The Game Was Over

Shui Gaoge had only said half of it. The other half was that he wouldn't be able to use his Qi to its full extent. After taking the pill, he would be able to use at most thirty percent of his Qi, cutting his strength by more than half.

And he had added a potent ingredient to the pill—the Thread Gu Queen!

Once inside the body, it would quickly latch onto the heart. When necessary, it could inject poison into the heart or even self-destruct and blast it apart.

By then, not even the best medicine could save its victim.

Especially when used together with Thousand Thread Soul-Attaching Poison, it would make the person who took it afraid to use Qi to envelop the poison pill. Thousand Thread Soul-Attaching Poison constantly corroded Qi, and the more Qi one used, the faster it ate away at it.

Like a snowball rolling downhill, it would turn into an avalanche almost as soon as it began. The victim would be completely screwed.

But Zhao Ping'an was unafraid. His body had long since become immune to all poisons.

"Fine! I'll take it!"

Zhao Ping'an held out his other hand.

"Haha, excellent! A true young hero, fearless in the face of danger!"

Shui Gaoge burst into delighted laughter, unable to hide the smile in his eyes. The four Grandmasters behind him exchanged glances, then looked at Zhao Ping'an with smiles of their own, their eyes full of mockery.

He tossed the poison pill into Zhao Ping'an's hand and watched him swallow it.

"Good. Hand Zhao Xiuyun over to him!"

After watching Zhao Ping'an swallow the pill, Shui Gaoge waved to Qian Yingying beside him.

"Here you go! I have to say, you really are adorably stupid..."

Qian Yingying flashed in front of Zhao Ping'an and tossed Zhao Xiuyun, who had been on her back, to him. She spoke softly, her voice full of regret.

Zhao Ping'an had no time for her. After catching Mistress, he immediately circulated True Essence through her body and found no poison or foreign objects. Then he carefully carried her on his back.

As for the poison and Gu Worm inside his own body, he had simply used True Essence to seal them off for the time being. Thousand Thread Soul-Attaching Poison was specifically designed to target Qi, so it had no effect whatsoever on True Essence. And there was no way the Thread Gu Queen could break through the barrier of True Essence, either.

Besides, that thing was useless now.

Crack!

At the faintest sound in Zhao Ping'an's ears, the poison pill inside him—and the Gu Worm within it—shattered. It all turned to powder.

He opened his mouth and spat out a mouthful of black saliva. It hissed on the ground, quickly corroding a hole in the earth.

Qian Yingying, who had been smiling moments earlier, suddenly went deathly pale. She pulled out a thumb-sized worm, looking utterly bewildered.

"What's wrong? Why did you take out the Worm King?"

Guan Liang, standing nearby, saw Qian Yingying's expression and asked in confusion.

"The Worm Queen is dead!"

"What? But the Worm Queen..."

Everyone immediately turned to Zhao Ping'an, then saw him spit out a mouthful of black blood.

"I don't know who gave you the nerve to target me, but that doesn't matter anymore. I'll find out soon enough. For now, the game is over!"

Facing the four Grandmasters and one Great Grandmaster, Zhao Ping'an crushed the cultivation manual in his palm into powder and tossed it into a nearby fire. His voice was as cold as a spring from the deepest depths of the underworld.

"No! My manual! You brat, you're asking for death!"

Seeing the cultivation manual turn to ash in an instant, Shui Gaoge roared furiously and lunged at Zhao Ping'an.

Imperial Extreme Raging Waves Fist!

A vortex nearly ten feet wide appeared between Shui Gaoge's fists. A stream of water condensed entirely from Qi became a raging dragon and charged straight at Zhao Ping'an.

Clearly, Shui Gaoge had been blinded by rage. He had forgotten that Zhao Ping'an was a living cultivation manual. If he killed him, he would lose everything for good.

But now that Zhao Ping'an no longer had any reason to hold back, he couldn't be bothered to waste words on them. As Shui Gaoge struck first, a tiny red glow appeared at Zhao Ping'an's fingertip. He flicked it forward.

It was fire-aspected True Essence from the Four Symbols Gathering Essence Art, paired with the technique of the Earth-grade perfected martial art Phantom Flying Dagger.

The speck of True Essence expanded in the wind, instantly turning into an enormous fireball that conjured a sea of flames and hurtled toward Shui Gaoge.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. The others were still caught between confusion, bewilderment, and shock.

Hiss...!

Boom!

As water vapor hissed and surged into the air, the Qi dragon formed by Shui Gaoge's full-force Imperial Extreme Raging Waves Fist evaporated completely beneath the enormous fireball.

The fireball then smashed through everything in its path and slammed into Shui Gaoge's chest before he could defend himself, unleashing a deafening boom. A bloodcurdling scream tore from his mouth.

When the smoke cleared, everyone saw Shui Gaoge lying there, his exposed skin covered in blisters and bloody welts from the burns. He looked utterly wretched, and screams continued to spill from his mouth.

"True Essence! You're not a Grandmaster—you've reached the Martial Venerable realm! A young Martial Venerable! I refuse to accept this!"

Shui Gaoge writhed on the ground, screaming and shouting in broken bursts. His cries were filled with bewilderment, shock, terror, and even despair.

He had never imagined that the gap between the intelligence he'd received and reality could be so vast—so vast he couldn't even have dreamed of it.

An eighteen-year-old Martial Venerable, someone capable of reaching the top of the overall Latent Dragon Ranking—and what had he done? Kidnapping and extortion!

Luckily, Zhao Ping'an wasn't planning to take Shui Gaoge's life just yet. Otherwise, he would already have been nothing but a pile of charred flesh.

As for the others, Zhao Ping'an had no intention of letting them go.

He pointed his fingers in quick succession. The four Grandmaster Peaks and twenty Black Underworld Guards, who had been staring in shock at the miserable Great Grandmaster Shui Gaoge writhing on the ground—the last ten had followed Qian Yingying here—were pierced through the head by earthen-yellow spikes of True Essence in an instant. Not one of them survived.

Perhaps these people held high positions, but anyone who dared to make trouble for him, Zhao Ping'an, had only one end: death.

Then Zhao Ping'an, purple light thick in his eyes, appeared before Shui Gaoge in a flash.

Soon, in the uninhabited Thousand Guts Valley, screams of unimaginable agony rang out again and again, making anyone who heard them shudder in horror.

Two herb gatherers happened to hear the screams while collecting medicinal herbs in the mountains. Word spread from two people to ten, then from ten to a hundred. Before long, the rumors had turned into tales of a man-eating demon emerging in Thousand Guts Valley. Anyone who ventured near would be dragged inside, skinned and dismembered, then have their flesh eaten, blood drunk, and marrow sucked out... until they died without even a body to bury.

Thousand Guts Valley had already been a place no one dared enter. Now it became a notorious deathtrap, and no one would even set foot on the nearby hills.

"Shui Gaoge? The Prince of the First Rank of the Profound Water Dynasty? The Poison Wolf Gang? I never would've expected..."