Realm Walker

The knock echoed through the silent office. Black Wuchang, narrow-eyed and long-faced, glanced at his subordinate.

Mature Women Are Moist crept cautiously toward the door and whispered, ”Who is it?”

A low, familiar voice answered from outside. ”It’s me!”

Relief washed over Moist’s face as he hurried to open the door.

He and Heaven’s Injustice had always gotten along well. Within Black Wuchang’s little circle, Rampaging Recklessly and the others had gradually been warped by their boss’s tastes and lost all interest in normal women. Only Heaven’s Injustice and Moist still harbored a fierce attraction to two-legged members of the opposite sex, recoiling three steps at the mere sight of a female beast.

Heaven’s Injustice stood silently in the darkness beyond the doorway. His gaze swept over Black Wuchang and Moist with an unfamiliar coldness, as if he were confirming something.

That icy expression and uncaring gaze sent Moist’s heart plummeting. A moment later, he watched Heaven’s Injustice reach into his pocket and produce a palm-sized clay figurine. The sculpture depicted a bare-chested giant hauling a mountain on his back as he trudged forward.

As both Black Wuchang and Moist stared at him in stunned surprise, Heaven’s Injustice tossed the figurine into the office.

Thud!

It struck the ground with a dull and impossibly heavy impact. The next instant, Black Wuchang and Moist found themselves pinned in place. Their bodies trembled, their shoulders buckling as though an invisible mountain was pressing down on them, rendering them immobile.

Standing at the doorway, Heaven’s Injustice drew the handgun from his waistband, leveled it at Moist’s head, and squeezed the trigger with mechanical calm.Bullets drilled into his skull one after another, blowing off the top of his head and splattering blood and brain matter across the room.

Moist’s body had only just begun to transform itself. Hard keratin had begun to grow, but it had barely covered half his frame before his life had been ripped away from him.

Heaven’s Injustice remained in the doorway and turned the muzzle toward Black Wuchang at the far end of the room. He kept firing as every remaining round slammed into the Hex Master’s body.

The bullets failed to scratch him. Even without fusing with a venomous creature, a Hex Master at the Saint tier could shrug off gunfire with just their raw physical toughness.

Seeing the bullets prove useless, Heaven’s Injustice toppled forward like a felled tree. From the darkness behind him, a white clad figure strode into view.

Black Wuchang stared at the approaching silhouette. ”The Holy Grail is in my Inventory. Kill me, and the Spirit Realm reclaims it.”

Fu Qingyang reached into empty air, his fingers closing around the hilt of the eight-sided bronze sword. His tone was flat. ”It makes no difference.”

If the Grail returned to the Spirit Realm, it simply meant no Hex Master would get their hands on that rule-type item for a very long time.

Black Wuchang let out a cold laugh and raised his voice. ”Did you hear that? The Five Elements Alliance wants the Holy Grail sent back to the Spirit Realm!”

***

Inside the convenience store, Zhang Yuanqing finished his instant noodles and ordered a bowl of oden. He leaned against the counter, chatting and laughing with the clerk, a middle-aged woman.

”Oh, your son’s in business school? That’s great. Business schools are crawling with pretty girls. I bet his girlfriend is gorgeous,” he lamented with an envious sigh.

”Eh, she’s nothing special.” The woman sighed, then decided this young man had a way with words and asked, ”So what university are you at?”

Zhang Yuanqing put on a wistful expression. ”I never went to college. I went straight to work after high school, so I figure anyone who made it into a university is basically an elite. My dream was always Songhai University.”

”Songhai University! Now that’s a serious school,” the woman said with a nod before offering some consolation. ”Honestly, degrees aren’t worth what they used to be. Once you’re out in the real world, it all comes down to hard work.”

She couldn’t quite explain it. Her son was just an ordinary college student, and yet she felt a small wave of pride swell in her chest, lifting her mood considerably.

”Mmhmm, you’re absolutely right. You’ve been through it, you know how it works,” Zhang Yuanqing replied, nodding eagerly. ”Could I trouble you for another ladle of broth?”

She gave him one.

”Thanks! Your cooking is really something else. Any chance I could get a stick of kelp on the house?”

She hesitated for a moment, then handed one over.

Zhang Yuanqing sipped the hot, peppery broth and rambled on about nothing in particular. Then, without warning, a violent pang of unease lanced through his chest.

It’s begun!

Black Wuchang had really been hiding inside Songhai Third Elementary School. Zhang Yuanqing kept his expression perfectly neutral and quietly summoned Little Goofball, ordering the spirit to observe the battle.

He intended to watch the confrontation through his Spirit Servant’s eyes. The feeling of being blind to an operation this critical was unbearable. If something went wrong, seeing the situation in real time would at least give him a chance to think of a countermeasure.

Beyond that, though, he was desperate to witness high-level Spirit Realm Walkers in combat.

After spilling out, Little Goofball lay flat on the floor, lifted his tiny head, and was immediately captivated by the snacks and drinks lining the shelves on either side. His glossy black eyes brimmed with longing.

You can’t even eat! Get to work! Zhang Yuanqing commanded.

Fine, I’ll buy some snacks later and eat them in front of you so you can live vicariously, he added silently.

With obvious reluctance, Little Goofball crawled out of the convenience store and vanished into the night.

***

The instant Black Wuchang’s shout rang out, a streak of crimson flame came hurtling at them from the distance, detonating beside Fu Qingyang. It burst apart like a firework, flooding the silent campus with a dazzling flash of light.

A tall, powerfully-built figure materialized from the scattering flames. He made no attempt to close the distance with the man below the Sovereign tier who was reputed to be invincible. Instead, he extended one hand and clenched his fist.

The tongues of fire that lingered in the air condensed into arrow after arrow of solid flame, their arrowheads aimed downward, all pointed at Fu Qingyang. Against a Scout at the peak of the Saint tier, melee combat was not a wise choice, even for a Fire Sage.

”Are you a steward from one of the Five Elements Alliance branches, or a Fire Sage that Dark Rose cultivated in secret?” Fu Qingyang demanded as he planted the tip of his sword into the ground and leaned on the hilt. Despite being surrounded and outmatched, his expression did not change.

The masked man’s voice was rough and gravelly, making it impossible to identify him. ”You don’t need to know.”

He drove his clenched fist downward, and the multitude of fire arrows that filled the air around them shrieked toward their target.

Fu Qingyang strolled through the rain of arrows. He sidestepped, pivoted, and retreated, the bronze sword in his hand whipping around him in a blur. Each arrow that met the blade shattered into a spray of searing sparks. He moved like a supercomputer given flesh, predicting the trajectory of every falling shaft.

Black Wuchang seized the opening afforded him by the barrage. Step by trembling step, he staggered out of the office. Dark Rose’s Fire Sage had bought him precious time.

”I underestimated you. I never imagined you’d already taken control of Heaven’s Injustice,” Black Wuchang muttered as he let out a cold snort.

His abdomen swelled into a bulging sphere that inched itself upward until it lodged in his throat. He retched violently, and vomited out a toad the size of a football. The toad’s belly pulsed as it let out a thunderous croak, then it yawned open its cavernous maw and spewed a dense curtain of purple fog.

The fog spread like thick smoke, billowing upward and converging above the campus until it formed a low-hanging toxic cloud layer. Every plant on the grounds withered and died in seconds.

Fu Qingyang frowned. Scouts had no poison resistance, and toxic gas was not something you could simply dodge.

Then, without warning, the purple fog began streaming toward a particular corner of the school grounds, pouring away as though drawn into a drain, vanishing at a terrifying rate.

Stunned by the sudden intervention, Black Wuchang whipped his head toward the destination of the flow and saw a three-meter tall humanoid mass of raw flesh standing there with its mouth gaping wide, greedily devouring the purple fog. The poison cloud that could make even a Saint wary had absolutely no effect on that creature.

”The Hex King?!” Black Wuchang’s voice climbed upward in pitch into a shriek. ”What are you doing here?! Fu Qingyang, you’re colluding with the Hex King!? That’s wonderful. Wonderful! So much for the Fu family’s golden boy. So much for a Five Elements Alliance steward!”

The Dark Rose Fire Sage let out a derisive laugh. ”Be careful about throwing stones from inside that glass house, Fu. You and I are cut from the same cloth. Nobody here’s better than anyone else. At least Dark Rose still maintains a Lawful alignment. Your bottom line is even lower than mine.”

Fu Qingyang did not deign to explain. He said nothing.

The Hex King roared with laughter. ”He’s right, you know! Fu Qingyang, thanks for the intel. I’ll be sure to repay you handsomely.”

Still laughing, the Hex King absorbed the last wisps of purple fog. The flesh across his body bulged and tensed. Then, a fine mist of crimson sprayed out from every pore of his body in a single explosive release.

The blood mist did not blanket the campus. Instead it coalesced into a towering figure, five meters tall and featureless, its face a smear of undefined flesh.

As a Sovereign tier Hex Master, the Hex King could, if he wished, poison an entire district of Songhai to death. But such crude methods were beneath him. For a truly powerful practitioner of the art, the real skill lay in precise manipulation, in shaping the fog with surgical control. And in that regard, Black Wuchang, a mere Saint, was nowhere close to the Hex King’s level.

The blood mist giant advanced on Black Wuchang with eerily light steps. At that moment, a pillar of pure, crystalline light descended from the dark sky and struck the Hex King dead on.The blood mist sizzled and dissolved in the golden radiance, and the Hex King howled in agony.

The Power of the Diurnal Spirit!

The instant that pillar of light fell, Great Protector revealed his position. He stood atop the main campus building, draped in a black cloak and wearing a black mask, gazing down at the figures below.

Through the night wind, a single hair-thin red thread reached out toward him like a probing tentacle. Then a thousand more erupted outward, as dense as a starburst of laser beams, wave after wave of them shooting out toward Great Protector.

The threads originated from a woman dressed in a Song Dynasty-style gown and a silver mask. Her striking silhouette hovered in midair as her skirt billowed around her.

Great Protector’s figure vanished from the rooftop but reappeared an instant later, suspended in the air. A fine red clung to his ankle. It was this single filament that had dragged him out of his Night Wandering state.

”Hmph!” He grunted, and the thread burst into brilliant, searing golden flame and snapped apart with effortless ease.

Then a sigh drifted through the night sky. ”What a night. Every ghost and demon under the sun has crawled out of the woodwork.”

As the words faded, the dead vegetation across the campus surged back to life. Tender green grass pushed up through the ground in thick clusters. Saplings punched through the concrete and shot skyward, growing into towering trees in a matter of seconds. In the blink of an eye, the elementary school was swallowed by a forest, brimming with vitality.

That was not all. Spectral animals descended from above—troops of monkeys, brown bears standing two meters tall, elephants of white jade, and solitary, striped tigers stalking between the trees. Every one of them stared with hollow, indifferent eyes, surveying the living creatures on the battlefield with chilling intent.

At the iron fence surrounding the campus, the round and adorable infant spirit pressed itself into a gap between the bars, peering inward as tiny tremors shook its body. Inside that spirit servant was Zhang Yuanqing’s consciousness.

At that moment, only one thought filled his mind. I have no idea what’s happening, but I am absolutely floored.

Raw destructive power was not the only measure of strength. The high-level Walkers fighting inside the school, the auras they radiated, the abilities they unleashed, all of it sent genuine tremors of awe rippling through him.

The forest’s appearance, in particular, made him realize with sharp clarity that the school had been sealed off. A faintly blue-green barrier of light enveloped the entire campus.

The Hundred Flowers Society Elder is even more powerful than I expected, he thought to himself. That’s good news and bad news at the same time.

The good news was that Black Wuchang and the Dark Rose members would have a hard time escaping anytime soon. The bad news was that if the officials seized full control of the situation, then even if the Palace Master obtained the Registry, she would be forced into making a compromise. He could only hope she was clever enough to destroy the document outright.

Abruptly, Zhang Yuanqing sensed Little Goofball pull himself away from the fence and begin crawling toward the intersection outside the school. This was not in response to a command from Zhang Yuanqing, and it did not seem like a conscious decision made by Little Goofball either. It felt more like pure instinct.

After an initial flash of surprise, Zhang Yuanqing understood what was happening. At this critical juncture, Little Goofball’s treasure-hunting instinct had activated. The infant spirit was still young, and he had only just mastered his Exchange ability. The higher-tier Treasure Hunting skill remained beyond his conscious control.

Somewhere nearby, something valuable was calling to him, stirring that buried instinct to life.