Chapter 89: Yin Winds in the Air

Chapter 89: Yin Winds in the Air

Picking up where the last chapter left off: Feng Du and I had talked about Future World, and sure enough, he knew a fair amount about it. He’d probably been there himself. What he’d told me would prove useful for my next move.

I took my leave of Feng Du and made my way first to Dusk Bar. There, I spent most of the day talking with Fatty Huang, Du Xiaoran’s code-body.

Since the two of us had just discussed Future World in the real world already, our meeting mostly turned into a meal together and an exchange of the latest gossip making the rounds in the virtual worlds.

Among other things, he told me Yuan Lingliang had gone looking for me in Ghostdark City, and had even stormed into the City Lord’s estate and made a scene there. Feng Du had ended up chasing her out. Fatty Huang kept insisting, over and over, that I shouldn’t let a beautiful woman’s heart go to waste.

There was also the matter of the Jianghai Gang. No one knew what teaching they’d gotten hold of, but their sect master’s strength had surged, and these past few days they’d been going out of their way to make trouble for Ziyun Sect.

None of it much concerned me. I hadn’t spent long enough at Ziyun Sect to feel any real attachment to it, and as for Yuan Lingliang, that was her longing, not mine. I’d never meant to encourage her.

After the meal, once I’d gotten clear directions on how to reach Future World, I stepped out of Ghostdark City.

The moment I emerged from the passage, I saw the Jianghai Gang and Ziyun Sect locked in a full-scale battle in the sky nearby.

I remembered Liu Tanzhuang telling me the Jianghai Gang wasn’t far from the Ghostdark City entrance, and I’d certainly run into plenty of their disciples inside the city itself.

I hadn’t expected the two factions to pick a battlefield so close to the Jianghai Gang’s own turf. It had only been a few months since the contest for the Heavenly Palace—now here they were at each other’s throats again. What were they even fighting over this time?

Not that it mattered to me. As long as they stayed out of my way, the two gangs could do as they pleased. If anything, this sort of skirmishing was good for both sides. It kept their people sharp.

This time, though, the Jianghai Gang clearly had the upper hand.

Off to one side, a Jianghai Gang grandmaster had just put down a Ziyun Sect grandmaster. Closer in, the Jianghai Gang’s sect master had Ziyun Sect’s own sect master pinned and was pounding him without mercy.

Yuan Jiangyi, Ziyun Sect’s sect master, had beaten the Jianghai Gang’s sect master handily the last time they’d met. Now he was crushed beneath a thick, roiling rain cloud, gasping for breath, being driven back nearly to the very mouth of Ghostdark City.

In truth, the disciples’ skirmishes barely mattered. The real contest was always between the grandmasters and sect masters. Last time, because the prize had been the Heavenly Palace, they’d fought it out through a tiered scoring system. I imagined the Jianghai Gang still hadn’t forgiven having their whole plan wrecked by a nobody like me.

When I appeared right in the middle of the two sect masters’ battlefield, the crowd of disciples and onlookers from both sides gasped and scrambled to their feet, murmuring in astonishment.

A duel between sect masters generated an aura so fierce that nothing could stand within a kilometer of it. No one had expected me to just stroll out of the Ghostdark City passage, squat down beneath that rain cloud, and take a good look at Yuan Jiangyi pinned to the ground.

When Yuan Jiangyi caught me looking at him, his face flushed scarlet with shame.

Talk about humiliating.

Losing wasn’t the embarrassing part. Getting ground into the dirt while a former subordinate crouched there watching—that was what made it unbearable. Where was the man supposed to put his pride after that?

The Jianghai Gang’s sect master looked just as rattled, clearly worried I’d step in to help Yuan Jiangyi against him. People at the sect-master level had surely heard by now that I’d beaten both Xiang Bianfeng and Pu Liuqian—names that towered over anyone in this fight.

None of them had expected me to turn up on the battlefield at a moment like this.

I hadn’t meant to get involved at all. Ruining someone else’s match was bad form, and none of it was my business.

I was about to fly off when Gao Haipeng spotted me from the crowd. He assumed I’d been holed up in Ghostdark City this whole time and figured this was the perfect chance to have his sect master rough me up. The real problem was that I was standing right inside the sect masters’ combat zone—by the rules, anything that happened to me there was my own fault.

He jumped to his feet and shouted at the Jianghai Gang sect master:

“Sect Master! That’s the brat who ruined our shot at the Heavenly Palace last time! He’s practically one of Ziyun Sect’s people anyway—give him a taste of what he deserves! He’s inside the combat zone, so it won’t count as collateral damage!”

The moment Gao Haipeng shouted, his fellow disciples chimed in at once, egging their sect master on to beat me down.

Judging by everything I’d seen, the first person their sect master probably wanted to beat was Gao Haipeng.

I glanced once at Yuan Jiangyi’s flushed, humiliated face, then at Yuan Lingliang up in the stands, hopping on the spot in a panic. Then I blew a breath at the rain cloud, sending it drifting easily aside, and in the same motion used cosmic consciousness to turn the whole mass of it solid.

The cloud became, in an instant, an enormous block of concrete—and immediately whipped around and slammed down onto the Jianghai Gang sect master.

Boom—

A crash like thunder.

The Jianghai Gang sect master ended up sprawled on the ground, drenched in blood, pinned beneath a massive cloud-shaped slab of concrete that left him unable to move an inch.

I crouched down again and looked at his face, gone red from being crushed, and said, “Your disciple told you to beat me up. What was I supposed to do—just stand there and take it? Seemed safer to fight back. Wouldn’t want you accidentally hurting me.”

The Jianghai Gang sect master was furious and desperate in equal measure, though whether that was from wounded pride or from having a boulder crushing the breath out of him, I couldn’t say. Either way, he turned his flushed face aside and gritted through it in silence.

I lost interest in the whole affair and turned toward the metaverse node gate.

Behind me, a commotion broke out at once.

Yuan Lingliang seemed to still be shouting my name.

Not my problem. I barely knew the woman.

When I reached the so-called node gate, I found it was nothing more than two churning banks of colored cloud, standing in the sky like a pair of grand doors.

According to Fatty Huang, this was the junction point between two metaverses. Looking at it now, it did feel rather like a boundary in space and time.

The instant I flew into range, the cloud-formed gate loosed a bolt of lightning that scanned my identity, rank, and other details.

At my current rank, entering any metaverse was no trouble.

What came next was the fee.

I sent my destination into the clouds through consciousness, and transferred a thousand achievement points to the gate.

At once, a whirlwind spun itself out of the colored cloud and swept me straight through.

Once I’d passed through, I looked back and saw it had become a rain cloud again—not unlike the gate to the Hidden World I’d first walked through when I’d arrived in the Elite World.

For some reason, the Shadow Pavilion seemed to have a real fondness for using clouds as doors.

Was this Future World?

I couldn’t tell whether I’d landed in some assessment zone or in Future World proper. All I felt was a bleak wind gusting around me, everything gray and hazy, nothing visible at all.

I had no wish to linger somewhere I couldn’t see, so I fell back on my penetrating-wave ability. Only then did a mountain, faint and distant, come into view.

I flew toward it at speed.

After about half an hour, once I’d finally closed the distance, I realized the mountain had no roots at all. It simply hung suspended in midair, with nothing around it whatsoever. Stranger still, in every direction—above, below, left, right, front, back—the mountain tapered to a point, and it drifted slowly as it hung there.

I rotated my own body up and down, and the mountain seemed to rotate with me in the opposite direction.

So there was no such thing as up or down here, no left or right.

Where exactly was I? Nothing but empty void on every side.

Just as I prepared to fly straight into the mountain, a spear came whistling toward me with a sound like tearing cloud. I dodged, caught it in one hand, and hurled it straight back where it had come from.

Whoever you are, spear me and I’ll spear you right back.

A moment later, an inhuman shriek rose from the distance.

What in the world?

Had I actually hit something?

Whatever. They were the ones who’d thrown first.

Since I had no fixed destination anyway, I figured I might as well go see who was bored enough to be chucking spears at strangers.

I flew toward the sound.

As I went, I turned invisible and swept the area with same-frequency sensing, wary of anything worse lurking nearby.

Before long, I spotted the thing my spear had run through, hanging upside down from a rocky outcrop on the mountainside. It didn’t look human at all—short, stocky, gray-brown all over, its skin rough as stone.

Its head resembled a toad’s, lacking both nose and ears, just a blood-red gash of a mouth splitting the center of its face. Four round black eyes glinted with menace. Its limbs were short and thick but knotted with muscle. I had no idea what it was.

I flew closer to get a better look, and the air split with a sharp whistling sound again.

Whoosh—whoosh—whoosh—

Four or five more spears came flying at me.

At the same moment, seven or eight more of the same creatures burst out of the shadows, gripping bone spears, eyes burning with hostility, roaring as they charged. They moved with startling speed, leaping and darting between the floating rocks—clearly they’d marked me as prey that had wandered into their territory.

Damn it—I was invisible!

My invisibility ranked among the best in the Elite World. Not even Xiang Bianfeng could see through it. But here, apparently, it counted for nothing against these toad-things.

They weren’t tracking me by sight or by same-frequency sensing, then. Something else entirely.

There was no time to puzzle it out. I threw myself into counterattack, martial technique and force of consciousness together.

I stamped down and shot skyward, dodging the first volley of spears, then whipped my hand back and condensed the force of consciousness around me into a series of invisible air waves aimed at the creatures below.

Tough as their bodies looked, their inner consciousness was nowhere near as sturdy as anything from the real world. My air waves weren’t pure force to begin with—they carried an attack meant for the mind itself.

One pass was all it took. Every wave landed square between their eyes. A string of shrill screams rang out as the front rank froze mid-stride, their consciousness shattering, and collapsed among the rocks.

When I pushed my force of consciousness into their brains, I felt something cool and silky, and a trickle of that coolness flowed into my own consciousness sea. It was unlike Earth force of consciousness—closer to my own cosmic force of consciousness, though murkier, more obscure. Strange as it was, it gave me an entirely new kind of sensation.

My cosmic force of consciousness had ticked up, just barely.

So killing monsters came with a reward.

Well then, why hold back?

I dove in with the momentum still carrying me, channeling cosmic force of consciousness through fist and palm, shattering a monster’s consciousness core with every strike.

This palm technique, wrapping martial technique in force of consciousness, was something I’d actually learned from Xiang Bianfeng. His final killing blow, back when we’d fought, had genuinely been something else. It had taken me a long while afterward to work out how he’d done it.

Once I unleashed that combined strike, screams rose from the ground in waves. I cut down monster after monster, and each time, I dove straight into their minds and drew out the force of consciousness within.

Individually, none of them carried much. But there were so many of them.

That murky, obscure force of consciousness soaked into me like a fine rain, and my own cosmic force of consciousness crept slowly upward.

By the time I’d more or less wiped out everything in front of me, my cosmic force of consciousness had climbed at least half a rank. More interesting still, the space around me had sharpened considerably.

So this murky force of consciousness could actually improve my perception here.

The slaughter left the remaining monsters wary. They’d clearly never encountered anyone whose force of consciousness could counter the very source of their power.

Whoever they’d fought before, I guessed, had probably all been ordinary elites arriving from other metaverses—people who only carried human force of consciousness, nothing cosmic.

That would explain why they’d charged in so recklessly. To me, though, that recklessness just looked like free benefits walking straight into my hands.

The rest of the monsters stopped fighting and simply watched from a distance.

But I hadn’t had my fill yet. They’d gone down so easily—no sense leaving free rewards on the table.

So I started hunting them down.

They weren’t entirely stupid, though. They knew they couldn’t beat me, and they couldn’t outrun me either. So instead they banded together into a tight circle and spat black corrosive mist into the air. Wherever that mist drifted, even the rocks hissed and smoked.

I probed it lightly with cosmic force of consciousness, and it stung—just a little. A sliver of my power actually dissolved on contact. So this mist could damage matter and consciousness both.

They had something like that?

I wasn’t about to charge through it. Not worth the risk. I hadn’t spent all this effort building up my cosmic force of consciousness just to watch some of it burn away.

Still—I wanted some of that mist for myself.

Now that was good stuff.