Forty millenniums of cul.., p.291
Forty Millenniums of Cultivation, page 291
'This is—'
Li Yao bit the tip of his tongue and shook his head hard, freeing himself from the illusion. He found himself soaked in sweat. His brain seemed to have been emptied, and he had never been more exhausted.
Wang Ji's declaration came to an abrupt end. Like a puppet whose string had been cut off, he floated in the seawater numbly. Suddenly, cracking noises burst out from the inside of the biochemical beast. All its joints had exploded. Its head, limbs, and broken tails were each twisted in a different direction, while it dashed toward Skeleton Dragon's residence in an extremely awkward posture, cramping.
BOOM!
Wang Ji crashed into Skeleton Dragon's residence and hit the spider-net-like cracks precisely!
The cracks quickly expanded, revealing the darkness inside.
For some reason, Li Yao felt that thousands of pairs of eyes were staring at him in the dark residence penetrating through his crystal suit and his flesh and blood into the deepest part of his bone marrow.
It was at this moment that Wang Ji was back to himself because of the excruciating pain. He waved his hands and legs, struggling crazily and screamed in despair.
He seemed to be fighting an invisible enemy. He tried his best to run away, only to be pulled back time and time again and smashed against the cracks.
Li Yao activated his crystal camera on full power. He could vaguely see that countless transparent tentacles were wrapped around the black biochemical beast, pulling and corrupting it. The shell and flesh of the beast was torn apart, through which the tentacles crammed in and attacked Wang Ji himself directly!
Finally—
After almost ten clashes, the widest part of the cracks was more than two meters wide. Like a wide-open bloody mouth, Skeleton Dragon's residence sucked in Wang Ji together with his biochemical beast brutally.
CRACK! CRACK!
"Chiliu! Chiliu!"
"Squeak! Squeak"
Blood-freezing, leg-souring noises reverberated inside the dark gaps. Thousands of sweltering steel needles seemed to be stinging Li Yao's brain.
Wang Ji screamed desperately, not befitting an eminent demon; he was more like a pig which had been skinned and was ready to be butchered!
The desperate wailing gradually turned into helpless screaming, and then intermittent moaning, until it became feeble muttering in the end.
But another aura that was much more dangerous was getting more and more dense. Li Yao felt that an invisible demon was talking in a low voice right behind his ears.
Shua!
Li Yao's heart seemed to have been stabbed by a spike. All of his hair stood up, while he turned around abruptly and slashed out his Boiled Blood Wind Slashing Saber.
There seemed to be nothing in the seawater, yet he had hit something extremely tensile.
Li Yao extended all his telepathic thoughts and detected the surroundings as best he could, only to find that it was a weird creature that looked like a tentacle of a jellyfish, but multiple times thicker, which was swimming swiftly.
It seemed as soft as gel, but it was much harder than it appeared to be. Li Yao had extended the aura on his saber to some twenty meters long, but he could barely cut into the tentacle. The tentacle was not affected at all; it even crawled upwards along the body of the saber.
Wang Ji's scream was still ringing inside his ears. Li Yao did not dare fight the weird tentacle the hard away. He quickly withdrew his saber and leapt backward.
The tentacle didn't chase after him and simply retreated to the cracks. Then, a shrilling roar exploded in the deep inside of Skeleton Dragon's residence, as if countless crystal bombs had been detonated in everyone's brains at the same time!
The Cultivators and demons which were fighting in the battlefield not far away were all shocked by the shrilling roar and rendered dumb like puppets for a moment.
"What is it?"
"Such a terrifying aura!"
"It's demonic energy! Unparalleled demonic energy!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The piercing roar represented the final awakening of the ancient deadly demon from forty thousand years ago. Earsplitting collisions occurred in the depths of the residence, triggering chaotic turbulences in the silver ocean. The seawater was raging, and the ground was shaking!
The other twelve Cultivators sensed that a great demon was going to appear, too, and all swooped above Skeleton Dragon's residence.
BOOM!
After an ear-splitting crash, the upper half of the cone-shape architecture was demolished to smithereens.
The muddy seawater gradually dispersed, revealing a frightening figure more than thirty meters long which was slowly stretching its body.
Skeleton Dragon was exactly what its name suggested. Its arms were made up by countless bones which were emitting a bright silver glow. Its body was like a gargantuan egg, but the bones supporting the body were quite messy. With a careful look, one would notice that they had the characteristics of various creatures, as if the body had been piled up by the bones from countless species.
Nine arms made of bones extended out of the egg-shaped torso. The front end of each arm was a skull of a different species with its bloody mouth wide open, making the body look like a prehistoric hydra, only much more hideous and vicious.
In the middle of the empty chest was soft flesh that looked like jelly, which was heavily protected by the bones, emitting glamorous, translucent brightness.
The jelly was in the coagulation state. Watery liquid flowed slowly toward the nine arms, controlling each and every bone on them delicately.
In the center of the jelly, a cluster of crimson brightness was glistening wetly, expanding and shrinking like the beating heart of a human being.
Skeleton Dragon, an ancient deadly beast which had hibernated for forty thousand years, had finally broken free from the barriers and returned to reality again!
Chapter 428: Preternatural Horror! |
Other than the giant skulls at the ends of the nine arms, Skeleton Dragon did not seem to have its own head. But on the top of the round torso, dozens of transparent tentacles lifted a bruised, swollen, and twisted face that everyone could see clearly.
It was Wang Ji!
Wang Ji's face was expanded to almost ten times its normal size. It was limp like a cake which had been stomped on. Somebody seemed to have smashed all the bones in his face and reassembled them in a hurry, making his countenance unfathomably weird.
The misery beaming out of the hollow eyes indicated that the owner of the face would be better off dead. But Wang Ji's mouth curled. Some uncanny power seemed to be forcing him to put on a smile that was even more ugly than crying.
His body was entirely gone. The only thing left was his face, which was laughing according to the rhythm of the fluctuation of the tentacles.
"Wang Ji!"
Almost ten demons had survived the previous battle. Seeing that 'Wang Ji' had put on a brand-new appearance, they were not sure what had happening, but they did sense overwhelming demonic energy from Skeleton Dragon. Therefore, they were all overjoyed and came close.
When they were a hundred meters away from Skeleton Dragon, their hands and legs were all twisted weirdly just like Wang Ji a moment earlier, before they were tied up by the transparent tentacles and absorbed into Skeleton Dragon's body without even being able to cry out.
The most disgusting scene took place!
Skeleton Dragon's body seemed to be extremely corrosive. The flesh and blood of the eight demons, together with the biochemical beast they were in, were sucked up completely within a moment, while the shell and bones gradually floated to the surface of its body, making the bone armor covering its body more complete and bloodthirsty!
Devouring the meat of the eight demons, 'Wang Ji' moaned in great satisfaction. The size of Skeleton Dragon expanded noticeably. The dominating aura surrounding it was even more intense!
Li Yao felt cold sweat trickling down his forehead. He started to realize that Skeleton Dragon was not a dragon-type demon beast, but some sort of weird demon mollusk or demon plankton, like a venomous super jellyfish or an enormous octopus!
No wonder its residence was hidden in an underground silver ocean!
Its most distinguishing ability should be that it could swallow other creatures and transform their bones into weird plate armor to protect its soft body.
There was a large skull at the end of every one of the nine bone arms. They must've belonged to nine powerful demon beasts which had fallen victim to it.
If that was the case, the eccentric barrier on the surface of Boneyard and the enormous corpse of the dragon-type demon beast would be very easy to explain.
The dragon-type demon beast hundreds of meters long must've been one of the victims captured by Skeleton Dragon. But it had been too large to be absorbed directly. Therefore, Skeleton Dragon had locked it in the barrier to weaken it first.
Or maybe, Skeleton Dragon was refining its bones with secret arts and would absorb the bones into its own body when the bones were indestructible!
'This life form is indeed terrifying. No wonder Skeleton Dragon had been one of the ancient demons who were knocked out of the game in the very beginning.
'It was not necessarily because Skeleton Dragon was not good enough. Chances were that the other demons were all in fear of its terrible ability and suppressed it joint-handedly!
'Right now, it has just woken up from tens of thousands of years of dormancy. It is currently the weakest it will ever be!
'We have to destroy it immediately, or we may never be able to!
'If it devours a huge number of spiritual beasts and Heavenly Materials and Earthly Treasures on Boneyard and resumes its peak capability, no, if it resumes 10% of its peak capability, it will be a catastrophe for the Heaven's Origin Sector!'
Li Yao made up his mind quickly. His gaze turned sharp again.
Skeleton Dragon's soft body wriggled nonstop. Manipulated by transparent tentacles, Wang Ji's twisted face unleashed queer brightness. The strange laughter gradually stopped, until it turned into an ancient dialect in the end, and Skeleton Dragon muttered to itself, "Forty thousand years… I have slept for forty thousand years!
"The Demon Beast Empire has been destroyed? Hahahaha. Well done! Well done! But I wonder, have the bloodlines of the demons who fought for the reign of the cosmos against me gone extinct or not?
"Oh? Cultivators reappeared, and mankind thrived again and took over most of the worlds? Excellent! Excellent! Human beings are the most delicious cuisine! To think that such a small body contains such a powerful soul! It is even more enjoyable than the demon beasts hundreds of meters long!
"Crystal suit? What is that? They are using strengthened external-skeletons to improve their combat ability?"
The more Li Yao heard, the more he was petrified.
He had been planning to deal with Skeleton Dragon by taking advantage of its ignorance, an inevitable result from forty thousand years of seclusion. But judging from the current situation, it could suck knowledge and memories directly from the brain of the creatures that it devoured!
Right now, it knew exactly as much as Wang Ji and the rest of the demons did.
A moment later, the smile on the big face of 'Wang Ji' was even more cheerful. Sharp brilliance was being condensed in the bottom of the hollow eyes, while it stared at Li Yao and the other Cultivators.
Everyone felt that their heart were pierced through by its eyes instantly.
"Blood Demon Sector? Heaven's Origin Sector?
"A single planet accommodates thousands of Cultivators and billions of creatures! After I absorb all of them, at least thirty percent of my capability can be restored!"
Li Yao's heart almost skipped a beat. The most horrible thing had happened.
Skeleton Dragon had learnt the information regarding the Heaven's Origin Sector and the Blood Demon Sector from the memories of Wang Ji and the other demons.
They were the two worlds that were closest to Boneyard.
In twenty days or so, the Heaven's Origin Sector would launch a new star shuttle to Boneyard.
As long as Skeleton Dragon absorbed a Cultivator, it would be able to acquire his memory, learn how to pilot a star shuttle, and thus embark on his journey to the Heaven's Origin Sector!
"Ahhhhh!"
Right then, abrupt changes took place. An Orb Patroller of Team Thunder Soul suddenly cried out, while he trembled violently beyond his control.
He was tangled by Skeleton Dragon's transparent tentacles!
"Be careful!"
It was not until this moment that Li Yao realized that countless transparent tentacles interweaved into an impregnable dragnet which was about to enclose them without anybody knowing anything.
"We were fooled!
"Skeleton Dragon is not a moron. There is no need for it to mutter to himself and tell us what it is going to do!
"It was merely trying to attract our attention so that it could spread all its tentacles around us!"
Li Yao gritted his teeth and dashed forward into a streak of brightness toward the Cultivator who was dancing uncontrollably. He bellowed and ignited his soul. The handle of the Boiled Blood Wind Slashing Saber was clutched so hard that it was almost broken.
Enhanced by the last proportion of the Ares Extension, the aura of the blade was extended to unprecedentedly twenty meters long, making it as unstoppably as a solar storm!
Shua!
In an upward motion, a perfect bloody curve was drawn. A transparent tentacle had been cut into two halves down the middle!
Skeleton had just woken up. It was at the weakest moment of its life. Due to the sharp pain of the chopped-off tentacle, it shrank suddenly, delaying its attack for about half a second.
Awed by its eccentric appearance, the Cultivators had been greatly alarmed. They discovered the transparent tentacles surrounding them instantly after Li Yao's reminder and all got away in time before the tentacles were able to bind them.
Team Blue Bronze sent a lot of information to the crystal processors of the other two Star Teams.
"Skeleton Dragon has been awakened!"
"He wants to swallow our home to regain his strength!"
"He must be stopped!"
All the Cultivators realized at the same time that Skeleton Dragon was the most dreadful demon they'd ever seen.
Right now, it had just woken up from a prolonged sleep and was at its lowest point. The only opportunity to destroy it would be this moment.
If it was not cleared in time, the Heaven's Origin Sector would be doomed!
Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!
'Shell' Leng Ziming was the first to launch an attack. Countless gold lasers rushed out from every corner of his body and darted toward Skeleton Dragon while altering their trajectories in graceful curves nonstop!
The rest of the Cultivators summoned their strongest remote magical equipment, too. Flying swords, mystic rays, crystal cannons rained upon Skeleton Dragon like thousands of rainbows without any spot left.
Skeleton Dragon burst out into laughter in the bombardment. Silver waves were triggered on the surface on the bone armor, which offset most of the damage. In the meantime, the jelly-like body pulled the magical equipment into it with a weird attraction force. Once the magical equipment penetrated into Skeleton Dragon's body through the gaps between bones, the magical equipment would be like a statue made of mud sinking into the ocean. The masters of the magical equipment were not able to reach out to their equipment at all.
Bullets, flying sabers and flying swords were all taken away!
Li Yao was dumbfounded. He realized only then that another several dozen pieces of magical equipment were hiding in Skeleton Dragon's translucent body.
According to their vintage style, they were all ancient magical equipment from forty thousand years ago.
Skeleton Dragon's body was a walking magical equipment arsenal!
"Are you kidding me? The monster can devour magical equipment, too?"
"The silver bone armor covering its body is clearly refined with secret arts. Most of the damage has been offset."
"Even if the damage is too intense and the bone fractures, it is not a big deal for him. It can just move a bone from other body parts to replace the broken bone!"
"But the body of Skeleton Dragon is made of soft flesh with extremely high elasticity. However powerful an attack is, most of the damage will simply be absorbed by it, without causing any real harm at all."
"How can we fight such a thing?!"
Li Yao was not a man who would give up easily. Although he was also shocked by the formidability of Skeleton Dragon, he still squinted and observed carefully.
The corner of his mouth suddenly twitched, as he suddenly realized something.
Skeleton Dragon seemed to be arrogant enough to just let everybody fire upon itself freely and absorb one item after another.
However, although it paid no attention when the bone armor covering other body parts was shattered, it would quickly wriggle and transport new bones to fill up the bone armor in the center of the round torso once the bone armor in this particular region was broken. It seemed to be fearful of the attacks at the center of its body very much.
In the center of its body, the cluster of red brightness that was fluctuating like a beating heart was blinking nonstop.
For the flying swords and bullets that had penetrated into Skeleton Dragon's body, even though they were quite far away, the red brightness would shrink suddenly in a defensive posture as if great enemies were coming.
Li Yao immediately realized something. The cluster of red brightness was Skeleton Dragon's weakness!
"Don't disperse your attack! The bones are not its true body. It is useless even if we blow the bones into pieces! The cluster of red brightness at the center of its body is its actual fatal weakness!
"Focus our firepower on one part and dig a hole on its body so that we can smash the cluster of red brightness!"
Chapter 429: Desperate? Definitely Not! |
As if they had been woken up from a dream, every Cultivator changed their attack strategy after hearing Li Yao's words. The crystal cannons and the mystic ray cannons all fired upon the center of Skeleton Dragon's body.
