Chapter 424: Hidden Cache
"Another skill maxed out on the spot."
A flying vessel was rushing at tremendous speed toward another fiend lord's residence.
The vessel was one of the spoils from killing the Heavenly Prison Fiend Lord, a void-type flight Dao Artifact. Its performance was nothing special, just an ordinary Dao Artifact that would sell for somewhere between 1,200,000,000 and 1,400,000,000 during an auction.
For Yaoguang, with the Limitless Sword and the Two-Realm Ruler at hand, using Void Flicker to move was faster than any vessel-type Dao Artifact. But activating two Dao Artifacts at once while pushing Void Flicker to full power would drain him so much that even he, despite reaching the Void-Shattering Realm and being able to use the Sovereign Human Emperor, could hardly sustain the energy expenditure.
Considering that the battles ahead would likely all be difficult, he needed to give his grotto-heaven some breathing room, allowing it to recover as quickly as possible and restoring himself to peak condition.
As he thought about his next moves, he glanced over the Daemon Hunter branch, freshly raised to 100% progress of the fifteenth tier. Compared with Source Tracing and Hunting Instinct, the Dao Fruit granted at the fifteenth tier was rather underwhelming.
"Apex Predator." After sensing this new divine ability, Yaoguang sighed. "Through the Apex Predator's pressure, I can deter lifeforms weaker than myself, with a certain chance of forcing them to submit directly... But it only works on lifeforms weaker than me. What's the point?"
Shaking his head, he withdrew his attention from the Dao Fruit. It was a pity that the fifteenth tier offered only such a Dao Fruit, but the great number of talents he had gained over the years had also taught him that not every talent would noticeably boost his combat power.
Low-level talents like Perception and Formless, which he had gained at the very beginning, were now of no use whatsoever.
"There's still some left. Next..." Yaoguang's gaze fell on the Merchant and Alchemist branches.
Considering the enormous time alchemy tended to demand, he invested the remaining experience into the Merchant branch instead, to see whether it might undergo a transformation.
After all, he had cut down six Void-Shattering cultivators from the Yin Lunar Sect, collecting no fewer than ten intact Dao Artifacts along with a dozen or so broken ones he had shattered himself, and all of that counted as an immense fortune.
If the Merchant profession could turn out to be a little more miraculous...
After briefly digesting the information from the Merchant branch, now raised to the thirteenth tier, Yaoguang let out a helpless complaint, "I really shouldn't have gotten my hopes up."
The talents the Merchant branch granted really were talents related to merchants: enhanced charisma, greater trust from others, more precise appraisal, and so on. The only barely usable one was called the Merchant's Intuition, the ability to roughly judge the value of an item or material he had never seen before.
That would at least keep him from overlooking precious treasures while treasure hunting. Then again, anything that was a treasure would naturally display its own wonders, and when those wonders showed themselves, he was hardly going to miss them anyway.
Still underwhelming.
Amid these thoughts, Yaoguang arrived at a sect built across a range of mountains. This sect's ruler was called the Curse Seal Fiend Lord, and the sect he had founded was the Heavenly Curse Sect, a subsidiary of the Yin Lunar Sect.
The Yin Lunar Sect held many small strongholds like this one.
Apparently having been warned in advance, every cultivator of the Heavenly Curse Sect was now on full alert, and the sect's protective array had already been activated, covering the sky above it.
Yaoguang sized it up briefly and was surprised to discover that its level was barely inferior to the Heavenly Dragon-Slaying Array before its improvements back then.
With a Void-Shattering cultivator controlling it, as many as five Void-Shattering cultivators could be trapped inside it, unable to break free for quite some time.
Even a powerhouse on the Dao Lord Candidate Rankings would need real effort to destroy a level 13 array with a Void-Shattering cultivator controlling it.
And this was the Yin Lunar Sect's territory. If he failed to break the array quickly, the sect's other experts would surely arrive quickly through the teleportation arrays, and he would be besieged by all the powerhouses the Yin Lunar Sect had.
But after studying the array from outside for a moment, Yaoguang quickly discerned something and smiled faintly. "Good, this is like a turtle shell. Since they've gone so far as to raise the sect-guarding grand array, they won't be leaving anytime soon."
He marked the Heavenly Curse Sect down. Then, in a flash, he headed for the territory of the next Void-Shattering supreme elder, the Golden Lion Fiend Lord. And as he traveled, his mind kept working through methods to crack the Heavenly Curse Sect's grand array.
It didn't take him long...
Found it. Yaoguang thought. It is a bit troublesome, though. Even with my strength and abilities, breaking that array in a short time would still be difficult...
If the array could not be broken, he would simply interfere with its operation. He would sneak inside and destroy the teleportation array linking it to the Yin Lunar Sect, so no reinforcements could arrive in a short time, and only then deal with this Curse Seal Fiend Lord.
Let's see if I can find one more fiend lord. If not, this Curse Seal Fiend Lord will be the last Void-Shattering fiendish cultivator I can kill. Any more, and the Yin Lunar Sect will surely go mad. If they call that Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign of theirs back early, things will get complicated. Yaoguang mused.
Before long, his flying vessel arrived at a city. Unlike the Heavenly Curse Sect, however, this city was all but deserted. Though plenty of fiendish cultivators remained, aside from a few Void-Piercing battle immortals, there was not even a single true Void-Piercing cultivator among them.
That's odd... I don't sense a teleportation array in this city. Its master is the Golden Lion Fiend Lord, a cultivator who advanced to the Void-Shattering Realm within the last thousand years... Now that I think about it, the Black Lunar Fiend Sovereign last returned 2600 years ago, when Golden Lion had not yet reached the Void-Shattering Realm, and that fiend sovereign would not have laid down a teleportation array for him in advance. In that case...
Yaoguang's gaze swept across the few Void-Piercing battle immortals, and in a flash he appeared beside one of them.
Seeing Yaoguang materialize out of nowhere, the battle immortal's eyes flashed with despair, and he opened his mouth as if to say something. But in the next second, his body simply disintegrated, and Yaoguang drew out a wisp of heavenly fiend origin from his remains.
"Source Tracing," Yaoguang muttered.
The divine ability activated, and Yaoguang quickly traced the origin of that strand of heavenly fiend origin back to its source. As for where that source lay...
"There!" Yaoguang looked toward a point in the distance, checked it against the direction of the Yin Lunar Sect, and could not help feeling surprised. "He isn't fleeing toward the Yin Lunar Sect headquarters? Or did he deliberately take a different route to keep me from cutting his path?"
He made a rough estimate of the distance. If this fiend lord had made straight for the Yin Lunar Sect at full speed, he might not have bothered chasing, given how far it was. But since the fiend lord had taken the long way around... he would give chase!
"Quite the clever one," Yaoguang remarked.
This time, Yaoguang did not use the Dao Artifact vessel to preserve his energy. He directly activated the Limitless Sword and the Two-Realm Ruler, and began using Void Flicker at full speed.
Each teleportation carried him over a hundred thousand kilometers, and he could do that several times in a single breath. Traveling this way, the distance between him and the Golden Lion Fiend Lord closed rapidly.
Just as Yaoguang activated the Sovereign Human Emperor to replenish what he had expended, a Dao Artifact vessel piloted by a Void-Refining fiendish cultivator appeared before him.
His psychic thought swept over it. The strongest aboard seemed to be that Void-Refining fiendish cultivator, with at most two Void-Piercing fiendish cultivators and a group of Golden Core fiendish cultivators in attendance.
But both Source Tracing and True Spirit Light were telling him that a much bigger fish was hidden within the vessel.
Because of those two talents, no matter how the Void-Shattering fiend lord inside concealed himself and how much he restrained his aura, in the end he could neither hide nor escape.
Amplified by the Torrent of Time, two Void Swords slashed down as one, aimed precisely at the Golden Lion Fiend Lord, who was doing his best to mask his aura aboard the warship.
Feeling the sharpness of the Void Swords, the Golden Lion Fiend Lord could no longer hide. His figure burst from the warship.
He had no intention of trading blows with Yaoguang. The moment he broke free, he deployed six strange objects.
Each of them erupted with astonishing Dao resonance, their power in no way inferior to a Dao Technique unleashed at full power by a Void-Shattering cultivator.
In other words, deploying all six at once was the equivalent of six Void-Shattering cultivators attacking together at once.
Yet, even with such fearsome means at his disposal, this fiend lord did not dare follow up at all.
Instead, using those objects as a cover, he tore a talisman apart and vanished from the area in the blink of an eye.
Even though Yaoguang immediately deployed the Heaven-Sealing Stele, it failed to lock down his figure.
"Hmm? A Great Translocation Divine Talisman? One that strong... it was probably refined personally by a Dao Lord," Yaoguang noted, finding it rather surprising.
The next moment, his Void Sword cut through the incoming Dao Techniques, shattering five of the six on the spot.
The last one broke through the Void Sword's interception and slammed into Yaoguang's body. But with a shimmer of starlight, his body seemed to release a glazed, jewel-like radiance that forcibly dispersed the technique's power.
"Did you think you could leave?" Yaoguang stepped through the void, crossing over a hundred thousand kilometers in an instant to continue the pursuit.
"Hm?" Arriving at his destination, Yaoguang was mildly taken aback. He had actually lost the Golden Lion Fiend Lord's trail.
It did not matter. He turned back and reappeared above the warship, pointed a hand through the air, and Great Annihilation Sword Qi came crashing down, blasting apart the fiendish bodies of every Void-Refining and Void-Piercing fiendish cultivator aboard.
Then his grotto-heaven swept out, and one Void-Refining and two Void-Piercing fiendish cultivators were crushed within it.
Yaoguang drew a strand of heavenly fiend origin from one of them and activated the power of Source Tracing. He quickly sensed something.
"He flickered back to where he started?"
His gaze shifted and settled on a mountain peak barely five hundred kilometers away. The Great Annihilation Sword Qi thundered down, and under the destructive power within the sword qi, that small peak, some twenty-odd kilometers across, was ground into nothingness.
A figure hidden in that area shot skyward in the wake of the destruction, the fiendish flames around him a great deal weaker than when the fight began.
"You really have a lot of Dao Lord Realm talismans! Did you find a Dao Lord's hidden cache?" Though Yaoguang phrased it as a question, his tone left no room for doubt.
Only a Dao Lord Realm talisman could have slipped past the perception of his True Spirit Light.
"Deputy Sect Master Yaoguang, please calm down!" The Golden Lion Fiend Lord capitulated with remarkable speed. "Spare me, and I will tell you at once where the Dao Lord's hidden cache is!"
"After I kill you, I can find the hidden cache just as easily." Yaoguang deployed the Heaven-Sealing Stele once more, sealing off space.
A newly formed Void Sword came slashing down right after it.