Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

1779 Fiends

Ryu stumbled backward, almost collapsing. A part of him even thought the Dream Wraith did it on purpose, but when he thought about the difficulty of using Spatial Qi on such a large scale, he chose to forgive it.

Plus, he didn't particularly have much of a choice. That was because the moment he appeared, he was assaulted by a suppression from above.

It felt like even the air was rejecting him, and it was the first tthat he had experienced such a thing.

But this was also the first tRyu was stepping into a world in this fashion.

Back when he first cfrom Sacrum to the True Martial World, his foundation had been took weak and inferior of the latter to take seriously, so he didn't face any suppression. And, as he rebuilt his foundation, he was doing so with the laws of the True Martial World, so, of course, he wouldn't be rejected.

When he returned to Sacrum, he had been returning to his own home, so how could he be rejected then, either?

But this time, it was different.

He was standing in a world with laws no weaker than the True Martial World, but his foundation wasn't built on its laws. Such a world would always fiercely reject him.

His vision could even clear for long enough to see what was going on around him. He could only feel his qi rumbling and his bones crackling.

Ryu knew that panicking wouldn't do anything for him right now.

He took a breath, and his Cosmos Fog rippled. Instantly, the suppression vanished into thin air. But he could also feel that this wouldn't be able to last for long. This was because his Cosmos Fog was being eaten up quickly.

'About two minutes? That's enough time.' Ryu thought calmly.

The first thing he did was scan his surroundings. What he saw left him with a frown.

He sensed that several figures were already rushing toward him, but that wasn't the main problem. The issue was that he didn't seem to be in the Real Plane.

It can't be that Mae was sent here, right? And what about Selheira and the others?

Ryu reached out with his senses and felt that there was a barrier between him and his wives. This left him cursing beneath his breath.

That Dream Wraith had either messed up, or the two of them had very different definitions of what the word "close" meant.

What Ryu didn't know was that he had truly wronged the Dream Wraith Ancestor this time. They were, indeed, close. The issue was that Ryu was currently on the border of Fiend territory.

In this location, the Chaos Plane was encroaching on the Real Plane. The reason he felt that there was a barrier was because his wives and companions had been sent to the Real Plane while he had ended up on the Chaos Plane.

Usually, the Real Plane and Chaos Plane were off-kilter, located in different dimensions. But in this world, they were battling for the sspot.

Ryu suddenly cursed.

This time, it wasn't just auras he sensed rushing toward him, but Heaven's Knights as well.

It was then that Ryu remembered that in Sacrum, the people on the front lines stopping invaders from entering were the Heaven's Knights. And all of them were stationed in the Chaos Plane, which acted as the barrier between their world and the outside world.

It seemed that Ryu had already been pegged as an outsider, and while he had shifted the suppression from his body to his Cosmos Fog, it still hadn't entirely vanished.

The Heaven's Knights could still sense the bombardment of the Heavens against his Cosmos Fog just as easily as anything else.

Though he realized the issue, Ryu still maintained his calm.

Just like he had said…

Two minutes was enough.

He plopped down directly and entered a state of meditation. When he sensed the power of his Mysteries of Heaven and Earth Pupils in this world, though, he was truly left speechless.

He had already been somewhat aggrieved that his Pupils were only tied for sixth place in the True Martial World, but it seemed that here the problem was even worse.

He couldn't sense the exact rank, at least not without running into other Heavenly Pupil wielders first, but it was likely not even in the top 20 here.

In fact, it didn't seem like this world had ever birthed the Mysteries of Heaven and Earth Pupils before.

This wouldn't matter much under normal circumstances. That was because with the improvement to his inner world, he didn't need to rely on external Faith any longer.

The trouble was that what he needed to do now was understand at least a foundational level of this world's laws and incorporate it into his Inner World. Only then would these laws stop attacking him.

While he did so, his eyes would need to rely on the laws of this world, and as such, its ranking was having a huge slowdown effect on his progression.

Ryu could only toss these thoughts away. He was running out of time.

At this moment, he was on a stretch of red land. The skies flashed with violet lightning and rolling black thunder.

Somehow, this land looked more like hell than the Nether Plane did.

And maybe that was because the Nether Plane of this world, too, had its own problems.

…

"Hurry up!"

"You sensed it too?"

"Of course I sensed it. Who could miss it? The others happened across the border, but this one is ours."

Three youths sprinted, if it could even be called that. Their bodies were so monstrous that they seemed to bound through the air for dozens of kilometers at a time, soaring over mountains and running across the bedrock of violent rivers.

With a burst, they shot out from the bottom of a raging sea, hurtling through the air as though surfing the wind.

The youths looked like true monsters, not in a grotesque, Lovecratian sense, and not quite in the sense of the power of their bodies either, but rather in the sense that they didn't seem like mortals at all.

One of them was a young woman who seemed to be half human, half fire. One of her legs and one of her arms looked coated in magma. Her hair was such a concentrating river of flames that it almost shone gold. At the stime, every ther heart beast, the echo of a magma barrier would thrum around her, incinerating everything to ash.

From tto time, the illusion of a fiery red-gold pair of gauntlets and boots, along with a thick draconic tail, would appear on her like the wisps of a ghost's whisper, but then vanish the next instant, leaving her instead wearing a simple set of roughed up linen clothing that outlined her figure… and the fact she was clearly wearing nothing underneath.

The second was the exact sas the girl, having odd body parts replaced entirely by elements or quasi elements. Except instead of the ghosts of gauntlets, boots and a tail, he had a single horn on his forehead that flashed in and out of existence.

The last of them was the exact opposite.

He was another man, but his hair instead was a river of water. Much like the other two, his eyes were also encompassed by his element, and the rest of him was even more exaggeratedly warped.

He only wore a beast skin to cover his lower body, so one could clearly see a fissure running up and through his chest, pulsing with water. This fissure continued up, through his neck, and even spiralled around his head, seemingly splitting him all the way in two.

Only one of his legs was entirely turned into the water element, and it was just one of his hands as well. But this one hand pulsed with light, a trident appearing from tto tbefore vanishing.

Whenever this tdove into the water, he would shoot out the furthest, leaving the duo further and further behind as he continued to accelerate forward.

The closer he got, the fiercer the blue lights around him grew.

Despite their odd appearance, each one of these three was strikingly handsor beautiful. It looked like the Heavens had carefully carved their appearances, allowing the elements to bless them.

And they were headed right for Ryu.

…

Ryu's eyes flashed open.

The Cosmos Fog around him finally settled down. He sensed that the Heaven's Knights in the distance had lost track of him. Compared to the other youths, they were much further away, and that was a relief.

But…

BANG!

Ryu's gaze locked onto a young man with a river of water for hair. It didn't feel like he was standing before a young man, but rather that he was looking at a God. Shockingly enough, he even felt that the Ice element wasn't listening to him as well as it usually should.

The young man frowned and looked around as though he was trying to spot something. But when he didn't find it, his gaze eventually landed on Ryu.

"A human is so bold to cto our territory?"

Ryu didn't understand a word he said, but the language of battle was universal.

"I haven't had a good battle in a long while. I've been surrounded by too much trash. I hope you make this worth my while."

Ryu took a step out, and he was the first to throw out a punch.