Chapter 1321: A Contact, Weakness and One Successful Opening!

"This is weird."

Phei said it from the Dragon Lady’s back while staring down at the two monsters waiting for them deeper inside the abyss.

They had clearly sensed him and the Dragon Lady long before the pair descended this far, yet even now, with barely any meaningful distance separating them, the two World Transcendents showed little interest in meeting their arrival. They stood beneath the cold brilliance pouring from the crystalline walls, their enormous figures motionless while their gazes remained fixed upward.

The sight bothered Phei more than an immediate attack would have.

Beneath him, the Dragon Lady had already changed completely. Her earlier amusement had disappeared beneath the rage gathering throughout her colossal body, and sitting directly upon her back allowed Phei to feel every pulse of Dragon Essence travelling beneath those glittering snow-white scales. Her breathing came harder through her nostrils, each furious exhalation throwing streams of frost away from her snout while the muscles beneath Phei gradually tightened.

Her Core was gathering power.

The scale beneath Phei’s palm trembled with each rising wave.

She was preparing to charge.

Phei knew it immediately, and judging from the complete absence of concern below, the two beasts knew it too.

That was the strange part.

Phei had thought he and the Dragon Lady would at least qualify as genuine threats by now. He had never imagined their year of slaughter inside the Primordial Frozen Zone somehow erased the immense difference in cultivation between them and the beings awaiting them, but they were no longer the same fools almost a year ago. The Dragon Lady had recovered an astonishing portion of what centuries of imprisonment had taken from her, while Phei himself had crossed into the Sky Sovereign Stage, tempered his body within Great Immortal essence, deepened his Void and spent month after month fighting until his powers no longer felt like interesting abilities attached to him.

Yet the two World Transcendents below looked at them as though none of that deserved adjustment or their attention.

Perhaps they were right.

Their pressure had already begun making that possibility uncomfortable.

Phei had stood before World Transcendents before, several of them at once during the battle in Anactica, yet beyond the Half Behemoth-Dwarf, these two possessed some of the heaviest presences he ever experienced. Their cultivation poured freely through the enormous cavern, pressing against the ancient ice until distant crystalline formations groaned beneath its weight.

The space around Phei thickened with every breath, and the pressure of their powerful aura falling upon his shoulders became severe enough that his newly tempered body had begun instinctively resisting it.

Even the Dragon Lady was affected.

Her claws sank slightly deeper into the ancient ice while another wave rolled over them.

Phei’s expression tightened.

The Chained in Anarctica had never truly begun that battle enough to release everything against him. The Vampires had attacked, the stupid Naga had tried killing him and the others eventually displayed increasingly horrifying portions of their power, yet events had spiralled out of control too quickly for Phei to properly experience what several World Transcendents focusing their full cultivation upon a Master Stage cultivator would actually feel like.

Bromgar had come closest.

The Vampire Lady had become only slightly serious with him, and Phei had practically found himself standing at the entrance of King Yama’s realm before the Endless Void awakened.

That was just one World Transcendent who had nearly killed him after putting a little more strength in her attack.

Phei did not particularly enjoy imagining what would have happened if Bromgar or others had begun the fight intending to crush him immediately.

These two would.

They knew the Dragon Lady and what she had become over the past year, and they had surely seen Phei slaughtering the Zone Lord’s servants again and again throughout the forbidden land. Their current lack of concern came from beings who had already watched enough to judge whether the approaching enemies deserved fear.

Phei should probably have found that conclusion more discouraging.

Unfortunately, he had also discovered something about them.

His second opinion came from Lust Reality.

Months ago, Phei had attempted to use the ability upon some of the Zone Lord’s thralls and failed spectacularly. Lust Reality required desire as its foundation because Hunger Touch reached into the soul, found whatever the target wanted most deeply and used that hunger to build the false world in which their soul would become trapped.

The thralls possessed nothing useful to the ability.

Once the Zone Lord stripped them down into mindless servants, whatever ambitions, fantasies, hopes and private hungers those creatures had carried through their original lives disappeared beneath the control holding their souls. Their obedience to the Zone Lord did not come from some passionate desire to serve. They obeyed because something stronger had seized what remained of them and forced their bodies onward.

Hunger Touch had searched those hollowed souls and found nothing worth constructing a reality around.

Phei’s solution had been wonderfully straightforward.

He just killed them.

All of them.

The arrangement had become increasingly profitable over the months. The Zone Lord provided endless creatures to fight, and Phei turned them into battle experience, resources and living targets upon which he could test the increasingly ridiculous physique Sienna’s elixir had given him. His strange bloodlust had also continued growing alongside Primordial Blood, and every slaughter made killing feel a little more natural inside his body.

Phei had no complaints.

Cultivators in stories spent entire arcs looking for secret realms that provided half this much training. Apparently he had simply needed save his little sister and annoy a God until the bastard supplied his own.

The two World Transcendents below were completely different from the thralls.

Phei could feel their desires.

Both wanted freedom.

They wanted it with enough intensity that the desire felt almost violent once Phei recognized it. Somewhere beneath whatever the Zone Lord had placed around their souls, beneath their obedience and however many years they had spent guarding this abyss, both World Transcendents still carried a terrible hunger to escape the creature they served. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Phei’s eyes slowly brightened.

The hidden third presence possessed an even stranger desire.

The Zone Lord wanted something deeper within the Primordial Frozen Zone.

Phei could not tell what it was from here, yet the hunger surrounding it felt immense. The bastard had remained inside this frozen land for centuries, built armies, enslaved powerful creatures and drained the Dragon Lady for so long that her imprisonment alone had become part of the abyss itself.

There had always been a reason.

Phei almost laughed when he felt it.

Interesting.

Very fucking interesting.

His thoughts returned immediately to the two.

Back then, Phei had been Master Stage, separated from the Half Behemoth-Dwarf by a difference so enormous that an ordinary fight between them should have been insulting.

Yet Phei had still managed to place him inside Lust Reality.

Now Phei was Sky Sovereign.

His soul was stronger too, so was his physique that had been rebuilt, his Void had grown far deeper and his understanding of Hunger Touch and Lust Reality had improved enormously since that battle.

How quickly could these two react before one of them fell into the reality Phei constructed?

The thought was arrogant and Phei knew that.

But he also knew arrogance became considerably less audacity when one possessed power to guarantee arrogance.

Unless an opponent already understood Lust Reality as Consort did, or carried such flawless protection around their soul that Hunger Touch could find no opening whatsoever, Phei only needed one mistake. Cultivation difference did not prevent Bromgar or Cassian from being caught, and the ability did not require Phei to overpower the target’s body through brute force before beginning its work.

He only needed contact and a heartbeat of weakness.

One successful opening.