Ultragenic Warlord

Chapter 942: Complete Metamorphosis

Wind and storm combined and crackled as the wind dragon and storm tiger revolved around the cocoon. Space deformed like putty and was sucked within as the silver and gray threads merged and vanished. Zhang Lie frowned and scrutinized the cocoon more closely—rather than vanishing, they had transformed into the formless energy of time, colorless, shapeless, tasteless, but influencing the world all the while.

The gold and black threads of karma continued to weave around each other, twining and twining until they formed a single thread of dark gold.

Dragon-like lightning, tiger-like storm, formless time, timeless space—those four disparate energies combined into a cohesive whole, tied together by this dark gold thread. The energies revolved around each other, summoning a howling gale surrounding a spatial rift.

Part of the energy from the spatial rift seeped into the lightning-attuned genetic energy, turning it into void lightning. The pitch-black lightning spiked and sizzled, combining with the spatial rift that was forming and tearing apart the space around Fang Yi.

The spatial storm and void lightning whirled around each other and merged together—the combination of spatial force and the howling storm on one hand, and the combination of lightning and time on the other.

All that energy, combined with the karmic power that Fang Yi had sensed for the first time, became something so abstruse that even Zhang Lie couldn't claim to comprehend it.

It was difficult to sense and harder still to understand. Zhang Lie thought that it was a force that belonged to a realm above his ken—somewhat like heaven's might, but wholly different.

Zhang Lie tried to comprehend it, but he was only able to glean a modicum of understanding—that all things were predetermined in the long, winding river of time. He now understood what the combination of time and karma resulted in: fate!

It was a power that transcended both of its constituents. Karma was prophetic, but it could be subverted and blocked. Fate, on the other hand, was trickier to avoid.

The combination of wind and storm, spatial force, void lightning, time and space, karma and fate—all of it combined into a hurricane, as though a new cocoon had formed out of the remnants of the old one.

Even Zhang Lie himself felt threatened by the cocoon.

With nothing but his own willpower, Fang Yi was condensing and refining his strength, dividing the various forces that combined into the power of fate up into skeins of thread of different colors.

The cocoon shrunk, bit by bit.

Zhang Lie's eyes widened. As Fang Yi simultaneously refined the elements of fate, the power of fate itself seemed to be creeping closer to its own evolution—destiny. Fang Yi was far from being able to channel that overwhelming power, but the fact that he was approaching its threshold was shocking enough to Zhang Lie.

Fang Yi, having refined those energies to the best of his ability and shrunk the cocoon by half its original volume, broke his control over the gray world of time. Time began ticking anew.

The draconian sage blinked, bewildered. "What just happened?"

As the king of the realm, the draconian sage was the highest-authority figure in the world, and he was the first to realize that something was amiss. Time had stopped. The other members of Team Zenith all sensed that something was wrong, but not precisely what.

The draconian sage sighed. "Anything that has to do with you, Zhang Lie, is always a major problem."

The members of Team Zenith all turned to Zhang Lie, hoping that he would confirm what had happened.

"Ah, what's that?!" The Yeluo chieftain suddenly pointed before him, where Fang Yi's cocoon had undergone a rather significant change.

Sun Mengmeng frowned. "Fang Yi's cocoon didn't look like this before, did it?"

Yang Ze nodded. "Fang Yi's cocoon had cracked, and the energies within it flooded out. How did the cocoon reform?"

Li Feng added, "Perhaps one or two of us might have been mistaken, but if we're all saying the same thing..."

While the members of Team Zenith puzzled over what was going on, lightning fell from the heavens, only to be absorbed by the cocoon. The threads that made up the cocoon split up into different colors, wind and storm in green and purple, spatial rifts and void lightning in black, time and space in silver and gray, karma and destiny in black and gold.

The seven distinct colors shone radiantly, dispelling the lightning and the dark clouds that remained in the air. Sunlight shone down once more.

Fang Yi stood still and silent, basking in the sunlight. Wind and storm morphed into a dragon and tiger and circled him. Spatial rifts and void lightning were arrayed by his back.

Loops of time layered themselves over him, and the mysterious, suffocating strength of fate washed over his body.

Fang Yi opened his eyes, which shone with newfound wisdom. "How do you feel?" Zhang Lie asked.

"I've learned a lot. I understand a lot, now."

Fang Yi gave off a completely different impression than before after absorbing peak limit fragments. Zhang Lie had had some idea of just what Fang Yi had gained from his breakthrough—his understanding of time and space, combined with that of karma, would elevate his mastery of all three powers to an entirely new level.

Zhang Lie simply wasn't sure just how much Fang Yi had intuited from the process.

The members of Team Zenith walked up to him. Yang Ze punched Fang Yi on the chest lightly. "Oho, I thought I made enough of a commotion when I broke through, but yours was even more astonishing!"

Fang Yi smiled in response.

Zhang Lie clapped. "All of you met my expectations and successfully obtained peak limit fragments. This also shows that the recipe that the Yeluo chieftain has devised is indeed successful."

Sun Mengmeng grumbled, "We just almost died in the process!"

If not for the restorative, their physical bodies would likely have been incapable of absorbing the potent medicinal properties of the potion. Their cells would have undergone apoptosis and killed the hunters.

The Yeluo chieftain shrugged. "Well, all's well that ends well. No one died, at the very least, and we figured out how to curb the side effects of the potion."

The members of Team Zenith were speechless. They felt as though there were something wrong with the Yeluo chieftain's words, but they couldn't pinpoint what, exactly.

He had instructed them to consume the restorative if any problems arose during the process, and they did do so, but the experience was something none of them would ever want to recollect...