Chapter 59: Liu Yuan Strikes! Counter-Killing the Five-Ring Evil Soul Master!
Under the cold, blade-like command of Old Ghost Tree-Infant, the Five-Ring Evil Soul King—whose right arm had just been reduced to a mangled stump by Liu Yuan—let out a shrill, bloodcurdling scream. He did not hesitate. Although the ragged flesh of his severed limb still hissed with charred smoke, and the agonizing pain crashed against his frayed nerves like a relentless tide, Evil Soul Masters were fundamentally a breed of lunatics. They were creatures dominated by distortion, base desires, and festering negative emotions.
Liu Yuan's previous heavy blow had not instilled fear. Instead, the scent of his own burning blood completely ignited the dormant, bloodthirsty killing intent deep within the fanatic's heart.
"I am going to kill you, you little bastard!"
The Evil Soul Master unleashed an incoherent, beastly roar. Beneath his feet, his third and fourth soul rings flickered in rapid, alternating succession.
Rich, viscous evil fire—a sickly, nauseating shade of green—erupted from his pores. The flames wrapped around his broken figure, twisting him into a grotesque bundle of pulsing, erratic fireballs. using the violent thrust generated by the jetting evil fire, his body tore through the forest, dragging a highly corrosive tail flame that withered the foliage in its wake. He bit firmly onto the trail left by Liu Yuan and Vina.
Ahead of the pursuit, Liu Yuan was dragging Vina along, speeding through the treacherous outer perimeter of the dense Star Dou Great Forest. The ancient trees around them grew in twisted, suffocating clusters. The decaying humus underfoot was several feet thick, acting like a swamp that severely limited their running speed.
Liu Yuan sensed the manic aura closing the distance behind him. The foul, fishy stench of the evil fire had already drifted into his nasal cavity, carried by the rushing wind. He knew that dragging Vina by the hand through such complex, unforgiving terrain was far too inefficient. At this rate, they would be overtaken.
"Vina, excuse me!"
Liu Yuan gave a low, sharp shout. The moment a sickly green fireball launched by their pursuer shattered a massive tree trunk to their left, his figure came to an abrupt halt. His right arm swept smoothly behind the backs of Vina's slender knees, while his left hand firmly supported her upper back. In one fluid motion, he lifted the princess of the Heavenly Soul Empire horizontally, securing her against his chest in an extremely steady posture.
Vina's body went completely stiff for a fraction of a second.
Feeling the hard, powerful lines of Liu Yuan's broad chest, along with the scorching body heat radiating through their thin layers of clothing, a deep blush instantly stained her normally pale, composed face.
Yet, in this life-or-death crisis, she displayed the exceptional psychological fortitude expected of a royal woman. She did not waste a single second on affectation or useless struggle. Instead, she took the immediate opportunity to stretch her arms up, wrapping them securely around Liu Yuan's neck and resting her head against his shoulder to lower their center of gravity.
"The distance behind us is closing. His speed is increasing!" Vina whispered calmly directly into Liu Yuan's ear, keeping her eyes locked on the rear to monitor the enemy's movements.
Liu Yuan did not waste breath on a response. He directly activated the Qilin Precious Technique.
In an instant, a sacred, ice-blue luster cascaded down his legs, enveloping his muscles in a crackling aura. His footwork became extremely light, taking on a strange, ethereal rhythm. Every time the tips of his toes grazed the damp earth, a faint, blooming ice crystal was left behind. His entire body transformed into a blur of blue light, pulling a long, continuous afterimage through the dense, obstacle-ridden forest.
The Five-Ring Evil Soul Master had nearly closed the gap enough to singe their clothes, but upon seeing Liu Yuan's speed suddenly skyrocket, his bloodshot eyes widened. In the mere blink of an eye, the boy had pulled away, widening the gap by hundreds of meters once more.
"Scum! You cannot escape!"
The Evil Soul Master ground his teeth together so hard that blood seeped from his gums. His distorted face twisted into an expression of absolute madness.
Desperate to catch his prey, he began to overdraw his own life potential without a shred of hesitation. Letting out a roar that sounded less human and more like a slaughtered beast, his second and fifth soul rings flared to life simultaneously. The sickly green evil fire clinging to his body instantly darkened, shifting into a heart-stopping, suffocating gray-black hue.
It was an explosive, suicidal technique fueled by burning his very blood essence.
He became a falling demon star, rampaging mindlessly through the jungle. The rolling gray-black demon fire incinerated everything in his path, forcibly shortening the distance to Liu Yuan once again.
"Really troublesome."
Liu Yuan scanned the chaotic destruction behind him through the peripheral vision of his Double Pupils.
His own cultivation rank was simply too low. He was two entire major realms behind this Evil Soul Master. Even with the tremendous boost of the Qilin Precious Technique, the opponent was clearly a speed-type specialist who had completely abandoned his own survival instincts.
Liu Yuan knew that if this chase dragged on, his soul power would eventually deplete, and they would be hunted down. His gaze gradually cooled, settling into the chilling stillness of a drawn blade. Pure, unadulterated killing intent overflowed within the depths of his Double Pupils.
"Since you are so anxious to die, I will just kill you directly."
He did not lose a fraction of his composure in the face of the enemy's madness. His mind processed the variables at lightning speed.
Tilting his head slightly, he whispered to the girl in his arms. "Vina, help me check. Is there any sign of regeneration on that guy's broken arm? Has the wound healed at all?"
Vina immediately braced her mental state. A faint golden light flashed within her beautiful eyes as she pushed her spiritual perception to its limits, locking onto the rampaging figure in the distance.
"No. His severed arm is still completely charred. The evil soul power gathering around the stump is highly unstable. He is merely using brute force to suppress the bleeding and the pain. There are absolutely no signs of tissue regeneration."
Hearing this precise analysis, the tension in Liu Yuan's shoulders eased slightly.
High speed, fire-attribute attacks, and zero high-intensity regeneration capabilities.
Based on this data, Liu Yuan could definitively conclude that this Evil Soul Master fell into the classic category of high attack, low defense. Such a Soul Master possessed terrifying explosive power, but their physical resilience was brittle. As long as he could exploit the man's frenzied state and his desperate eagerness to secure a kill, delivering a fatal counterattack to wipe him off the face of the earth was entirely possible.
Liu Yuan deliberately allowed his speed to drop, his breathing growing slightly heavier to project the false illusion of depleting soul power.
"Vina, I am putting you down now. Listen to me very carefully. You will continue to run forward at your absolute maximum speed. Escape with everything you have, and do not look back."
He lowered her to the ground with gentle precision, his tone dropping into a low, uncompromising command. "You have to make him believe that we have reached the end of our rope and have been forced to split up to survive. You must not let him sense anything out of the ordinary."
"I will set an ambush right here. The moment he enters my blind spot, I can kill him."
Vina looked up into the deep depths of Liu Yuan's Double Pupils and gave a firm nod, showing zero hesitation. She understood perfectly well that any display of reluctance or emotional indecision right now would only sabotage his tactical setup.
"Be careful. I will wait for you up ahead."
After delivering those words, Vina forcibly surged her soul power. She activated her movement techniques, deliberately stumbling slightly to fake a panicked, exhausted demeanor, and sprinted desperately toward the darker depths of the dense forest.
The moment she was clear, Liu Yuan's figure blurred. He instantly vanished into a thick cluster of withered, waist-high dead grass.
He immediately activated the restrained form of the Undying Body. Every pore on his skin sealed shut tight. He forcibly suppressed his internal functions, dropping his heartbeat to a mere handful of thumps per minute. His breathing stopped entirely. Hidden within the underbrush, his presence vanished, rendering him indistinguishable from a cold, lifeless stone.
A few moments later, the Evil Soul Master tore into the clearing, his chest heaving with heavy, ragged pants.
His bloodshot eyes darted around, catching sight of Vina's slowing, solitary figure in the distance, and then glancing at the trampled intersection where Liu Yuan's tracks seemingly vanished. A cruel, jagged smile split his distorted face.
"Running? Finally separated? That little brat must have burned through his soul power and is hiding in a ditch somewhere waiting to die. I will catch this little princess first, and then I will take my sweet time hunting him down!"
In the eyes of the Evil Soul Master, Liu Yuan was merely a Rank 39 Soul Elder. It was only natural that his soul power would completely bottom out after carrying another person at such high speeds for so long.
His vigilance plummeted to absolute zero. Raising his remaining left hand, he condensed a swirling sphere of gray-black evil fire, preparing to accelerate and capture Vina.
However, just as he sprinted past the patch of dead grass, passing less than three meters from Liu Yuan's hiding spot, the trap was sprung.
Sshhh—!
A searing red beam of light, radiating an extreme, concentrated heat, shot out from the dead grass without a single warning sign.
The Evil Soul Master was, despite his madness, a seasoned outlaw with rich combat experience. Even in a state of complete relaxation, his survival instincts kicked in. He let out a startled roar, and the sickly green evil fire clinging to his body surged frantically, condensing into a thick ring of flames in a desperate bid to block the incoming attack.
But the piercing power of the Laser Eye fired from the Double Pupils far exceeded his wildest imagination. The red beam punched cleanly through the fire ring.
More, in the exact fraction of a second the beam restricted the enemy's movements, Liu Yuan's figure had already erupted from the grass like a coiled viper.
He did not stay in place to maintain the beam. Instead, he fully ignited the Qilin Precious Technique. His body dragged a violent series of crackling blue arcs through the air, instantly bridging the spatial gap. He materialized directly behind and slightly to the side of the Evil Soul Master.
"Die for me!"
Liu Yuan clenched his five fingers into a tight fist. The entirety of his Rank 39 soul power surged into his right arm, crashing forward like a burst levee. His fist took on a blinding, ice-blue hue, radiating extreme kinetic force. Accompanied by the sharp crack of breaking air, his fist slammed mercilessly into the Evil Soul Master's completely defenseless abdomen.
Crack!
The sickening crunch of shattering bones echoed clearly through the clearing.
With this single, devastating punch, Liu Yuan channeled the unique, destructive vibration frequency of the Qilin Precious Technique, driving the kinetic force straight through the man's flesh and organs, piercing cleanly out the other side.
The Evil Soul Master's pupils shrank to the size of pinpricks. He looked down at the gaping, blood-soaked hole blown through his chest and abdomen. The manic bloodlust in his eyes instantly dissolved, replaced by a desperate, nihilistic desire for mutual destruction.
He knew his life was over. In the final second before the fire of his life extinguished completely, he unleashed one last, shrill roar.
"Let us go to Hell together!"
His fifth soul ring flared with a blinding, erratic light. It was his final, suicidal trump card—a blood-fire self-detonation.
Boom!
A violent, devastating explosion ripped through the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest.
Scorching evil fire mixed with pulverized fragments of flesh and bone, forming a terrifying, expanding shockwave. The blast instantly flattened the massive ancient trees, reducing everything within a radius of dozens of meters to splintered ash.
Vina, who was still running up ahead, whipped her head around at the deafening sound. She watched in horror as a gray-black mushroom cloud rose above the canopy. Her heart plummeted straight into the abyss.
At the absolute epicenter of the explosion, Liu Yuan took the full, unmitigated force of the blast.
Even with his soul power desperately shielding his body, facing the point-blank self-detonation of a Five-Ring Soul King was catastrophic. His physical form instantly suffered a devastating, tearing blow, his flesh ripping apart under the sheer pressure.
However, amidst the agonizing destruction, Liu Yuan's consciousness remained absolutely, chillingly clear.
Just as his body was on the verge of total disintegration, the second soul ring resting within his core—the Undying Body—erupted with an unmatched, blinding golden-red brilliance.
The scattered droplets of blood and shredded tissue seemed to be pulled by an overwhelming magnetic force. In a scene that defied all logic, the broken fragments re-interwove, knitting bone, muscle, and skin back together in mid-air.
After only a few short breaths, Liu Yuan fell heavily to the scorched earth. Though his face was drained of color and pale, his body had been completely and flawlessly reconstructed, looking exactly as it had before the blast.
"What a lunatic."
Liu Yuan coughed up a mouthful of residual bruised blood, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He did not dare delay for a single second.
His heightened senses picked up a tremendously powerful, wrathful aura approaching rapidly from the distant flank. It was the Seven-Ring Soul Sage, the elite Evil Soul Master who had previously been stalled by the royal guards.
Liu Yuan's figure blurred into motion. He quickly closed the distance to where Vina stood frozen in panic, sweeping her up into his arms once more.
"Go. Do not look back. That Soul Sage is on our tail!"
Without another word, the two figures vanished into the suffocating darkness of the dense forest.
Not long after they evacuated the area, a figure clad in a pitch-black robe descended from the canopy, landing heavily at the edge of the smoking crater. The Seven-Ring Soul Sage possessed a gloomy, sunken face that was currently twisted in absolute fury.
He stared down at the scattered, charred remains of his subordinate, taking in the shocking scale of the explosion marks etched into the earth. His chest heaved violently under his robes.
"Good. Very good! Two mere juniors actually managed to force a Soul King to self-destruct."
The Soul Sage extended a withered, bone-thin finger, reaching down to touch a small splatter of Liu Yuan's blood that had landed outside the blast zone and had not yet completely dried.
He brought his bloodstained fingertip directly beneath his nose, taking a long, deep sniff. Instantly, two gloomy, malevolent rays of light burst from his sunken eyes.
He ruthlessly injected his own evil soul power into that single drop of blood. The crimson liquid boiled, instantly vaporizing into a thin trail of red smoke that pointed straight into the depths of the forest—locking directly onto the path Liu Yuan and Vina had taken.
"You killed my people and still think you can run? Today, every last one of you will die!"
The Soul Sage's figure dissolved into a streak of pitch-black light. Following the unerring guidance of the blood smoke, he launched into a wild, murderous pursuit.
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