Chapter 427: Ancient Demon
Li Yao's head was dizzy, his throat filled with blood. But he was not sure whether he should laugh or cry.
The scenario was quite familiar, albeit with the bomber and the bombed swapping their roles.
Before, he was the one who had set up a myriad of traps in order to survive when he was hunted by strong enemies; today, he was the one doing the hunting, while Wang Ji, a renowned demon, had been forced to flee like a rat with his head in hands and resort to bomb traps to struggle against him.
'I was too careless. I thought that I was invincible with the Ares Extension. But Wang Ji is much more cunning than before!
'As a bomb expert, I was negligent and fell for the trap. This is really a terrible mistake!'
Li Yao frowned. By analyzing the situation, he reached the conclusion momentarily that the explosion was a quite powerful one. If the bombs had been planted in the right locations, the entire undersea town might've been demolished.
The Ares Extension was a one-off expendable after all. Affected by the blast, one component after another lost its functionality and detached from the Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
Li Yao's crystal suit was immediately shabby again, the previous splendor gone.
But he was more concerned about the situation inside Skeleton Dragon's residence.
'This moron... Don't play with the bombs when you don't know how to use them properly!'
Gnashing his teeth, Li Yao furrowed his brow. He had anticipated a lot of things, but never did he expect that Wang Ji would be so crazy as to open Skeleton Dragon's residence in such a violent way.
"Haha. Vulture Li Yao, you didn't see this coming, did you? I learned a lot of things from you after the tremendous failures I suffered against you. Explosive magical equipment is your favorite. How does it taste?"
Wang Ji's cocky laughter came over from a dirty undercurrent. "You've lost your Ares Extension. What can you rely on to fight against me right now?"
Li Yao's eyes were glittering. He completely ignored Wang Ji's provocation and extended his telepathic thoughts to the undersea town.
More than half of the undersea town had been utterly demolished. The seabed was full of craters as if it had been bombarded by a meteor shower for three days and three nights.
Wang Ji stood right in front of Skeleton Dragon's residence, more arrogant than ever.
Li Yao was greatly alarmed. He stared at Skeleton Dragon's residence carefully.
The cone-shape architecture was carved with dense rune arrays, but in two completely opposite styles.
Some of the rune arrays were crude, simple, and askew, as if a wild animal had engraved them with its claws and teeth forcefully. They were brimming with viciousness and bloodthirst. One would feel terrified just looking at them.
But the other runes were square and upright, full of astounding dignity.
The rune arrays in two different styles were engaged in a fierce battle like two formidable armies.
However, because of the intense explosion, a lot of stones were blown off the cone-shaped architecture. The rune arrays were all mottled. Many of them were even completely destroyed.
'Not good!'
Li Yao's heart was pounding. He found a crack that was more than half a meter long but thinner than a hair on the surface of the building!
'Was this crack originally in this place, or was it caused by the explosion just now? Does it affect the inside of Skeleton Dragon's residence?'
Cold sweat was appearing on Li Yao's forehead. He gazed at the crack, not even blinking, only to discover that the crack thinner than hair was growing, splitting and spreading as if it were a living fungus. Very soon, it covered more than ten square meters. A spider net of cracks had formed on the surface of Skeleton Dragon's residence!
"Go away!
"Leave Skeleton Dragon's residence right now!"
Li Yao summoned his spiritual energy and shouted. His voice turned into intense vibration in the seawater and crushed over toward Wang Ji like wind and thunder.
Wang Ji's face color changed. He was so furious that he laughed, while he gnashed his teeth.
"Vulture Li Yao, without the Ares Extension, we are very alike to each other in capability. Do you still think you are the sure winner right now?
"I have sworn in the Pantheon of Demons to all the demon spirits that I will not stop hunting you until I die. You will beg me more mercy, but I will—"
Before Wang Ji was able to complete his sentence, a weird aura leaked out through the spider-net gaps on the surface of Skeleton Dragon's residence, which interrupted Wang Ji's egotistical declaration.
LUM DUM!
Li Yao suddenly heard a clear heartbeat in the depths of his brain.
The feeling was extremely strange. The sound seemed to be from Skeleton Dragon's residence, but it exploded directly inside Li Yao's brain, completely overlooking the distance in between.
At the same time, somebody seemed to clench his heart, press it hard, and let it go abruptly. He felt extremely uncomfortable.
LUM DUM! LUM DUM!
Heartbeats echoed like dull drumming neither too fast nor too slowly. But the frequency and the pitch were becoming higher and higher.
LUM DUM LUM DUM LUM DUM LUM DUM LUM DUM LUM DUM LUM DUM!
In several seconds, the beating heart already turned into a raging storm, raising a chaotic tsunami in Li Yao's brain and chest.
Li Yao felt like his head was exploding. His eyes were crimson. The bloodiest scenes were unfolding in front him.
He saw countless Cultivators and ordinary people crying in burning flames, tens of thousands of years ago.
Many other Cultivators were fighting the demons on flying swords.
But after a weirdly drifting breeze, the blood and flesh of the ordinary people, the Cultivators, and the demons were all corrupted, turning them into bare bones.
A moment later, the bones stood up robotically and constituted countless hideous killing machines. Then, they spread out in various directions like a swarm of locusts.
'This is—'
Li Yao bit the tip of his tongue and shook his head hard, freeing himself from the illusion. He found himself soaked in sweat. His brain seemed to have been emptied, and he had never been more exhausted.
Wang Ji's declaration came to an abrupt end. Like a puppet whose string had been cut off, he floated in the seawater numbly. Suddenly, cracking noises burst out from the inside of the biochemical beast. All its joints had exploded. Its head, limbs, and broken tails were each twisted in a different direction, while it dashed toward Skeleton Dragon's residence in an extremely awkward posture, cramping.
BOOM!
Wang Ji crashed into Skeleton Dragon's residence and hit the spider-net-like cracks precisely!
The cracks quickly expanded, revealing the darkness inside.
For some reason, Li Yao felt that thousands of pairs of eyes were staring at him in the dark residence penetrating through his crystal suit and his flesh and blood into the deepest part of his bone marrow.
It was at this moment that Wang Ji was back to himself because of the excruciating pain. He waved his hands and legs, struggling crazily and screamed in despair.
He seemed to be fighting an invisible enemy. He tried his best to run away, only to be pulled back time and time again and smashed against the cracks.
Li Yao activated his crystal camera on full power. He could vaguely see that countless transparent tentacles were wrapped around the black biochemical beast, pulling and corrupting it. The shell and flesh of the beast was torn apart, through which the tentacles crammed in and attacked Wang Ji himself directly!
Finally—
After almost ten clashes, the widest part of the cracks was more than two meters wide. Like a wide-open bloody mouth, Skeleton Dragon's residence sucked in Wang Ji together with his biochemical beast brutally.
CRACK! CRACK!
"Chiliu! Chiliu!"
"Squeak! Squeak"
Blood-freezing, leg-souring noises reverberated inside the dark gaps. Thousands of sweltering steel needles seemed to be stinging Li Yao's brain.
Wang Ji screamed desperately, not befitting an eminent demon; he was more like a pig which had been skinned and was ready to be butchered!
The desperate wailing gradually turned into helpless screaming, and then intermittent moaning, until it became feeble muttering in the end.
But another aura that was much more dangerous was getting more and more dense. Li Yao felt that an invisible demon was talking in a low voice right behind his ears.
Shua!
Li Yao's heart seemed to have been stabbed by a spike. All of his hair stood up, while he turned around abruptly and slashed out his Boiled Blood Wind Slashing Saber.
There seemed to be nothing in the seawater, yet he had hit something extremely tensile.
Li Yao extended all his telepathic thoughts and detected the surroundings as best he could, only to find that it was a weird creature that looked like a tentacle of a jellyfish, but multiple times thicker, which was swimming swiftly.
It seemed as soft as gel, but it was much harder than it appeared to be. Li Yao had extended the aura on his saber to some twenty meters long, but he could barely cut into the tentacle. The tentacle was not affected at all; it even crawled upwards along the body of the saber.
Wang Ji's scream was still ringing inside his ears. Li Yao did not dare fight the weird tentacle the hard away. He quickly withdrew his saber and leapt backward.
The tentacle didn't chase after him and simply retreated to the cracks. Then, a shrilling roar exploded in the deep inside of Skeleton Dragon's residence, as if countless crystal bombs had been detonated in everyone's brains at the same time!
The Cultivators and demons which were fighting in the battlefield not far away were all shocked by the shrilling roar and rendered dumb like puppets for a moment.
"What is it?"
"Such a terrifying aura!"
"It's demonic energy! Unparalleled demonic energy!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The piercing roar represented the final awakening of the ancient deadly demon from forty thousand years ago. Earsplitting collisions occurred in the depths of the residence, triggering chaotic turbulences in the silver ocean. The seawater was raging, and the ground was shaking!
The other twelve Cultivators sensed that a great demon was going to appear, too, and all swooped above Skeleton Dragon's residence.
BOOM!
After an ear-splitting crash, the upper half of the cone-shape architecture was demolished to smithereens.
The muddy seawater gradually dispersed, revealing a frightening figure more than thirty meters long which was slowly stretching its body.
Skeleton Dragon was exactly what its name suggested. Its arms were made up by countless bones which were emitting a bright silver glow. Its body was like a gargantuan egg, but the bones supporting the body were quite messy. With a careful look, one would notice that they had the characteristics of various creatures, as if the body had been piled up by the bones from countless species.
Nine arms made of bones extended out of the egg-shaped torso. The front end of each arm was a skull of a different species with its bloody mouth wide open, making the body look like a prehistoric hydra, only much more hideous and vicious.
In the middle of the empty chest was soft flesh that looked like jelly, which was heavily protected by the bones, emitting glamorous, translucent brightness.
The jelly was in the coagulation state. Watery liquid flowed slowly toward the nine arms, controlling each and every bone on them delicately.
In the center of the jelly, a cluster of crimson brightness was glistening wetly, expanding and shrinking like the beating heart of a human being.
Skeleton Dragon, an ancient deadly beast which had hibernated for forty thousand years, had finally broken free from the barriers and returned to reality again!