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Chapter 269: Another!?
🕑 Added 2023-09-25 17:36:01 +0000 UTCShorter chapter today, but there will be some long ones starting tomorrow. Enjoy!
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Artus Emberheart opened his eyes when someone knocked on his door. Of course, he’d sensed them coming; his Dao perception stretched for a hundred miles around.
“Come in,” he commanded, and the door opened soundlessly.
“Warden,” the leonine who entered saluted him humbly. “I have a report on the missing teams.”
“Speak.”
“More of them disappeared. We’ve tracked down the numbers of missing people over the last month, and they are unusually high in seven low-level zones. The latest casualties were reported a few minutes ago in zone sixteen. We suspect there is someone out there hunting us.”
“Hmm.” The Warden’s eyes narrowed slightly. His mane fluttered in the gentle breeze generated by the mere act of him thinking. “It is not a prisoner, as they would not be able to traverse multiple zones. Someone snuck in from the outside. Investigate every teleporter connected to Hell for immortals at the middle D-Grade and above, and recruit ten low immortals and a healer to scour zone sixteen. The intruders could still be there. If you don’t find them, be prepared to move to the next zone where disciples go missing.”
“Yes, Warden,” the leonine replied. He hesitated for a split-second, then, in a voice as steady as before, added, “What if the enemy is too strong?”
Artus gazed over this leonine. He was one of his young and promising personal disciples at Level 180. It would be a pity if he died.
“It’s a low-level zone,” he replied. “When you find them, the deacon shadowing you will eliminate anyone over Level 165. You should be able to deal with the remaining ones. If you fail, nobody will interfere.”
The leonine nodded sharply. “Of course, Warden.”
“You may leave.”
“Yes, Warden.”
***
A team of Animal Kingdom inner disciples had just finished putting down an elderly prisoner. One of their members had gotten heavily injured in the battle, but the rest were fine.
“I got a level!” a canine woman cheered.
“Me too!” another canine, a man, smiled at her. The glint of insanity in both their eyes sent chills down the spine of the third member, a deer person with antlers the size of tree branches.
“Let’s get going,” said this third person, looking left and right. “There are rumors of many teams not returning lately. I wouldn’t want to get caught out.”
“Heh. What are you afraid of, coward? A prisoner defeating all four of us?”
Suddenly, the air around them lightened. Their hair rose. “Who’s there!?” one of the canines shouted, only to be answered by a cold, young-sounding voice.
“Your deer friend was wise, but you delayed. It’s too late now.”
The four cultivators—including the fourth one, an injured lycan—looked around wildly. “There!” the deer man shouted, pointing at a spot between the trees, where a figure awaited—clad in a long gray robe, with a dark hood draped over their face.
“Who are you?” the deer man shouted again, but the figure only laughed.
“Your death!” it replied. Then, it disappeared. No—it simply moved too fast.
“Careful!” the injured lycan shouted, releasing his Dao Domain, but it was pierced and shattered before it could even form. All four inner disciples readied themselves for battle, but all they caught was glimpses. The deer man’s toppled over without warning, cut cleanly in two. The explosion only came after his upper half had slid off the lower one. A bloody hole appeared on the forehead of one of the canines, while the other managed to block a stab, only to have her throat slit almost simultaneously.
All three of the inner cultivators tumbled to the ground, dead in an instant. Only the lycan remained, lying on the ground in a puddle of his own blood as the figure appeared over him.
“I could let you bleed out,” the figure declared, “but then, I wouldn’t get the levels. Just blame your bad luck for putting you in my way.”
The lycan gritted his teeth. Before he could reply, his brain was pierced, and he was dead.
Four immortals, gone in the blink of an eye.
The hooded figure shook its weapon once, shaking off the blood, then coldly turned around and disappeared in the wilderness.
***
Jack shot out of the foliage, approaching four people in a small crater. They were bruised and bloody—one of their member had already fallen to his punches.
“Formation!” An eagler—a half-eagle half-human similar to Fesh Wui from the Integration Tournament—shouted out. Four immortal Dao Domains sprang out, completing each other to form a whole greater than its parts. Four grand Daos boiled under it.
Jack fell on them like a missile. His Dao Domain unfolded, a purple dome of violence. Now that he’d leveled up a few times, glittering stars were visible in the purple, each a miniature fist waiting to strike. Simply watching his Dao gave one a sense of unavoidable, impending doom.
Jack’s Dao Domain ground against the combined domain of the other four, slowly but surely pushing them back. At the same time, Brutalizing Aura erupted from his body, filling his opponents with visions of their deaths and weakening them. They struggled to hold on, but it only took one of them succumbing to the pressure for the formation to collapse.
The weakest of the four was only Level 130—how could they resist Jack?
Their combined Dao Domain deteriorated. It crumbled under Jack’s pressure, slowly approaching the ground as the purple dome pushed on it from above. The four inner disciples were sweating.
“Why are you doing this!? Stop!” the strongest of them, an eagler at Level 161, shouted. He was the only one above Level 140.
“Sorry,” Jack replied coldly, “but you are my enemies.”
The eagler cawed, stirring the very wind. Seeing that their domain was about to crumble, he let it go completely and mustered everything for a full-power strike. “WINDS OF HELL!”
Jack had been waiting for exactly that. As his domain overpowered theirs and reached the ground, pushing down everyone but the eagler, he clenched his fist and shot it out.
“METEOR PUNCH!”
The purple stars in his domain fused into the meteor, augmenting it even further. When it clashed against the eagler’s tornado, it didn’t even stop; it simply pushed through unstoppably, dominating the air and smashing hard into the earth, right where his four enemies lay suppressed.
A tremendous impact shook the ground. Jack narrowed his eyes to protect them from the explosion, letting the shockwave ruffle his pants and hair. For a moment, the world was chaos—then, everything calmed down, and Jack was left alone in the wilderness with five mangled corpses.
Level up! You have reached Level 163.
It was lucky he got a level. They’d been getting scarcer and scarcer lately. In the month he’d spent terrorizing the low-level hunting zones, his level had grown dramatically, but so had the difficulty of each successive level-up. At least the System acknowledged the difficulty of finding D-Grade opponents and didn’t make things too slow, but still… Jack estimated he must have killed at least a hundred inner disciples so far over five hunting zones, creating a tiny but noticeable gap in the Animal Kingdom’s forces.
Not a single inner disciple had escaped him so far, but they were bound to have noticed something was wrong.
Perhaps I should hide out for a while, he thought calmly, by now used to the sight of immortal corpses. Or I could just move directly to the mid-level zones.
He was a bit leery of doing that. When he first entered the low-level zones, he had been Level 146, while his opponents ranged from 130 to 165. Those first battles hadn’t been easy.
If he tried to assault a team of mid D-Grade disciples while only being a low D-Grade himself, things might get too risky. Even if he could beat them, he had no confidence in preventing everyone from escaping—unless he used his Life Drop, but that was something he would really rather avoid.
However, he also didn’t have time to waste. Even hunting furiously, he’d gotten fifteen levels in a month. At this rate, he wouldn’t get anywhere near the peak of the D-Grade in the five months he had left.
What a dilemma, he thought again, clicking his tongue. Where are you, Shol… I need you to pick up the slack.
Done ruminating, Jack zoomed off. The more inner disciples he killed, the higher the chances of people looking for him. He flew low, crossing the jungle until he reached a distant mountain, where he darted into an obscured cave.
This place had become his house for the past few days. It contained nothing, but he was an immortal; he needed nothing.
Well, nothing besides a hiding place, which the cave gladly offered.
Jack stepped inside, releasing a long sigh. He tossed his credit card and treasures on a leaf pillow he had lying by the side, then sat down cross-legged in the middle of the cave. It wasn’t large—ten feet from end to end and rectangular-ish in shape, it contained nothing but the bare necessities.
At least it had a view, whenever he chose to remove the boulder sealing the cave mouth.
Jack then reached for some of the food he had lying around—cooked bird meat, mostly—and started eating. He didn’t need to do that anymore, but it helped him focus. He also spared a few glances for his credit card.
After his previous one had evaporated in the heavenly tribulation as he reached the D-Grade, he’d gotten a new one from the Exploding Sun, filled with a token ten million credits. For an immortal, he was considered dirt poor. He really looked forward to reaching a hundred million and purchasing the telepathy function for his faction, but he’d discovered that the inner disciples hunting here did not carry their credit cards with them.
Misers.
At least, when he did manage to gather some money, he would be able to contact the professor and find out what the hell was going on on Earth.
I hope everyone is okay… Man, I really should have asked Shol to lend me some. He must be a billionaire—with a B!
Hunting the Animal Kingdom disciples was a risky endeavor. Therefore, Jack couldn’t slack off on safety measures. After every successful hunt, he would lay low for at least eight hours, sometimes more. When the number of immortals in a hunting zone decreased noticeably, he would change zones.
In those eight hours, he would meditate. He had no time to waste, so this was the best way to keep himself busy. He’d brought the Dao Battery from his cellar in the estate as well. It waited right next to him in the small cave, making it a Fist Cave.
This time, like every other, Jack finished his meal, then made himself comfortable and closed his eyes. Instantly, he dived into his soul world, the bare rock replaced with starry terrain and a Dao Tree.
He’d been looking forward to this. Because, as he leveled up, his Dao Tree had begun to evolve.
