Beastmaster of the Ages

As Tianming felt a stinging pain in his head, the darkfiends arrived. They filled the blood path to the brim as they descended along it, treating him like their prey and baring their fangs at him. At the same time, they also fought one another, scrambling for the chance to consume him.

”Fuck!” Even though the bloodsoul storm hadn’t been able to stun his soul, the darkfiends had managed it. He could only endure the pain and try to avoid their onslaught. But when they were right before him and slammed into him, he was squeezed from all directions and couldn’t even use Fiveway Blitzrun!

He was crushed in their midst like a puny fly. He was so small compared to the darkfiends that they wildly tore away at each other to look for him. The gigantic mouths that snapped at him from close range stunned him.

He couldn’t stand being sandwiched between their legs at all and used his sword to cut open some flesh, driving a darkfiend away to make space. The darkfiend that he cut noticed the pain and tried squeezing closer!

Tianming felt that he was a small ingredient within boiling soup. The darkfiends were like sharp bones in the soup, yet, like minced meat, they kept squeezing downward to the point that some of them were crushed, but that didn’t detract them from continuing to rush down at all. The darkfiends could sense that Tianming was somewhere in their midst, but couldn’t even spot him through all the chaos.

”I’m going insane!” Tianming couldn’t vent no matter how hard he tried. ”I wonder if the others are also squeezed in here like me?”

Tianming had been right in the center of the path and caught the eye of the darkfiends, so he couldn’t move away in time. However, he was fine for now, thanks to how tough his body was. The others, however, might end up being turned into pulp. Such tight conditions had never been encountered even once during previous astral wars.

”The problem is, even if I’m relatively unharmed, won’t I get pushed farther and farther down at this rate?”

Yue Lanfeng had said that once one entered the depths, they would emerge a madman! Past a certain point, there was no return. Tianming had to use his sword to open up a path of blood through the darkfiends. He tried again and again, only to realize that he wasn’t going up nearly as fast as he was being pushed down! There were so many darkfiends that he couldn’t kill enough of them. The ones nearby kept attacking him with soul storms.

”It’s over, fuck! I let those idiots drag me down with them!” Tianming was speechless and grit his teeth. The deeper he went, the more he felt the sensation that Yue Lanfeng and the others had described to him. Compared to the bloodsoul storm, the cavern was filled with a subtler kind of spiritual energy. It didn’t forcefully enter Tianming; instead, it gently wiggled its way past the Skysoul Tower to enter Tianming’s astral brain and fight to coexist with Tianming’s evil impulses.

The sound of wind and all kinds of other noises drowned Tianming’s mind as his field of vision contorted. The darkfiends were roaring right beside him, yet they sounded as if they were coming from farther and farther away.

”Is this the power of the depths of the blood path?” Tianming felt that he was leaving his own being farther and farther away, seemingly having disassociated from his body and making it seem like all the noises and sights he was experiencing weren’t actually happening to him. At the very end, the world itself seemed to have lost all sound. His sight, hearing, and sense of touch grew blurrier and blurrier, as if they were being stripped away from his body.

”What’s that?” He knew that he was still heading down. Even though his vision was gradually turning blurrier, the eye on his Sky Plundering Hand still had perfect vision. It was the only thing he had remaining that he could sense the world with! The fading of his other senses even seemed to sharpen what the eye on his palm could see.

All the way in the depths of the blood path, he saw something unexpected, something that instilled so much shock into him to the point that the drowsiness completely vanished from his astral brain. His vita received a sharp jolt that caused him to feel considerably more awake.

”An Archaionfiend Eye!” His mind returned to its sharp focus at the realization of what was waiting for him below. It was a gigantic, blood-colored eye that was surrounded in a mist of blood. If he didn’t have the Skysoul Tower, evil impulses, and the Sky Plundering Eye, he wouldn’t have been able to sense anything, let alone see, hear, smell, or touch! He would have fallen into complete sensory oblivion.

”The reason Yue Lanfeng didn’t mention this at all must mean that nobody’s been able to see the Archaionfiend Eye!” But not only could Tianming see it, he even got an incredibly good look at it. Yet it didn’t seem that he could do much about it at all; it felt like cosmoforce and order had entirely left his body.

The astrons of his astral brain seemed to have been jumbled up, cutting off any link between his body and cosmic charts. He didn’t even seem able to reach out to Ying Huo and the rest. Perhaps they had lost all senses like he had, or had simply fallen unconscious.

All he could do was watch as he seemed to get closer and closer to the eye. The darkfiends around him were still rushing toward it, almost as if they were on a pilgrimage.

Was the bloodsoul storm a signal that triggered the pilgrimage of the darkfiends? Tianming wondered. Given the size of the eye, the Archaionfiend that once owned it must have been much larger than normal darkfiends.

He got an even better look of the eye now that he was closer. The Archaionfiend Eyes that Tianming had obtained in the past had been dried out, almost as if they’d been left aside for far too many aeons. But the one before him seemed to be fresh and alive, which was also the reason for its powerful soul attacks.

”There’s a bunch of tinier eyes inside it!” The Archaionfiend Eye seemed like a kind of compound eye that was made up of a hundred smaller eyes, densely packed together. It was a horrific sight indeed. They all seemed to be alive, their gazes reflecting their differing mental states and attitudes. They would often look in completely different directions.

Tianming felt that things were even weirder when the Archaionfiend Eye began to take up the entire field of vision of the Sky Plundering Eye. His sense of self seemed to vanish, leaving only a sense of passing time.

The distance between him and the eye closed more and more until Tianming’s eye noticed that the darkfiends stopped advancing. All of them suddenly stopped some distance away from the Archaionfiend Eye, intensely looking at it as if it was their object of worship.

The darkfiends had finally stopped moving, but Tianming didn’t. Instead, he slowly slipped past the darkfiends from the force of the fall and made it out, falling like a leaf toward the Archaionfiend Eye, which only seemed to grow larger and larger in his field of vision.