At eleven o'clock on the night of January 4th, Standard North American Time, Year 75, Manhattan Island in New York, the Northern Hemisphere's largest financial district.
Pitch-black clouds seemed almost to press against the rooftops of the skyscrapers. A grim, icy wind shrieked through gaps in the clouds and rushed toward the ground, while snowflakes the size of a child's palm slapped heavily against the glass curtain walls with sharp crackling sounds.
It was Christmas Eve. Nearly half of New York had gone to 93 Square in the city center to celebrate the coming New Year, and Manhattan Island was almost devoid of people. Every building was shrouded in thick shadows as the piercing wind threaded between them, while the black clouds seemed to press lower and lower.
Gu Tower was the tallest building in Manhattan, and indeed all of North America. Rising 999 meters high, Gu Tower stood by Manhattan Island's coast like a sharp military blade. Occasionally, a ship's searchlight swept over Gu Tower from the distant sea, revealing a colossal hundred-meter ink-black dragon riding the clouds across its glass facade. The ferocious dragon held a blood-red dragon pearl in one foreclaw and a sharp sword in the other. When the light shone upon its head, its two dragon eyes, set with tiny sapphires, glittered brightly, while a faint but oppressive evil aura coiled around its enormous body.
Gu Tower, headquarters of the Gu Group.
The Gu Group, a colossal entity controlling the largest share of the Earth Federation's arms market.
Without warning, the black clouds whipping wildly through the sky seemed to freeze. A massive bolt of violet lightning tore apart the pitch-black heavens amid a deafening crash. Like an enraged dragon, the lightning pillar ripped through the clouds and plunged toward the ground, barely grazing Gu Tower's roof before striking the black sea.
Amid the thunder, a burst of fire erupted four hundred meters above the ground on Gu Tower. A hole more than thirty meters wide had been blasted through the building, and a shadow leaped from the flames. Dozens of shadows stood at the edge of the blasted hole, shouting something as they unleashed a frenzied barrage of weapons, large and small, at the figure outside the building.
The icy wind swept snowflakes around, concealing the figure that had flown from the building. The gunmen above quickly lost their target.
Gu Xiechen spread his arms and glided through the night sky. He turned to glance at the gunmen firing at him, a faintly wicked smile appearing on his handsome face.
The drop of over four hundred meters vanished in an instant. Gu Xiechen landed heavily on both feet. Spiderweb cracks spread across the concrete, but he rolled lightly forward to disperse the force of his fall. With sharp swishes, more than a dozen heavy two-handed swords struck the ground close against his rolling body. Sword Qi howled as it tore through the concrete, slicing more than a dozen nearby parked cars in half. The vehicles exploded with a roar, metal fragments spraying everywhere and throwing the area into chaos.
The True Qi within his body erupted like a bomb. Gu Xiechen's long hair streamed behind him as he viciously slashed forward with both claws, his ten fingers shrouded in a faint layer of white force. Two burly men clad in medieval heavy knight armor rushed out of the darkness, wielding three-meter flails as they charged toward him with muffled panting. The head-sized steel balls on their flails spun rapidly, their shrieking passage through the air enough to drive anyone mad.
Gu Xiechen's claws slammed into the descending steel balls. His pale, slender-looking hands brutally sank into the heavy spheres. Taking a deep breath, he flashed blue light from his eyes, and violent force burst from his claws. The flails forged from special alloy steel shattered inch by inch. Gu Xiechen swept past the two men with a strange laugh, his claws, which had just shattered the flails, cruelly raking across their lower abdomens.
Two fountains of blood sprayed more than ten meters away. Gu Xiechen's claws tore apart the men's armor, dragging out and pulverizing their internal organs with savage force. Great chunks of flesh and blood danced in the black night wind, cooling as they flew.
"He's here! Kill him!"
Shrill cries came from every direction. More than twenty burly men in knight armor, wielding two-handed cavalry-cleaving swords, charged in from all sides, steam billowing from their mouths. Heavy swishing sounds tore through the night wind as their swords reduced everything before them to rubble. Streetlamps, tree trunks, benches for tourists—Sword Qi crisscrossed the blades, sending countless fragments soaring into the sky amid thunderous, violent force.
"Come on!"
With a shriek, Gu Xiechen suddenly straightened. He raised both hands high, his pale claws glimmering with faint white light in the night. A thread of blood slowly slid from his fingertips as sinister evil Qi surged skyward. More than twenty two-hundred-kilogram cavalry-cleaving swords formed an impenetrable net overhead and descended upon him. Gu Xiechen spun rapidly, countless pale claw shadows carrying chilling coldness as they violently met the attack. Fearlessly, he smashed his claws into those heavy swords.
The swords shattered. The armor shattered. The bodies of more than twenty burly men shattered. Gusts from his claws shot several yards away, shredding everything around them to pieces with razor-sharp force.
Blood splattered across Gu Xiechen's handsome face, and steaming blood drenched his entire body. He gave a few eerie chuckles, then suddenly threw back his head and shrieked, "Gu Juechen! You want me dead? It won't be that easy! I, Gu Xiechen, will return! Just wait! You just wait!"
Hundreds of people wielding all manner of firearms surged out of Gu Tower. The dull gunfire shattered the black night wind, while the heat contained in the torrent of bullets melted countless snowflakes into warm snow water.
Gu Xiechen drew a circular arc through the air with his hands, shaped like a taiji symbol, before finally holding them loosely before his lower abdomen around an invisible ball the size of a human head.
Nearly ten thousand bullets fired at him froze three feet before Gu Xiechen. He smiled at the terrified gunmen, then viciously thrust both hands forward.
The nearly ten thousand bullets shot back at more than triple their incoming speed. Hundreds of gunmen danced frantically amid the barrage as their bodies were pierced through, their blood staining the plaza before Gu Tower.
Gu Xiechen raised his head, as though he could see certain people standing on the top floor of Gu Tower.
Another bolt of lightning crashed down from the sky, and a terrifying force pressed down from above.
Without a word, Gu Xiechen turned and fled. Dozens of fireballs over a meter wide screamed down from the sky. The crimson fireballs exploded thunderously, engulfing everything within several hundred meters in raging flames. Gu Xiechen's lean body was swallowed by fire, but he broke through the blaze in an instant and vanished into the pitch-black night, trailing smoke and soot.
True Qi condensed like mercury flowed joyfully through his meridians as Gu Xiechen exerted all his strength and fled at full speed. The sea was a hundred meters ahead—the only hope of escape.
The previous fireballs had already badly wounded Gu Xiechen. Three had exploded less than three meters from him, each as powerful as a heavy aerial bomb. Had it not been for his profound cultivation and the constant circulation of his protective force, he would have long since been blasted to pieces. Even though he had fled the moment he sensed danger, his skin had still been scorched and several meridians shattered. Whenever True Qi flowed through him, his body convulsed with agonizing pain, as if more than a dozen small knives were stabbing and slashing wildly inside him.
The lights within Gu Tower suddenly all turned on at once, while dozens of high-powered searchlights shone down from the roof.
More than a dozen figures leaped from Gu Tower's highest floor. One of them, a handsome young man holding a crimson wooden staff, was still in midair when he extended his right palm toward Gu Xiechen, who was fleeing for his life. A fiery red ring appeared in his palm, a flash of red light flickering within it. Nearly a hundred crimson fireballs, each over a meter in diameter, appeared out of thin air around him. With a light wave of his staff, the fireballs immediately shot toward Gu Xiechen with heavy whistling sounds.
The fireballs came too swiftly. Gu Xiechen had no time to dodge before a chain of explosions engulfed the ground across several hundred meters around him.
Everything nearby was pulverized, and deep conical craters three meters deep appeared across the ground.
Gu Xiechen felt scorching heat envelop his body. He threw back his head and roared madly, his heartbeat surging from its normal pace to over two hundred beats per minute. An astonishingly powerful energy erupted from his heart, white force bursting from every pore of his body. The blast waves had barely reached him before the white force shattered them. Every strand of Gu Xiechen's hair stood straight up as blood sprayed from his pores. Amid dense cracking sounds, the glossy black hair on his head exploded outward. His body having grown a size larger, Gu Xiechen swung a backhand strike at his severed hair.
His hand-claws were powerful bows, and his hair was sharp arrows.
Each long black strand tore through the air with a dull bang. Infused with violent energy, the black hairs seemed ten times thicker than before. Roughly a hundred thousand strands covered an area of a hundred meters, carrying shrill, soul-snatching whistles as they reached the staff-wielding young man in an instant.
Several thousand extremely fine black hairs pierced the young man's body. With a muffled boom, the handsome young man exploded in midair into a cloud of blood mist.
The dozen or so figures pursuing him cried out in alarm. Forgetting all about chasing Gu Xiechen, every one of them instinctively scattered and fled.
The black hairs shot several hundred meters away, pulverizing every flower, plant, tree, streetlamp, and bench in their path.
More than a dozen bolts of violet lightning struck the black sea in succession as Gu Xiechen leaped high into the air and lunged toward the water ahead. At this moment, he looked incomparably savage. Spiderweb-like cracks covered his skin, and columns of blood constantly spurted from his seven orifices. Yet his palms, capable of breaking gold and stone, were scorched black, proving that he had not emerged unscathed from the explosions.
On Gu Tower's rooftop, a gaunt figure standing in the shadows watched Gu Xiechen's body plunge toward the sea from afar.
He reached out and made a grasping motion toward Gu Xiechen. Accompanied by the sound of an indistinct incantation, an extremely thin green bolt of electricity shot down from the black clouds and struck Gu Xiechen precisely. A mass of dark green flames wrapped around him, and his body, which had been soaring high, abruptly fell like a bird shot from the sky.
"Gu Juechen... no, Patriarch Gu, Gu Xiechen will certainly die. No one will ever again be qualified to compete with you for the Gu family's authority."
The gaunt figure chuckled eerily, his laughter as unpleasant as an owl's cry.
A tall figure standing in the darkness slowly nodded. The rooftop beneath his feet rippled like water, and he silently merged into the waves.
"Farewell, my little brother! To die beneath the Soul Punishing Yin Lightning of a Three Witch Sect elder, you can die without regrets!"
Perhaps Heaven itself had gone mad, for bolts of lightning continued to bombard the sea.
Fifty kilometers out in the ocean beyond Manhattan Island, a charred black arm suddenly pierced the surface of the sea.
Gu Xiechen, blackened from head to toe, slowly floated to the surface. Thin wisps of black smoke drifted from his body as a nauseating smell of roasted flesh gradually spread through the air.
Gu Xiechen's halted heartbeat slowly resumed. Gradually, it beat faster and faster.
His heartbeat surged to three hundred beats per minute. Pure, vast energy continuously poured from Gu Xiechen's heart. His life force had been extinguished by that green Yin Lightning, but nourished by this energy, the flame of life that had gone out within him blazed fiercely once more.
His tightly shut eyes slowly opened, and two rays of ghostly blue evil light shot more than a foot away.
Gu Xiechen let out an eerie, hissing laugh.
"Gu Juechen, we'll see!"
The charred black skin covering his body suddenly burst apart. With newly grown pale skin, Gu Xiechen soared into the sky like a monstrous demon.
Before you continue