Beastmaster of the Ages

Eventually, it worked. In fact, it was much better than when the ability first awakened. ”Then again, Reverend Daolie is also a specter. He should be even faster than Lan Yun, so he’d still be able to keep up with me. I have to keep improving Fiveway Blitzrun.”

This time around, Chen Tianyong represented a chance for him to improve. ”When I reached the first level of the Cosmic Cartography stage back then, I was fighting with omnisentient power to protect the Sun. My imperial order grew more and more stable, leading to its growth as well as that of my other orders! I’m not suffering under any side effects of rapid growth anymore—that means I can use another order fragment without worry!”

”He is... inside there... now is... the time... to act... nobody is... around him... settle this... very quick!” Yin Chen said.

Chen Tianyong had tried seeking out Zi Zhen without relying on anyone else, in search of a vain hope. Even when nobody was around, he would take out the grade-six order fragment from time to time, his only hope. That was how Yin Chen had managed to notice him. Someone like him was no doubt incredibly paranoid and vigilant. He noticed Tianming and Zi Zhen as they approached him from afar.

”Who’s this?!” someone yelled from within the ruins with a deep, struggling voice. Quite a few walls collapsed all of a sudden as a gigantic figure rose toward the sky! The ruins were an endless stretch of gray. While the ruin was a gigantic fortress to Tianming, it was nothing but a straw hut for the minotaur. Tianming was simply far too small in comparison to a titan of myth.

The gigantic minotaur was ash gray and covered in huge black robes. Despite his darkness-shrouded face, his bull horns were tall and prominent. His entire body looked like a mountain! However, the aura of xeno fatigue was heavy on him, marking him with the curse of certain death.

Through the darkness, his gigantic gray eyes looked straight at Tianming, a white-haired outsider accompanied by a small specter. The combination immediately caused him to raise an eye. Back then, he wouldn’t have cared, but now the purple fiend was quite a threat to him.

Tianming felt hostility coming from the giant and hurriedly said, ”Chen Tianyong, I’ve come to save you.”

Those simple words sounded ear piercing to Chen Tianyong’s ears. He’d hidden his identity for a long time and nobody had called him by that name for ages. Hearing that he would be saved instantly made his mind race. He glared at them and his expression changed. ”You two!”

”Shhh. Let’s get straight to the point. I can solve all kinds of xeno fatigue! I’m Li Tianming. Nice to meet you, Chen Tianyong, former lord of Commonsky City. You have a grade-six order fragment for me, right?” Tianming daringly said.

”You!” Chen Tianyong’s eyes widened even more. His bull face was filled with disbelief and shock. Tianming knew everything—his name, his status, and even his possession of an order fragment! Not to mention, ’xeno fatigue’ had caught his ear. It was a chance for a renewal! A revival! Something that he had yearned for so much that he couldn’t recall ever wanting anything else. He had come all the way to Antiquitas Capital to find that vain silver lining!

”But... but the rumors.... That person should be a purple-haired female specter....” Chen Tianyong looked at Zi Zhen and immediately went quiet. She was just as the rumors had described! The information he’d received wasn’t complete at all, so he had never expected her to be this young.

In actuality, the high officials of the antiquitean imperials knew that Zi Zhen herself wasn’t the miracle savior. Instead, it was someone that she was really close to. Chen Tianyong simply couldn’t bring himself to believe that the young human was actually that person, someone who wasn’t the least bit fazed at the sight of him.

”Senior Chen, can you shrink yourself? My neck’s going to break if I keep looking up while talking to you. You specters of the Xenoabyss really are used to going about life in your gigantic bodies, eh?”

”Very well.” Chen Tianyong’s heart pounded. He shrank by increasing the density of his astrons, going from more than a kilometer tall to about Zi Zhen’s height. In that form, even his fatigue-afflicted body seemed explosively stronger.

”There’s no rush, Senior Chen. Let’s take our time to talk,” Tianming politely said without putting on airs in the slightest, causing Chen Tianyong to relax.

The minotaur sat down cross-legged amidst the ruins. ”Please go on. I’ll dutifully listen.” His unease and anxiety could clearly be felt. Hope was dangling right before him; he was all too worried that it would burst and vanish like a fragile bubble.

Tianming began, ”First, I’ll inform you about who I am. I’m a normal person from the astralscape of order. Before coming to the Xenoabyss, I didn’t know what kind of power I possessed. Eventually, I learned that my body allows me to absorb xeno fatigue and restore people afflicted by it to their normal state. The girl beside me was also once afflicted by it. She had it much worse than you. However, as you can see, she’s recovered. Apart from becoming a little more conceited, there haven’t been any side effects.”

”How could a normal person know my name, status, and what I have?” the minotaur asked, shaking his head in wonder.

”Oh, that’s thanks to an ability I have that lets me gather information. I don’t have any informants in the Xenoabyss or anything. You should know how difficult it would be for humans to form an information-gathering agency under the noses of the antiquitean imperials’ own, right?”

”That’s true, which is why I was so awed.” Chen Tianyong was fully aware of that. The folks in the Xenoabyss were really protective of their secrets, so there was no way an outworlder would be able to learn so much about them. If the antiquitean imperials knew so much, they would have taken Chen Tianyong’s grade-six order fragment long before the two youths sought him out. ”However, why’re you telling me this?” ”The reason we bother to do that is that the two of us don’t have any powerful backers here, yet what we can do can shake the foundations of the Xenoabyss. What do you think would happen if I publicly claimed to be able to do what I do?” Tianming asked.

Chen Tianyong narrowed his eyes in thought. ”You’d be captured by the closest antiquitean imperial, who’d use you to rob others blind. You’d lose your... freedom?”