Chapter 385 - 310: Under the Gray Clouds, Heading North Alone
Outside Starlight City, gray clouds hung heavy overhead.
Li Yao remained standing there, motionless, like a stone statue fixed atop the city wall.
In midair, Li Xing didn’t look back, heading straight for the north.
That was the edge of the gray clouds, a boundary that hadn’t receded in over three hundred years.
The wind howled past his ears.
The farther north he went, the colder it became.
A bone-chilling cold seeped through the seams of his robes and clung to his skin, like countless tiny ice needles piercing his pores.
Li Xing used no Power to dispel it, simply letting himself feel the cold.
The most terrifying thing about the corrupted lands was when one couldn’t even feel the cold anymore.
Two hours later, the grayish-black line on the horizon grew thicker and drew closer.
It was no longer a line, but a wall.
A wall of gray clouds, stretching from the ground to an unseen height and blotting out the sky.
The leaden clouds churned, as if something inside was struggling, tearing, and Devouring.
The surface of the cloud wall continually swelled with enormous bulges, only to collapse again.
The bulges were deeper in color, while the collapsed sections revealed an eerie purple glow.
Li Xing slowed his pace, flying gently closer.
When he was still a kilometer from the cloud wall, a scent drifted into his nostrils.
A rotten stench assaulted his nostrils, the nauseating smell of meat left out for too long and then baked by the sun.
Li Xing’s stomach clenched instinctively, but his expression remained unchanged.
He flew straight into the giant wall of gray clouds.
The world before him changed in an instant.
The sky... was gone.
Overhead, there were only churning gray clouds, so thick that not a sliver of light could penetrate.
The clouds pressed down extremely low, in some places nearly scraping the ground, like the underbelly of a prostrate behemoth.
Within the churning clouds, purple lightning occasionally flashed—silent, fleeting bursts of light.
Li Xing looked down at the ground. The Earth was torn asunder by countless massive Rifts.
The widest Rifts spanned dozens of yards, while even the narrowest could swallow a person whole.
The Rock along their edges was not a normal grayish-black, but instead had a sickly purple sheen.
A viscous, dark purple liquid flowed within them, writhing slowly as if it were alive.
Li Xing stared into one of the Rifts, observing it carefully for a moment.
A bubble formed on the liquid’s surface, then burst, releasing a small puff of purple mist.
The mist drifted into the air, and a gust of wind scattered it into a fainter haze.
He took a deep breath. The cloying, rotten stench was even stronger now.
It was like a layer of corpse oil had been smeared on the back of his tongue.
Li Xing continued to fly forward, extending his Starlight Perception to its maximum range.
Everything within a fifty-mile radius appeared clearly in his mind.
The paths of the Rifts, the flow of the purple liquid, the tiny corrupted creatures hiding in the Rock crevices.
The instant Li Xing passed, all these creatures recoiled into their hiding places.
They could sense the aura emanating from him—an aura that sparked instinctual fear.
After flying for another two hours, Li Xing roughly estimated the distance he had traveled.
’I must be at least thirty thousand miles from the Starlight Holy City.’
It was a testament to the sheer vastness of the Yalan Continent.
Ahead in the gray mist, three enormous silhouettes appeared.
Li Xing’s Starlight Perception swept over them.
’Three Corrupt Lords?’
Each of the Corrupt Lords was five hundred feet tall.
The one on the left was humanoid, with twisted limbs and joints that bent the wrong way. Its face was featureless save for a horizontal gash of a mouth, inside which teeth were arranged in three concentric rings.
The one in the middle resembled a bear, but over a dozen Tentacles grew from its back, each tipped with a murky eyeball.
The one on the right was a constantly writhing mountain of flesh. New tumors continually bulged from its surface, only to burst and spatter purplish-black pus.
The instant his Starlight Perception swept over them, they sensed him as well.
The three Corrupt Lords turned toward him simultaneously.
No roars, no threats—they charged straight at Li Xing with lethal intent.
The one on the far left was the fastest. Its five-hundred-foot frame made the Earth tremble with every step. Its horizontal mouth gaped open, and a purple light glowed from deep within its throat.
’Once corrupted, they lose their minds. Utterly reckless.’
When the three Corrupt Lords were two thousand feet away...
Li Xing extended his right hand, his fingers curling slightly.
The Gravity Orbit expanded instantly from his position, enveloping an area a thousand yards in every direction.
The charging Corrupt Lords jerked to a halt.
The very structure of space was being rewritten, and the ground beneath them began to crack and splinter.
The humanoid lord struggled desperately, its limbs flailing madly, but no matter how it thrashed, it could not advance another inch.
It discovered, to its horror, that it was trapped in an invisible sphere.
When it tried to charge forward, space itself would bend, pulling it back to where it started.
When it tried to retreat, space would bend again, dragging it back to the same spot.
It let out a hoarse roar and spat a beam of purple light, trying to attack Li Xing.
But the moment the beam left its mouth, it bent, circled around Li Xing, and shot off in the opposite direction, nearly hitting the lord itself.
The bear-like lord’s dozen-plus Tentacles thrashed wildly. All its eyeballs turned to Li Xing, pupils shooting out rays of chaotic light.
But those rays were also distorted within the Gravity Field, never reaching Li Xing.
The mountain-of-flesh lord had it the worst.
It had no fixed form. The tumors that bulged and burst from its body were compressed by the Gravity Field into tiny droplets that hung suspended in the air.
Then, bathed in the light of the Purification Starlight, they evaporated completely.
Li Xing watched them struggle, his gaze unwavering.
Then, the light of his Purification Orbit flared.
Silver light spread from his body, as gentle as moonlight and as pure as the first snow.
The light fell upon the three Corrupt Lords.
HISSS!!!
The ear-piercing sound of sizzling corrosion erupted!
The horizontal mouth on the humanoid lord’s face began to dissolve.