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Translator: Truth
Editor: Dhael Ligerkeys
As usual, Lu Ye kicked off the battle by launching his flying weapons at his enemy. Nine auras slammed into the body-tempering cultivator’s Shield Spirit Artifact so hard that his body shook, and the light on the shield weakened with each impact.
The body-tempering cultivator was shocked to say the least. He knew just how powerful his Shield Spirit Artifact was, and yet it had lost a ton of Spiritual Power in a matter of seconds. That was just how powerful Lu Ye’s attack was.
By the time all nine flying weapons had struck the shield, Lu Ye was already in front of the body-tempering cultivator. He activated Gravity Well as he brought down the Inviolable like lightning.
An unimaginable pressure pressed down on the body-tempering cultivator. He felt like he was struck by a mountain, not a saber. Although he ultimately managed to withstand the blow, he still nearly dropped to one knee.
The body-tempering cultivator pushed his Spiritual Power so hard that his entire face was red. He let out a mighty roar, pushed back Lu Ye’s saber, and brought down his spiked hammer all at the same time.
Lu Ye’s flying weapons appeared from the sides and slammed into the spiked hammer, causing it to miss and strike the floor right next to Lu Ye instead. There was enough force behind the blow to cause some cracks.
Spiritual Power boiled around Lu Ye as he thrust his saber forward. He was a Heaven Eight cultivator, and his saber was empowered by two Sharp Edges. Right now, his offensive power was off the charts.
The Shield Spirit Artifact’s aura vanished instantly. In fact, the shield itself shattered into pieces with a loud crack.
The body-tempering cultivator’s expression turned horrified as Lu Ye brought his flame-wreathed saber down. He instinctively tried to call for surrender.
It was at this moment Amber—the white tiger had been crouching on his shoulder this entire time—opened its mouth and let out a mighty roar. A visible shockwave swept across his body and caused his thoughts to go blank for an instant. As a result, he missed the window to say the words he needed to say to survive.
Metal cut through flesh, and blood splattered everywhere!
The body-tempering cultivator took two unsteady steps back before collapsing on the ground. His wide open eyes were full of grievance even as they gradually turned glassy.
He knew he was no match for Lu Ye, but he thought he would have the time to surrender at least as a body-tempering cultivator. However, Amber had ruined his one shot at surviving at the last moment.
Yi Yi appeared and asked, “Done already?”
The girl was extremely unhappy. It was because she didn’t even have the chance to participate!
They picked up the loot and requested the Heavens to teleport them away from the battlefield. After they had returned to the wooden building, Lu Ye checked the Scroll of Supremacy and confirmed that he was now in the ninety-eighth spot. The challenger could challenge the ranker five places above their spot at most. In Lu Ye’s case, that was the ninety-third ranker.
He didn’t do so though. Instead, he challenged the ninety-fifth ranker. The reason he did not challenge the ninety-sixth and ninety-seventh ranker was because they belonged to the Grand Sky Coalition, of course.
Since he entered the Core Circle, the Thousand Demon Ridge had attacked him like he had massacred their nine generations. If he wasn’t as strong as he was, he would’ve died a million times already.
Naturally, he was quite resentful of their actions even though he understood why they had done this. Forget that he was a brash young man, even the Buddha would be provoked into violence if you pushed him too far. It was why he had chosen to break out of the Myriad Poison Forest by force instead of stealth. For one, he needed to accumulate the Contribution Points necessary to buy his ward flags. Two, he wanted to give his pursuers a taste of their own medicine.
But of course, he couldn’t challenge the entire world all the time. The risks alone made it something to be attempted only once in a blue moon.
On the other hand, the challenge battles of the Scroll of Supremacy was a completely different story. Since the battle only featured one-on-ones, he never had to worry about being ganged up by multiple cultivators.
That was why he decided that he was going to kill every Thousand Demon Ridge cultivator he encountered along the way. It was only right considering all the attacks he had received so far!
The ninety-fifth cultivator wasn’t as busy as the bottom feeders, so Lu Ye’s challenge request went through and was accepted in just a short time. After the Heavens teleported him into the battlefield, Yi Yi immediately hid herself as she had before. Amber was also crouching on Lu Ye’s shoulder
Lu Ye examined his environment and discovered that it was a massive desert. The hot sun was hanging in the middle of the sky, and the air felt hot enough to scald a mortal’s skin. Wherever he looked, there was only yellow sand. Not only that, his opponent was nowhere to be seen…
Lu Ye immediately determined that his opponent was probably a spell cultivator who majored in Fire Attribute or Earth Attribute spell techniques. No other cultivator would choose a terrain like this.
Lu Ye could not be bothered to search for his enemy across an entire desert, so he just stayed where he was and waited for the signal. A while later, Yi Yi messaged him saying that she had found the enemy. As predicted, they were a spell cultivator.
Meanwhile, the Thousand Demon Ridge was in shambles yet again. The Yi Ye Elimination Front were searching for the Vanquisher of Sects all over the Core Circle to no avail. No one knew where he had hidden himself. It was almost as if the young man had vanished into thin air.
It was at this moment Lu Yi Ye’s name appeared on the Scroll of Supremacy once more. As it turned out, the sonuvabitch was climbing the rank list!
At first, only a handful of people were aware of this. However, all eyes were on the Scroll of Supremacy once the news had spread.
They watched as Lu Yi Ye climbed the Scroll of Supremacy at meteoric speed. When they first noticed him, he was only at the ninety-fifth spot. However, it only took him half a day to ascend to the eighty-second spot. Another half a day passed, and he was at the seventy-third spot. When the following day came, he was at the sixty-fifth spot!
The speed at which he was climbing the rank list was ridiculous to say the least. Moreover, it didn’t look like he was planning to stop any time soon. He would be climbing even faster if it wasn’t for the fact that the rankers he challenged often made use of the four-hour preparation time to the max. The waiting actually cost him far more time than the actual fights.
What angered the Thousand Demon Ridge even more was that Lu Yi Ye was challenging every Thousand Demon Ridge cultivator in his way instead of skipping them to save himself some time and energy. As if that wasn’t bad enough, none of them had survived the challenges!
As a result, a strange phenomenon was happening on the list. The twenty rankers behind Lu Ye all belonged to the Grand Sky Coalition.
This had never happened before as both the Thousand Demon Ridge and the Grand Sky Coalition were overflowing with talent. Usually, it was rare enough for a group of four or five rankers on the Scroll of Supremacy to all belong to the same faction, much less twenty of them. Now? Lu Ye had done something unprecedented yet again.
For a time, countless Thousand Demon Ridge cultivators were angry both at Lu Ye and their own rankers. They just could not understand how these so-called future pillars of their faction would be so weak. Even if they were no match for Lu Ye, why didn’t they just forfeit the battle and save their own lives? Surely they had enough sense and time to do that, right?
Regardless, it was clear that Lu Yi Ye was targeting them on purpose. He was slapping the Thousand Demon Ridge’s face so to speak.
If the rank list was created by cultivators, then they would have had a million ways to manipulate it. At the very least, they could’ve removed it and stopped their shame from spreading further. Unfortunately, the Scroll of Supremacy was generated by the Heavens, and it was impossible for mere cultivators to interfere with it in any way. Any Spirit Creek Realm cultivator with sufficient strength could connect to Scroll of Supremacy and check it.
The Thousand Demon Ridge was deeply humiliated by the rank list to say the least. Every time someone took a look at the list, they would feel their faces turning deep red with shame. It was as if someone had slapped them multiple times in a row.
While Lu Ye’s mad actions deeply humiliated the Thousand Demon Ridge, the Grand Sky Coalition was celebrating as a matter of course. Countless Grand Sky Coalition cultivators were spreading the news as far as they could reach. Every time Lu Ye ascended a rank, and the Thousand Demon Ridge cultivator he was challenging had disappeared from the list, a cheer would break out among the crowd.
By the third day since Lu Ye began climbing the Scroll of Supremacy, he was sitting at the fiftieth spot!
Contrary to his faction or the Thousand Demon Ridge’s feelings, Lu Ye was feeling rather miffed and disappointed. It was because none of them was strong enough to put up a fight at all.
No matter what cultivator faction they belonged to or the terrain they chose, Lu Ye almost always ended the battle shortly after he or Yi Yi had located them. Even better, Amber’s roar prevented them from being able to surrender and live.
In fact, Amber’s only role on the battlefield was to sit on Lu Ye’s shoulder and roar the second it looked like the challenger was about to speak. So far, no one who had been struck by Amber’s roar had managed to regain their mind fast enough to survive the battle!
When Lu Ye wasn’t fighting the rankers, he was cultivating and feeding the Tree of Glyphs the Flame of Earthen Spirits. Since he was so busy these days, he had only fed it half of the Flames of Earthen Spirits he had bought. Still, he was able to obtain two new Glyphs. They were Glyph: Golden Arc and Glyph: Invoke Lightning…
He already suspected it was the case when he saw their names, but upon absorbing their information, he discovered that he could use them as spell techniques after construction.
Intentionally or not, the Tree of Glyphs was bringing him further down the path of a spell cultivator.
That said, he suspected that the spell techniques cast using these two Glyphs would be quite different from the usual spell technique because his Primary Attribute was Fire, and his Supplementary Attribute was Gold. Also, the best way to use these two Glyphs was actually in offensive wards. He was sure they would perform wonderfully with the proper application.
He had already issued a challenge request to the forty-eighth ranker, but the battle had not begun immediately even though his opponent had accepted the challenge. It was likely he was going to have to wait another four hours before the battle would ensue. So, he took out another Flame of Earthen Spirits and fed the Tree of Glyphs. While doing so, he spared some concentration to cultivate as well.
The remaining twenty Flame of Earthen Spirits were devoured in no time. Once done, Lu Ye looked at the Tree of Glyphs expectantly. He was hoping to see if it had obtained more Glyphs.
His eyes contracted into needles as he saw a clump of leaves glowing red…
He had encountered this exactly one time in the past. It was when he was absorbing the True Phoenix Flame in the Burning Lands. At the time, an entire clump of leaves had reacted more or less the same way. It wasn’t until the Tree of Glyphs had devoured the True Phoenix Flame completely did they burst into flames. After that, the image of the Vermillion Bird had appeared on the tree crown, and he had obtained Glyph: Fire Phoenix.
Since this was happening again, it meant that he was most likely getting a special Glyph!
Lu Ye examined the leaves closely. Only a dozen or so leaves were glowing red, which was nowhere as impressive as Fire Phoenix. Even so, he still looked forward to the Glyph a lot. In fact, he had been hoping to receive special Glyphs since Fire Phoenix because they were far, far more powerful than the average Glyph.
The arrangement of the glowing leaves on the Tree of Glyphs weren’t random. If he wasn’t mistaken, it was shaped like a… pair of wings?
Lu Ye immediately perked up.
[Could it be…]
[It could be…]
[It better be…]
Unfortunately, twenty Flames of the Earthen Spirits weren’t enough to manifest the Glyph completely. He would need to feed the Tree of Glyphs more flames to confirm his suspicion.
