Chapter 1324: An Hour Against World Transcendents

The battle lasted close to an hour, although Phei would later discover that reducing what happened beneath the abyss to sixty neat minutes felt almost insulting.

An hour belonged to ordinary life; breakfast, traffic, baths, arguments, naps and whatever other harmless little things people did when existence was not actively trying to pulp them against the walls of an ancient frozen chasm.

Down here, time had become vicious.

Every passing breath arrived beneath enough pressure to make Phei’s marrow ache inside his bones, while the Dragon Lady was hurled through glaciers fare another, buried beneath collapsing ice and dragged back into battle so many times that the deepest abyss gradually stopped resembling a cavern and began looking like the aftermath of some old divine calamity.

The two World Transcendents had been right to watch their arrival without concern and with arrogant contempt.

Their cultivation alone had saturated the abyss until the air itself felt diseased with weight. Vast waves of their powerful aura rolled from both beasts with every breath they took, slow and oppressive, grinding against the crystalline walls until cracks crept through ancient ice kilometers away. The pressure settled over Phei’s shoulders, sank into his muscles and pressed against his organs with an almost intimate cruelty, while the Void surrounding them grew constricted beneath that same monstrous presence.

Hollows that had always opened to him like familiar wounds in existence now trembled, narrowed and occasionally collapsed before he could enter them with the True Void Steps.

The cavern seemed to breathe with those creatures.

Its walls groaned whenever their cultivation swelled. Crystalline veins buried inside the ice brightened and dimmed beneath each pulse, while the frost hanging from the ceiling shivered loose in long curtains and drifted downward through the gloom. Even the vast black spaces between the glowing formations appeared to contract around the two World Transcendents, as though the abyss had learned their rhythm after centuries and now moved with them.

The first creature carried enough of a humanoid shape to make its wrongness more offensive. It towered above Phei beneath layers of pale frozen flesh and corded muscle, its shoulders spreading beneath jagged growths of ancient ice while cyan brilliance throbbed through fissures beneath its skin.

Those buried veins brightened whenever its heart beat, each pulse illuminating the inside of its chest and arms with a cold spectral glow before fading beneath frost again.

Long icicles hung from its forearms and spine, trembling whenever power gathered inside the thing, while the flesh between them gave small living contractions as though the ice itself had rooted into muscle and learned how to breathe.

Its companion was even larger, a sprawling four-limbed horror buried beneath white-blue frost. Crystalline ridges rose from its back like mountain ranges grown directly through flesh, while enormous forearms ended in claws capable of burying themselves several meters into the frozen floor with effortless weight.

The thing’s breathing came in cavernous drafts, drawing frost toward its nostrils before expelling clouds of frozen vapor that rolled across the ground around it.

Every exhalation thickened the ice beneath its body, layer after layer growing outward until the ancient floor cracked beneath newly formed frost.

(Image again)

Phei had fought monstrosities throughout the Primordial Frozen Zone for nearly a year.

These two felt older than monstrosity; they were more settled and established.

Their barrier both World Transcendents in a pale shell barely visible until Phei attacked, a vast enclosing membrane of cultivation power alone that pulsed slowly around them. The surface was almost translucent, yet Phei could see faint currents moving beneath it in rivers of condensed power flowing through layer after layer in a pattern so complete that True Void Sense struggled to decide where one layer ended and another began.

His next attack of the Void-Blood spear struck that shell like an executioner’s stake.

The weapon tore a black-crimson wound across the cavern in its wake, the Void crawling along its surface in ravenous fractures while Primordial Blood churned beneath them with wet, living hunger; dark-red flesh-like veins crawled along the spearhead, swelling and contracting as it flew, and droplets peeled from its wake only to twitch in the air behind it before being dragged forward again.

The impact made the abyss convulse.

The barrier caved inward beneath the spear for a fraction of a heartbeat, and an immense sanguine splash burst across the pale shell. Primordial Blood spread over it like a living infection, crawling in branching streams while black Void fissures wormed outward from the point of contact.

Phei’s eyes sharpened and the barrier’s pale surface swelled once; that simple pulse annihilated the spear.

The weapon ruptured into a cloud of blood so violently that the mist filled several hundred meters of the cavern. The Void fractures screamed soundlessly before being crushed shut, while the Primordial Blood clinging to the barrier writhed for several breaths as though refusing to accept death.

Then the World Transcendent cultivation washed through it making Phei’s blood blacken and shrivel, before it fell away in steaming droplets.

Phei stared.

"Wonderful."

He attacked again.

Hundreds of Void-Blood spears flowered throughout the abyss, some growing directly from rivers of crimson spread across the floor while others emerged from black-white mouths opened within the surrounding space. They came from above, below, behind, and from angles that would have left most cultivators scrambling to understand which direction contained death.

Several immense blades followed.

They descended like black-red guillotines, their edges bleeding as they fell.

The World Transcendent barrier swallowed every impact:

Each collision produced another violent bloom of blood and Void, turning the space around the two monsters into a continuous storm of crimson mist, black fractures and shattered frost.

Yet beneath that carnage, the pale membrane kept throbbing with almost obscene calm.

True Void Sense crawled across the shell again and again, searching through the upper reaches, the frozen ground beneath the beasts and every narrow seam where separate layers of cultivation met. He followed the circulation of essence inside the barrier until the pattern almost felt carved into his mind, waiting for some hesitation, some damaged place, some microscopic flaw where the barrier had been joined imperfectly.

His Lust Reality and Hunger Touch needed just a single physical contact and they’d be done for!

Phei could still feel the desires festering deep inside both monsters, their buried lust for freedom was so strong that his ability seemed to stir whenever he looked at them. Those desires were almost painfully ripe, hidden beneath obedience yet still alive after however many years the Zone Lord had possessed them.

If Phei could touch either beast, he was confident he could drag that hunger open.

The problem remained reaching them physically.

The barrier might as well have been an entire world wrapped around them.

Phei sent True Void Sense deeper.

The space beneath the shell was even worse.

World Transcendent cultivation had compressed the surrounding hollows until the space felt ossified around the beasts, squeezed so brutally that entering through True Void Steps would have required him to force himself through gaps thinner than non-existent.

Phei pulled his perception back.

"Fine." His sword moved.

If the bastards wanted a proper fight, he had spent the last year studying for exactly that examination.

The following stretches of battle became a savage exhibition of almost everything Phei had learned inside the Primordial Frozen Zone.

His sword rarely rested.

Sometimes he fought close enough to the OP bastard that each exchange bathed his face in its pale glow. His body flowed through its attack and his own thrusts while Void coiled around the blade like black-white smoke and Primordial Blood crept across its edge in thin pulsing veins. He struck high, vanished through a surviving hollow, reappeared below and drove the sword upward before the first attack had fully faded from the barrier.

His footwork had become far cleaner after months of fighting things that punished hesitation with mutilation.

The sword danced with him.

A downward cut became an enormous crescent of Void-Blood that tore through kilometers of frost before crashing into the barrier. A reverse sweep released thinner blades behind it, each curved projectile screaming through the air while blood dripped from their edges.

Long-range attacks came almost constantly whenever the Dragon Lady engaged the other beast.

Black-red spears rose from the ground in forests.

Chains of living Primordial Blood and Void crawled through shattered ice, their surfaces throbbing as though arteries had been torn from some colossal creature and taught how to hunt. They snapped around limbs whenever the barrier loosened around an attacking World Transcendent, tightening for the briefest moments before monstrous strength ripped them apart.

Void-Ice erupted beneath the larger beast in crystalline jaws lined with serrated frost.

The creature stepped through them.

Phei opened a dark hollow above its head and dropped an enormous spear into the same place.

The World Transcendent raised one hand and caught it.

The spear fought in its grasp.

Primordial Blood crawled over the monster’s protected palm and tried burrowing between its fingers while Void fissures opened along the shaft.

The beast squeezed and the weapon burst before blood sprayed across its barrier-covered chest.

Phei watched from several hundred meters away, genuinely offended.

"That took me effort, you ugly bastard."