Archfiend

Chapter 99: Spirit Treasure Vortex (3)

Xu Yangyi licked his lips, his mouth heavy with the reeking taste of blood. His lung had just been pierced through by an unknown magik artifact… His breathing had become full with bloody chunks… 

Grimly lifting his chin, he faced towards the side and spat out. He looked at his counterpart and suddenly smirked, “That’ll have to wait and be put off until later if you’re still even alive.” 

Xu Yangyi’s intent to kill didn’t need to be explained. Whoever obtained the demon core first wouldn’t only be able to borrow the support of the amassed ocean of qi within the thousand-year-old origin crystal and experience an instant resurrection in both flesh and magical energies, but would moreover be capable of forcing all to tread carefully! [1]

Regardless of Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, or Core Formation… None ventured whether or not the possessor would make the demon core explode!

“Hahaha!” God Ming faced the sky and cackled, yet before he could finish laughing he began to cough loudly as his wounds were aggravated. “Good… I will be waiting on you!”

There was no further talk. They were waiting… on the eruption of this great treasury, a thousand-year-old hidden treasure. Even Daomaster Jadewave’s demon form was unable to support it, transforming into shreds… However!

The demon core… would absolutely not shatter! Soon… very soon, it would appear on the water’s surface! Both of them could feel… down below, there existed a fist-sized object that happened to breaking through layers of obstacles. Five seconds… four seconds… three seconds… Afterwards, it was certain to spout out!

Already at a speed too difficult to distinguish with the naked eye, this blanket of golden prismatic light dyed the water’s top layer with a light-blue halo from the lake bottom!

Xu Yangyi’s gaze turned solemn. No one knew, but even now, he was teetering on the edge of collapse. He used Innersight; the small stone in his qi sea was shockingly covered with cracks! A feeling of bloodthirst and frenzy that he was almost hard-pressed to contain battered each of his muscles as a few minor cracks swiftly invaded the stone sliver by sliver. He gritted his teeth and forcibly stifled the discomfort in his body, unwaveringly locking onto the vortex’s bottom.

The inside had already been contaminated red by a tremendous amount of Daomaster Jadewave’s blood, calculated by the ton. Of every wound on Xu Yangyi’s body, the bloody lakewaters seemed to find a place to drain into! He was ignorant… but drop after drop of pure demon blood quietly flew into his wounds as the seed's cracks became greater in size. It was like the blood was watering the seed!

Two seconds… one second!

The two of them riddled with scars, their gazes flashed explosively. At the same time, God Ming and Xu Yangyi charged towards the heart of the vortex with speeds almost irrespective of first or last!

Meanwhile, a rumbling followed like the sound of rolling thunder. At the heart of the maelstrom, the bottom radiated an aqua-blue color.

Bang… A bolt of white lightning began to echo from within the vortex. Subsequently, there was a second and a third! There was… an immeasurable number! A fist-sized aqua-blue sphere noiselessly appeared at the vortex’s bottom. In its surroundings, there was no trace of water, wind, or life. It seemed like nothing could approach it. It existed there, yet it appeared not to exist there, isolated from the world.

In the instant the sphere emerged, supremely dense qi in the vortex, qi from the shattered millennium-old treasures, unexpectedly solidified! Bolts of qi lightning resonated in this cyclonic maelstrom!

The wind was so furious like it could uproot mountains! The rain so overflowing like it could flood rivers! In an instant, the area below became a nest of thunder spirits!

Xu Yangyi’s heart seemed to palpitate with each rotation of the origin crystal. Based on this light, the magnitude of terror from the qi inside could be felt. It wasn’t the same as Vermilion Snow’s half-completed product. Only perfection could be used to describe this origin crystal.

“It… can only belong to me!!!” Accompanied by manic cackling, God Ming continued to charge, both his eyes scarlet-red. He had left the three-headed demonbeast at his side. Xu Yangyi’s speed wasn’t slower than his in the slightest, but at this moment, what followed was deranged laughter. “Explode!”

At this fleeting juncture of life and death, God Ming dragged the three-headed demonbeast towards Xu Yangyi in rapid advance. In the wake of a loud noise, the beast exploded beside Xu Yangyi!

“Fuck!” Xu Yangyi’s pupils suddenly contracted! The demonbeast’s self-detonation was an additional wound on top of his injuries, but this wasn’t the most crucial matter at all! The most crucial was… 

That the qi shock wave born from the detonation had forcibly brought him across and pushed him out! The origin crystal… was there at the bottom of the vortex!

“Mortal!” God Ming laughed heartily, “You are undeserving to touch this object!”

“When I refine it, the Ming Clan will be certain to personally visit your doorstep to demand repayment!!! HAHAHA!!!”

God Ming’s laughter reverberated throughout the entire vortex. At the beginning, neither of them gave way to the other. For a time, God Ming had once believed his opportunity was lost, yet by a freakish combination of factors, mistakes and errors of both Yin and Yang, he had arrived at this moment!

In this terrible storm, everyone had already been run haggard by scars. Although the loss of the tenth coffin’s explosion was great, how was it comparable to a Core Formation origin crystal? The self-detonation this time was finally enough to fling away that repulsive tick!

“It… is mine!” Already, God Ming’s speed was so fast that it was difficult to make him out! The closer he neared the vortex’s bottom, the more magnificent the blue color was! Even now, he could sense the colossal might akin to holy light inside the origin crystal within reach! 

His hand—already his smile crazed and his eyes scarlet-red—extended with the quickest speed. Behind him, Xu Yangyi had been battered away a good ten-odd meters by the detonation just now. Presently, he had taken the lead, yet there was still ten meters!

It’s mine… It’s mine! This supreme treasure belongs in the possession of I, God Ming, by all rights! I am THE favored son of Heaven and Earth! So long as I touch it… it will immediately hail me as master! Even if a Core Formation master stands before me, they won’t dare act against me! Confronted with another Core Formation cultivator’s origin crystal, do they venture whether I risk not detonating it?

He didn’t look at Xu Yangyi who was behind him. The sliver of a merciless smile hung at the crook of Xu Yangyi’s mouth. As God Ming’s hand neared closer and closer, Xu Yangyi took out his watch again and looked at it.

“Two hours and twenty-three minutes…”

Xu Yangyi closed his eyes and growled, “Li Zongyuan.”

Swoosh! There were two slender tongues, yet they were incomparably precise! At the instant God Ming’s hand was on the verge of touching the origin crystal, they suddenly shot out from above the vortex! One tongue had hooked around God Ming’s middle finger with incredibly accuracy! The other tongue… had hooked his entire soul! The Core Formation origin crystal!

God Ming was stunned. He almost dared not believe in this tremendous reversal. Time appeared in slow motion. The fist-sized origin crystal, in the wake of his eyes and his slowly opening mouth, followed his line of sight… and flew upwards.

The enormous disparity between reality and dream caused the inside of God Ming’s brain to become an empty white expanse. It was only after a full three seconds did he react!

“NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!” Tearing at his heart and splitting his lungs, a miserable scream echoed in the bottom of the entire lake!

This was Xu Yangyi’s true ace! From the beginning, he had been looking at his watch, always waiting upon the time when Li Zongyuan would regain consciousness! From the start, he hadn’t been planning on having a proper talk with God Ming! 

Presently, they were in the water! And Li Zongyuan had just completed his evolution moments ago! There was only one opportunity. Xu Yangyi had kept on enduring, enduring for now! In his spiritual sense, he had finished communicating with Li Zongyuan early on.

God Ming exhausted his full strength as he charged towards the direction from where the tongue had disappeared, like he was insane! However, as soon as he turned around, he saw a giant fist!

Boom! The fist heavily smashed into his face!

Bang! At the same moment, a qi-condensed thunderbolt struck Xu Yangyi’s body with a rumble!

“Puh!” A mouthful of blood sprayed out from the gaps of Xu Yangyi’s rigidly gritted teeth. His whole body was covered with countless wounds of all shapes and sizes, bubbling into a spring of blood in an instant! 

All of a sudden… an unknown number of his bones broke. Even his qi sea was madly shaking, no end in sight! He simply dared not examine his own injuries. Mustering his strength, he used all of his power to raise his fist and pound it into God Ming’s face for a second time!

Yet he hadn’t discovered that at this moment, the small stone inside his qi sea was close to completely shattering! A shiver-inducing aura wildly launched from there within!

“Mongrel!” With his eyes maddened, God Ming tilted his head. His wounds were even more severe than Xu Yangyi’s! Without one or two years rest, they would essentially be unhealable… Before this thought even vanished, a wave of fierce aching graced his nose. Subsequently, it extended to his entire body! Already, Xu Yangyi’s fists were falling down on him like raindrops! 

“Puh! Bah! Hurk!” Arrows of blood flew in the air. The qi lightning was so dense that it was solid. Inevitably, there were several that struck the two of them. Xu Yangyi tenaciously clenched his teeth. Even though the roots of his teeth were trembling, he wouldn’t relinquish this opportunity to defeat the other at all!

The golden core’s disappearance right before his eyes caused God Ming to lose his support pillar. It was an absolute drop from the paradise of heaven to the inferno of hell. He… was already without the slightest will to battle!

Boom! Boom! Boom! Like he was beating leather, Xu Yangyi’s final punch brought God Ming’s body to drag out a long bloody line in the sky. God Ming wailed miserably as he fell into the vortex.

It wasn’t that Xu Yangyi was unwilling to use qi, but rather… he had long since been without a fraction of qi! The combination of Life Sacrification and the Ten Cardinals Red Lotus, added on top of resisting the spirit treasure vortex formed from the ruin of a thousand-year-old treasury, had ultimately delivered him to the stage of a lantern depleted of oil! His qi sea was a void. So long as he wanted to employ a smidgen of qi to even come bubbling around his fist, he would feel a stabbing pain akin to a scraping blade!

In his body, pain swelled forth like a tide, injury upon injury. He moved his hand straight behind him, his vision somewhat hazy, and gently cried out, “Li Zongyuan…”

His voice was marred by the blood that ceaselessly spilled out from the gaps of his teeth.

“Mongrel!” God Ming flew back ten-odd meters, yet surprisingly stood up in madness. His fingers stirred, and he learned of an emptiness on his middle finger! The storage ring on his middle finger was absent!

That damned gremlin! That fiend of an inferior bloodline! It had actually plundered his storage ring and ran off as he was preoccupied with the human trash in front of him!

Damn… Damn! Dammit! Damn it all to hell!

His rationale had already been driven to insanity! To lose something and then regain it, to gain something and then lose it…. It was right before his eyes! In a mere blink, it was a difference of two to three meters, but in the end, the core still wasn’t his!

He had already been beaten to the extent that his facial features were beyond all recognition. Even standing was challenging. Blood flowed from his seven apertures, and he looked on with wide eyes… at Xu Yangyi’s hand which stuck out behind. A tongue delivered a fist-sized object that radiated blue light into Xu Yangyi’s hand. 

“AAAHHH!!!” God Ming turned towards the sky and shouted furiously. That item… was the origin crystal that had almost fell into his grasp just now!

“Origin crystal?” At this moment, several hundred kilometers away in the sky, a blazing rainbow paused, seemingly in a state of immense shock. However, in the next instant, it rushed towards the Four Great Joint Pools with an even swifter speed!

“Did someone… attain Jadewave’s Core Formation origin crystal?” Likewise, a few hundred kilometers elsewhere in a different direction, a startled flush appeared on the face of a woman who was wearing a qipao. Followingly, she was already a thousand meters away with the settling of her next step!

At every location her high heels fell, a lotus was born at each pace. Rootless lotuses swayed gently in the sky as if they were supporting her advance. At the same time, there were also several charging auras cursing loudly!

“This bastard!” 

“Who could possess such fortune! To actually seize a Core Formation origin crystal?! One that was even right in front of us! 

“Urgh… a Core Formation origin crystal… a Core Formation origin crystal! This son of a bitch’s luck is straight out of this world!”

Xu Yangyi’s hand held onto the origin crystal. At this instant, his entire body was already dripping with blood from head to toe, his breathing labored like an ox. However, in that splinter of time that he grasped the origin crystal, he knew that everything had been worth it.

Streaks of blue qi, like a river entering the ocean, quickly and violently flooded Xu Yangyi’s qi sea, and his body was restored at lightning speed. In nearly the blink of an eye, qi immediately poured into his body, filling him to the brim! It moreover continued to rejuvenate him at an incomparably frightening rate! It was practically the same as pressing the resurrect button in a game!

1. Just a note I want to make for people who study Chinese as well. Author tends to use some gaming slang every now and then and “resurrection of flesh and magical energies” is literally “Full Meat, Full Blue” (满肉满蓝). It was confused at first, but quickly made the connection to a red hp bar/blue mana bar.