Had greed gotten the better of him?
He was starting to remind Fang Xiu of Orochimaru.
Fang Xiu was inevitably a little surprised by what he saw, but there was no need to get angry over someone who was destined to die.
At that moment, wisps of cold white mist poured from the Ghost King's body. A baby suddenly emerged from within it, its entire body as black as ink and covered in strange tadpole-like runes. Its wails were chilling.
One after another, similar spirits appeared. Some were his own kind, whom he had devoured years ago; their faces were blank, their minds long since broken. Others were innocent passersby who had been killed and then cruelly enslaved after death.
It looked like a massive explosion was about to happen!
"Hahaha, this is just too good! What fierce battle? We can just sit back and enjoy the show!" Silver-Armored General Xiaogui held the Red Tassel Spear and guarded Hermit Caolu, looking anything but serious. Instead, he laughed and joked.
Beside him, Ma Shangfeng, carrying the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, nodded along with a foolish grin. He loved a fight where the odds were in their favor. It even sounded good when you put it this way: I helped Big Brother crush the Ghost King, and we finally killed him in a different time and space five hundred years later.
At last, Hermit Caolu opened his eyes, having finished preparing his ultimate move. For a moment, he didn't know whether he should make a move or not.
He could deal damage too! But Fang Xiu was simply too dominant. At the very beginning, he had used the Northern Emperor Dharma Spell on the Ghost King, causing the rot to spread from the corners of his eyes across his entire face. Dao Fire had also scorched his bones.
After that, Hermit Caolu hadn't had another chance to act.
As Hermit Caolu hesitated, Fang Xiu gave him the answer: he wasn't about to surrender the decisive kill.
In an instant, the pattern in Fang Xiu's Mangekyō Sharingan swirled, and a golden phantom projected from his body. From bones to sinews, within just a few breaths, a gigantic half-body Susanoo towered above them.
"Takemikazuchi."
Once the Susanoo quickly stabilized, the pattern in its left eye socket began to spin on its own.
Brilliant lightning crackled in its palm, coalescing into a simply designed Sky-Piercing Spear. Though this wasn't the Complete Body Susanoo, it was still in its second stage—and everyone who witnessed it from afar revered it as though it were a god.
Faced with the power of Susanoo, the Fusang Ghost King's face was blank, as if he'd been broken. He showed no sign of resistance.
The lightning spear left Susanoo's hand and plunged down from above. Its enormous boom echoed across the battlefield, where the ten-thousand-mile Earth Style Wall had contained the slaughter. The deafening sound made their eardrums ache, while the ground trembled again and again.
Even Tang Tian and the others, who were Reincarnators themselves, had never expected the battle to reach a fever pitch from the very beginning.
First came the earth-shaking tremors and Deep Forest Emergence, then a gigantic Wood Buddha that seemed like a deity. And the final blow was delivered by Susanoo.
Forget joining the battle—the others had to be careful even just watching from afar, holding their breath as they did so—
Under the onslaught of the raging lightning, one enormous boulder and ancient tree after another was shattered. Rocks flew everywhere, and amid the clouds of dust and the rush of wind, countless craters were blasted into the ground.
The ground, strengthened by immortal techniques, had returned to normal.
[You have slain the Fusang Ghost King alone. You have received one B-rank side-quest plot and 4,500 reward points...]
The Main God's announcement was like a shot of reassurance. Fang Xiu knew that Shazhou Team's second newbie trial was more or less complete.
Unfortunately, the cost of killing the Fusang Ghost King had far exceeded what it took to kill the Alien Queen last time, but the reward hadn't increased accordingly.
Had the Main God grown stingy?
No. The team-building bonus period was about to end, and things were returning to how they were supposed to be.
Besides, Fang Xiu thought this generation of the Great Light Sphere was pretty fair. It gave rewards for a solo kill rather than counting it toward the group's main-quest rewards. Fang Xiu had been the only Reincarnator putting on a show throughout the trial; the other members hadn't even been qualified to watch from the sidelines. Giving them the same reward would have been ridiculous.
"Just like the last world. The boss takes out the overpowered final boss right at the start, and the rest is up to us."
Meanwhile, on the rooftop of Ferocious Ghost Mansion, Tang Tian casually shot a little ghost dead with a spirit bullet and said with boundless enthusiasm, "Come on, everyone. Give it your all!"
Though he couldn't take part in that battle and was still far from possessing the terrifying power of the "Wood Release Buddha" or "Susanoo," the thought that the godlike powerhouse before him was his own team captain made Tang Tian's heart surge with excitement.
Having a powerhouse to rely on was better than a group of newbies struggling to survive an impossible mission.
The other members, along with the newbies scattered around looking for temples, Taoist temples, and churches where they could try their luck, all felt much the same way.
"It's over."
In the suburbs, as Fang Xiu murmured those words, the Earth Style Wall that had enclosed the dueling ground sank into the earth. The vast, terrifying green sea created by Deep Forest Emergence also withered at a visible pace.
Before long, the entire battlefield had become flat ground. There wasn't even a single crater deeper than five meters. If the effects hadn't been so far-reaching, this absurd reality might well have been dismissed as a mass delusion.
"Many thanks for lending me your aid, fellow Daoist."
"I, Caolu, thank you as well. We likely won't meet again, so please take care."
Just then, the Mystic Gate in the sky opened once more.
Last time, it had opened by accident. This time, Hermit Caolu had opened it deliberately, using the power of the Big Dipper that he had accumulated.
His worst-case plan had been to wound the Ghost King, then open the Mystic Gate and drag him into the currents of time.
He hadn't expected...
Such an overwhelming variable to appear.
"Hey, hey, I'm not ready to leave yet! I haven't had enough soda!" Having just watched the whole show, Ma Shangfeng shouted in protest, but his body uncontrollably turned into a streak of golden light and was sucked into the portal in the sky.
Xiaogui sighed, then vanished in a streak of silver light. "What a shame. I'll never get to taste the delicious food from five hundred years in the future again."
Hermit Caolu circulated his internal energy and briefly resisted the Mystic Gate's pull. Then he left Fang Xiu a complete message: "I have little to offer you. Since we're parting here, I'll leave you the cultivation notes I wrote. I hope they'll be of some use."
Before his voice had even faded,
an ancient book appeared out of nowhere. It fell from the portal, heading straight for Fang Xiu's hands.
But in an instant, gravity became a joke. The book turned into a streak of light and shot back upward.
The power of the Heavenly Gate was clearly about to take it away too! After all, people, events, and fates from different times and spaces had intersected—a grave taboo. Now, a special will was acting to erase every trace of their connection that it could.
Without hesitation, Fang Xiu leaped into the air and reached for the notes, using a towering tree generated by Wood Release to propel himself upward.
Rip!
He managed to tear off a few pages from the thick book. The rest turned into specks of light and fell back into the portal.
Everything disappeared.
[Secret Art: Heaven and Earth in a Pot. Within it lies Qiankun...]
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