However, these pills were vicious, drastic stimulants distributed by the Heavenly Palace. They squeezed out every drop of one's life potential in a short burst, making the consumer appear overwhelmingly heroic and brave, but once the effects wore off, the user would collapse as limp as mud. Even if they survived, their body would be utterly depleted, requiring at least two or three years of recuperation to recover.
He Jing glanced at the last remaining attendant boy, vexation flaring in his chest.
Of the four devouring child ji beasts he had brought, only three had emerged, while the strongest showed no sign of stirring. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been forced into such a passive position in this battle.
Under his urgings, the Red Tiger launched a furious, all-out assault against the Que Beast King, completely disregarding its own safety.
The creature's claws and fangs were startlingly sharp, capable of clawing through even the Que Beast King's hard ice armor. Though thrown off several times, it lunged right back each time, its tiger jaws never straying from the Que Beast King's neck and chest, spewing black flames as it fought.
Twice, the Que Beast King nearly had its chest pierced by the beast's awl-like tongue. Roaring in fury, frost began condensing in its left palm, as if some weapon were taking shape.
Yet the Panlong Realm possessed a desert climate, not the creature's native domain of ice and snow, so the condensation of ice proceeded slowly.
Seizing the opportunity, the Red Tiger spat a mouthful of black flames and blinded its opponent's left eye!
Howling in pain, the Que Beast King clutched its eye and staggered back two large paces.
With it pinned down by the Red Tiger, the pressure facing the Heavenly Palace squad eased dramatically, and they immediately pressed forward toward the cenotaph.
Eight zhang left.
Six zhang.
Every inch gained was paid for in human lives.
He Jing twitched the ring finger of his left hand. His storage ring had a massive capacity, easily able to hold several tons of supplies; stowing away that giant block of ice would be child's play.
All that was needed was to drive back the dense horde of beasts in front and let him get close.
Right at that moment, the ice weapon in the Que Beast King's left hand finished coalescing—a colossal axe!
Though its design was crude and primitive, it was larger than an ordinary door plank and genuinely bore a razor-sharp edge!
The Red Tiger lunged to bite once more, but the Que Beast King ripped it away, uncaring that a large chunk of flesh was torn from its own neck. Swinging the ice axe with its left hand, it hacked down viciously!
It slammed the Red Tiger right into the Heavenly Palace squad's formation, crushing a guard flat beneath them.
The ice axe smashed into the Red Tiger's ribs, the crisp cracking sound audible to everyone.
There was no telling how many ribs the Red Tiger had broken.
Yet its outer shell was truly resilient; even with the Que Beast King's brute strength and the sharpness of the ice axe, it failed to cleave through immediately.
The Que Beast King's fury flared instantly, and it swung the axe down in a frenzy of brutal blows.
Seizing this window, He Jing darted to the side of the cenotaph in a flash, ignoring the surging horde around him.
Pressing a hand against the massive block of ice, he silently commanded:
"Collect!"
The next instant—
There was no next instant. The giant ice remained completely motionless.
Cold sweat poured down He Jing's forehead in a torrent.
He tried twice more, but the block of ice and the contents within sat right where they were, not budging in the slightest.
It... it won't go in!
Why? It's clearly not too wide or too heavy!
Cries of agony rang out from behind as two more guards fell. In his panic, a realization struck He Jing:
Storage rings could never store living creatures, with trees and eggs being the exceptions.
Could the Dafang Pot be a living thing?
Or were the Dafang Pot's contents too vast and profound, exceeding the storage ring's capacity to contain it?
The most terrifying reality confronting him now was that he would have to seize the pot with his own hands to take it away!
Right then, the two battling behemoths brawled their way over.
He Jing shifted aside to dodge just as the Red Tiger crashed against the solid ice. Suffering from several broken ribs, its movements were far less agile than before. Before it could scramble back to its feet, the Que Beast King's ice axe came cleaving down.
With a dull thud, a wound half a palm wide opened across the Red Tiger's neck. Black blood sprayed everywhere, hissing as it splashed against the ice—
The power of the black flames within its blood had a corrosive effect on the hard ice.
Having finally pierced the armor and drawn blood, the Que Beast King grew emboldened. It pinned the Red Tiger firmly beneath its massive foot and hacked down three more times with the giant axe.
Each blow was fiercer than the last, striking precisely into the wound on the Red Tiger's neck.
Even as the other Heavenly Palace guards poured all their attacks into its back, it paid them no heed.
The final chop finally severed the Red Tiger's cervical spine, its leftover momentum carving a four-foot-deep axe mark into the solid ice behind!
Victorious, the Que Beast King roared to the heavens, wrenched its giant axe from the ice, and swept it toward the tactical formation.
Now that the strongest opponent, the Red Tiger, was dead, the rest looked like easy prey, ready to slide smoothly down its gullet one by one.
The ji beast resembling a pufferfish had been continually spitting toxic fire at it to draw its attention; only now did the Que Beast King have the leeway to deal with it.
Recalling how this thing had hovered in midair firing cowardly snipes while it was occupied with the Red Tiger, fury surged in the Que Beast King's chest. It hurled several ice bullets. The hetai dodged in haste, but with a casual wave of the Que Beast King's arm, a blast of fierce wind swept it right before the giant snowman.
With a squelch, the Que Beast King crushed it to pulp in its grip!
The resulting explosion was violent yet compact—whether the hetai had self-destructed or not was unclear, but it unexpectedly blasted the caught-off-guard Que Beast King more than a dozen zhang away.
He Jing took the chance to signal his disciple Fu Liang, who drew an explosive arrow and fired it straight into the fissure in the ice according to his gesture.
The Que Beast King itself had carved a large crack into the ice, and a heavy pool of the Red Tiger's black blood had seeped into it, corroding deeper and deeper until the crack widened into a pit. Seeing that it had eaten through more than half the ice, He Jing naturally refused to let this opportunity slip by.
The arrow flew true, landing squarely in the icy pit.
A deafening blast followed, yet the upper layer of hard ice—
Remained completely unscathed.
It was hard. The Que Beast King's ice element was truly dense and unyielding; even explosives couldn't budge it.
At the sight, despair fell over everyone's faces.
He Jing had no choice but to throw out two Divine Fire Talismans.
Talisman masters of the Heavenly Palace had sealed a wisp of true fire from the mountain spirit Juju within these talismans for combat. They were extremely effective, but finished products were exceedingly rare.
He Jing had already cast four or five earlier to fend off the beast herd; these were the final two.
The reason the Heavenly Palace squad could withstand wave after wave of beast attacks was not just their own formidable prowess, but also their endless arsenal of magic artifacts, pills, talismans, and puppets, fully showcasing the sheer might of their boundless wealth.
From a distance, He Lingchuan watched, his mouth watering with envy.
Yet in such high-intensity combat, even the most abundant reserves would eventually run dry. With even He Jing's personal treasures mostly exhausted, the Heavenly Palace squad was naturally stretched to its absolute limits.
It had to be said that anything from Juju remained reliably potent. The true fire of the earth's core burned all things, and once the two Divine Fire Talismans were unleashed, the rate at which the hard ice melted became visible to the naked eye.
This was a contest between ice and fire.
The Que Beast King, having just scrambled up from the ground, naturally wouldn't sit idly by while they set fires and caused explosions. It actually gouged out its mangled left eye and slapped it onto the giant axe.
The massive axe immediately transformed into a brilliant, gleaming azure ice.
It then swung the giant axe, slamming it into the ground three times in succession.
With each strike, thick sheets of ice radiated outward at breakneck speed, centered around the point of impact.
The Que beasts took to it like fish in water, while the faces of everyone in the Heavenly Palace squad drained of color.
If they were in Beijia territory, such a wide-range, indiscriminate supernatural attack might look terrifying, but it would have affected them very little. Yet this was the Panlong Realm in the western reaches of the Yuan Kingdom; their numbers were few, and their origin power was exceptionally thin, far from sufficient to shield them.
The Northern Defense Kuixing Formation bore the brunt of the assault. When the Que Beast King's first icy shockwave hit, three Kuixing stones shattered on impact.
By the time the three waves of shockwaves subsided, only two Kuixing stones remained intact.
Though the formation possessed defensive power and deflected seventy percent of the icy shockwave's force, the remaining thirty percent still crashed into the Heavenly Palace guards.
Two of them, exhausted beyond endurance and unable to counter, had their protective artifacts explode one after another; within two or three breaths, they froze solid into ice sculptures!
The Que Beast King fared little better. After delivering those three heavy blows, its frame shrank by two full sizes. Blood oozed from all over its body, and several wisps of eerie light drifted from its mouth and nose, sucked into the Dafang Pot.
Immediately afterward, it charged forward brandishing its giant axe, sweeping it toward the Heavenly Palace survivors.
The Divine Fire Talismans burning against the solid ice had also exhausted their power.
They were only talismans after all, not Juju in person.
Even so, a large hole had been melted into the hard ice, revealing General Red's shoulder armor.
There was hope! Disregarding his injuries, He Jing lunged forward, raising his heavy mace to batter, smash, and hammer at the ice.
At this life-or-death juncture, he forced his true energy to the fore, unleashing every ounce of his strength.
Even He Lingchuan in the distance could hear the shocking commotion, which was scarcely inferior to the Que Beast King's icy shockwaves.
With clattering crunches, shards of ice broke away and tumbled down. Half of General Red's armor was now exposed, reaching past the ribs.
As He Jing raised his mace to strike again, a sudden breathlessness seized his chest, and he coughed up another spray of blood with a wet gag.
This time the clots were dark, speckled with bits of visceral flesh.
The backlash from the dissipation of his lamp spirit still lingered. Fending off the beast herd had drained his true energy, and pushing past his limits now aggravated his internal injuries, racking him with pain so sharp his vision went dark and he nearly passed out.
Yet at such a crucial moment, he could not afford to slacken. Forcing another breath of true qi through his meridians, He Jing struck twice more, until finally—
The Dafang Pot was exposed.
Overjoyed, He Jing grabbed the pot's spout.
He yanked—it didn't budge in the slightest.
He yanked again—still unmoving.
What was going on?
Looking down along the body of the pot, he discovered that not only was the Dafang Pot protected within the embrace of General Red's armor, but both gauntleted hands were also gripping it tightly.
What was keeping him from taking the pot... was it the solid ice, or this suit of armor?
He couldn't tell clearly, because General Red's gauntlets were indeed still frozen inside the ice.
Seeing the Que Beast King turning toward him, frantic and furious, He Jing rained frenzied blows with his heavy mace down onto General Red's gauntlets.
Crack, crack, crack! Ice splinters flew everywhere.
With force like that, let alone ice, even refined steel would have been smashed away.
Yet he managed neither to shatter the gauntlets nor dislodge the Dafang Pot.
Instead, frost was already beginning to reform over the pot.
The Que Beast King's ice element possessed the ability to regrow and repair itself.
With the Divine Fire Talismans spent, in less than half the time it took to drink a cup of tea, this entire massive block of ice would freeze solid once again.
He Jing's only chance was to dig out the armor along with the pot and carry them away together.
With a loud snap, the final two Kuixing stones shattered, and the Northern Defense Kuixing Formation was breached by the swarming beasts!
The Heavenly Palace squad was scared out of their wits.
Their means were almost entirely exhausted, and only four of their men remained standing—not counting the unconscious attendant boy—while at least one hundred and forty Que beasts still roamed the field. Worst of all, the Que Beast King was still alive and kicking.
He Jing whipped his head around and tossed a bronze talisman to his disciple. "Activate the lesser mountain-moving array."
In combat, terrain conditions were often unpredictable and complex, so the lesser mountain-moving array brought by the Heavenly Palace was not inscribed on the ground, but carved into refined bronze talisman plates, two to a set.
This was precisely why the Heavenly Palace squad had dared to venture deep into enemy lines: they had reserved an escape route all along. If they couldn't win, they could always run.
Chapter 844