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Translator: Truth
Editor: Dhael Ligerkeys
Over twenty people were dead or seriously injured after the first two Explosive Wards were triggered. The rest were having a hard time withstanding the ongoing effects of the remaining wards as well. From time to time, someone would cry out in pain and die.
The defensive ward surrounding Lu Ye and Ju Jia had shattered a while ago. Although the defensive ward was pretty tough, it could only withstand that much damage. In fact, it had broken down after the first wave of assaults. It was just that no one could spare the effort to attack them right now.
Standing on the rock, Lu Ye kept waving his ward flags here and there to maximize the effects of his wards. The battlefield was chaotic to put it mildly.
“Get on your flying Spirit Artifacts and get out of range of his wards!” Someone finally noticed they were losing horribly and shouted.
They had come here with the confidence that they would be able to remove Lu Ye’s head from his shoulders, and yet they had suffered huge casualties before they even managed to get close to him. Naturally, the best plan right now was to escape the traps and regroup. Since there was no telling if there were more wards in this place, their best escape option was to fly into the sky.
No matter how skilled Lu Ye was in ward creation, he could not possibly cover the entire sky.
The words of that cultivator washed over his fellow cultivators like a bucket of ice water. Recognizing the wisdom of the advice, they immediately summoned their flying Spirit Artifacts.
In a forest filled with large trees, gigantic canopies and Heavens know how many more obstacles in the way, flying via telekinesis honestly wasn’t their first option of escape. The branches alone were a hazard that might see them falling right back into the death trap beneath their feet. Right now though, they had no better option.
Countless Spirit Artifacts started rising to the sky. The survivors were just about to escape this death trap when suddenly, a new set of patterns appeared on the ground and joined together to form a new ward.
The second the ward was activated, every cultivator in the air suddenly felt as if a mountain was pressing down on their shoulders, and they weighed a thousand pounds in an instant. Despite their best efforts, they were unable to withstand the invisible pressure pushing them back toward the ground.
“Aerial Lock?” A cultivator cried out in fear and panic.
There were few cultivators in the Cultivation World who hadn’t heard of the Aerial Lock Ward, but it should be beyond the ability of a Spirit Creek Realm cultivator to create. This time, no one was able to keep their cool.
In fact, it wasn’t an Aerial Lock Ward. A true Aerial Lock Ward would’ve stripped them of their ability to fly completely. The ward currently affecting the Thousand Demon Ridge cultivators was just an ongoing effect ward with Gravity Well as the core. If these cultivators were strong enough to outmuscle the gravitational pull, they could still rise into the air and escape. However, how could a Spirit Creek Realm cultivator possibly escape the effects of an entire ward?
Cries of horror and blood curdling screams resounded throughout the forest as they fell from the sky. Worse still, a powerful and wide-range spell engulfed them in a sea of flames before they could even hit the ground. It was Yi Yi launching what seemed like a gigantic fire lotus. Her arms were pointed at the air as Spiritual Power surged around her.
All Thousand Demon Ridge cultivators caught within her spell were turned into screaming fireballs.
This was just the beginning. Ju Jia ran forward and grabbed the leg of a falling cultivator. He then swung the man at all nearby enemies like he was a large mace.
Lu Ye had also leaped down from the rock with one hand pressed lightly against the hilt of the Inviolable. The scene around him was something straight out of someone’s worst nightmares, and yet he looked like he was taking a walk in the park as his nine flying weapons flew out of his Weapon Holder and killed everyone around him. From time to time, he would unsheath the Inviolable to end an enemy’s life.
Finally, Amber had manifested its true body next to him and was leaping all over the battlefield with uncanny agility. While light gold mutant energy coiled around its body like smoke, it smashed open the heads of every Thousand Demon Ridge cultivator around it like watermelons. If one strike wasn’t enough, then two would do it.
It wasn’t that the Thousand Demon Ridge group wasn’t prepared. Everyone who dared to enter the forest and come after Lu Ye was a cultivator who had switched to a Heaven Grade cultivation technique. Even the weakest among them was a Heaven Seven cultivator, not to mention that there were over seventy of them. Their target could be a Cloud River Realm cultivator, and they still would have rushed in without fear.
The problem was that they had walked into Lu Ye’s trap hook, line and sinker. The Two Explosive Wards alone took out nearly one-third of their numbers, and the many wards that activated afterward were even more overwhelming.
As a result, what was a formidable force powerful enough to give even a Cloud River Realm cultivator a run for their money transformed into a disorderly rabble that could not even leverage their numbers to their advantage. Naturally, only a massacre lay at the end of their cultivation journey.
An incense stick later, the battle was over. Mutilated corpses were strewn all around the large rock and the battlefield. The pungent smell of burning flesh mixed with a bloody stench was so thick it was almost tangible. Not a single person in the group of seventy had managed to escape alive.
Some of them really had a chance to escape—there were only four of them after all—but by the time they finally came to their senses, the elusive Yi Yi had managed to intercept them and kill them with Amber’s aid.
The group swept the battlefield and looted everything they could find. Then, they immediately left the battlefield behind.
It wasn’t long before more Thousand Demon Ridge squads converged on this location. Suffice to say, what they found had chilled them to the core.
The five squads who tracked down Lu Ye first had been annihilated to the last. Judging from the messages some of their comrades managed to send before they perished and the various signs on the battlefield, the Vanquisher of Sects had obviously done it using his wards.
For a time, a grim mood permeated all the Thousand Demon Ridge squads. Lu Yi Ye was a strong, speedy bastard. They had mobilized the entire Core Circle to hunt him down, and yet he was still able to outrun his pursuers and hide in the Misty Mountains.
Even then, they were optimistic. Now that the bastard had stopped running like a rabbit, they thought they would finally be able to kill him once and for all. Instead, their comrades had been blasted to the Heavens by his wards.
Judging from the remnants on the battlefield, the Vanquisher of Sects had set up at least seven wards. They found many broken ward flags and ward keystones in the vicinity as well.
It was then the Thousand Demon Ridge cultivators realized something they had subconsciously ignored until now.
Whatever made them think that Lu Yi Ye’s ward creation skills were shoddy, when the young man had proven that he could breach even a grand ward?
The Misty Mountains was a mountainous forest that was constantly shrouded in mist and clouds, so it was basically impossible to locate the Vanquisher of Sects in the air. But if they were to search him on the ground, who knows if they might accidentally step into a death trap? The chances they might escape alive were almost nil if that happened.
For a moment, the Thousand Demon Ridge squads felt as if they were suffocating. They felt as if there was nowhere safe in the entire forest.
“All of you are overthinking this.”
Just when the fear was about to swell into full blown panic, someone suddenly stepped into the open and declared, “Lu Yi Ye might be adept at ward creation, but even he cannot possibly do this forever.”
As if to increase the persuasive power of his words, the speaker revealed himself to be a Heaven Nine cultivator. Someone addressed him courteously, “How should we address you, senior brother?”
“I am Qin Zheng of the Thousand Feather Sect.”
Many people inspected their Battlefield Imprint immediately after they heard his name. Someone exclaimed in surprise, “You’re Senior Brother Qin, the ninety-eighth ranker on the Scroll of Supremacy?”
At a certain cultivation level, a cultivator could communicate with the Heavens and dig up certain information that was unavailable to them before through their Battlefield Imprint. The Scroll of Supremacy was part of that.
Qin Zheng’s name was third from the bottom of the Scroll of Supremacy. Even so, it was a position most Spirit Creek Realm cultivators could never hope to reach.
To be honest, they weren’t expecting an elite of the Scroll of Supremacy to join in in the pursuit of Lu Yi Ye. It wasn’t because they weren’t tempted by the bounty on the young man’s head, but because most of them would rather not mingle with lower cultivators.
Not only was Qin Zheng an exception to the rule, he normally preferred to keep a low profile. He would not have revealed his sect if the group’s morale was higher.
Qin Zheng turned a little red when he heard someone calling out his rank. It was because he had appeared on the list just a few days ago, specifically after the Three Tumors had vanished from the Scroll of Supremacy.
“What were you saying, Senior Brother Qin?” The guy who asked his name earlier asked.
Qin Zheng replied, “To be honest with you all, this one is barely a ward a cultivator.” He waved a broken ward flag he had picked up from the ground before continuing, “So you might say that I know a thing or two about wards. This is a ward flag Lu Yi Ye used to set up his wards, and I can tell you right now it was purchased from the Vault of Providence.”
“How can you tell?”
Qin Zheng smiled and summoned a different ward flag into his free hand. “Because I’ve bought them before. At our level, it takes a lot of time and energy to forge a ward flag. That is why most people would choose to buy them from the Vault of Providence. Each ward flag is almost as expensive as a Lower Grade Spiritual Artifact. While I cannot say how many ward flags Lu Yi Ye has bought, I’m sure you’ve all heard of the rumors about him buying a Point Restoration Pill for Li Baxian. Assuming that it is true, there’s no way he had enough Contribution Points to buy too many ward flags.”
Now they understood what he was trying to say. “You’re saying Lu Yi Ye will run out of ward flags eventually?”
“Yes, unless he purchased more of them. From what I could observe, Lu Yi Ye used up at least ten ward flags to set up his traps. I counted four ward keystones in total as well. These items alone cost at least one thousand Contribution Points, and that is assuming he recycles the ward flags that weren’t destroyed in the process.”
“Fuck! That piece of shit sure is wealthy!”
“One thousand Contribution Points… just how many of our comrades did he kill? Dammit!”
“Don’t forget the Point Restoration Pill. That Lu Yi Ye is a leech who sucks out the lifeblood of our Thousand Demon Ridge to strengthen his own.”
For a while, the group could not stop criticizing the shit out of Lu Ye.
Noticing that they were going off topic, Qin Zheng raised his voice and declared, “Anyway, my point is that we have nothing to fear from Lu Yi Ye’s wards. If we were to give up now, then our comrades truly would’ve died for nothing. Yes, I cannot deny that some of us may die in the process of pursuing Lu Yi Ye, but it would be worth it if we could protect the future of our Thousand Demon Ridge, would it not? We really can’t let him grow any stronger than he already is, or there would truly be no one in the Spirit Creek Battlefield who could defeat him anymore. I’m sure that no one here is willing to witness someone like him joining the ranks of the Grand Sky Coalition, right?”
“You are absolutely right, Senior Brother Qin,” someone replied, “Technically speaking, we are traveling in a group. In reality, there is no unified chain of command here. That is the biggest reason the first group fell to that bastard. Since you are a ranker on the Scroll of Supremacy, why don’t you become our commander, Senior Brother Qin?”
A lot of people immediately voiced their support of the suggestion.
Qin Zheng thought for a moment before nodding. “We do need a unified chain of command to succeed. Very well. If you all believe that I am worthy of this position, then I swear to perform to the best of my abilities. Of course, if I turned out to be wanting, and one of you believes that they will be able to do better than me, then please do not hesitate to volunteer yourself. I am not the jealous type.”
