White Tiger's figure vanished from the spot without leaving even a ripple of spiritual energy. He came and went without a trace, just as he always did.
The abandoned industrial area returned to a dead silence, leaving only the whimpering wind and the increasingly piercing sound of police sirens approaching from afar.
Long Ao's eyelids struggled to open a crack, then closed heavily as he completely passed out.
Chen Guan didn't delay for a second. He bent down to prop Long Ao up, but the sheer weight of the man made him stumble.
He was dead heavy... Long Ao looked heavy, and he was indeed not light at all. If it were a proper illusionist, they really wouldn't be able to carry him.
He muttered to himself, adjusting his posture, and simply slung the man over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Choosing a direction opposite to the approaching official vehicles, he plunged headlong into the labyrinthine alleys.
The bullet screen comments floated by at the right moment.
[He's off, Brother Guan hides his achievements and fame.]
[This wave by White Tiger is an absolute landslide victory. The coolness factor is maxed out.]
[By the way, do Brother Ao and Brother Guan know they are colleagues now? One is Vermilion Bird, the other is a reservist... Speaking of which, doesn't that make Brother Ao Chen Guan's superior?]
[They probably don't know, right? Little Brother Guan hasn't even become a full member yet.]
Chen Guan had no time to pay attention to the banter on the bullet screen; his feet didn't stop moving.
His enhanced spiritual power worked rapidly in his mind, causing the layout of the entire area to surface in his head.
Like a ghost, he perfectly avoided all areas with surveillance cameras, specifically choosing to travel through abandoned pipes and the crevices between buildings.
Ten minutes later, he exerted force to pry open a rust-mottled manhole cover and jumped into an abandoned underground subway platform with Long Ao still on his shoulder.
The air was thick with the choking smell of a mixture of rust, mold, and stale dust.
Chen Guan set Long Ao down, leaning him against a graffiti-covered pillar, and checked the man's breathing.
His breathing was steady, and his chest rose and fell rhythmically.
White Tiger's healing methods were clearly simple and crude, merely keeping him alive. Long Ao's current condition was still a hundred thousand miles away from being fine. After all, he was a summoner, not a life-type Esper. Relying on summons to heal, it was understandable that the healing efficacy was a bit lacking.
But it was enough.
No one would find this place anytime soon, and his own condition was still perfectly intact—at the very least, casting a Raging Flame wouldn't be a problem.
Chen Guan took two steps back and leaned against the cold wall, finally having the time to take stock of his gains this time.
At the same time, a question hovered in his mind—who exactly was the person who sent the message in advance, warning him that he was being targeted?
He had no clues for now.
He stopped dwelling on it and sank his consciousness into the system.
In his field of vision, the popularity points counter had stopped jumping, and the final aftershocks had settled.
A number that was enough to make his breathing stop lay quietly on the panel.
[Popularity Points: 124,880]
One hundred and twenty thousand!
A Tier 7 firework display, followed by the pursuit, the plot twist, and White Tiger's entrance... This series of events had directly multiplied his assets several times over.
Greedy Wolf died a worthy death, as did his two colleagues.
A whole family of loyal martyrs!
The cold enemies had all turned into warm popularity points at this moment.
Chen Guan suppressed the emotions in his heart without the slightest hesitation.
"System, add points to Spirit, 10 points."
[Spirit: 50]
The moment the attribute breached the 50-point threshold, Chen Guan's world was turned upside down.
There was no exaggerated shifting of light and shadow.
It was just that in an instant, it felt as though all the limiters on his brain had been removed.
A drop of water seeped from the top of the tunnel and fell onto the tracks. In his hearing, that sound was broken down into the whistle of the water drop piercing the air, the sizzling sound of it hitting the rust, and the clear chime of it finally shattering.
The trajectory of every speck of dust in the air, the direction of every tiny crack on the wall, the faint sound of blood flowing within Long Ao's body...
The entire world transformed into an endless stream of data, flooding into his mind and being processed in an instant, constructing an unprecedentedly detailed and realistic model.
The previously black-and-white model had now been endowed with color.
This was the world of a Tier 5 Spirit Esper.
Illusions would no longer be mere visual deceptions.
Instead, he could construct out of thin air a reality that could deceive even the five senses.
Chen Guan opened his eyes. The gloomy subway platform was revealed in minute detail to his eyes, as bright as day.
He left the remaining twenty-odd thousand popularity points untouched for the time being, saving them for emergencies.
...
At the same time, in the abandoned industrial area next to Blackwater Pier.
Dozens of heavy armored vehicles bearing the insignia of the Great Wall had already surrounded the place, making it watertight.
Over a hundred Great Wall members in black combat uniforms blocked all the exits. In the sky, several drones hovered, their infrared beams scanning every inch of the ground over and over again.
Long Ye paid no attention to the reports of the subordinates beside him. He crouched down and, with white-gloved fingers, pinched a pinch of scorched black soil.
He brought the soil to his nose and closed his eyes.
A moment later, he opened his eyes, his gaze filled with an unresolvable solemnity.
"Old Master, high concentrations of Tier 7 magical residual have been detected at the scene. It should be Pojun and Qisha from the Flesh Embrace," an adjutant reported in a low voice. "In addition to that, there is an unidentifiable power of extremely high tier. Our instruments cannot even analyze its composition."
Long Ye did not speak.
Of course he knew.
In this soil, he smelled three scents.
One was the nauseating rot of Pojun and Qisha.
One was the aura of Dragon Blood Marrow belonging to the Long family bloodline, which he was all too familiar with—violent, blazing, and carrying a tendency toward self-destruction. His grandson had been here and had even used a taboo item; this was within his expectations.
As for the third...
It was an unfamiliar aura he had never encountered before: gentle and vast, yet carrying an unquestionable, absolute dominance.
It had easily smoothed out the violent frenzy of the Dragon Blood Marrow, and had even roughly erased the traces of Pojun and Qisha's existence from this space.
That person had indeed kept their promise and sent someone over.
"Lock down Jiangcheng, Class A alert." Long Ye stood up. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried the weight of a mountain. "Investigate. Turn all of Jiangcheng upside down if you have to, but find the remnants of the Flesh Embrace."
"Yes, sir!"
...
Abandoned subway platform.
Chen Guan had just adapted to the brand-new perception brought by the surge in his spiritual power when an extremely faint vibration came from Long Ao's direction.
In the past, it would have been absolutely impossible for him to notice it.
But now, in his ultra-precise perception, this vibration was as clear as a beating drum.
He walked over to Long Ao and fished out a still slightly vibrating phone from the other man's pocket.
The screen was lit up, showing a newly received encrypted message.
The sender was an unknown number.
Chen Guan looked at Long Ao's unconscious face, a hint of hesitation flashing in his heart.
Snooping on someone else's phone was immoral.
But considering that mysterious warning message...
To hell with morality.
Chen Guan grabbed Long Ao's finger, swiped it across the screen, and unlocked the phone.
The content of the message was only a single line of text.
A line of text that caused Chen Guan's newly maxed-out brain to instantly crash.
[The ritual is brought forward. The entire city is the sacrifice. — White Tiger.]
e bizarre and supernatural had descended. The previous emperor was a thoroughgoing tyrant; no longer satisfied with human women, he had set his sights on a stunningly beautiful supernatural entity. He met his end in his bedchamber, drained of all his vital essence. As the legitimate eldest son and crown prince, Wang Hao was thus hastily enthroned, becoming the young emperor of the Great Zhou Dynasty. No sooner had he awakened the "Imperial Sign-In Intelligence System" than he was assassinated by a Son of Destiny—a classic villain's opening. The Great Zhou, ravaged by the former emperor's excesses, was in national decline. The great families within its borders harbored their own treacherous schemes, martial sects began to defy the imperial court's decrees, and border armies, their pay and provisions in arrears, grumbled incessantly against the central government. Fortunately, the central capital was still held secure by the half-million Imperial Guards and fifty thousand Imperial Forest Army who obeyed the court's orders, along with the royal family's hidden reserves of power, barely managing to suppress the realm. As the Great Zhou's finances worsened and supernatural activities grew ever more frequent, the court sat atop a volcano. Ambitious plotters everywhere dreamed of overthrowing the dynasty, and even some reclusive ancient powers emerged, attempting to sway the tides of the world. At the first grand court assembly, the civil and military officials nearly came to blows, fighting tooth and nail over the allocation of fifty million taels of silver from the summer tax revenues. The spectacle opened Wang Hao's eyes—the Great Zhou's bureaucracy was not only corrupt but also martially proficient, a cabinet of all-rounders. Some officials even had the audacity to suggest the emperor release funds from the imperial privy purse to address the emergency. Wang Hao suddenly felt weary. Let it all burn.
. As long as he maintains the villain image and follows the plot to the grand finale, he can obtain generous rewards and return to the real world. So Gu Chen'an entered the role and began to act as a scumbag villain, but who would have expected that the female leads could hear his inner thoughts. Miss Su from the Su family was shocked: "I originally thought Gu Chen'an was a scumbag, but I didn't expect he turned out to be a gentleman! What? You said I have to call off the engagement? I definitely won't, I'll piss you off!" Bai Yuan Tian was dumbfounded: "Young Master Gu is usually unreasonable and a complete brat, but he actually calls me little sweetie in his heart? What, Young Master Gu even said he likes me?" As the female leads' images collapsed more and more, the plot also collapsed with it. Gu Chen'an looked at all this chaos. "Ladies, don't aggro me, if you keep this up the male lead really will stab me, I still need to survive to the grand finale!"
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
