Beastmaster of the Ages

Yumo Yuanni likely hadn’t absorbed any starblood, so he still seemed rather pure. However, Yumo Xue’s sickly appearance was definitely due in part to the heavy baleful aura that came from him. Yumo Lingyue, on the other hand, was somewhere between the two, having quite a bit of baleful aura herself.

The baleful aura on Yumo Xue has increased from before. He could well be the one who absorbed the starblood refined from the people of Viridian! Tianming wasn’t worried that his home had been exposed, since not many people from Viridian had known his name. Not to mention, the specters probably saw the people of the world as mere specks of dust. It was rather unlikely for them to suddenly be interested in them enough to talk to them.

Tianming let out a fierce glare at the prospect of the killer of all those people being right before him. It was something he couldn’t tolerate in the least. Without another word, he stepped into the Fortuna Arena. His cold attitude as the one who issued the challenge could be seen as a provocation.

”That kid’s truly arrogant and without class! Not even people from House Qitian would be so rude when challenging Sister Lingyue!” Yumo Yuanni hated Tianming to the bone and didn’t bother hiding his killing intent.

”Nothing but victory or loss matters. Yumo Lingyue, let’s see the fruits of your efforts in the past hundred years,” Yumo Xue said.

Yumo Lingyue was a bit younger than him, but she was at the same cultivation level. Her talent wasn’t inferior to his by any means. In fact, she was only not made a minor pathkeeper because House Yumo only had slots for three. Given her age, she was likely to make it into the top five once Suishen Yao and Qitian Jian turned five hundred and left the Fortuna Ranking.

”Alright.” As Yumo Xue’s cousin and partner, Yumo Lingyue had a high status in House Yumo. Quite a few specters fervently cheered for her when she stepped into the arena.

Even so, her fame didn’t eclipse Tianming’s.

Cheers of ’Pathkeeper Li’ rang out all over the colosseum, causing quite a few eminents from the Three Exalted Houses to furrow their brows. It wasn’t a good sign for Tianming to be the main object of worship for so many disciples that weren’t from the Three Exalted Houses. However, they didn’t take any action about it due to how complex the network of interests was.

The Fortuna Arena completely sealed Tianming and Yumo Lingyue in, marking the start of battle. Both sides hated each other. Tianming was normally quite fierce himself, but Yumo Lingyue seemed even fiercer. The instant she got into the arena, she turned into a blurry white trail as she charged toward him with consecutive fatal strikes!

Foundationeers from the Three Exalted Houses were much stronger than Suishen Yong. Tianming didn’t dare to be careless even though he had grown stronger. Ying Huo and the rest were freed from his body, but against a specter, their fused combat form was ideal.

As such, Ying Huo, Meow Meow, Lan Huang, and Xian Xian emerged from the lifebound space and turned into discrete astrons, merging into Tianming’s flesh. The process only took an instant. After a transformation sequence, Tianming’s physical body was greatly enhanced.

With his lifebound beasts having evolved, their integrated forms neared perfection. Tianming’s black left arm was covered in lightning and his right was covered in flaming sword feathers. One leg shook the earth while the other was as steady as a towering tree. All their orders and cosmoforce blended into one!

Then came Ji Ji’s genesis ancestral nova source. Tianming’s body glowed bright pink with more power than he had ever shown. While it couldn’t compare to his fully powered state with omnisentient threads, it was already quite impressive.

Coupled with Yin Chen, his totems, and divine wonders, Tianming wielded his full arsenal as an eighth-level cosmic cartographer. His opponent was one of the top geniuses in the astralscape of order and five levels stronger than him. Nobody would believe that Tianming was only an eighth-level cosmic cartographer; he seemed fully capable of taking Yumo Lingyue by looks alone.

”After getting all that merit and springwater from the Prehistoric Path, he must’ve gotten even stronger!”

”Yumo Lingyue’s no pushover, though. She’s in the top ten in the entire astralscape, so there’s no way she’s weak!”

Yumo Lingyue ferociously charged like Zi Zhen, turning from a sickly beauty into a pale white fiend! Unlike Zi Zhen, she was more of a conventional specter, covered in sharp white spikes and long fur. The six irises in her eyes glared daggers. Her claws, fangs, and the bone-like scales all over her body made her look like the picture of danger. Perhaps hers was the true form of the specter bloodline of Myriadpath Valley.

As a foundationeer, Yumo Lingyue dominated on two fronts. First, her foundation fortress manifested as a city of white bones, filling the entire arena with a chilling frost that seeped into Tianming’s entire body. Too bad for her, however, the order suppression that would normally work on non-foundationeers didn’t affect his Order Relic Universal Body at all. He could move as he pleased without even batting an eye.

Second, her minor astral giant physique manifested in the form of really bright starlight from every single astron that made up her body. She looked like a smaller version of Huang Qi. The form worked even better for specters, as it was akin to a transformation on top of their natural transformation.

House Yumo was said to produce fighters with perfect single-unit fighting forms. How would that contrast against Tianming, who had fused with his beasts to achieve what he believed was an even more perfect fighting form?

Tianming didn’t see starlight on her, unlike the others. Instead, every astron in Yumo Lingyue imprisoned a baleful soul. They had remained there since their deaths to be used as an energy source for attacks, as well as to inflict fear and terror in their opponents.

Yumo Lingyue looked incredibly terrifying, like an incarnation of death itself. With four trillion baleful souls contained within her, her aura of death and resentment could cause people to turn numb with horror. However, Tianming felt nothing but boundless wrath and sympathy when faced with the four trillion suffering souls. They had been forcefully kept in a state of undeath, suffering for thousands of years!