Mystical Journey

Slayer appeared in the air above Garen quickly, his sharp fingers attempting to gauge out Garen’s eyes.

“It’s over.”

His expression was emotionless.

His fingers stabbed downward like knives.

The strength and speed behind that attack were enough to instantly make Garen’s eyeballs explode, and he could even shatter Garen’s brain at the same time too.

Smack!

All of a sudden, Garen grabbed his palm tightly. Slayer’s finger was suspended just a hair away from his face, but it could not move even a millimeter more.

The immense impact brought both of them crashing down, making them sink into the bottomless ocean.

Blood spread slowly from Garen’s chest, the blood-red water accompanied by hints of pain. As a result, Garen’s previously calm expression finally turned serious.

“How many years has it been… since I got hurt?”

His murmur penetrated Slayer’s eardrums.

In that instant, he abruptly felt a chilling wave of immense threat.

He did not think twice. Even though his average physical fitness levels had doubled, he still retreated instantly, without an ounce of hesitation.

Smack!

But even so, his arms still fell prey to Garen’s tight grip. He looked down to see an eerie smile on Garen’s heart. An ominous premonition crossed his heart.

“Goodbye,” Garen spoke softly.

In that instant, an extremely vast wave of Soul Energy Forces abruptly burst forth from Garen’s body, the invisible Soul Energy instantly forming an enormous sphere that surrounded them both.

This was purely a clashing of Soul Rings, but they could only truly collide when their limbs came into contact, so that their bodies acted as a medium. Garen’s two Soul Rings rushed madly at Slayer’s single Soul Ring.

The clash between the three was like a collision of three spheres. Large torrents of blood gushed out of Slayer’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and nose, dying all the seawater around him red.

“You…!!” He stared at Garen disbelievingly. It had never occurred to him that Garen would have two Soul Rings. One of them even had a lingering wisp of Mind Reader’s aura.

At that moment, he finally understood why Garen would choose to take him on, one-on-one, and even why he chose to conduct the battle in these uncharted and unclaimed waters. He offered the condition that the loser would have to obey the victor as bait, but everything, all of it was just a trick to hide the truth from the others. His real aim was to absorb Slayer’s Soul Ring!

In terms of simply excavating Soul Rings, he had already reached the highest pinnacle. Even those who had reached the peak of the Demon Lord One-Ringed Level could not do much better once they got this far. The only way to know that would be to fight them yourself.

But right now, Garen grabbed the opportunity and used their bodily contact to start a battle of Soul Rings. It was no longer a test of power utilization. It was the same as in a regular fight, once the two fighters become embroiled in a close-quarters wrestling match, fighting skills such as throwing punches or evading hits become pointless. It would come down directly to a test of stamina and strength.

“This is truly the end.” There was an eerie smile on Garen’s face.

“No!!!” Slayer’s eyes shone brightly with red light. “Nobody can defeat me! Nobody!!!”

It was the first time he lost his cool. He howled loudly, the muscles all over his body twisting and rippling madly. Many mysterious symbols and words appeared on the surface of his body, spreading from the black hole in his chest and moving all over his body like countless black tadpoles.

“This is?!!!” Garen instantly felt something was wrong, so he quickly released his grip and attempted to retreat.

“Above the Clouds! Thunder Field! Wind Jade!!!” Slayer roared, ferociously and madly.

A large number of high-pressure white electric arches appeared all around him suddenly, and most of these electric arches wove into a white net of electricity that trapped Garen within it.

A torrent of seawater gathered in Slayer’s hands, compressing and condensing, becoming a giant white bow and arrow that was as tall as two people and more than a meter thick.

An enormous ice-crystal arrow, crackling with white electricity, aimed straight at Garen who was retreating backward rapidly.

Boom-boom…

There was the sound of real thunder in the distant sky.

Barroom!!!

A pillar of electricity, several dozen meters thick, descended from the sky and shrunk instantly. It landed on the tip of Slayer’s nocked arrow, turning into a blinding ball of white light.

“Are you trying to pull me down with you!?” Garen’s scalp had gone numb. Even he could not take this amount of power in this Universe, and the same went without saying for Slayer, whose body type was the same as his! Did he have a death wish?!

“Pull you down with me?” The red light in Slayer’s eyes grew brighter and brighter. His voice sounded androgynous, eerily high-pitched, as though the mutation had changed his voice as well. “No, I will reincarnate. You, on the other hand, will fall to the depths of this bottomless oceanic abyss, and become fertilizer for this entire World…”

Garen could already feel his body temperature start to rise rapidly, white smoke was rising from his skin even though it was underwater.

But Garen was no weakling either, he had experienced countless life-or-death battles. The panic from before was instantly suppressed. If he did not fight for his life now, he would surely never have a chance again.

Right now, his Soul Energy Sphere had completely sealed Slayer within it, and Slayer was directly invoking an explosion of lightning. Although he could not break out of the Soul Energy seal, he could still drag Garen into the afterlife with him before the Soul Energy Sphere finished him off!

“Well, I’d like to see who dies first, you or me!!” Brutality rose in Garen’s heart, and he used his palms like knives, abruptly carving out a circle beside him.

“Sky Sword, Four Directional Stars!!!” All the strength in his body surged into his palm blades, and he jumped up fiercely, pouncing downward as he fell. All of the immense Soul Energy was resonating at the same time.

The infinite seawater before him was slashed apart as though cut by a gigantic knife, creating a huge vacuum and isolating the two of them completely. Garen’s twin sabers beckoned forth a huge torrent of seawater and waves, forming the image of a peacock that screeched piercingly. It pounced downward madly, like a gigantic bird on the hunt.

Slayer raised his bow and gathered his Soul Energy together with the lightning, the red light in his eyes sparkling like the sun. The tip of the arrow was absorbing the white water currents around it madly, as though they were countless white strings gathering at the tip of his arrow.

Bloody cracks were forming on the muscles all over his body. His muscle sinews began to snap one after the other, like steel cables that could not take the pressure.

All of a sudden, he relaxed his arm, and the giant white bow and arrow vanished abruptly. The bow fell apart and shattered, whereas the arrow just disappeared from the spot, rushing instead at Garen with unimaginably terrifying speed and strength.

Barroom!!!!!

The entire blue ocean gave a jolt, and then a round blue image made of lightning actually began to appear on the surface of the water. After a mere two seconds, all the seawater had vanished from the several hundred meters taken up by the electric image, and a giant black abyss had appeared on the surface of the ocean.

Strangely, the water around it did not cascade into the black hole. Instead, it just turned straight to ice.

The storm of lightning and the layer of ice spread across the walls of water, engaged in a tug-of-war battle. One half had turned to ice, and the other half was lightning.

The white and the blue fought evenly against each other, dividing and splitting.

Boom!!!

Endless white vapor surged out of the black hole and shot into the air. The white steam became a white pillar of air, shooting straight into the sky.

The infinite pillar of air currents rushed madly into the sky, turning into many white clouds. The white clouds grew thicker as time passed, and the sky grew dimmer. The endlessly clear and sunny sky above the ocean slowly began to darken.

Ker-chak!

A bolt of lightning flashed by, illuminating the gradually darkening ocean.

Whoosh…

There was a sudden and heavy downpour of rain.

The white air current pillar also gradually shrank, becoming thinner and longer. The original white hue slowly turned grey, until it finally became a sea tornado. The giant tornado was connected to the sky and the earth, like a grey-black funnel.

As the hurricane blew at the heavy downpour, rather than falling straight down, the rain formed many disorderly slanted lines in the air.

On an abandoned island nearby.

On a yellow beach, Garen and Slayer both lay face-up at the line where the sand met the sea, all the strength drained from their bodies.

The two of them were covered in pale wounds. Both of Garen’s arms were broken, his chest had sunk in, and one of his ears had been ripped off.

And Slayer had returned to his original form, having broken both legs and lost one arm completely. He had also gone blind in one eye.

It was a draw with injuries on both sides. Neither of them expected that outcome.

Lying on their backs on the beach, both of them had no extra strength left.

“Hah… Haha… I won in the end, after all…” Garen forced a smile. He had lost a lot of blood together with his grievous injuries, and other than his external injuries, he had also sustained massive internal damage. He had a concussion too, which was why his senses were a bit blurry even now.

“You… won?” Slayer smiled with great difficulty. “Or do you think you won?”

“All of your Soul Energy will be mine eventually.” Garen panted heavily and began to turn over, crawling toward Slayer’s direction slowly.

He could no longer remember how long it had been since he got injured like this. But that just showed how high the quality of Slayer’s Soul Ring was, it was far better than the other three Cornerstones.

Slayer’s physical fitness had only been temporarily increased, unlike Garen, who was already usually this powerful. There was still a difference there, which was why he was basically unable to move now, and could not do anything but to watch Garen approach him slowly.

Watching Garen’s slowly crawling body, the red light in his eyes died down, and they gradually lost their glow, returning to their original state that was no different from a normal person.

After the red light faded, confusion and dazedness flashed through Slayer’s eyes.

“I think… I remembered something… something I had once forgotten.”

He murmured dazedly.

Garen dragged himself there step by step. The remaining distance between them was the distance of death.

Strangely, however, Slayer was not scared at all. After the red light vanished from his eyes, he seemed to have forgotten fear, and instead, he only continued to search his own memories, growing more lost as he went.

“I once… forgot some very important things, I think… Very important…” His brain was completely blank, but some familiar yet unfamiliar memories were slowly appearing there.

Finally, Garen moved up to him, reached out a hand slowly, and pressed his forehead.

“It’s over.” He heaved a long sigh.

“That’s right… It’s over,” Slayer replied mysteriously. His gaze had instantly become oddly clear, without a hint of red light. “I remember now…”

Before he knew it, a mist began to rise slowly in his eyes.

“Many, many years ago… I wasn’t like this.”

Garen looked at his clear eyes and paused slightly. He seemed to have understood something as well.

Slayer was never any Slayer to begin with, he was being controlled. That red light from before was the source of that control, and now that he was on the brink of death, he could finally obtain release, returning to the person he used to be.

No wonder Garen sensed that he had two different types of forces in his Soul Energy during their earlier battle.

All this time, Garen had sensed that something was wrong with Slayer.

“I don’t have a future life, and I don’t have many attachments at all.” Slayer’s eyes were strangely peaceful. As though he did not see Garen’s hand suspended above him at all.

Garen was quiet for a moment. His hand grabbed downward abruptly.

Pff.