"Even though we got up here first to set an ambush, frankly speaking, we don't have a way to deal with Silver Lantern—we can barely even hold her back. As a god-host, she can resist the vast majority of my mind miracles, and Harvey hasn't unlocked his strongest Blood Moon Corpse King yet."
"You create the opening for me."
"Are you sure? This isn't like the food-processing plant town. Back then, I danced along her bottom line, forcing her to flee without pushing her into god-hosting, which created the perfect chance for a clean assassination. Now she is already in a hosted state. Harvey can at least use miracles to save his life, but you..."
"I am sure."
"Harvey?"
"Fine by me. Any ending is a good ending to me."
"Kill-All-Crows, do you have any other requests?"
"The same as last time. After you die, record my name in your Sorcerer Chronicles—Judgment Retainer of the Kill-All-Crows Cult, Tamaxi Kill-All-Crows."
*
The moment she saw Black Crow, Weise's immediate instinct was naturally to watch out for the Grey Fox blade at his elbow!
Even if Black Crow was a mere mortal, with that weapon alone, he could punch through miracles and slay gods!
Yet Yaxiu and the others still hadn't taken away Black Crow's Grey Fox relic. No matter how strong Black Crow was, no matter how fully he could unleash the weapon's potential, there was no way he could compare to a sorcerer wielding it. A sorcerer could use miracles to enhance and extend it further, while Black Crow, from start to finish, could rely only on his own flesh.
*In that case, I will gladly help myself to it.*
A cold glint flickered in Weise's eyes. Her right hand, moving like a scalpel, slashed toward Black Crow's arm a step faster!
The situation was urgent; she would just have to take the whole arm with it!
The strike range of the elbow blade was ultimately too short. Even though Black Crow did his best to evade, Weise's strike pierced through his shoulder first—
*Snick.*
The moment Weise's fingers struck Black Crow, the fingers of Black Crow's left hand also touched Weise's neck.
A nearly imperceptible scratch appeared on her slender neck, pale silver blood welling out with her breath. Tilting her head, Weise saw a grey blade pinched between the fingers of Black Crow's left hand.
The Grey Fox blade was in his left hand; the piece on his right elbow was merely a matte iron plate!
Weise's pupils contracted. Her right hand unleashed a thunderous chord powerful enough to shatter a Sanctuary, slamming into Black Crow like an iron hammer. Black Crow was blasted into the floor like a cannonball, the scorched aroma of roasted flesh filling the air!
Yet before Weise could rejoice over eliminating her target, delayed as she was by the Ghost King and Kill-All-Crows, Yaxiu had already caught up to her!
*Thump!*
The instant the two collided, clashing golden and blue thunder burst into arcs of dazzling brilliance. Although Weise used the recoil to swiftly flee upward, she noticed something was off.
Yaxiu had changed.
He didn't look at the falling necromancer, the mind sorcerer to the side, or the battered Black Crow. Instead, he calmly gazed at her. Every arc of electricity coursing over his body had retracted, leaving only a solitary spark of golden lightning at the tip of the horn on his forehead.
If it were a charged strike, such a posture would be normal, but maintaining it throughout combat was something even Weise could not achieve.
More importantly, it was Yaxiu's eyes.
No killing intent, no disgust, no fondness, no fury, no negative emotion, and no positive emotion.
It was a gaze Weise knew intimately.
So familiar she saw it in the mirror every single day.
*Bzzzt!*
As if realizing he could not catch up to Silver Lantern, thunder threads shot from Yaxiu's ten fingers, instantly coiling around Weise's spectral blue phantom like lightning!
The Witch's thread attack.
He lacked the corresponding sorcery spirits, yet he had achieved this relying purely on lightning morphing from the Transcendent Prison Grand Law?
Weise swiftly deduced the answer. Twisting her body, she unleashed a burst of lightning that easily snapped Yaxiu's threads. Unless crushing ordinary people, the vast majority of god-hosts relied on close-quarters combat; long-range attacks lost far too much damage.
Still, since Yaxiu could condense weapons, he could just as easily manifest a blade tens of meters long. Weise shifted into an irregular movement pattern, spinning and leaping between floors, denying him any chance to test her defenses.
Seeing this, Yaxiu condensed a blade anyway, but it took a form rarely seen in Senluo—
A whip sword.
*Crack!*
Breaking the sound barrier with a sonic crack, even though Weise had predicted the trajectory and dodged in advance, the tip of the whip sword bent around a curve and lashed across her face!
Striking alongside the whip sword was a wave of bone-chilling, freezing emotion!
"Ah!"
Even though Weise instantly choked back her wail of weakness, her soul still shuddered with piercing agony—on top of the Transcendent Prison Grand Law, Yaxiu had actually layered his 'Singular Devotion' miracle!
Naturally, Weise knew Yaxiu's primary means of dealing damage: the four swords of Singular Devotion and the Heart Pen sword marks.
Back when she watched Yaxiu use the Healing Sword and Strengthening Sword to buff the Sword Princess and the Witch, Weise had noticed a problem: *We are soul bodies—can even that be healed?*
Though a soul body aligned with one's physical form, differences remained. Sorcery spirits such as Flesh, Bone, and Water Therapy only worked on Void Realm creatures; they had no effect on sorcerers themselves.
Once Weise was affected by the Healing Sword herself, she realized it was a soul miracle capable of directly affecting the soul. Taken further, healing soul damage or dealing direct damage to the soul would not be out of the question.
Soul miracles were exceedingly difficult to defend against without deploying a Sanctuary. But in the Void Realm, Weise had only just constructed a Sanctuary; if Silver Lantern in reality suddenly revealed a Sanctuary when she had possessed none shortly before, it would be far too easy for Yaxiu to make the connection. She couldn't take that risk.
To conceal her identity, Weise had already resolved not to display her Sanctuary in reality for ten days. She had no choice but to endure it with sheer grit!
"Ah—!"
Failing to dodge another strike of the whip sword, a soul-deep pain burrowed into the marrow of her bones like crawling ants!
*Crack!*
*Crack!*
*Crack!*
Over the span of dozens of floors, Yaxiu lashed her dozens of times! Weise was in so much agony she could barely stand, nearly slipping during her leaps!
*Crack!*
Seeing that she had reached the top floor, a surge of joy welled up within Weise, and she bolted toward the dark night with all her might! But this time, not only did Yaxiu lash her again, the whip sword coiled around her body, violently hauling her downward!
Even though Weise instantly tore free, her upward momentum was cancelled out. With nothing to push off from in midair, she could only unfurl her gold and silver wings to keep flying, but Yaxiu seized the opening to lunge straight toward her!
Weise intended to repeat her trick of escaping via the recoil of their mutual clash, but this time Yaxiu didn't attack at all.
Calmly, he used his own body to tank Weise's spectral blue scalpel. Ignoring the gash across his chest, his arms clamped around Weise like a vise, as if trying to crush her into his own flesh!
Then Yaxiu flipped his body, aligning with gravity, holding Weise tight as they plummeted together.
Below them lay an express shaft leading straight down to the ground floor!
Weise looked at Yaxiu, reading only one message from his cold, impassive eyes: *You will not escape my grasp.*
*Illusion sorcery spirit!*
Distorting Yaxiu's perception of the strength in his hands!
The instant Yaxiu's grip slackened slightly, Weise wriggled free like a hamster, using the recoil to flee into the night.
Shattering the glass skylight at the top of the Transcendent Building, Weise looked back at Yaxiu plummeting toward the bottom. She gave the man a deep, lingering glance, then vanished into the darkness.
...
Yaxiu seized the edge of a floor to arrest his fall and returned to the 45th floor, where he found Igola and Harvey already waiting.
Harvey had dismissed his Nether Knight form but remained bathed in cold flowing fire. The massive wound on his chest churned with rolling flesh and reconstructing bone. It was safe to assume that once he ended his fusion state, Harvey would have lost another dozen jin.
Igola crouched silently before Tamaxi.
This Black Crow had cracked the wall into a spiderweb of fractures—and this was a wall in the Transcendent Building, which ordinary miracles could barely scratch. The clothes over his abdomen were completely shredded, his abdominal muscles a charred, bloody mess that contrasted starkly with the fair skin around the edges.
"I didn't catch Silver Lantern," Yaxiu stated his failure calmly.
"Yeah." Igola stood up and said, "We'll try harder next time. A pity about Kill-All-Crows."
Yaxiu nodded, glanced at Black Crow, and turned to leave. "Let's go. The Transcendent Cult will be here soon. We need to head down to the first floor to prepare—"
"It's hard for me to move right now. Wait for me to finish treating myself."
Hearing that familiar distorted voice, Yaxiu instantly dropped out of his 'Spectator state,' staring at Black Crow in shock. "You're not dead?!"
When he saw Tamaxi intercept Silver Lantern, Yaxiu had known there was no chance he could survive. After all, as a god-host himself, he knew Silver Lantern could blow Black Crow away with a breath.
It was precisely upon realizing Tamaxi couldn't possibly survive that Yaxiu had slipped into the long-absent 'Spectator state,' unifying all his techniques and nearly capturing Silver Lantern.
"Usually, my enemies say those words. And once an enemy says that, my hand shatters their brain tissue." Black Crow coughed twice, chuckling. "Though seeing you all so surprised isn't bad either."
"You took a fatal blow from Silver Lantern head-on—one not even Harvey could endure! How did you—"
"If I died to sorcerer attacks so easily, I wouldn't have lived this long," Black Crow said. "Ordinary people aren't entirely helpless against miracles. It just takes techniques with a slightly elevated degree of difficulty."
"You know my bare-handed strikes can break the sound barrier and produce shockwaves, right? While useless against Silver Lantern, unleashing fifteen shockwaves in an instant was enough to launch me backward through the explosions before she touched me. Even so, she still grazed my belly. Luckily, it only broke my costal arch."
Frankly, regarding everything after 'Ordinary people aren't entirely helpless...', Yaxiu felt like he understood the words, yet didn't understand at all.
"But you smashed the wall like that. That impact—"
"It's precisely because the wall cracked like that that I'm fine. I transferred all the kinetic energy into the wall."
Yaxiu furrowed his brows. It sounded somewhat reasonable, yet made no sense at all.
Yaxiu turned to Igola. "What were you lamenting just now?"
"Lamenting Tamaxi's tactics," Igola said. "Tamaxi moved the Grey Fox blade to his hand this time and nearly slit her throat. Silver Lantern won't fall for that again."
Yaxiu looked back at Black Crow. "Then what are you lying here for?"
"Healing," Tamaxi said. "I'm immune to sorcery spirits, so I can only treat myself. But with broken bones this time, I can't move while healing."
Yaxiu's expression grew increasingly colorful. "You can heal your bones just by lying there?"
"Yeah, it's a very simple treatment," Tamaxi said. "Just like a dislocation. Even though the bone is broken, as long as I use my muscles to force it back into the correct position, it can be used for now. True healing will require nutritional intake."
Yaxiu: "...Is the reason you refuse to show your true face because you're actually a human-looking monster that crawled out of some Abyss?"
Igola: "You know, if anyone else said that, I would definitely treat them as my patient."
Harvey: "Cancelling grand law attacks with shockwaves, manipulating muscles to treat severe trauma... even for me, you're crossing a line."
"What I do is nothing." Tamaxi shrugged. "You can do all these things through miracles alone, and do them better and easier than me. No matter how you look at it, you guys are far more impressive, right?"
Seeing Black Crow banter with them in such a lighthearted tone, Yaxiu let out a long breath. He crouched before Black Crow and rested a hand on his shoulder. Black Crow let out a squeak: "Don't touch me, it still hurts a bit."
"Tamaxi."
"Yeah?"
"You did great this time. Don't do it again."
Black Crow replied, "For religious reasons, I cannot agree to such an impudent demand."
"You bastard..."
*Tap.*
Yaxiu turned his head to find that Transcendent cultists had already quietly surrounded these floors.
...
Under the bright moonlit night, the Flame White Tiger bounded across the wilderness. Upon its back lay a nearly naked young woman, draped only in a spare coat.
Even though the Flame White Tiger moved steadily, each jolt still made the girl draw in a sharp, pained breath.
"Ah... ah... ugh..."
Barely audible moans gradually devolved into muffled sobs. In the silent night, Weise finally couldn't hold back her tears. Her clothes had been torn to shreds, and only the illusions cast by her Illusion sorcery spirit spared her from total exposure...
Her body was covered in purple bruises. Since she had fled with her back turned, her back, legs, and buttocks had taken the brunt of the punishment; she had no choice but to lie flat on the Flame White Tiger so her back could heal faster.
Physical pain could be tuned out directly with her Illusion sorcery spirit, but she had no way to ease the agony searing her soul. Her soul was already exceedingly frail due to the secret poison of the Illusion Mirror Dragon—if another's soul was a block of ice, hers was a puddle of water, easily disturbed into ripples.
Never in her life had she experienced such soul-deep agony; the sheer torment left her mind in complete disarray. Recovering a sliver of composure, Weise wiped the corner of her mouth and ground her teeth together, rolling that man's true name through her mind: "Yaxiu, Yaxiu, Yaxiu..."
At that moment, she recalled Yaxiu's eyes during the final pursuit.
So cold, so calm, detached from all things, elevated above truth itself, as if a god dwelt within them.
In those eyes, she felt as though she could see herself.
A more perfect self.
Weise's breathing grew ragged. Wrapping her arms tightly around herself, the wretched, stinging pain gradually morphed into a far more intense sensation, spreading to the deepest folds of her soul and allowing her to feel a long-lost sense of reality amidst hollow illusions.
For the first time, alongside the desire she had harbored all along, Weise had found a new goal.
She was going to make Yaxiu hers.
She wanted to see that other Yaxiu again—the noble soul concealed behind vulgarity, the eternal presence hidden behind illusion!
As long as she made him hers, not only would her wishes within the illusion be realized, but even upon the eternal battlefields of the Void Realm, they would be invincible together.
"Yaxiu, Yaxiu, Yaxiu..."
The voice echoing into the dark night was no longer a resentful wail, but carried a different, indescribable flavor.
Chapter 557