rushing sound, the river water surged upward, coiling into the shape of a roaring dragon. The serpentine form twisted and writhed through the air, swallowing up the fog-like poison into its belly. The water dragon slowly turned a dull, murky green.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The sharp crack of gunfire erupted from a distance. The instant the emerald haze began to thin, the Lawful team's marksmen launched a surprise attack on the Evil team.

However, the Evil Walkers were seasoned fighters with eyes in the backs of their heads. They reacted without panic, rolling, ducking, or throwing themselves sideways. The gaunt man hit the ground just as something punched into the earthen wall behind him with a muffled impact, leaving a deep crater wreathed in smoke.

"Hah! Do you think you can catch me off guard from that far away?"

The smirk had barely formed on his lips when another shot rang out. This time the target wasn't him. It was the deep green toad lying on the ground beside him.

The jade vessel shattered on impact, sending fragments scattering in every direction. All the emerald poison sealed within erupted outward, engulfing the area in a toxic cloud.

The earlier shots hadn't come from Guan Ya at all. They had been Li Chunfeng's, fired as a diversion, a smokescreen for the real attack. It was Guan Ya's bullet that struck the toad.

Queen saw her opening. She abandoned the thought of dispersing her water dragon and thrust her hands forward in a forceful push instead. The dragon collapsed into a curtain of rain that poured down over the Evil team that was already shrouded in a cloud of poison.

At the same moment, the black robed sorcerer reached into a cloth pouch at his waist and drew out a staff, three feet long and black as ink, crowned with an egg-sized gemstone of dark jade.

He raised the staff high, and his voice rolled out, low and imperious. "Everyone must die!"

The black gemstone flared to life, radiating a dim, oppressive glow.

In the mouth of the alley, Guan Ya was sighting down her barrel when a searing pain lanced through her chest, and her heart stopped. She clutched at her chest, sinking slowly to a crouch, gasping in agony. Next to her, Li Chunfeng doubled over the same way.

In the square, Zhang Yuanqing, Queen, Grass Upon the Plains, Li Xianzong, and the others all seized their chests simultaneously, faces turning ashen.

It was a curse. A devastatingly powerful curse.

"This... this shouldn't be possible..." the youth with the missing ear groaned through clenched teeth. "A Level 4 Saint's curse shouldn't be this strong."

A Level 4 Saint could certainly cast a curse strong enough to kill any single person present, but that would be a focused, targeted hex. A blanket curse covering this many people shouldn't have been able to carry this kind of force.

A blazing halo of golden light erupted around Zhang Yuanqing. He had fallen into a half-crouch, but the radiance burned the curse away. In one fluid motion, he hurled the Demon-subduing Awl at the sorcerer and activated Night Wandering, sprinting forward under its cover.

The awl streaked through the air, trailing golden light. The sorcerer swatted it aside with a flick of his staff, the impact ringing out like a struck bell. But the moment the awl was deflected, the dark halo pulsing from the black gemstone dissolved into nothing, and the curse vanished.

The awl's demon breaking power had done its work.

Zhang Yuanqing lunged and caught the spinning awl cleanly out of the air.

In the alley, Guan Ya leaned back against the earthen wall, sliding from her crouch into a seated position. She raised the long barrel, trained it on the sorcerer, and squeezed the trigger. She had abandoned any thought of picking off the Evil Walkers. The sorcerer was too dangerous. One misstep meant a total wipe. Their priority was clear.

The bullet flew straight into the sorcerer's skull, but it passed through nothing more than a flickering afterimage.

The sorcerer materialized several meters away, staff still raised. At some point, his robes had split apart. He now stood two meters tall, his torso encased in hard chitinous armor. His legs were knotted with muscle but still lean, shaped like the powerful hind limbs of a locust. His face had twisted into something grotesque and inhuman. Mandibles jutted from a mouth that no longer resembled anything mammalian, and two long antennae extended from his forehead.

Guan Ya worked the bolt, ejecting the spent casing, and fired again.

Again, the bullet punched through another afterimage as the sorcerer appeared on the opposite side of the square. Those locust-like legs and twitching antennae granted him reflexes and speed beyond imagination.

At last, the sorcerer noticed her. His eyes, black and glossy as polished obsidian, turned in her direction. Guan Ya's heart sank, then she saw Zhang Yuanqing throw himself forward, recklessly, charging at the sorcerer to draw his attention away from her.

The sorcerer's gaze shifted to Zhang Yuanqing, but his target vanished into thin air.

The antennae on the sorcerer's forehead twitched, sensing air currents or emitting some imperceptible signal. Without warning, he dropped low and lashed out with a brutal roundhouse kick to his right.

Crack!

A figure materialized out of the air in mid-flight, arms crossed over his chest. Zhang Yuanqing tumbled through the air and hit the ground rolling, the taste of iron flooding his throat.

The sorcerer bent his knees to give chase, then froze. He looked down at his own calf. A deep gash ran across it, weeping thick greenish fluid.

He raised his head. His staff swung toward Zhang Yuanqing, and the black gemstone pulsed with dark light.

Zhang Yuanqing felt a sudden, searing pain in his own calf. The flesh split open silently, the wound widening on its own. Without hesitation, he drove the Demon-subduing Awl hard into his thigh.

Golden light washed over his entire body, and the widening rupture in his leg stopped growing instantly.

"Be careful! He can use his own injuries as a curse medium!"

Zhang Yuanqing had barely finished the warning when the transformed sorcerer advanced in a blur, trailing a cascade of afterimages and closing the distance between them in a heartbeat.

In that instant, his vision sharpened to its absolute peak, allowing him to follow the trajectory of the attack. Without thinking, he threw himself into a roll to the right.

With a massive boom, the butt of the staff hammered into the ground where he had been, smashing the stone tiles apart.

The sorcerer had just raised his staff again when Fire Virtue reared back and hurled a fireball compressed to its absolute limit. The explosion gouged a crater into the earth, but the sorcerer's silhouette dissolved in the shockwave like smoke.

Zhang Yuanqing looked up. "He's coming!"

Fire Virtue backpedaled, launching fireball after fireball, carpeting the space in front of him with flame. But the sorcerer flickered left, then right, weaving between each blazing orb with impossible speed before closing in and driving a fist into the burly man's gut.

Fire Virtue's body folded in half, and his eyes lost focus.

Violent flames erupted around Fire Virtue's form, swallowing him whole. More than a dozen meters behind the sorcerer, a flickering tongue of fire suddenly ballooned outward, and the Fire Sage materialized within it, falling to his knees and gasping as he clutched his stomach.

After just two exchanges, both of the Lawful team's frontline fighters were already in dire straits.

The Evil team, having just extricated themselves from the poison cloud, watched the scene unfold and sucked in a collective breath.

"That boss is brutal. Should we pull back?"

"No," said the youth with the missing ear. "This is our only window, when the Lawful team is keeping him occupied. Once the sorcerer finishes them off, we're next."

His voice turned grim. "The hex insect he fused with is of an extraordinarily high level. It grants enhanced perception, agility, raw strength, and regeneration. I can't fathom how he cultivated a creature like that. In close combat, even you Enchanting Demons wouldn't stand a chance against him."

Li Xianzong nodded slowly, his expression grave.

The sorcerer's grotesque mandibles clicked open and shut, forming human words. "Lapdogs of the court. Today will be the day you are buried."

Then, without warning, crimson light surged in his pupils. A mass of black mist engulfed his head. The sorcerer clutched at his skull, letting out a bestial howl. Swallowed in that dark fog, the sorcerer's rationality dissipated, dissolving like ice in boiling water.

In the mouth of an alley, Li Chunfeng turned to look at the figure beside him. There stood the wiry frame of Lotus Eater, clutching the Straw Doll in his hands. Its features were unmistakable—it had taken on the exact likeness of the insectoid sorcerer.

An opening!

The eyes of both sets of Walkers lit up at once.