The space before Xu Mu suddenly compressed and warped. Before he had time to react, Leng Xing appeared right in front of him.
With a casual flick, he sent out a purple blade of sword energy. In the blink of an eye, it was upon Xu Mu’s face.
Xu Mu was secretly startled. That speed was truly too fast—at his current level, he simply could not react in time.
If there were no one else nearby, then forget an eighth-rank opponent—even an attack from a seventh-rank expert would be something he would have to take head-on. The odds of evading it were extremely slim.
Buzz!
The instant the purple blade touched Xu Mu, it vanished.
The next moment, the purple blade appeared directly above Youhuo’s head.
Youhuo had only just gotten to his feet. When he sensed the attack descending from above, he froze in shock.
“What the hell?”
Leng Xing immediately dashed over, but he realized there was no time. He could only trigger the blade’s explosion.
Boom!
With a deafening blast, a massive storm swept through the area, sending Youhuo flying backward.
Leng Xing immediately flew over and caught Youhuo in his arms.
“Elder, you almost got me killed.”
At that moment, the flame on Youhuo’s earring had dwindled to only a tiny flicker.
“Fortunately, I detonated the attack early. If it had pierced through your body before exploding, you might have died.”
Leng Xing stared solemnly at Xu Mu. “I didn’t expect you to know a technique that can redirect attacks.”
The looks everyone cast at Xu Mu changed completely. No wonder someone at his level had dared to come here alone.
Now they finally understood why. Put simply, his strength was formidable.
“Senior of the Nine Nether Clan, that move is called Shifting Stars. It can redirect an attack onto a third party. As long as only you and he are nearby, your attack is guaranteed to hit him!”
Wu Tian shouted from the distance.
He had not expected Xu Mu to be this powerful. Even an eighth-rank expert had failed to take him down instantly.
Wu Tian had already given up on facing Xu Mu alone. To deal with him, they would have to join forces with others.
Xu Mu turned to look at Wu Tian, frightening him so badly that he immediately tensed up and hid behind the two black-robed figures nearby.
At the same time, three more black-robed figures appeared on distant rooftops.
As for Xu Mu, some of the people around him had now recognized his strength and no longer dared to try snatching anything from him.
At this moment, Tian Bufan appeared before Xu Mu. “What I want to ask is whether the two characters in your possession are the same. If they are, I’m willing to pay a high price for them.”
Xu Mu smiled faintly. “You certainly know how to speak. The ones I have really are identical.”
As he spoke, Xu Mu kept both hands in his trouser pockets and took out the seals inside, holding them up for Tian Bufan to see.
He was deliberately displaying the characters as well. After all, there were many seals bearing the character *Xi*, and this would keep him from becoming everyone’s target.
Just as everyone was examining the characters on Xu Mu’s seals, the world before them suddenly went dark.
The sun had been blazing only moments ago, but now the surroundings seemed to have turned into night.
Then, a huge golden sphere of light appeared high in the sky.
Like the sun itself, the sphere was so bright that no one present could look directly at it.
Yet it was like a lamp in the darkness. While it illuminated the ground below, the sky overhead remained pitch-black.
Buzz!
All of a sudden, a gigantic eye appeared upon that golden sphere of light.
It was a black eye, scanning the people below.
Everyone below narrowed their eyes warily and looked up toward the heights.
“Hahaha! There are so many of you.”
The light sphere let out a hearty laugh. “This is the final formation. As long as you can break through it, you’ll be able to reach our true territory.”
“What are you?” the goateed old man standing beside Tian Bufan asked with his hands behind his back. “Are you the one who created the formation, or a soul that resides within it?”
Xu Mu was inwardly surprised. As expected of an expert from a top-tier faction—the old man had clearly encountered quite a few souls that depended on formations to exist.
Just like the one who had previously tried to possess Xu Mu.
“I don’t know what I am, either. I seem to have been set up this way.”
The eye high above continued, “I’ve appeared only to tell you how to leave.”
At this, everyone present pricked up their ears.
“The first group to enter will randomly receive seals. After that, night will fall, and monsters will appear.”
As the eye high above spoke, densely packed armored figures emerged from beneath the yellow sand.
Green light glowed from the eyes of every one of them.
“These monsters cannot be killed. As long as it remains night, they will continue to exist. Then dawn will come, and the sky will brighten in an instant. At that time, seals will randomly appear again on the second floors of the buildings here.”
The eye continued, “After four rounds, as long as you obtain four seals bearing different characters, you’ll be able to leave this formation.”
“After four rounds? Other than the one at the beginning, that means we only need to survive three more nights to gather the characters?”
Xiao Gui raised his head and asked.
“That’s right. Most of these characters are useless scribbles. Among all the characters that appear over the four rounds, you can only assemble one key—and that key will allow just one person to leave the formation.”
After saying this, the eye high above closed once more. Only the golden light sphere remained, suspended in the air.
Crack! Crack!
The armored figures in the distance all began walking toward them. As they moved, the distinct sound of bones grinding against one another could be heard.
Tian Bufan quickly rose into the air and landed in front of the armored figures. He crouched down and pressed one hand against the ground.
A formation rapidly took shape, covering all the armored figures before him.
Chilling air flashed across the formation, freezing all the armored figures in an instant.
But in the next moment, the armored figures transformed into black vapor and vanished. Then, more of them emerged from the desert in every direction.
“To put it simply, the purpose of these monsters is only to prevent us from resting.”
Tian Bufan spoke indifferently. “As for the true purpose of this formation, it’s to make us turn on one another.”
Xu Mu silently nodded. That was indeed the case. After four rounds, they could only assemble one complete key, and it could be used by only a single person.
With so many people here, there simply wouldn’t be enough to go around.
What was more, the people trapped in the formations ahead were still continuing to pour into this place.
Just then, two more people appeared on the roof of the building.
They were experts of the eighth rank, one from the Holy Light Clan and the other from the Black Moon Clan.
The elder of the Black Moon Clan also bore a crescent moon on his forehead. He immediately went over to Zilan Yin. “Ninth Princess, I’ve been searching for you for a long time. I never expected you to get in here ahead of me.”
“Heh, you’re not late. You arrived at just the right time.”
Zilan Yin suddenly addressed everyone around them. “Since only one person can enter at a time, and those who come afterward will have to wait a long while, why don’t the four great divine clans invoke the Divine Clan Treaty?”
“Good idea. Otherwise, things will descend into chaos.”
After taking a healing pill, Youhuo got back to his feet, though his face was still somewhat pale.
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
grated, and just when he finally managed to get into an elite academy, he discovered that he actually had a system, and the way to earn rewards was extremely ridiculous. So for the sake of rewards, he had no choice but to start acting ridiculous as well. Su Cheng: "It's nothing but system quests after all." But later, what confused Su Cheng was that while he was already quite ridiculous, he never expected those serious characters to gradually become ridiculous too. And the way they looked at him became increasingly strange... (This synopsis doesn't do it justice, please read the full story)
