Beastmaster of the Ages

The two ashuras were rather far from the main combat zone. They didn’t need to fight up close at all. All they had to do was control their beasts from far away. Though the folks from the Primordial Sands knew who was going after them, they couldn’t even properly fight back while the cosmic godbeasts continued to hound them!

Some distance away in one of the caverns, two young girls in black chatted listlessly. Their hair and eyes were pitch black, while their skin was a sickly pale, making for quite the stark contrast. Both of them had slender, elegant figures that seemed to project wisdom. Though they were cosmic gods in their own right, they still gave off a pitiful aura. The two girls looked practically identical in all aspects, not that that would sway Tianming at all, considering he had Moran and her forty-nine identically beautiful sisters.

The fact that these two girls appeared completely listless meant that they were using only their hands to control the beasts. On each of their palms was a pitch-black eye that shone with the light of an arcane, spatial power. Looking closer, one would see that those eyes looked somewhat similar to Tianming’s Plundering Eye on his left arm, appearing to be compound eyes. However, there were only forty-two tiny eyes for each of them, twenty-one on each palm.

”Mo Lian, who has the Ninelives Fruits?” asked one of them.

”The green-haired one. He has everything,” the other said.

”Oh, that third-level cosmic god? Very well. I’ll get the Saturatian wolves to deal with him.”

”Alright, Mo Xi. If we can bring the Skyfiendling the Ninelives Fruits, we’ll probably gain quite a bit of merit and status from him.”

The fact that they knew what was happening on the battlefield despite not being there meant that the eyes on their palms could see what the beasts saw. Tianming had learned quite a bit about the ashuras beforehand. No doubt, they were much stronger than the ebons. They had a blood-contract relationship with their warbeasts, but it wasn’t a symbiotic one. Even so, they were more unified than the ebons with their warbeasts. The ebons hadn’t been able to see what their beasts could. At the end of the day, the ebons were likely descended from a small branch of ashuras that migrated to the Lower Star Ruins. They were not that uncommon in the Realm of Order.

The fiendsky eyes of the ashuras also served to distinguish them from the ebons. Tianming didn’t know if the similarity in name to his Fiendsky Arm was just a coincidence. All in all, the divine ashuran race and the sky plunderer race both had eyes on their palms, so they probably had some blood ties at one point.

Tianming’s Plundering Eye’s powers focused on destruction, especially on formations, whereas the ashuras’ fiendsky eyes were only used to control warbeasts. The colors of those eyes no longer represented the kind of talent that they had inherited, since all of them were far superior to the ebons’ taixi divine eyes. Instead, the more talented an ashura, the more subeyes they had in their compound eyes.

Mo Lian and Mo Xi had a total of forty-two subeyes in both palms combined, making them 42-eye talents. It was a similar schema to primalwingers’. Fiendsky eyes could be used to cultivate ocular arts, which were the main means of offense for ashuras as far as their own bodies were concerned. Most of them were illusory types. Apart from that, they were used to make nova wildbeasts submit.

Every single fiendsky eye also had traces of spatial energy that allowed the ashuras to use something like lifebound spaces. Though each eye didn’t have a large space, the space could be enlarged to store one warbeast. Put another way, the number of beasts that ashuras could bring with them at any given time depended on how many subeyes their fiendsky eyes had.

It was clearly apparent that the ashuras weren’t strong individually, but relied on numbers to rise to power. Each of the three divine races had their own unique traits. At the end of the day, the ones that were best at actual single combat were the specter devas.

Most of Mo Lian and Mo Xi subeyes had turned from black to red, a sign that the warbeasts within had been released. Tianming was nearby and locked onto them immediately. ”Amazing! These two are third-level cosmic gods....”

Tianming wouldn’t dare to fight cosmic gods of that level alone if it were any other faction of the Eightpart Pantheons, but he would give the ashuras a try! ”Meow Meow!”

Liu Cheng and the rest were being swarmed by Saturatian wolves and scorchstar snakes, all of them near a hundred meters in size like cosmic gods. Time was running out. Tianming stared at the two ashuras and let Meow Meow take control of his body. The next instant, white lightning diagrams of Thousandway Blitzrun filled the entire cave.

The two of them immediately noticed it and reacted. The fiendsky eyes in their hands shook and shone, summoning five astral beasts, all wolves with coats of silver fur. Their bodies were like mini universes in their own right, and they could also travel through the astralscape with just their bodies. Apart from five Saturatian wolves, there were six scorchstar snakes, all golden and stretching two hundred meters in length. They burned with astral flames and raised the temperature of the cave the moment they were released.

While the beasts were basic cosmic godbeasts, they seemed rather well tamed. They immediately surrounded the two young girls protectively, treating them like masters. Unlike normal beastmasters that considered their lifebound beasts cultivation partners, warbeasts were nothing but servants or pets to infinite beastmasters. While cosmic godbeasts didn’t have tripartite souls and were not as intelligent as lifebound beasts, they were even more ferocious.

Though they were fast, Tianming had been faster. His sword had already appeared next to Mo Lian after Meow Meow and Ying Huo launched their abilities. Ying Huo had only launched three barrages before using its feathers to execute Skyscorch Featherblast, but it was completely different from the move that it used all the way back at the Grand-Orient Sect. Every single Infernal Swordfeather carried the power of Monorigin Infernal Blaze. The cosmic swords of flame went blasting out with full fury. Meow Meow, on the other hand, had launched nine subsequent blasts of lightning abilities!