Chapter 537: Teleport

Even without body-enhancing pills, Liam’s physical strength was immense, putting him closer to magical beasts than humans, and that was without using Qi.

Considering the greatsword’s weight, Liam’s downward slashes were nothing short of devastating, making them proper rank 2 weapon arts. Yet, the floor endured four of those, confirming what his senses had already spotted.

That surface was indeed special, but the fifth blow ultimately broke it, and a chain reaction followed. The meaningful crack ruined the floor’s structural integrity, bringing it down.

Liam fell among the debris and toxic slime, a rain of sizzling, fuming pebbles surrounding him. He was about to call for the fan when his senses captured the scene below, changing his plans.

In but a second, Liam landed on flat, smooth stone. He had fallen on a slightly elevated circular platform, and the area provided much to absorb.

The stone platform had intricate geometrical symbols all over it, their glow dark and ominous, similar to the pillars the Church used. Also, they didn’t stop at the circle’s edge, filling its insides.

It was a magical circle of sorts, with thicker lines highlighting a heptagon. Moreover, one-meter-tall, translucent boulders stood at its corners, right past the platform, but seemingly connected to it.

’Are those spirit stones?’ Liam wondered. The translucent boulders were several times bigger than the crystals in his ring, but their nature seemed to match.

The seven crystals couldn’t claim Liam’s attention since he wasn’t alone. That underground area was a relatively small hall that he instinctively flagged as a laboratory, and it had cultivators.

A rooting expert stood behind each tall crystal, hands on their smooth surface, seemingly controlling them. Other cultivators were sparsely arranged beyond the platform, and their appearance reminded Liam once more how he had stepped into a hidden world.

All the cultivators in that underground hall wore the Church’s colors, but none were human, not on the surface. Liam saw protruding fangs instead of teeth, fur instead of beards, and even feathers instead of hair.

Moreover, those mutations were all incomplete or messy. No cultivator had a single set of inhuman features. The least Liam could see belonged to a middle-aged man who had both feathers and fur.

The underground hall was no laboratory. It was a den of monsters, and they had looked to be in a hurry, only for the floor’s collapse to stop them in their tracks.

Truth be told, few seemed to have noticed Liam. At least, they weren’t focusing on him. The slime that had accumulated on the upper floor was raining down after all, and more was falling from the corroded surfaces further above.

The shock Liam tasted in the air added another explanation to that apparent disinterest. Those experts probably hadn’t expected him to get to the basement so soon.

That was understandable. Considering all the Cathedral’s Qi-enhanced surfaces, the average cultivator would have taken a while to go through them, but Liam’s alchemical spell had achieved that basically instantly.

Of course, the distraction played in Liam’s favor. He had an extremely simple approach to life, and his current mission made everything even more straightforward.

Liam only had to destroy the teleport, kill everyone, and run away.

Despite having no real knowledge of teleports, it didn’t take a genius to pinpoint it. Qi was still running through the magical circle Liam was standing on, and its quantity was genuinely massive, a lot coming from the crystals in the corners.

As for killing, the path above was open, but the slime still threatened to submerge that basement. Its dark fumes were no less toxic, either, creating a nigh-perfect environment for a poison master.

Liam lifted the greatsword high above his head with one hand while his other arm snapped left and right. Yellow pills flew through the air, exploding into clouds as soon as they hit something.

It didn’t take long before yellow fumes engulfed the hall, joining the slime in its deadliness. Screams began to resound, but Liam didn’t even hear them. His only target was the glowing circle under his feet.

The hulking piece of dark metal swung down with all the might and weight Liam could pour into it. Its massive edge would crush that platform into countless pieces rather than splitting it in two.

However, the magical circle’s ominous glow suddenly intensified, rising upward and engulfing anything above the circular platform.

A dark flash unfolded, shining all over the hall and beyond the crumbling ceiling, but the light vanished as quickly as it came, its effects limited to the circular platform.

A group of fifteen men had appeared on the platform, all wearing the Church’s white robes. They were all rooting experts with the exception of the bald, elderly man in the lead. He was a branching expert, one with a feathery, white beard.

The group was stern beyond belief, seemingly on the warpath. They had a clear mission in mind, and it was of the bloody kind, as reflected by the sharp killing intent conveyed by their auras.

However, the hall’s predicament shattered that joint killing intent. The dark flash had cleared the platform of any slime, but more was pouring from above.

The feathery Priest was inevitably a whole second late in reacting to the situation. Screams had welcomed his arrival, followed by the warning cries from his survival instincts.

In that short gap, toxic slime and yellow fumes had invaded the platform, threatening to infect the Priest’s team. They had actually partially succeeded, but a branching expert was quick to react once his brain caught up with the stage situation.

A humming shockwave blew away the slime and fumes, and a canopy of heptagonal shields formed above the platform, protecting it from additional infections.

Halos even began to shine around the infected rooting experts, pushing away the suffocating and flesh-devouring poisons, but the Priest still couldn’t find the missing piece in his inspection.

After all, no matter where the Priest looked, he couldn’t find the cause of that destruction.