Chapter 916 Don’t Belong Here
The Abomination’s strength made him more dangerous than a Cla.s.s XI champion.
“Pity. This weapon had served me rather well.”
Li Mu reached a hand at the broken shards of his saber and groped, magically drawing each and every single piece into the air, which he handed to Shen Jia for safekeeping.
Next, Li Mu fired a few Mana beams on the ground and carved out a circle filled with strange glyph-like inscriptions. He stomped and the ground quivered as if in response. Before Shen Jia knew it, faint lines appeared, like slender veins of silver running in the ground. More Mana continued to fill the grooves on the ground and steadily, they grew broader and clearer until the magical circle was complete.
The Magical Circle of Transcendence.
A barrier-type magical field.
A cylindrical wall of light rose up from the outer peripherals of the magical circle on the ground and kept Shen Jia within its protection.
This was the first time Li Mu used Taoist magic in Molderad. The Magical Circle of Transcendence was nowhere near the most potent barrier-type force field he ever used, but its low need for spiritual energies made it perfect to be used here. He had been studying on ways to allow himself to use the Mana in the atmosphere here as sustenance to use Taoist magic.
“Stay inside the circle and don’t come out.”
Li Mu instructed Shen Jia before he stepped out of the circle.
Shen Jia gazed at his mentor with deference and respect before he glances at his trapped sister once more. She has still bound to the oversized stalagmite not far away.
The Abomination stared at the magical circle with suspicion and confusion before the misshapen monster gasped with dawning horror, its trembling voice fraught with disbelief and panic, “T-That’s a demonic circle! You! Are you a demon from another world?!”
Li Mu heard him and was mildly surprised by the remark.
“So this monster knows about Taoist magical circles?
“But it called my enchantment ‘a demonic circle’ and me ‘a demon from another world’?”
For one second, Li Mu’s mind was a.s.sailed by myriads of theories and postulations about what was really going on.
But this was neither the time nor place for such pondering.
He attacked.
He waved a hand. One of the sabers used by one of the scale-mail-armored a.s.sa.s.sins shot of out his grasp and flew straight into Li Mu’s grasp, whose fingers only just closed in on the hilt of the saber and he was gone. Like a black wraith, he streaked towards the giant red stalagmite at blinding speed.
“Lives first!” Thought Li Mu.
Whoos.h.!.+ Whoos.h.!.+ Whoos.h.!.+
The Abomination flung three of its blood-red tentacles at Li Mu.
This time, Li Mu was prepared. He injected a rich spurt of Mana into his saber’s blade and fired a blast.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Fiery sparks burst out angrily into the air.
The clangor of steel striking against steel rang like raindrops. In mere minutes alone, Li Mu and his foe exchanged several hundred blows.
Like an apparition, he detached himself abruptly from the fight, s.h.i.+fting his position nonstop in midair. Finally, when the last of his afterimages faded and he had withdrawn, he was already back inside the magical circle with the unconscious Shen Xiaoyue in his arms.
“Sister!” An overjoyed Shen Jia scampered over and took Shen Xiaoyue over.
She still hasn’t woken up.
“Teacher, my sister… She’s…” Shen Jia said to Li Mu.
“She’s lost too much blood and much of her spiritual vigor. But other than that, she’s in no immediate danger. All she needs is nourishment. In a half-year, she’ll be as fit as a flea again.”
“Thank you so much, Teacher,” Shen Jia said gratefully.
Encountering Li Mu was the Fates smiling upon them. Without Li Mu, Shen Jia would have long been dead and the score with the Sky Dragons would have not been settled, never mind finding and rescuing Shen Xiaoyue.
Li Mu merely nodded without saying anything, keeping his gaze transfixed on the Abomination.
The enormous creature — a monstrous amalgam of multiple dead limbs st.i.tched together — has displayed surprising strength beyond Li Mu’s expectations.
“Demon… You really are a demon…” The Abomination’s putrid-filled and grotesque face twisted as he spoke with a cloud of miasmic sick escaping his jaws, “I’ll savor your blood today. I needed that girl, but no longer. Now, I need your blood instead. With your blood, I’ll finish the final step to creating the most perfect body!”
His dozens or so tendril-like tentacles shot forth like beams of light, then like a cyclonic tsunami, they bore down on Li Mu, each and every one of the tentacles like hungry serpents eager for his blood.
Li Mu inhaled deeply. His presence and aura began to grow like a leviathan stirring from its long peaceful slumber. His Mana churned like a gathering storm and for one moment, Li Mu looked different. Transformed. With a power that almost felt physical and undoubtedly destructive, Li Mu stepped forward to meet his enemy. The cave chamber shook with every pace. Then he vanished. With speeds that no naked eye could capture, he charged.
CRACK!
With his bare hands, he caught a few of the tentacles. He yanked them furiously and pulled with all his might, pulling the Abomination — a creature almost the size of a hilly knoll — into mid-air.
“What the…?!”
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
Li Mu swung his arms back and forth, slamming the Abomination into the ground left and right again and again viciously like he was using the ugly and misshapen monster as a pillow in a terrible pillow fight.
With each blow, the ground rocked like an earthquake was happening.
The armored a.s.sa.s.sins who were still nearby could not believe that they were witnessing. None of them believe that a fight could be such a one-sided beatdown. There was no skill. There was no finesse. Only sheer brute strength.
What these men wors.h.i.+pped as their true G.o.d was now being treated like a helpless punching bag. The Abomination tried everything imaginable and yet nothing it did could free it from Li Mu’s abuse.
Crack!
The tentacles snapped all of a sudden.
That cut short the Abomination’s misery — at least for the moment. But its momentum did not prevent its gargantuan girth from smas.h.i.+ng into numerous stalagmites and stalact.i.tes like a bowling ball plowing through a set of pins before it rammed into the rock face of the wall and got itself stuck inside.
Li Mu peered at the broken tentacles in his grasp.
They were hollow.
So they were not tentacles. They were capillaries.
That was not all. Of the many stalact.i.tes that the Abomination had smashed when it careened off, many of them were hollow too. Something was amiss with the ceiling of this cave.
Drip. Drop.
A strange claret liquid dropped from inside of the hollowed-out stalact.i.tes that hung from the ceiling, dripping into a little pond just beneath them.
“That’s the blood-like liquid from the pools in the jail cells above.”
Li Mu peered at the many sanguine-colored stalagmites and stalact.i.tes, plus the one Shen Xiaoyue was bound to earlier. Each and every one of them acted like conduits. The blood-like liquid from above was funneled down here where the liquid would drip into the pool and ground to be further channeled somewhere deeper inside the cave.
Something told Li Mu that there must be another larger pool of blood inside.
He was beginning to make sense of everything.
“Stay inside the circle and don’t get out no matter what.”
With that instruction to Shen Jia, Li Mu began pacing toward the inner bowels of the cave.
A hunch told him that as much as the Abomination was both dangerous and terrible, the creature was nowhere near the “True G.o.d” that the son of the Lion spoke of. He must be referring to someone — or something — else.
Whoos.h.!.+ Whoos.h.!.+ Whoos.h.!.+
More tentacles poured out of nowhere at him.
It was the Abomination. Having freed himself from the rocky wall, he stormed straight at Li Mu.
Li Mu, with not so much as a look back, fired an energy bolt at the creature.
Whoos.h.!.+
The scythe-like energy bolt sliced through the head of the abominable creature before it boomeranged back, where, in all its deadly splendor, it cleaved through the creature’s wide and oversized girth like a hot knife cutting through b.u.t.ter.
The Abomination’s stomach bust opened like a balloon and foul, putrid pus-like muck came gus.h.i.+ng out like a geyser. The limbs that were st.i.tched together using some foul necromancy and science all fell off his pudgy and obese torso and his guts spilled out the jagged gap on his stomach like a piece of ancient and decrepit machinery spewing loose bolts and nuts everywhere on its way to a complete breakdown.
“That’s impossible! How could you have such powers!?”
The Abomination writhed and flailed vainly.
But the more he struggled, the faster his body broke apart.
Finally, with every ounce of its life force expended, the Abomination’s sickeningly protuberate bulk crashed to the ground, a huge mound of rotting flesh both mephitic and decaying.
One blow. That was all Li Mu needed to make short work of it.
He did not look back to check if his attack had worked or not. All he did was continue his stride further inside.
Back inside the magical circle, Shen Jia stared with awe at the back of his mentor pulling further and further away.
That attack his mentor delivered was definitely like that the Abomination had described. It really was something out of legends and fables. Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t anything mortal. No mortal attacks could swerve around as if with a life of its own. In mere seconds, the abominable creature of death and decay was gone and only a G.o.d could have been capable of such a feat.
Meanwhile, Li Mu had walked for almost a hundred meters when he stopped.
He was surrounded by numerous tiny little channels like human blood vessels, each filled with that strange blood-like fluid. The tiny little channels converged into one another and joined up into a large stream.
Li Mu looked further. At the end where the stream of blood finally end was a wide lagoon of blood.
The waters of this lagoon rippled like the waves of the sea. To call it a sea would not be an overstatement either; the vastness of this sea of blood could engulf even the whole city of Rydorburg down here.
That was not all. Li Mu could feel the presence of something yet hidden and elusive lurking within the waters The presence of tremendous might and power.
Li Mu stood at the ledge of the wide and boundless lagoon of blood, staring off into the darkness gravely.
Whatever it was lurking inside the waters, he could feel its powers and danger.
Something that should have not existed in Molderad.
“From whence do you come from?”
An ancient voice echoed from inside the waves.
Li Mu did not answer.
He was trying to discern the exact origin of the voice.
But the voice sounded as if it came from the sea of blood itself instead of a certain point somewhere in the lagoon. It was as if the sea itself was communicating with him.
“You and I… We are the same… Strangers from another world…” The deep ancient voice rumbled, “We should not be against each other, young one…”
“I am my blade at all evil no matter where I go,” Li Mu insisted.
“Character, eh?” The ancient voice responded. It paused for seconds, “I see… We’re different and never the two shall meet… But even with your remarkable abilities, young one… Your present strength is not enough to defy me…”
“I’d love to try.”
Li Mu rose into the air, hovering just over the sea of blood. He shrouded himself with Mana and plunged down into the water.
The billowing waters looked as if nothing was wrong.
But that did not last long. The water began to churn.
The entire sea of blood began to bubble as if it was boiling.
Then, without warning. blood-red columns of fluids shot up into the sky.
A wave more than tens of meters tall reared up.
Minutes later, Li Mu shot out of the water. Still hovering over the sea of blood, he paused and gripped his saber, which he swung with all the might and power he could summon. The blow parted the sea, revealing a humanoid ent.i.ty brandis.h.i.+ng a trident — a humanoid lifeform that looked just as impressive and majestic as a G.o.d.
“Who are you?! You don’t belong here! You’re from the evil realm! Speak your name!” The trident-toting figure demanded with full wrath.