Chapter 47: Ling Luochen's Worldview Shattered! A Three-Ring Hunting a Five-Ring?
The smoke choking the canyon floor slowly thinned, leaving behind an atmosphere thick with the acrid stench of charred flesh and the nauseating copper tang of stagnant blood.
Long Aotian exhaled a heavy breath, his tense shoulders dropping slightly as he assumed the brutal battle had concluded with the Evil Soul Master's explosive end. Yet, a quick glance at Liu Yuan forced him to swallow his relief. Liu Yuan's jaw was set like carved granite, his posture rigid and coiled for violence.
Liu Yuan stood at the epicenter of the blasted canyon, his Double Pupils pushed to their absolute limits. In his enhanced vision, the mundane world of dirt and stone peeled away, replaced by a complex, flowing schematic of soul power currents. He looked down at the shattered earth. The scattered droplets of pus and blood pooling in the gravel crevices were not congealing like normal blood. They were squirming.
"Something is wrong," Liu Yuan muttered, his voice devoid of warmth. Through his dynamic vision, he keenly sensed that these crimson droplets were wrapped in a viscous, freezing black energy, slowly drawing toward one another as if possessed by an independent, malicious consciousness.
Liu Yuan was a man who left nothing to chance; he would never offer a dying enemy the luxury of a second breath. Without a fraction of hesitation, the soul ring beneath his boots flared to life. The crimson light swirling deep within his Double Pupils ignited into a blinding glare, and two slender, hyper-concentrated beams of destructive pupil light erupted from his eyes, lancing directly into the squirming pools of gore.
Sizzle—sizzle—!
The instant the searing heat struck the tainted blood, a piercing shriek tore through the canyon, sounding like the collective wail of a thousand tortured ghosts. The previously sluggish blood violently convulsed, and thick, suffocating clouds of black mist spewed from the crimson puddles.
Following that, a grotesque scene unfolded. Under the shroud of the dark fog, the scattered gore rapidly gathered, climbing upward against gravity. In mere seconds, the fluid mass molded itself into six slightly smaller, bright red Blood Clones.
These twisted facsimiles of the Blood Lord locked their hollow, malicious gazes onto Liu Yuan. When they registered that Liu Yuan's previously mangled right shoulder and lower back were already completely pristine and fully healed, a chorus of furious, gurgling roars erupted from their throatless maws.
"Scheming against me... you damn insects..." the clones hissed in horrific unison, their voices overlapping like grinding bones. "I will suck your bone marrow dry!"
The six Blood Clones launched themselves simultaneously. Moving at extreme speeds, they blurred into six streaks of crimson shadow, tearing through the air to converge on Liu Yuan, Long Aotian, and the others from every conceivable blind spot.
Liu Yuan let out a cold, dismissive snort, a trace of utter contempt flashing across his Double Pupils. "As expected of an Evil Soul Master. This grotesque method of rebirth and substitution is truly vile. But if this parlor trick is all you have left, today remains your death day."
His mind processed the battlefield in a fraction of a second. While this Blood Shadow Clone technique was incredibly rare, the near-fatal ambush they had orchestrated earlier had clearly inflicted catastrophic trauma on the Evil Soul Master. The soul power fluctuations radiating from these clones were pitifully thin, a far cry from the oppressive might of the Soul King-level powerhouse they had just fought. Stripped of his infamous Blood Pool Domain, the monster was running on fumes.
"Attack! Grind them to dust!"
At Liu Yuan's command, his figure vanished from his spot before the words even finished echoing. Empowered by the Qilin Precious Technique, the explosive force contained within his physical body reached a terrifying extreme. He met two of the incoming blood shadows head-on. Thick, oppressive soul power coated his fists, and he threw a punch that detonated with the dull, heavy crack of rolling thunder, caving in a clone's chest.
Long Aotian surged forward, a dark golden luster enveloping his entire frame. Moving with the unstoppable momentum of a heavy siege engine, he plowed directly into a crimson clone, using the sheer kinetic force of his charge to drive a brutal elbow strike straight through its skull, bursting it like a rotten melon.
Nearby, Chen Lu and Wang Yanfeng executed their maneuvers with flawless synchronization. Standing back-to-back, they unleashed the Body Sect's signature combo tactics. Every strike that connected with the blood shadows tore away large chunks of their mass, sending plumes of black mist scattering into the wind.
This skirmish was a slaughter compared to the grueling battle before. Under the relentless, coordinated siege of Liu Yuan, Long Aotian, and the others, the severely weakened Blood Clones crumbled rapidly.
With a final, sweeping arc of Liu Yuan's destructive pupil beams, the last blood shadow was bisected. It let out a howl of sheer unwillingness before shattering completely. This time, no blood splattered against the rocks. The remains instantly vaporized into black mist, dissolving into the night air before they could even touch the ground.
"Is the bastard finally dead for good this time?" Chen Lu gasped, his chest heaving as he scanned the empty canyon, phantom adrenaline still making his hands shake.
Liu Yuan did not answer. His Double Pupils darted across the terrain, dissecting every shadow, every crack in the canyon walls. The cold knot of unease in his gut had still not uncoiled. Given the insidious, cowardly nature of this Evil Soul Master, would he truly risk his entire origin essence inside mere decoy clones?
Just as the group's tense muscles began to relax, Vina—who had been standing at the periphery, keeping her Spirit Eyes active to monitor the battlefield—went pale. She thrust her hand out, pointing frantically toward a patch of deep shade near the canyon's exit, her voice cracking with urgency.
"He isn't dead yet! He's escaping! Twelve o'clock direction! Four hundred meters out! There's a faint fluctuation of his origin essence moving!"
Liu Yuan's head snapped toward the exit. The dynamic vision of his Double Pupils instantly locked onto a pathetic smear of pus and blood, slithering rapidly through the darkness cast by the jagged rocks. Using the canyon's natural gloom as a shield, the vile puddle was silently squirming its way to freedom.
"Damn it!"
Realizing his perfect camouflage had been pierced, the puddle of gore abandoned all stealth. It violently launched itself from the dirt, rapidly knitting flesh and bone together in mid-air to form a grotesque, humanoid shape. At this moment, the Blood Lord was in a horrific state; the entire left half of his torso was simply gone, exposing jagged, stark-white ribs to the open air.
"Just you wait! Once I return to the Blood Pool, I will slaughter every living soul in Yaluo City!"
The Evil Soul Master shrieked, his voice a wet, gurgling rasp of pure malice. The fourth soul ring hovering beneath his feet suddenly flared with a blinding, corrupted crimson light.
"Fourth Soul Skill: Blood Shadow Escape!"
In a heartbeat, his mangled body dissolved into a semi-transparent streak of red light. He shot toward the direction of his abandoned manor at a velocity that completely defied common sense, fleeing for his life.
Liu Yuan's expression darkened into something terrifyingly cold. They had exhausted themselves setting up traps, outmaneuvered this monster at every turn, and literally blown his physical body to pieces within their ambush circle—yet they had still failed to completely eradicate him. The sheer tenacity of this Evil Soul Master's survival instincts was staggering.
"He must not be allowed to return!"
Liu Yuan knew the stakes perfectly well. If this beast managed to crawl back to its lair and absorb the accumulated gore from those four blood pools, he would not only regenerate his missing half instantly, but he might also trigger a suicidal, destructive Soul Skill to drag them all to hell with him. By then, all their spilled blood and broken bones would be for nothing.
"Pursue!"
Liu Yuan roared, pushing the Qilin Precious Technique to its absolute maximum. His entire body erupted in a blinding, ice-blue holy luster. His speed shattered his previous limits; he tore through the dark night like a falling blue comet, the sheer velocity of his charge ripping a series of deafening sonic booms through the air.
Two li... one li...
Just a few hundred meters away from the rotting gates of the abandoned manor, Liu Yuan finally closed the distance on the fleeing blood shadow.
"Stay right there!"
Liu Yuan plummeted from the sky like a meteor. The destructive beams within his Double Pupils charged to a blinding intensity, outputting soul power at a frantic, reckless pace.
Boom!
The top-down aerial strike was devastatingly precise. The two scorching pillars of crimson light slammed directly into the back of the Blood Lord's head, cutting off his endless stream of curses in an instant. The Evil Soul Master's mangled body crashed heavily into the dirt road, the sheer kinetic inertia sending him tumbling and bouncing violently for over a dozen meters.
Liu Yuan descended heavily, his boots slamming into the earth as he pinned the opponent's broken remains down with the crushing weight of a mountain. He did not pause to gloat. He did not stop just because the creature was missing its head. He had read enough about the sickening regenerative tricks of Evil Soul Masters to know better.
Liu Yuan slammed his hands flat against the Evil Soul Master's chest, pinning him to the dirt. He leaned in close, his Double Pupils hovering mere inches from the opponent's tattered flesh.
Sizzle—!!!
At point-blank range, the destructive pupil beams erupted once more. Liu Yuan employed no flashy martial arts, no grand techniques. He simply held the monster down, methodically and brutally using the terrifying heat of his Double Pupils to boil away every single drop of tainted blood left inside the Evil Soul Master's body.
"No... spare me... ah!"
A shrill, agonizing scream tore not from a mouth, but directly from the Evil Soul Master's mangled abdominal cavity—the desperate wail of his primordial spirit. The headless corpse thrashed wildly beneath Liu Yuan, its remaining limbs twisting at unnatural angles, frantically trying to liquefy into blood and slip away.
But Liu Yuan's physical strength was overwhelming. Combined with the relentless, scorching heat of his eyes, he pinned the struggling evil soul power firmly in place. The foul blood evaporated into hissing steam, and the black mist grew thinner and thinner.
As the last drop of the monster's origin blood was incinerated into gray ash, this heinous Blood Lord finally went limp, his vile life completely and permanently extinguished.
...
Meanwhile, just as Liu Yuan was exerting every ounce of his strength to execute the monster, a silent figure crouched behind a grove of withered trees near the manor's rear.
Ling Luochen, her face concealed behind the specialized mask of a Shrek Academy enforcer, held her breath in the shadows. She had been dispatched on a strict inspection mission under Elder Xuan's direct orders to suppress this very Evil Soul Master. Yet, upon arriving at the manor, she had found the lair already reduced to a chaotic ruin. Following the distant echoes of explosions and collapsing earth, she had tracked the battle here, only to witness this brutal final act with her own eyes.
Ling Luochen pressed her back against the rough bark of a dead tree, her beautiful eyes wide with absolute shock.
She watched as that youth—using a method so primitive, so violently absolute—pinned a five-ring Soul King-level Evil Soul Master to the dirt and slaughtered him like a dog. The crimson light bleeding from the youth's Double Pupils in the pitch-black night did more than just illuminate his cold, ruthless face. It completely shattered and redefined her entire worldview.
'Is it him?'Her mind raced, her heart pounding against her ribs.'Has he become this powerful already?'She swallowed hard, staring at the ash drifting into the night sky.'A dignified five-ring Evil Soul Master... being chased down and butchered by him?'
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