Beastmaster of the Ages

A 500,000-meter-tall statue was an incredible height. After all, even thousand-meter-tall cosmic gods were already extremely frightening.

“Maybe this statue’s just exaggerated in size. It might not be a true one-to-one carving of a real cosmic god...” he muttered to himself as he flew upward. His current position was at a rather indecent location somewhere below the neck of this golden female war goddess, so he flew upward. At last, a golden mouth appeared before him.

Tianming wondered what the bright and shiny material was.

“Pretty heroic looking, and kind of captivating.” He hadn’t expected that inside Miracle Mountain, there was a female statue.

“Wait a minute... I should be inside the Grand-Orient Sword fragment right now...!” It meant this statue must also be part of the Grand-Orient Sword!

Just as he was wondering what to do next, the Grand-Orient Sword in his hand suddenly reacted on its own. It shot out and flew toward the colossal statue’s mouth. But in front of such a giant figure, the several-hundred-meter-long Grand-Orient Sword was more like a toothpick.

“Well, this should be interesting.” Tianming didn’t interfere. He crossed his arms and stood aside, obediently playing the role of a bystander.

The sword directly pierced into the crack between the golden statue’s lips, with only the hilt left outside.

Did it overestimate itself? He wondered. But just as he had that thought, the golden statue violently shuddered and its golden face quivered, as if it was waking up.

Another rumble followed as the statue opened its heavy eyelids, releasing two dazzling golden beams that shone directly on him!

“Whew. It isn’t alive.” Tianming had been startled for a moment before he realized that the giant eyes were clearly made of the same material as the statue; it wasn’t a real cosmic god body.

“So what now?”

Tianming didn’t expect the statue’s mouth to open and an immense, solemn voice to speak. “Emperor, the chaos swordmaiden has awaited you for a long time....”

“What?” The voice was so deafening that Tianming’s ears rang. All he could make out were the words chaos swordmaiden. Beyond that, he couldn’t catch the rest of the statue’s reverent chanting.

The entire mountain chamber echoed with this booming voice, but it didn’t end there. As soon as the statue finished speaking, her entire massive body began melting like flowing molten gold. The Grand-Orient Sword gluttonously drank in the golden sea, beginning a true restoration of its might!

The Grand-Orient Sword keeps evolving, but the Prime Tower still hasn’t had any changes.... Tianming’s eyes burned with intensity as he patiently observed, while Yin Chen kept track of the situation outside.

There was still a little time left.

Tianming stepped forward and grabbed the Grand-Orient Sword. Boundless golden energy flooded into his body, rushing into the middlekin astrons within his heptastar organs. “This power rivals that of a cosmic god’s cosmoforce!”

The sensation was somewhat like the Grand-Orient Vortex from before, but even stronger. He discerned that it might be the power of the chaos swordmaiden. The Grand-Orient Sword relentlessly devoured it like a starving beast, undergoing an earth-shattering transformation.

“Eh?” Tianming noticed that the sword’s original gold-and-black dual colors had changed. The black portion had been compressed into a single point and the entire sword was now otherwise a brilliant gold.

“What about the black part? Where’d it go? Could there be a second statue?”

At that point, the golden chaos swordmaiden had completely merged into the Grand-Orient Sword while a transformation was still ongoing inside it.

“Right! That chaos swordmaiden was just a statue inside the mountain. But the whole mountain was what initially drew the Grand-Orient Sword here, and the mountaintop is a sword tip.... The entire mountain is probably a fragment!”

Tianming had just considered that when the golden rock walls also began to melt and flow toward the Grand-Orient Sword! “Is it possible that Miracle Mountain itself is melting?”

That would be an even more earth-shaking event.

***

It was exactly as Tianming suspected. It’d only been a short while, but the tens of thousands of Eightpart Pantheons geniuses had already almost arrived at the sword cave.

The worst part was that several seventh-level cosmic gods had noticed that something was wrong with the sword cave. They had detached from the main force and rushed over at full speed. They hadn’t hurried before, thinking Tianming could never enter the sword cave, but they had been informed of the new developments.

Moran and Zi Zhen exchanged glances. Though neither of them spoke, they had already silently prepared for battle. The word “retreat” didn’t seem to exist in their vocabulary.

“Take them down.”

The leading figures among the Eightpart Pantheons forces were the true pillars of the Ten Desolate Starforges, all of them ranking among the top of the under-five-hundred-year-old fighters.

Even the famed Princess You You, with her sevenfold hell-ring, was only ranked third in talent. There were plenty of others with both talent and strength. Seeing the sword cave behaving abnormally, their killing intent surged. The Heavenly Dao Arena had been opened, yet things weren’t going their way. How could they tolerate it?

But then....

“What!?” Everyone looked up and was stupefied. Starting from the peak of Miracle Mountain, the mountain had begun to melt and collapse inward.

The collapse caused the sword cave to completely disappear! In just a short time, the entire area around it was gone. Even the restrictive formations that had once blocked its entry vanished.

The mountain had already mostly turned into a golden sea, continually shrinking inward with a bottomless pit at its centre.

“He succeeded.” Zi Zhen and Moran exchanged glances, then fled in the chaos.

“It was that masked man who went in!”

“He... melted Miracle Mountain in less than a quarter of an hour...!” The fifty thousand genius cosmic gods blankly stared at the scene before them, knowing full well just how massive Miracle Mountain had been.

But now it was getting shorter even faster than the speed they had scaled the mountain just now.

“Don’t tell me the super cosmic relic’s gone....”

All eyes turned to the commanders.