Chapter 164

The lotus petals shifted and the black flame flickered faster.

Soren drew back the arm holding it, taking the stance of a man about to throw something a very long way.

Azel came apart.

"We understand! We understand!"

"We'll withdraw from Exalted Continent today!"

"Let us live and..."

"...we can be friends!"

Kain scrambled in after him. "Yes! A friend of the Kunpeng Beast Tribe!"

"Soren! I swear on my Dao heart, I will personally talk our Patriarch and the Supreme Elders into treating you as an honored guest! We can dig out the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea together!"

"The Kunpeng Beast Tribe rules the Beast Continent. We do not break our word."

Kain kept going.

"That's right! Our tribe will never forget the enormous favor you did us in uncovering the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea!"

Inwardly, Soren decided the two of them were profoundly stupid.

These idiots have "mentally unwell" written across their foreheads.

"So I let you go. And in exchange, I get you two to beg your Patriarch for permission to share the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea with your tribe?"

Azel nodded hard. Relief spread across his face.

He was certain of it. Soren had tasted what the Nether Sea offered, so an alliance on that scale had to tempt him.

"To hell with you."

"You delusional morons."

Soren hurled the World-Destroying Demonic Lotus straight at them.

The black flower tore through the void screaming, petals opening as it went.

A murderous intent big enough to break the world detonated and shredded the fabric of space.

From the first instant it was a divine power made for ending heaven and grinding earth to nothing.

"I can take every treasure in the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea for myself! Why would I share it with your Kunpeng Beast Tribe?"

"You're staring death in the face and you still have the gall to make that offer! Did a donkey kick your brains loose?"

The rest of Soren's cursing vanished under the explosion.

Nothing about the lotus was survivable.

Under his eyes, Azel and Kain came apart in strips. Pulverized flesh and shattered bone went into the fire and stopped existing.

The whole process took under three seconds.

As the last central petal went, Soren disappeared into a roaring wall of black flame.

Running on the dregs of what he had left, Orathis held his full beast form and curled claws and wings around Liana.

Even so. His entire back was flayed into charred, bloody ruin. The smell of burnt meat rolled across the waste.

Orathis screamed through bared teeth.

Still shielding his sister, he twisted his head and cut a frantic look toward where Soren had been standing.

The second the lotus went off, Master threw up a barrier around the blast. That barrier ate seventy or eighty percent of the shockwave.

If it hadn't, beast form or no beast form, everything I put over Sis wouldn't have mattered.

We would have gone to ash with those Beast Ancestors.

That black lotus is too much.

Looking at the sea of black fire still raging, Orathis felt his scalp go numb.

The blast had shattered Azel's spatial lockdown into pieces that fell like broken glass.

Now that the concussion had passed, what remained was an inferno of black demonic energy and nothing else.

Orathis pushed his senses into the flames, hunting for Soren's fluctuation.

Liana stepped out from under his wing.

She stared into the black fire and her chest tightened.

That man. Did he actually go in there with them?

Whatever she hoped for, she couldn't find the faintest trace of his aura anywhere in it.

He had been standing at the absolute epicenter, which took opening a pocket dimension and ducking inside off the table entirely.

Even if he had managed to open a tunnel, a blast that size would have warped the passage and collapsed it. It could have triggered Spatial Displacement.

Spatial Displacement meant being dumped into some unknown dimension in the void with no way back. Ever.

Nobody survives that.

One conclusion remained. Soren had gone to ash alongside Azel and Kain.

Liana let out a long breath.

She muttered something under it that might have been regret.

She patted Orathis's enormous claw. That was as much consoling as she knew how to do.

Orathis had still been holding a sliver of hope.

Watching his sister go quiet and shake her head, he sat down hard on his rear.

"Master risked being swallowed whole by the black lotus and still remembered to put a barrier up for Little Dragon..."

"Master, you really are the best master under heaven!"

"And you went out so miserably!"

Orathis bawled like a toddler the size of a hill.

The noise shook the sky and kept shaking it.

Liana kicked him in the ribs and clapped both hands over her ears.

Fortunate her dantian was sealed. At normal strength that kick would have broken his spine and left him crippled.

"Stop crying!"

"Put that energy into finding whatever ash or relics he left!"

"Bury him properly!"

"The two of you had a master-servant bond, after all."

"I'm going."

Liana had no expectations that Orathis could break the seal on her dantian. His cultivation was far too green for that.

So she turned to go.

Orathis reached out with one massive claw and tugged gently at her sleeve.

"Sis! Do you have a conscience anywhere in there?"

"My Master gave his life for ours!"

"Is a few tears really so much to ask?"

Liana's aura didn't budge. Her eyes came around cold enough to cut. "Get lost."

"He was your master. Not mine."

"Why the hell would I cry at his grave?"

"And another thing."

She clenched her fists, and indignation came off her in waves.

"He opened the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea. I took the beating for it."

"If he weren't dead, I'd have definitely..."

Her voice stopped.

There didn't seem to be any point in finishing it.

The man was dead. Holding a grievance against a dead man was a waste of breath.

When she spoke again her tone had gone colder and further away.

"Hmph. Forget it."

"What matters now is getting this seal off my dantian."

"Then I keep climbing."

"One day I'll walk into Kunpeng Beast Tribe territory myself and make those bastards pay for today."

"Azel and Kain crossed me. I'll bring the whole lineage down for it."