Beastmaster of the Ages

Sheng Guangfa’s expression was one of terror and anxiety.

”Are you insane?” Shenxi Xingtian asked. The moment he said that, the transmission stone from Meng Ying lit up. The two figures that the stone projected were actually youths, albeit ones that looked incredibly ill. ”What kind of tricks are you up to now?”

”Don’t tell me you didn’t know that the enemy actually had two infinitum-class divine astralships!” Meng Ying snapped the moment they saw Shenxi Xingtian. The ebon ruler could tell that the two of them seemed rather odd. Anger, reluctance, and anxiety were clearly written on their faces.

”Two of them?! How could that be possible?!”

”That nine-headed dragon ship turned into an infinitum-class one! The one Li Tianming pilots!” the two of them said in unison.

”No way! Surely, you jest. Friends, let’s be open with each other. If the two of you want more treasures, you just have to discuss it with me. There’s really no need for jokes like that.” That was Shenxi Xingtian’s first reaction.

Hearing that, Meng Ying laughed uncontrollably. In the same mocking voice, they said, ”Do you still doubt us at this point? To be frank with you, our Dreamchild has been wrecked so badly that we’ll need decades to repair it. We’ve escaped the battlefield, so the nine-headed dragon should be heading your way. If you don’t leave now, even if they can’t kill you, you’ll definitely lose the Ebonfiend!”

Shenxi Xingtian was utterly stunned. Someone like Meng Ying wouldn’t joke around at a time like this, yet how could all that be possible?!

Meng Ying was fully expecting such a doubtful reaction. They had witnessed the might of the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb firsthand and reacted just as badly as Shenxi Xingtian did. ”Our collaboration has failed and we’ve suffered heavy losses. You should retreat, too. If you do, we might work together again in the future. Forget winning this round and don’t sacrifice yourself to prove my point. We’ve utterly lost, it’s a truth you’ll just have to accept. We have to return to Wondrium to repair the Dreamchild. Farewell.” Meng Ying’s faces gradually vanished. Though they seemed unwilling to accept how things had turned out, they’d still managed to cut their losses short and escape.

”Rex Mundi, what they said should be true. Let’s have our troops retreat! We have to retain every single person we can!” Sheng Guangfa said in a harrowed voice. He saw a large number of flameyellow fiends appear, a sign that the Dreamchild had retreated. The moment he finished speaking, however, he witnessed Shenxi Xingtian shudder and split out gallons of blood. His gaze darkened once more.

Shenxi Xingtian had sustained many shocks in his second expedition. The last time, he had merely lost face, but this time he had been completely messed up. He had suffered the worst losses among everyone else, so much so that he’d become a universal case for pity. For someone that had been at the top of the world to be dealt a hand like this to the point that he’d ruined what generations of forebears had come to build was something that he couldn’t bring himself to accept. He felt thousands of times more torn than Meng Ying had, to the point that even a man of his caliber would physiologically react to the shock. After splitting out all that blood, his face paled even more. With a hoarse voice and all the energy he had left, he uttered a single word: ”Retreat!”

”Yes!” Sheng Guangfa shook his head and vanished, knowing that it was already too late whether Shenxi Xingtian gave the order or not. Even his ether-class ship had been heavily surrounded. ”Everyone, run if you can. Those that can’t, accept your fate. Sigh....”

The Sun was a burning world filled with miraculous wonders that made him feel despair and short of breath.

......”Rex Mundi, save us!”

”Shenxi Xingtian!”

”Save us!”

Such cries echoed by his ears without end. Shenxi Xingtian remained standing, completely stiff. He turned back for a look and noticed that the two-headed Gladean Ruins was still giving chase. More and more flameyellow fiends had appeared to stop the Ebonfiend as well. Xiaodao wasn’t planning on letting him run. The world of flame, the two-headed dragon, and the nine-headed dragon had cemented themselves as nightmares in Shenxi Xingtian’s heart. His entire body seemed to be bleeding from the loss.

”I didn’t think a place like this would completely overthrow me and the ebons.... We’ll have a hard time coming back from this.” Despite all his hatred and rage, he was helpless to do anything about it. It would take far too long for them to deal with the consequences of that day.

Shenxi Xingtian took a deep breath. Meng Ying had told him that the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb would soon be arriving. ”Old friend, I didn’t know that you’d be forced to flee by abandoning your tail like a lizard under my watch after so many generations of pilots.”

He grit his teeth and activated a change in the demonic head that was the Ebonfiend. A crimson-and-black storm sprouted from the head as the hair-shaped chains exploded into individual links. After the countless links had been shed, the Ebonfiend looked like a bald head, its pores like thousands of holes. The links were among the most powerful weapons of the ship, each of them functioning like a fatal whip. Yet it had abandoned all of them, seemingly completely disarming itself! Losing its “hair” was worse than having its hull breached. In the latter case, repairs would be possible. However, it would be impossible for the Ebonfiend’s hairs to regrow. It would take a few dozen generations of effort to collect the materials necessary to fashion new weapons for the ship.

Yet the shedding had been voluntarily conducted as a desperate means to escape. The individual links of the chains formed a large net of metal, stopping the pursuit of the Gladean Ruins.

”What’s this?” Xiaodao wondered. He wasn’t expecting the Ebonfiend to be capable of such a transformation. His best guess was that it was a last-ditch method the ebon forebears had left just in case their descendants needed a desperate way to flee.

The gigantic metal net immediately covered the two heads of the Gladean Ruins before they began constricting, binding the heads, body, claws, and tail of the ship. Then the Ebonfiend began ascending to quickly break out into the astralscape. Having lost a huge part of its combat capabilities, it was now vastly inferior to the Gladean Ruins. But at the very least, it hadn’t been completely destroyed, nor would Shenxi Xingtian go back to the Sun to cause any more trouble within. If he had stayed behind, there probably wouldn’t be many people on the Sun that would be able to stop him and his infinitum-class warbeasts.

”Let’s kill the astral gods first! Keep fighting!” Xiaodao had spent quite some time tearing an opening in a net to escape from it. By then, the Ebonfiend had long escaped into the wider astralscape, thoroughly crippled. However, everyone aside from Shenxi Xingtian, including Sheng Guangfa, remained locked within the astralguard formation of the Sun. News of Shenxi Xingtian being the sole person among three million to survive would surely stupefy everyone that heard it, and that was with the help of the rex mundi of the Infinitum Mundus.

”Die!” The Gladean Ruins chased the Ebonfiend all the way out of the Sun. Wudi, on the other hand, wiped out the remaining astral gods of the Exterminatus Army within.