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Chapter 512: The Hunt

They stood up together. Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan both extracted something together and slapped it on their faces.

Lu Ye looked. Face masks. Li Baxian’s was a rosy-lipped and ivory-teethed mask of a boy grinning whilst Feng Yuechan’s was one depicting a tearful girl with a mourning and baleful expression.

Li Baxian extracted and offered one more to Lu Ye, “Here, take this one. Makes it easier for us to operate.”

Without a word, Lu Ye retrieved from inside his Storage Sphere a face mask with the visage of a hideous and fanged demon and put it on.

Li Baxian was surprised, but he quickly burst into a giggle, “I see. You’ve come prepared.”

All three of them were being targeted by Cultivators of the Thousand Demon Ridge. It was only natural and expected that all three of them would share the same idea of preparing enough face masks for their own use.

They got out of the cave and kept their Spiritual Power signatures low, then they chose a bearing and headed that way.

Their motive might be to secure Lu Ye’s lead on the first place of the Carnage Roster, but safety remained their first and foremost concern, meaning that they would be operating within range of this cave. If anything were to happen, this cave would be the point where they would retreat. Too far and they might not be able to make it back here safely.

That way, they could fall back to the cave if they encountered enemies beyond their ability to defeat and use the Teleportation Wards to escape.

Hence, the ideal range would be ten to a dozen miles.

But that would greatly limit the scope of their operations. They could only wait for potential targets to pass by instead of launching attacks on others freely.

Lu Ye had shared his ideas of sticking within range of the cave with Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan prior to setting off and they agreed to the idea. While they could plead guilty to feeling enticed by the prizes of winning first place, they acknowledged the soundness of his idea that safety would remain their paramount concern. Launching attacks might provide a lot of initiative, but it could also be risky all the same.

But now that they had formulated a plan, all they needed to do was stick to it.

They stopped a quarter of an hour later, hardly twenty miles away from the cave. Lu Ye studied the surroundings and gave a couple of curt nods to Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan.

There was no need for further communication. The latter two sped away in different directions where they would maintain a perimeter. At the same time, Yi Yi materialized and headed in a third direction, doing the same.

Alone, Lu Ye extracted his ward flags one after another and began constructing a magical ward.

He was going to build wards not for killing, but for restraining enemies. That could buy them some time while they escaped if they were to encounter anyone too powerful or dangerous.

The ward would be manually activated, not automatically triggered. That would ensure that it could be used to its greatest effect at the right moment.

Every now and then, elite Cultivators might zip by overhead. But thanks to the perimeter maintained by the others, the early warning they provided allowed Lu Ye to keep himself invisible to prevent detection.

Constructing the magical wards took two hours.

With the preparations now completed, everyone waited in hiding.

It had been three days since the Carnage Colosseum first opened and many Cultivators had chosen to band up and move around in groups. Despite receiving fewer rewards individually, this could at least provide greater protection.

Those who still roamed around alone were at least Seventh-Orders. Confident enough about themselves, only they could move around alone without fear of being in danger.

Silence pervaded the forest where they remained patiently in waiting.

High up in the sky, changes never stopped occurring to the blood-red pennant that was the Carnage Roster with Xia Liang swiftly and steadily raking in spades after spades of Carnage Points in his race to the top. At his current pace, it would not be long before he caught up with Lu Ye and overtook him.

Two hours turned into four…

The idle vigil remained a fruitless, if futile wait.

They sat on pins and needles as the waiting game became a frustrating and seemingly endless ordeal. There were still a huge number of Cultivators around but the vastness of the Colosseum made everyone scatter, especially with the need to maintain caution, hardly anyone was eager to reveal themselves. More so, Ghost Cultivators who flit from hither to thither unseen and unnoticed.

All of a sudden, a flicker of light crept into his sight. Lu Ye panned his gaze that way and there it was, a tiny speck of white light bobbing lazily just under a tree not far away from his position.

He was sure that it was not there moments ago. It had just appeared. Just like that.

And he knew what it was. That had to be another one of those prizes that the Heavens scatter all around the Colosseum every now and then—an Endowment. He had encountered one before which gave him a White Amulet.

[So this is how Endowments appear…] Lu Ye realized, gaining a deeper understanding of how cruel and callous the enigmatic entity, the Heavens, could be.

Every day, the Heavens would select a person and bestow them a Golden Amulet. Every day, the Token of Providence spectacle—another contrivance of the Heavens—would take place to distribute Amulets to anyone nearby. Aside from all those events were also random Endowments like this, to say nothing of the Carnage Roster that hung high up in the sky for everyone to see…

All these events existed only for one reason—to incite skirmishes and conflicts amongst all Cultivators in the vicinity. The Heavens were like an invisible hand, prodding the Cultivators so that more blood could be spilled everywhere in the Colosseum.

“Brother…”

Li Baxian’s message came suddenly.

“Yeah, I saw it,” Lu Ye responded.

What was initially a futile wait had just changed into a real hunt, despite his earlier concern that this was going to be a fruitless wild goose chase.

And true enough, merely a few minutes later, Lu Ye spied four figures appearing in the distance.

Carefully and meticulously, the four had separated into groups of two that approached from two different directions. But without the abilities unique only to Ghost Cultivators, they could not fully mask their tracks. Keeping their Spiritual Power signatures as low as possible was pretty much everything they could do.

Patiently, these strangers did not make a beeline straight for the white speck of light. Instead, they moved inward very slowly as if they were scanning for boobytraps.

The strangers would have discovered Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan with such cautious methods, but fortunately, Lu Ye had earlier constructed magical wards that could mask their Spiritual Power signatures to a great extent that so long as the enemies did not have extraordinarily acute spiritual senses, they would not be detected.

With Glyph: Concealment, Lu Ye himself was as undetectable as a Ghost Cultivator.

Two of them passed just ten meters away from Lu Ye’s position without noticing anything while the remaining two were heading straight towards Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan’s position.

“I’m gonna make the first strike, brother,” Li Baxian communicated again.

Lu Ye did not respond.

He was not at all perturbed by the number of enemies. That these enemies operated in a group indicated a certain possibility that they might not be high-tier Cultivators. If anything, Lu Ye would be more worried if it were just a lone Cultivator who came.

A flash of light slashed through the gloomy dimness of the jungle, followed closely by a piercing ring of steel as Li Baxian broke cover. More than a dozen shafts of light hovered in the air like a bunch of swarming wasps and, as one, they barreled straight after one of the strangers.

The sudden attack caught all four strangers unaware, the ones heading towards Li Baxian most of all. Their faces fell with shock and awe that gripped them. Right in that second, their hair stood on end as they felt danger. True and overwhelming danger. One of them cried, “Ambush!”

Every one of them produced their weapons and brandished them at the massing shafts of light streaking towards them.

There was no telling to which faction the four strangers belong. But Li Baxian—after his long years of experience as a Sword Cultivator—could freely control his many shafts of light as if they were the very digits on his hand and he could stop them before committing any mistakes the moment he realized who they were.

Which happened fast enough; the moment the skirmish broke out, he saw who they were.

If they were Grand Sky Coalition allies, Li Baxian would immediately stand down. But if they were Thousand Demon Ridge enemies, then the initiative could ensure that he could at least cut down one opponent in the first exchange itself.

The moment the word “Ambush” left the stranger’s lips, the truth was revealed, both red and blue blazed brightly in the gloominess of the jungle.

Launching the attack was hardly the only thing Li Baxian was doing. Looking and observing, he was trying to make out the ranks of the four strangers. The sudden ambush would have easily rattled them enough to display their power fully.

And he was right, there was nothing for him to be afraid of. The two strangers—one a Fifth-Order and the other a Fourth-Order—were minor threats to him.

The pair near Lu Ye’s position sprang into action. One of them, a burly and tall mountain of a man whose girth suggested that he could be a Body-tempering Cultivator, began to race to the aid of his comrades. The other one—presumably a Spell Cultivator—began channeling his Spiritual Power.

The Body-tempering Cultivator had barely reached far enough when he was greeted by an astonishing sight.

A barrage of more than a dozen sword-like shafts of searing-white incandescence had rained down on his comrades and had failed to kill them, but more were homing in on them.

Li Baxian had gone easy on the first exchange; after all, he needed to ascertain if the four strangers could be Grand Sky Coalition allies. But once he made sure, he unleashed more and he was still far from reaching his limit.

Li Baxian could already conjure and control up to a hundred shafts of light back when he was still in the Spirit Creek Realm. Reaching the Fourth-Order of the Cloud River Realm meant that his bar had risen.

Sword Cultivators have always been known for their aptitude in killing and unless his opponents were at least two ranks beyond his, few could possibly withstand Li Baxian’s wrath.

The radiance of the multitudinous bolts of light illuminated the dimness of the jungle as they ripped through the two enemy Cultivators’ protective aura, perforating them like a sieve with blood streaming out of every wound they rendered.

The gaps between ranks within the Cloud River Realm were as huge as a canyon. Both enemy Cultivators were at least fully fledged Fourth- and Fifth-Orders, but all that meant nothing in the face of Li Baxian’s skill and experience.

In just one exchange, one Fourth-Order and one Fifth-Order were nearly dead. In fact, Li Baxian would have been able to slay them all outright if not for the fact that he was intentionally keeping them alive—or half-dead—for Lu Ye.

The Body-tempering Cultivator who was on his way towards his comrades could feel his blood curdling the moment the sight of them crashing to the ground and the grinning boy mask panning towards him hit him. Deep down inside, he grappled with panic at facing off against such a formidable opponent.

His legs stopped moving, not realizing that he had just involuntarily become a sitting duck. A thunderbolt came out of nowhere, whipping him and nearly knocking him to the ground.

He jerked his head sideways and there was a female to his flank not far away, wearing the mask of a tearful girl—obviously the pair of the man in the grinning boy mask just now!

[There’s more than one ambush here!] he realized.

The Body-tempering Cultivator was panicking.

Behind him, his Spell Cultivator colleague howled, “RUN!”

The Spell Cultivator had only just finished channeling his power and was ready to charge when he saw first his two colleagues being cut down like a tornado tearing through a town before seeing the Body-tempering Cultivator being pummeled by another spell. That was enough reason for him to turn tail and flee. Hurling his spell straight at Feng Yuechan, he channeled another surge of Spiritual Power and took into the air to escape.

But he did not manage to fly high enough; his feet were barely one foot over the ground when a massive force crashed into him from above before he felt the bite of steel gnawing through his flesh and bone.

The fiery-red glimmer of the steel blasted apart the protective aura that bristled the surface of the Spell Cultivator’s skin, slicing through his sinews and crunching through his bones down the length of his back. He crashed to the ground a lifeless cadaver.

He did not notice that there was someone waiting to strike from behind.

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