Chapter 1329: Price of Arrogance

The abyss drowned beneath black-white, crimson and black.

The World Transcendents’ eyes widened.

Their barriers had withstood Phei for an hour because vast cultivation continuously nourished them. Every spear he shattered had been replaced by another tide of power. Every scar he carved into the shell had been washed over and healed before he could deepen it enough to matter. Phei had spent that entire hour watching those repairs, learning how quickly Essence reached damaged sections and how much of their reserves they were willing to pour into defense whenever he forced them to respond.

Now the monsters had made their first true mistake.

They had withdrawn their deepest reserves from those barriers.

Everything was being gathered for the final strike.

Phei had been waiting for exactly that.

The Void touching their barriers suddenly drank:

World Transcendent’s Essence surged toward the damaged shell to resist Phei’s assault and vanished into blackness the instant it arrived. More cultivation followed; the Void swallowed that too, eating through it with a ravenous corrosion that had been waiting beneath Phei’s attacks throughout the entire battle, hidden beneath blood and ice while he carefully avoided revealing exactly what it could do.

Phei grinned inside the Blood Fiend.

He had saved that little horror for last.

The monsters reacted immediately and forced more Essence toward the failing barriers:

—the Void drank deeper.

The reaction was violent enough to tear through Phei in return.

The connection between his Void and the World Transcendent Essence became a raging current, power far beyond his cultivation slamming against his control as it was devoured.

His body jerked before a line of blood burst from one ear.

The Blood Fiend split over his abdomen as the pressure drove through it, and Phei tasted blood at the back of his throat while the entire abyss seemed determined to crush him between the two Transcendents and his own assault.

He held on.

Primordial Blood found the wounds he had spent an hour creating and flooded them before Infinity Control clenched.

The pale shells surrounding the two World Transcendents shuddered so violently that the entire cavern flashed beneath their light. Great fractures raced through both barriers, each new wound immediately filled with Primordial Blood while Void ate the Essence rushing to close it.

Then the barriers broke.

The sound resembled an entire frozen sea splitting apart.

The explosion threw Phei backward like a stone. His body crossed hundreds of meters before smashing shoulder-first through a wall of crystal, and the impact nearly buried him beneath collapsing ice. The Blood Fiend tore open across one arm. Something cracked beneath his ribs, but he forced himself upright just as the second barrier ruptured.

That shockwave hit the Dragon Lady.

Her massive body was already braced, yet the blast lifted one foreleg from the ground and shoved her sideways. Scales burst from her wounded flank and her blood sprayed across the ice, and her damaged wing folded beneath the pressure before she caught herself with a roar that shook frost from the ceiling.

Both barriers were gone.

Blood invaded the openings.

Ice clamped around their limbs and torsos.

The final attacks the two beasts had been preparing convulsed halfway through formation as their cultivation was suddenly dragged into three different nightmares at once.

For perhaps the first time since Phei entered the abyss, both World Transcendents were rooted where they stood.

Their expressions changed.

It had taken perhaps a second.

One fucking second.

Phei turned toward the Dragon Lady and shouted loud enough that the words tore through the collapsing cavern. "LITTLE SISTER!"

She had been waiting.

The three World Transcendent cores power Phei had given her were already burning inside her body.

Their power erupted through the Dragon Lady in one overwhelming tide.

Every scale along her immense body ignited beneath blinding white brilliance, the wounds and blood covering her suddenly drowned beneath light so fierce that Phei had to narrow his eyes even through the Blood Fiend. Crystalline ridges along her neck became radiant one after another.

Her damaged wings spread despite the pain ripping through them, and fresh blood immediately ran between scales where injured flesh tore open under the movement.

The three cores’ power thundered through her Dragon Core.

The first pulse shook the floor beneath her; the second cracked cliffs kilometers away:

—the third travelled through the entire abyss and returned as a deep subterranean roar from somewhere far below.

The power was helping her.

It was also tearing at a body already pushed far beyond comfort.

Phei could see it.

Fine cracks appeared along several glowing scales near her chest. Blood leaked from beneath the brightness. One of her forelegs trembled before she forced it still.

ROOOOOOAAAAAAAARRRR

She roared.

The sound itself became physical.

The remaining walls trembled, powdered frost exploded from distant cliffs and the blood floating throughout the cavern rippled outward beneath the force of her voice. Phei himself was shoved half a step backward as the roar struck his chest, and the Blood Fiend tightened around him while his long white hair whipped behind him.

Her mouth opened:

White flame gathered inside her throat.

Phei had seen that flame before.

He respected it more than most things willing to burn him.

The flame began as a point of intolerable white deep inside her jaws, then swelled until her entire throat shone from within. It glittered strangely, almost beautifully, carrying countless tiny crystalline motes through an inferno whose cold was so savage that the surrounding air whitened and vanished wherever it touched.

Frost formed across the Blood Fiend hundreds of meters away from her mouth.

Even Phei’s hard so hard body had once been devoured beneath that white flame.

The Dragon Lady had burned his skin with it too.

His skin.

The same skin World Transcendent ice attacks had repeatedly failed to cut during the previous hour.

Phei knew exactly how horrifying that breath was.

The humanoid World Transcendent apparently did not share his respect.

Its glowing cyan eyes settled upon the Dragon Lady, and even with its barrier destroyed, Essence being devoured and Infinity Control pressing against its body, contempt remained inside them.

Phei stared at its expression:

"Bro..."

The Dragon Lady’s throat continued blazing brighter.

Phei almost felt offended on her behalf.

Sure, the bastard was faster. Ridiculously faster since it stood several cultivation stages above her and could probably cross the width of her Dragon breath before her eyes properly followed the movement.

That did not make it indestructible.

The white flame gathering inside his little sister could vaporize things the monster had spent the entire hour assuming were impossible to destroy, yet the bastard was still looking at her as though superior speed somehow meant her attack lacked enough power to kill it.

Phei’s eye twitched: "...quit the shit."

The Dragon Lady released her breath.

Roaring white incinerating flames engulfed the abyss.

The torrent came from her mouth with such violence that the cavern ahead disappeared beneath it. An all-consuming river of glittering pale flame expanded until its width dwarfed buildings, then cliffs, then entire sections of the battlefield. Every crystalline mote within it screamed through the air beneath enough frozen fury to erase whatever it crossed.

The recoil nearly broke the Dragon Lady’s stance.

Her claws tore trenches through the ground as her enormous body slid backward. The injured wing folded halfway. Blood burst from several cracked scales along her chest, but she drove her claws deeper and kept breathing.

The blast struck Phei even from outside the main torrent.

His body bent beneath the shockwave and he was forced dozens of meters backward, heels plowing through frozen ground while the Blood Fiend groaned around him.

The humanoid beast moved exactly as Phei expected.

It sidestepped.

Its speed remained obscene.

The monster disappeared from the attack’s center and crossed hundreds of meters before the Dragon Lady’s eyes could finish turning. The great bestial World Transcendent moved with it, claws ripping free of Phei’s frozen hold as sheer strength finally broke Infinity Control around its limbs, tearing away chunks of frozen flesh in the process.

Phei cursed beneath his breath. "Fucking World Transcendents."

The humanoid monster reappeared beside the Dragon Lady before her breath had crossed even half the distance toward its original target.

Its enormous arm drew backward to deliver a devastating attack at the unsuspecting dragon.

At the same time, the bestial World Transcendent rushed along her opposite flank, huge paws exploding through frost while its car-sized head lowered toward the wounded section beneath her wing.

The humanoid struck first.

Its fist crashed into the Dragon Lady’s neck.

The impact sounded like a mountain being struck by another mountain.

Her head snapped sideways so violently that the white breath carved across the abyss with it, sweeping through several kilometers of frozen terrain and erasing cliffs that had survived everything else. Scales exploded from her neck. Blood sprayed through the white light. The force travelled down the length of her enormous body and lifted one foreleg completely from the ground before she crashed sideways hard enough to collapse the ice beneath her.

The bestial World Transcendent hit her wounded flank almost simultaneously.

Its paw buried through damaged scales.

The Dragon Lady’s roar changed.