Chapter 60: Striking Again! A Seven-Ring Evil Soul Master Dies Miserably!
The massive canopy of the Star Dou Great Forest blotted out the sky, plunging the ancient woods into a perpetual, suffocating twilight. The heavy air clung to the skin, thick with the damp scent of rotting soil and the faint, metallic tang of old blood.
"What exactly is going on?"
Liu Yuan furrowed his brows. He vaulted over a massive, moss-covered root, tearing through the dense underbrush at absolute maximum speed. His chest rose and fell in a steady, controlled rhythm. Beneath his feet, the ice-blue light of the Qilin Precious Technique flickered and pulsed, propelling him forward like a phantom.
Yet, despite his blinding pace, a cold, creeping sensation clung to the base of his neck. It felt exactly like the unblinking stare of a venomous snake locked onto his spine—a feeling that proved entirely impossible to shake off.
"Is it a perception-type Evil Soul Master? How can he pinpoint our direction with such terrifying accuracy?" Vina lay securely against Liu Yuan's back, her arms wrapped tight around his shoulders. Her delicate features were drawn taut, her expression grave to the extreme.
She had been continuously extending her mental force backward to sweep their trail. To her deep unease, she discovered that their pursuer was not tracking them through conventional vision or lingering scent. Instead, the enemy was locked onto a much deeper, almost conceptual marker.
Liu Yuan's jaw tightened, a rare flicker of cold frustration flashing through his usually placid eyes.
He had executed their escape flawlessly. They had put a massive distance between themselves and the enemy right from the start. Throughout this grueling chase, he had carefully manipulated his soul power to suppress every conceivable trace of his and Vina's presence. He had even gone so far as to form a vacuum seal of soul power over their skin, forcibly isolating the scent of their sweat from the humid forest air.
Despite all these flawless countermeasures, the seven-ring Soul Sage hunting them managed to precisely correct his orientation at every turn. The man was like a rusted nail driven directly into their shadows, constantly biting down hard on their heels.
Calculating their current speed and the rapidly shrinking gap, Liu Yuan arrived at a grim conclusion. Within thirty minutes, they would be completely overtaken.
"Should we turn back and fight?" Vina asked. Her palms, pressed against his chest, were slick with cold sweat. She looked up at the side of his face, her gaze fixing on the eerie, deep depths of his Double Pupils. Her voice was kept to a barely audible whisper.
Liu Yuan did not hesitate. As he twisted his body to weave through a deadly cluster of thorned thickets, he decisively shook his head.
"No. The opponent is a seven-ring Soul Sage, and I am only at level thirty-nine. There is a chasm of three major ranks between us: Soul Ancestor, Soul King, and Soul Emperor."
His voice remained frighteningly calm, entirely devoid of panic. "This gap is far too massive. It cannot be bridged by simply risking our lives in a burst of hot blood., we have absolutely zero intelligence regarding his Soul Skills or his specific attack methods. To strike back rashly now would only be courting a meaningless death."
Freeing one hand for a fraction of a second, Liu Yuan hoisted Vina higher up his back to secure her center of gravity, never once breaking his sprint through the suffocating forest. "Let us keep running for now. I will rack my brain to find a solution. There has to be a blind spot we have overlooked."
...
Far behind them, the oppressive aura was closing in. The violent, deeply evil pressure radiating from the pursuer had already begun to warp the surrounding environment, terrifying the low-level Soul Beasts and startling massive flocks of birds into frantic flight.
Several hundred meters away, the black-robed Soul Sage tore through the ancient tree trunks. His sunken eyes burned with naked cruelty.
He raised his withered hand, his gaze locking onto a strand of increasingly dense, blood-red smoke coiling around his fingertip. A series of raspy, sadistic sneers escaped his throat.
"Little beast, you still think you can run? Once I get my hands on you, I will personally skin you alive. I will pull your tendons out one by one, refine your soul into my soul banner, and subject you to the fires of agony for forty-nine days and nights!"
The distance between predator and prey continued to shrink in this brutal test of endurance. Finally, the high-speed chase reached its ultimate intersection.
Looming ahead was a towering, ancient tree, its trunk so impossibly thick it would take ten grown men to embrace it. Thick aerial roots hung down from its massive branches like heavy, wooden curtains.
Liu Yuan's figure flickered like a ghost, darting directly behind the massive trunk and vanishing from sight.
Long before he made that move, Vina's presence had already completely melted away into the dark depths of the forest.
A sharp rush of wind tore through the canopy.
A black shadow flashed overhead, and the Evil Soul Master landed with heavy, absolute stability upon a slanted, mossy branch.
He looked down at the deathly silent ancient tree below. The disdain twisting his scarred features was completely undisguised.
"Still trying to hide? Do you really think you can? Under the lock of my Blood Curse Tracking, even if you burrowed straight into a crack in the earth, you would still glow like a beacon in the night."
The Evil Soul Master slowly opened his hand. His fingers were as withered and grotesque as a chicken's claw. A mass of dark, suffocating black mist rapidly condensed within his palm, swirling violently before solidifying into a razor-sharp blade of necrotic Qi.
With a casual, almost lazy flick of his wrist, he sent the attack downward.
The black blade of Qi tore through the air with an ear-piercing shriek, slicing precisely toward the exact section of the tree trunk where Liu Yuan was concealed.
Bang!
The deafening explosion of splintering wood echoed through the clearing. Massive chunks of bark and timber flew in all directions, forcing Liu Yuan to flash out from behind the ruined cover.
He stood alone in the clearing. The gaze within his Double Pupils radiated a deep, freezing chill.
The Evil Soul Master immediately swept his perception across the surroundings. His brow twitched as he discovered that Vina, the girl who had been practically glued to the boy's back moments prior, was nowhere to be found.
He stopped his advance, standing tall on the branch as he demanded coldly, "Where is that little princess? Where did you hide her?"
Liu Yuan looked up at him. A trace of extremely sarcastic, biting mockery slowly surfaced on his calm face. "Looking at your reaction just now... it is exactly as I guessed."
He brushed a stray woodchip from his shoulder. "Your tracking method can only lock onto me. The moment I separate from her, you become completely blind to her existence."
The Evil Soul Master's expression twisted hideously, his sore spot ruthlessly poked. Murderous intent surged wildly in his sunken eyes. He took a step forward, his voice dropping into a sharp, lethal hiss. "I will ask you one last time. Where is the princess?"
Liu Yuan let out a cold, dismissive snort. Deep within his Double Pupils, a dangerous red light began to flicker and build. "You had better worry about your own life first, old man. Lest you accidentally capsize your boat in a shallow gutter."
"Refusing to speak? Then you can go die first! Once I cripple you and drag you back, I naturally have countless ways to search your soul and extract her location!"
Pushed to the absolute limit of his fury, the Evil Soul Master's face contorted into a hideous snarl. His body blurred into a distorted black shadow, leaving a lingering afterimage on the branch as his true form instantly flickered directly in front of Liu Yuan.
His five fingers formed a vicious claw, thickly entwined with corrosive black death Qi. Without a shred of hesitation, he slashed horizontally toward Liu Yuan with extreme, lethal viciousness.
Puchi!
Hot blood splattered across the damp grass.
Although Liu Yuan pushed his reaction speed to the absolute limit, attempting to twist his torso away from the strike, the sheer, impossible gap in soul power proved fatal. The black claw swept past him, and his right arm was cleanly severed at the shoulder, hitting the ground with a heavy thud.
"Go to hell!" the Soul Sage roared.
Enduring the sudden, excruciating explosion of pain, Liu Yuan did not retreat. Instead, his left eye—his Double Pupil—focused with terrifying precision. A highly concentrated, scarlet Laser Eye beam erupted from his pupil, shooting directly toward the Evil Soul Master's face at point-blank range.
"A trifling parlor trick!"
The Evil Soul Master let out a harsh, disdainful laugh. His reaction speed was monstrous. He simply leaned his upper body back slightly, allowing the scorching red beam to fly harmlessly past his cheek. In that split second, he even had the leisure to flash Liu Yuan a deeply mocking, triumphant grin.
In his arrogant view, the boy's desperate strike was ridiculously off-target—a pathetic miss caused by the blinding panic of losing a limb.
However, in the very next second, deep within a patch of dark, overgrown grass roughly fifty meters behind the Evil Soul Master, a sudden, catastrophic change occurred.
Liu Yuan's scarlet beam had not missed. It had precisely struck a massive, circular object heavily concealed beneath a thick layer of dead leaves.
Hiss—Roar!
An devastating roar that threatened to rupture eardrums exploded through the forest. It was a sound dripping with pure violence and suffocating toxicity.
The originally calm forest floor instantly collapsed inward. A gargantuan venomous spider, its body pitch-black and adorned with strange, pulsating red patterns across its carapace, violently broke through the soil.
This was a Death Spider Emperor. And judging by the terrifying pressure radiating from its massive body, its cultivation age had reached the legendary world of one hundred thousand years.
Because it was currently in a period of extreme weakness after laying its eggs, the beast had buried itself here to enter a deep, restorative sleep. But its slumber had been rudely interrupted. Liu Yuan's sudden scarlet beam had perfectly struck a tiny, sensitive gap in its thick carapace.
For this violent-tempered, absolute overlord of the forest, such an attack was an unforgivable, intolerable provocation.
The Death Spider Emperor's dense cluster of compound eyes snapped open, instantly locking onto the Evil Soul Master. In the beast's perception, this human possessed the strongest, most threatening aura in the vicinity. As for the one-armed Liu Yuan bleeding out nearby, the giant spider registered him as nothing more than an insignificant, dying insect.
Swish!
The Death Spider Emperor moved with a speed that defied its massive size. Its spear-like sharp claws, dripping with a sickening green poisonous mist, instantly tore through the air, stabbing viciously toward the exact spot where the Evil Soul Master and Liu Yuan stood.
The Evil Soul Master's triumphant expression shattered, replaced by drastic, unadulterated terror. The sheer, suffocating pressure of the incoming strike made his scalp tingle to the point of numbness.
"A hundred-thousand-year Soul Beast?! Damn it!"
Panic seizing his heart, he immediately tried to pull back and launch himself into the air to escape.
But unexpectedly, at this exact, critical moment, a horrifying anomaly occurred. On the ground, Liu Yuan's severed right arm twitched. Driven by the terrifying, heaven-defying self-healing power of the Undying Body, flesh, bone, and sinew rapidly extended from his bloody shoulder. Within a mere handful of breaths, a completely new arm grew back into existence.
In that same instant, Liu Yuan detonated every last drop of remaining soul power within his body.
He did not run. He did not dodge.
Instead, acting like an absolute madman, the very moment the Evil Soul Master turned his back to flee, Liu Yuan lunged forward and locked his arms around the man from behind in an unbreakable, vice-like grip.
"Are you completely insane?! Do you want to die with me?!" The Evil Soul Master shrieked in absolute horror, struggling desperately to break free. To his absolute shock, he found that the physical strength erupting from this level thirty-nine boy was shockingly, impossibly massive.
Liu Yuan felt the rapidly enlarging shadow of death descending upon his back. Despite the impending doom, the corners of his mouth hooked into a cold, ruthless arc.
"The one dying today is you," Liu Yuan whispered into the man's ear. "Not me."
Puchi!
A sickening, muffled sound of flesh being ruptured echoed through the clearing.
The Death Spider Emperor's colossal, razor-sharp claw pierced through them as easily as a hot knife sliding through tofu. In a single, devastating strike, the massive appendage impaled both Liu Yuan and the Evil Soul Master, pinning them together on the spot.
Thick, black corrosive venom immediately flooded into their bodies along the groove of the spider's claw.
The seven-ring Soul Sage let out a short, gurgling scream of absolute despair. In the face of the absolute, tyrannical power of a hundred-thousand-year Soul Beast, his entire body instantly began to shatter and melt. The highly concentrated venom violently corroded his physical form, and in that very same moment, his soul was entirely dissolved into nothingness.
Liu Yuan's chest was also blown open, a massive, gaping blood hole pierced straight through his torso. His body hung heavily upon the massive spider claw, dripping blood onto the forest floor.
The Death Spider Emperor let out a low hiss. It seemed to deeply despise the foul, rotting stench belonging to the Evil Soul Master that now coated its limb. With a violent shake of its massive claw, acting as if it were merely flicking off a piece of disgusting trash, it violently flung Liu Yuan and the dissolving corpse away.
The two bodies crashed heavily into the distant underbrush.
Subsequently, the giant beast let out a final, venting roar that shook the canopy. Completely ignoring the two "ants" it considered already dead and rotting, the overlord turned its massive body around and descended back into its subterranean lair to resume its deep sleep.
The ancient forest slowly returned to a deathly silence.
The Evil Soul Master was already dead beyond any shadow of a doubt, his body reduced to a melting pile of sludge.
But a few dozen meters away, Liu Yuan lay quietly in a massive pool of his own blood.
Deep within his shattered chest, the Undying Body was operating frantically. Flesh knitted together, shattered bones realigned and fused, and severed blood vessels reconnected at a terrifying speed completely visible to the naked eye.
Soon, he would be fully recovered.
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