Chapter 1327: Infuriating Calamity

By the time the hour approached its end, the deepest abyss barely resembled the place they had entered.

Primordial Blood flowed through trenches where crystalline floors once stood, its surface occasionally rippling despite the absence of wind. Void wounds hung between broken walls, opening and closing with slow black-white contractions. Great sections of the cavern ceiling had collapsed, leaving jagged hollows overhead while enormous spears of natural ice continued falling through the ruined battlefield.

Phei’s Primordial Blood drifted in crimson clouds, and the pale blue light of the abyss passed through it until the entire cavern seemed illuminated from inside some colossal wounded body.

For almost the entire hour, the World Transcendents had dominated every direct exchange.

Phei and the Dragon Lady had simply refused to stop returning.

Eventually, the beasts had begun understanding the real nuisance.

Killing the pair was going to take much longer than beating them.

Phei regenerated, he healed the Dragon, his Essence kept flowing, his blood and void remained alive throughout the battlefield and attacked whenever he willed.

The Dragon carried enough cores to continually replenish the power being beaten out of her.

Over that hour, Phei had become a small, infuriating calamity that refused to remain wherever he was thrown, while the Dragon Lady had become an enormous wounded beast whose body grew progressively more ruined even as her Core kept roaring back to life.

They could last longer than the two World Transcendent who lied more on their energy and essence despite having so much of it thanks to their higher cultivation but that was different when the others had almost unending essence and energy.

That realization offered Phei remarkably little comfort.

Because he could see the price every time he looked at his little sister.

Her beautiful snow-and-blue-white body had become a ruin of fractured crystal, frozen blood and missing scales. Healing Touch had helped. Her Dragon vitality had helped. The cores had filled her with Essence again and again.

Every method had merely given her enough strength to endure more punishment.

Phei himself had never experienced a beating this complete.

Anactica had nearly killed him, but much of that battle had spiralled into chaos before he properly understood what was happening.

This had been different.

For nearly an hour, he had been conscious for every humiliation.

He had watched his strongest attacks fail while the barriers reject his True Void Steps entry.

He had tasted blood each time World Transcendent strength found him.

Lust Reality had remained inside him, exquisitely useful and utterly unreachable because he could not touch the souls protected behind that maddening shell.

His sword could wound them whenever their protection dropped.

Those opportunities had come rarely, and almost every one demanded that Phei offer his body to something capable of smashing him across the cavern afterward.

For perhaps the first time since his powers began becoming truly unreasonable, Phei had spent nearly an entire hour throwing almost everything he possessed at enemies who remained horrifyingly above him.

He had hated every second of it.

Near the end of that hour, his hatred finally became mutual.

The humanoid World Transcendent stared through the blood cloud and mist covering the battlefield with fury etched visibly across its face.

The sword wound remained on the other’s flank.

Several ugly marks scarred the barrier.

The larger beast carried claw wounds beneath one shoulder and a cracked plate of crystalline armor where the Dragon Lady had managed to strike cleanly.

Tiny wounds compared with the ruin covering her.

Yet those wounds should never have existed.

Phei hovered opposite them with his clothes torn and his white hair hanging wildly around his face. Blood had dried beneath his mouth. A bruise covered part of his jaw and another darkened one side of his chest, though both were already fading as the monsters watched.

Behind him floated hundreds of blood droplets, contracting together through the crimson mist while more Primordial Blood crawled along the shattered floor and gathered around his shadow, rising darkness and the Void within.

His sword remained steady in his hand.

Below and behind him, the Dragon Lady stood with one wounded wing sagging toward the ice while another core dissolved inside her.

Phei felt the fresh power entering her.

They could continue.

The two World Transcendents had realized that too so they both stepped backward.

Phei’s instincts revolted.

For nearly an hour these monsters had advanced whenever they pleased, broken through his attacks and treated the Dragon Lady’s fury as an inconvenience that needed beating into the ground.

Seeing them retreat even several steps made the blood inside Phei run cold.

Then their cultivation began rising.

The deepest abyss convulsed.

Pressure descended with such malign force that Phei’s body sank several inches through the air before he caught himself. True Void Sense shuddered as hollows throughout the cavern collapsed one after another, crushed flat beneath the increasing weight.

The ground began trembling.

Broken crystals lifted.

Great stones dragged themselves out of rubble.

The rivers of Primordial Blood covering the cavern floor rose in long red ropes, drawn upward despite Phei never calling them, and millions of shattered ice fragments followed.

Soon the entire battlefield hung suspended around the two World Transcendents, trembling inside their gathering power.

The humanoid beast’s cyan veins became incandescent beneath its flesh. Light throbbed through the creature with every beat of its heart, stronger each time, until cracks began opening across its body and baleful radiance poured through them. The air around it twisted inward while frost disintegrated before touching its skin, reduced into pale vapor that spiralled around the monster in tightening circles.

The larger beast crouched.

Its crystalline spine awakened.

The mountain-like growths along its back began drinking the cold surrounding them so violently that entire frozen walls darkened as their Essence was pulled away. Blue-white brilliance deepened inside those crystals, passing beyond ordinary brightness until staring directly at them made Phei’s eyes ache.

Their power grew together.

The cavern started bending toward them.

Phei saw rivers of blood stretching sideways through the air. Falling rubble curved toward the monsters before gravity could reclaim it, while even the distant cracking of ice became lower and heavier, dragged toward that gathering center until the entire abyss seemed to groan through clenched teeth.

For the first time, the casual stomp that had launched Phei and the Dragon Lady through kilometers of ice felt almost harmless to what was coming.

The previous hour looked equally obscene in hindsight.

The two World Transcendents had spent all that time beating them half to death while still possessing this much power in reserve.

He returned against the Dragon Lady’s neck and planted one hand against her bloodied scales.

Healing Touch flowed immediately: "Move."

The Dragon Lady turned toward him with fury still burning through their bond.

Phei shook his head before she could gather herself.

"I know exactly how you feel."

Her muscles tightened beneath his hand.

"Look at them."

She did.

For the first time that hour, her rage faltered.

The two World Transcendents were disappearing beneath what they were gathering. Their bodies remained visible, yet the power surrounding them had become so thick, oppressive and violently alive that they looked like dark shapes buried beneath a brewing celestial disaster.

Phei stared at the torn wing beneath his hand, the missing scales and the crimson frozen across what had once been immaculate white.

His own bruises continued disappearing as Dragon Regeneration repaired him while Healing Touch fed into her.

They had survived everything before because there had always been enough left to heal.

Phei looked toward the power swelling across the abyss; he suddenly doubted the next attack intended to leave that much.

"They’re ending it."

The Dragon Lady’s breathing deepened.

Phei tightened his fingers against her scales and felt savage anger move through him.

He had watched his little sister get mauled for nearly an hour. He had watched her rise, fall, bleed, swallow another core and rise again.

That was enough.

The beasts wanted their final attack.

Fine.

Phei had finally reached the same conclusion.

He gathered the Dragon Lady into True Void Steps the instant another hollow survived the crushing pressure, but it was too late ad they were both buried into the ruined heart of the rising abyss.

The World Transcendents had gathered power until the entire deepest cavern throbbed around them like the inside of a dying god.

Phei within the rising ruin burying the two of them had learned what he needed.

A normal fight against these bastards was hopeless.

So the normal fight was over.