Chapter 1409: The Battle That Couldn’t Break Out

Chapter 1409: Chapter 1409: The Battle That Couldn’t Break Out

The situation of the other battle group didn’t look nearly as good. Facing the joint siege of Liu Xuanji and Situ Maocai, Jue Liunian still appeared to handle it with ease, only suffering a few minor injuries, while his opponents were like enraged bulls provoked by him, bodies covered in wounds yet still mustering all their strength to launch charge after charge against this matador.

Pei Yan only watched for a moment before spotting the problem. If we’re talking sheer strength, Liu Xuanji and Situ Maocai were definitely a notch below Jue Liunian, but not to the extent of being toyed with like this—at least in Pei Yan’s eyes. The reason this situation had arisen was their poor coordination. Both of them were only aiming for rapid attacks on their own, which played right into the hands of Jue Liunian, who excelled at this style: using speed against speed, forcing the two into a frantic chase, unable to form any effective cooperation.

Both of them were too hot-headed. If their senior brother were here to coordinate with them, this wouldn’t be happening. Watching this, Pei Yan pondered in secret. Now only these six were still fighting on the field; as for the battles between the Children of Origin and the Heavenly Dao apex experts, they had already ceased when Pei Yan unleashed those two Sword Qi gales. Both sides wanted to see who had come as reinforcements. When they saw Pei Yan’s silver-white Mecha appear in their field of vision, the Investigation Office side’s morale soared, while Nero and his people showed a trace of disappointment and unwillingness on their faces.

As reinforcements from the Investigation Office continued to arrive, the two Heavenly Dao apex experts on the Blood Shasa side clearly lost all interest in prolonging the fight. After each used a killing move to force back their respective opponents, the two leapt out of the battle circle and regrouped with their own subordinates.

Liu Xuanji, having been forced back, still wanted to charge up again, but at this moment the slightly cooled-off Situ Maocai reached out to stop him. At the beginning he had actually been facing that Witch, but he found her various techniques far too bizarre, making the fight extremely unpleasant for him, so he exchanged opponents with Heaven-Questioning Talisman, and went to join Liu Xuanji against Jue Liunian. But this fight only proved more infuriating: Jue Liunian seemed to see right through the two of them, seizing the initiative step by step, always one step faster. If not for that shred of rationality remaining in his heart, reminding him that this was a battle that didn’t truly belong to him and that going all in wasn’t worth it, he would almost have used the Thunder Observation Eight Techniques and other sect bottom-of-the-chest ultimate skills to stake his life against the opponent.

He felt it wasn’t worth risking his life; Liu Xuanji, however, felt it was! In this battle he could be said to be fighting harder than the Investigation Office people, and as a result had taken heavier injuries. The meridians in his left hand were currently damaged by Sword Qi and could no longer grip a sword, forcing him to switch to his right. Blood dripped, tick-tock, from his torn sleeve onto the ground; his wrist trembled slightly out of control. Even after Situ Maocai restrained him and talked him down, he still locked his gaze firmly on Jue Liunian, unwilling to shift his eyes even half an inch.

"Don’t stare at me like that! I’ve already gone easy on you! Be thankful today isn’t a situation where either you die or I live! Otherwise I would’ve long since struck to kill! I told you, your Sword Dao ends here." Jue Liunian showed not the slightest fear toward Liu Xuanji’s man-eating glare. Instead he sighed, speaking in a tone of genuine regret.

"Then how high has your Sword Dao reached? Is it just relying on the power of Candle Dragon to raise your own realm? Is that the Sword Dao you pursue?" Pei Yan walked slowly toward the center of the field, interjecting at just the right moment. As he spoke, a sliver of his peripheral vision swept toward that Witch, and he discovered that in the time it took to say those few words, her previously disheveled, filthy appearance had already changed. The wounds all over her body were rapidly healing, scabbing over and vanishing, and with a casual wave she had once more returned to the state she had been in when Pei Yan first met her. It seemed her injuries had never been as severe as she had just made them appear; that earlier eerie look was most likely the result of some Magic she had cast.

Ignoring Pei Yan’s sarcasm, Jue Liunian raised an eyebrow, fixing his gaze on Pei Yan and asking in return, "The fact you can still move freely and show up here means Delacuri lost. I didn’t expect you actually killed him."

What Jue Liunian said was exactly what most of the people present were concerned about. This touched on the success or failure of this entire operation and the life or death of Ye Jiumu, so everyone turned their eyes to Pei Yan to see how he would answer.

"Why ask it that way? Why don’t you hope for something good for your associate? How can you be so sure I killed him? Maybe he ran off." Pei Yan chuckled, teasing him.

Jue Liunian let out a dry laugh. "A moment ago I wasn’t sure; now I am. Also, we’re not ’associates’—we just gathered together for shared interests, that’s all. Still, I do feel a bit of regret that he died. He was a decent opponent. I’m more surprised that you really managed to kill him."

Delacuri really was dead. Although they knew Pei Yan already possessed the strength to fight a Heavenly Dao apex expert, when they heard confirmed that the famously troublesome opponent across multiple planes, Delacuri, had truly died at Pei Yan’s hands, Liu Xuanji and the others still fell into the same stunned daze that Jin He Xuan had when he first heard the news.

"A Heavenly Dao apex expert and the family he commanded, used and tricked to death by you lot, and in the end all he gets is an evaluation of ’he was a decent opponent.’ If Delacuri were still alive, I think he’d be enraged to death by you. I’m very curious what you’re ultimately after. I’ve only just realized now that you’ve twisted the time flow of this space to make it converge with the Keystone Plane, so we wouldn’t notice anything wrong. From this, it seems your true target is still the Keystone Plane." Pei Yan lifted off his faceplate, raising his head to look at Jue Liunian as he asked.

"That question is meaningless—you’ll soon learn the answer yourselves. This is something we were always going to do sooner or later, and we already had a corresponding plan laid out for it. It’s just that the conflict between you and Delacuri let us see another path, a much more convenient and safer way to resolve this problem, so we chose to make a slight adjustment to the matter, that’s all. We never intended to sacrifice Delacuri! He was simply too useless and really did die by your hand. If he’d managed to escape alive, Master Candle Dragon would definitely have fulfilled his promise to him, and might even have granted him extra rewards as payback. A pity! He died. And that means his family is now useless. Starting a clash with you over a useless family isn’t worth it. But their existence could still draw your attention for a while, so you could say they were more than worth the cost."

At this point Jue Liunian’s lips curled into a cold smile. "Sounds pretty heartless, doesn’t it? But I wasn’t the one who said it. That was the person who spelled this plan out to me. You should be quite familiar with that person."

"Mu Fanchen." Without Jue Liunian needing to say it, Pei Yan enunciated the name word by word.

Jue Liunian nodded and smiled. "That’s right. A very interesting man." Having said that, he glanced at Nero; seeing the other man nod to him in signal, he turned back to Pei Yan with a grin. "The business over there is finished. There’s no need for us to linger here any longer. Everyone, we’ll be taking our leave. Don’t be impulsive—I imagine we’ll have the chance to fight again in the future."

With that, the Blood Shasa group followed Jue Liunian’s lead and slowly retreated outward. Everyone looked toward Pei Yan; seeing that he had no intention of pursuing, they too remained where they were, simply watching as that group’s figures vanished into the opening spatial passage.