Tribulation of Myriad Races

While Su Yu was talking to Grandstar.

The white-haired divine king sent a voice transmission, “Dao King, Moge, these people are killing death spirits to force our people apart. If this continues, our plan to join hands and wipe out the others will no longer be doable.”

Dao King said, “They were still weaker. It won’t be easy for them to outlast us. Just wait and see. We only need to provide our people with more heavenly source qi and we will be able to get a large number of slots without much effort.”

Regardless of what the minor races did, it was undeniable that the major races were still stronger. The minor races were only killing the death spirits to give themselves a slightly higher chance at winning more slots.

The white-haired divine king nodded in agreement. They had to give the minor races a little bit of hope to keep them from causing too much trouble.

***

Time continued passing.

Fifth match. Sixth match. Seventh match.

As the matches progressed, Su Yu saw several familiar faces. Wan Mingze was one of them. He did not showcase anything too eyecatching, but his sealing abilities were as impressive as ever. He was able to seal even death spirits.

Furthermore, the death spirits were quite helpful to him. He was quite lacking in terms of offensive strength. With the death spirits all over the city, he could easily seal his opponents before tossing them into the midst of the death spirits. Or he could simply seal his opponents before throwing them into the ancient buildings. When everyone was prevented from killing, he enjoyed a great advantage.

He alone won ten slots for the human race. One could say that this was the best performance the human race had displayed so far.

As for Su Yu, he had been sending one death spirit per match. Over the nine matches, he had won twenty-five slots. With this, he could take it even slower for the remaining matches.

Meanwhile, the human race had won around fifty slots over the nine matches.

As for the divines, devils, and immortals, each had won around two hundred slots. The dragons had won a similar number of slots as the humans. As for the minor races and the ancient races, they had won about a hundred slots combined.

***

Eastrift Valley.

When Great Qin King and the others received the latest update, their expressions turned unsightly.

The human race had performed too poorly in the competition. Over the nine matches, apart from select individuals such as Wan Mingze and Zhu Hongliang, the rest had performed terribly. In fact, some of them had performed worse than even the minor race combatants.

At this rate, they would only receive four hundred slots, including the two hundred they had been promised earlier. This was far worse than what they had received in the previous openings. This was unacceptable as they had received two hundred slots in advance for this opening.

Silk Destroying King said, “Our gap with the divines and devils are too big. They have each won about two hundred slots. Even Su Yu was able to get twenty-five slots by deploying nine random death spirits into the matches. That’s half of what we won after sending nearly twenty Skysoars out. Individually, they are performing no better than even the death spirits.”

This was a disastrous result.

The divine and devil races would each send eighty combatants overall for the competition while the human race would send seventy combatants. The difference wasn’t that big, but the difference in results was massive.

It wasn’t like their opponents enjoyed an advantage in cultivation level during the competition. Each combatant would only be matched with those in the same cultivation level.

Great Han King said, “It’s not that we’re too weak. Rather, they are all joining hands against us.”

Silk Destroying King grumbled, “Do we have no one we can team up with? Sigh.”

After their recent quarrel with the immortals, their alliance was as good as gone. On paper, they were still allies. But the alliance might as well not exist. Because of that, the humans found themselves in an even more difficult position.

As for the minor races, they no longer dared to work with the human race for fear of the potential backlash from the three major races.

The ancient races did not have such concerns, but they had the habit of ignoring the humans. They had simply been around for too long. They were well aware of humanity’s history. Again and again, humanity had been defeated. Most of the races that had allied themselves with humanity in the past had gone extinct.

Thus, the ancient races would not ally themselves with the human race unless absolutely necessary.

They knew history too well. Each time the humans were defeated, they would be able to somehow survive extinction. Their past allies were far less lucky. Thus, the various ancient races had developed a new mantra: to live long, stay far away from the humans yet refrain from becoming their enemies.

And this was the mantra of the majority of the ancient races in existence. It would remain regardless of how strong or how weak the humans were. Most of the ancient races would remain neutral.

History had taught them that those who had helped the humans when they were in need or stepped on the humans when they were down would not last long. Prior to the competition, the humans had expected to gain eight hundred slots. But at this rate, it was likely that they wouldn’t even get half of that.

The human Invincibles looked at each other helplessly. What now?

Not long ago, they had happily allocated twenty slots to each Invincible. But reality had smashed their dreams apart.

After a short silence, Great Qin King said, “Change our participants. Send the best we have. Stop hiding your geniuses. If you keep hiding, we won’t even have enough slots to use anymore. It’s pointless to keep hiding your geniuses. If we miss this chance, we will need to wait ten years for the next opening. The younger generation can’t afford to miss this chance.”

Humanity seemed obsessed with hiding its trump cards. Or to be precise, this was what every major race enjoyed doing. But humanity could no longer afford to keep hiding those trump cards. The Luminous Domain Mansion slots were on the line. And for a weakened humanity, those slots were extremely important.

Many Invincibles nodded in agreement. One of them said, “Can we contact Su Yu and negotiate a cooperation? He is the master of the ancient cities. Since the competition is being held in an ancient city, he should be able to do something, right?”

Once again, many Invincibles nodded. If this had happened before, they would have ordered Su Yu to do something. Now that Su Yu was clearly showing his indifference toward humanity, they had no choice but to negotiate.

Great Qin King did not reject that proposal. He said, “I’ll get Old Zhou to negotiate with him. Let’s see if he can do anything to help.”

***

Outside the ancient city.

Su Yu was in the middle of watching the match between the first-stage Cloudbreaches. Bai Feng was participating in this match. This teacher of his was actually quite strong among those in the same cultivation level.

Very few of his peers were stronger than him. There was a reason for him to remain relatively unknown despite his strength. Too many experts had emerged from his generation, such as Wu Qi, Liu Hong, Huang Teng, and Qin Fang. They had enjoyed all the limelight. Furthermore, Bai Feng’s cultivation level was lower compared to theirs.

Suddenly, Su Yu received a voice transmission from Great Zhou King, “Su Yu, do you have a way to help the human race get more slots? We are willing to negotiate. Consider this a partnership instead of you working for us.”

Su Yu smiled and said, “Great Zhou King, is there a need for this? If your candidates aren’t strong enough to win the slots themselves, they will die in the mansion even if you manage to get them the slots. What’s the point? I believe you are aware of how special this opening will be. Sending more people into the mansion is the same as sending more people to their deaths. Why bother?”

Well, that was rude.

Great Zhou King said, “You know why. The nine-leaf skylotus will bloom this time. Furthermore, Wan Tiansheng’s destruction of the two holy lands has greatly reduced the cultivation resources available to humanity. The Luminous Domain Mansion is our sole hope to recover from our recent losses.”

If they missed out on this chance, they could very well exhaust all their remaining resources in less than ten years. And Su Yu was partly responsible for this predicament they were in. Yes, he was not the one who had destroyed the holy lands. But the cultivation methods he released had greatly increased the demand on cultivation resources.

Without sufficient cultivation resources, it wouldn’t matter how good the cultivation methods were. Humanity did not have enough resources to last until the next opening. This was a greatly troubling issue.

Su Yu smiled and gave no answer. Rather, he spoke loudly, “Everyone, if anyone needs more slots, feel free to buy some from me. I’m looking forward to it. In fact, if you feel like you can’t win enough slots from the competition, you can consider helping my people during the competition. With that, I will have more slots to sell. Better that than let others win the slots away, right?”

“…”

Everyone was rendered speechless. Great Zhou King glanced at Su Yu, but he received no reply. Clearly, Su Yu was not planning to help. He said nothing about it. It wasn’t like he could do anything about Su Yu’s refusal to help.

***

The competition for the slots grew more and more intense.

The number of death spirits in the city was also rising steadily.

Bai Feng had performed quite well during his match. When several divines and devils attempted to join hands against him, he crippled them before tossing them into the midst of the death spirits. When the number of people going after him surpassed what he was comfortable with, he entered an ancient building without bothering to last until the very end. He lost one slot doing that, but he also managed to keep the slots he had won previously.

However, Su Yu knew his teacher too well. Bai Feng was very impressive offensively, but he was lacking in endurance. There was no way he would be able to last for half an hour. He would probably reach his limits in perhaps five minutes. Ultimately, he was not able to win too many slots for humanity.

During the match between the fourth-stage Cloudbreaches, Wu Qi entered the stage. She was quite an impressive cultivator. Apart from a large number of characters, she also had many other trump cards, such as her poison arts. In fact, her poison arts were so dangerous even the death spirits had to retreat in the face of her assault.

The shadow was also in the same match, and he was not to be underestimated. Ultimately, the shadow left the match with three slots while Wu Qi left with nine slots. That was quite an impressive result on Wu Qi’s part.

The human race had a decent lineup for the matches involving the Cloudbreaches. After all, Huang Teng was a sixth-stage Cloudbreach while Qin Fang was a seventh-stage Cloudbreach. Neither of them was a weakling.

Additionally, Shan Xiong had recently advanced into the third-stage Cloudbreach Realm. With his unique ability to phase out of the current dimension, he was an extremely difficult opponent for those in the same cultivation level. He was able to leave the match with ten slots.

When the match between those in the sixth-stage Cloudbreach Realm arrived, Huang Teng performed admirably. With his saber, he started slashing everything around him without stopping for half an hour. He was so ferocious that many of his opponents nearly died during the match. He left with an impressive result of fifteen slots.

During the match for seventh-stage Cloudbreaches, Qin Fang demonstrated his strength as a Heaven Index genius. Unfortunately, the number of death spirits in the city was too high. He had no choice but to settle with only twenty slots.

As a whole, humanity had performed well during the matches between Cloudbreaches. They had won nearly a hundred slots through these matches.

Unfortunately, humanity had a far weaker lineup for the Mountainsea matches. But that was understandable. Most Mountainseas were those born over fifty years ago. And that was the era where humanity had declined due to Ye Batian’s fall.