Two Years!

The desert wasteland was filled with windblown sand, while the blazing sun freely poured down its searing heat. Judging by the angle of the sunlight, it was nearing noon—the hottest time of day in the desert wasteland.

Yet on the vast dunes stretching beyond sight, an amusing scene was playing out. A crowd of more than a hundred people was desperately running across the sand, fleeing in panic as though some terrifying, peerless beast were pursuing them from behind!

What made the scene so amusing was that the pursuer was only one person! One person was chasing more than a hundred people? And the side with the overwhelming numbers looked utterly terrified?! What kind of joke was this?! If word got out, no one would believe it!

In fact, even the people being chased would never have believed something like this could happen if they had not seen it with their own eyes, experienced it themselves, and been the ones it was happening to!

"Pick up the pace, all of you!! If you don't want to die, then run faster!!!" Amid the crowd, a scar-faced man who appeared to be their leader wiped the sweat from his brow. He panted heavily as he ran for his life, shouting hoarsely at the others, "Don't forget! That demon is still following us!!!"

Upon hearing the scar-faced man's last words, the exhausted crowd jolted awake! Then, as if injected with adrenaline, they accelerated once more and ran madly for their lives!

"Heh heh, playing cat and mouse once in a while in a godforsaken place like this is actually pretty interesting..."

About a thousand meters behind the group of a hundred, a graceful figure dressed in a pale moon-white robe slowly walked after them without any hurry. His head was hidden beneath a large hood.

Having traveled through the desert for a long time, his moon-white robe was already covered in dust and looked thoroughly weather-beaten. If there was anywhere on him that remained clean, it was probably the long sword hanging at his left waist, its moon-white sheath still completely spotless.

He reached up and pulled down his white hood. Amid the fluttering black hair beneath it was a slightly youthful face. The boy smiled and muttered softly to himself, a playful grin hanging at the corners of his mouth.

This person was naturally our protagonist—Achill. It had been exactly two years since he had left Kaisa City, and this year, he had turned fifteen.

Two years had changed him considerably. Whether in physique or strength, he was vastly different from how he had been two years ago!

Let's start with his appearance. Two years had successfully turned him into a handsome young man's relative—well, all right. In truth, although Achill looked decent enough, he could only be considered somewhat handsome at best. He was barely above average in looks, still quite some distance away from being a truly stunningly handsome man. Of course, he would never admit that...

Being extremely narcissistic, his worldview basically only had room for one handsome man: himself. As for anyone better-looking than him, he automatically chose to ignore them...

All right, enough about his looks. Let's talk about his current strength!

As for just how powerful Achill had become, even he himself did not know. After all, he had never undergone a professional assessment. Over the past two years, he had mostly spent his time wandering about, occasionally attacking a Dark Mage Guild or two to earn some extra cash.

Perhaps because he had gone through so many real battles, he had accumulated considerable combat experience. But his greatest gains lay in his magic. Not only had he completely mastered the abilities and characteristics of the Zanpakutō he already possessed, he had even perfectly integrated all of those abilities and techniques into his combat instincts!

Not only that, his unique Requip Magic now offered him even more Zanpakutō to choose from. Over the past two years, he had successively summoned several highly practical Zanpakutō from that mysterious space! And every single one possessed exceptionally powerful abilities!!!

More than that, he could now vaguely sense that several of those Zanpakutō seemed to contain immensely powerful and terrifying forces! However, those higher-level powers appeared to be sealed in some unknown way. With his current strength, releasing them was not entirely impossible, but it would be extremely difficult!

Achill looked frivolous on the surface, but he was actually exceptionally cautious when it came to doing things. Since he could not yet release that hidden power safely, he might as well let nature take its course and wait until his strength met the requirements! In any case, as far as he was concerned, his current strength was already more or less enough.

That was only in terms of magic. His magical power had also improved enormously. To give a simple example, if he used a miraculous movement technique like Flash Step with the amount of magical power he had two years ago, he could use it at most several dozen times before nearly running dry. But now, even if he used Flash Step continuously, a technique that consumed tremendous amounts of magical power, it would not place much burden on him at all, because the rate at which he consumed magical power was basically equal to the rate at which it recovered.

So, to put it simply, Achill's overall strength in every aspect was utterly incomparable to what it had been two years ago. It was practically an absolute leap to an entirely new level!

That seemed to have gone a little off topic. Back to the point!

The reason this cat-and-mouse scene had occurred was actually nothing more than an innocent coincidence. Achill had originally been traveling around, and his next destination had been the beautiful grasslands!

But this guy's natural talent in a certain area was simply too powerful. No one knew how exactly he had walked, but he had clearly been heading toward the grasslands. Yet somehow, after walking and walking, he had inexplicably ended up in the middle of a huge desert?!

For fuck's sake! In terms of being directionally challenged alone, probably no one would be able to surpass him for the next five hundred years...

Getting lost was one thing. Since it had already happened, he could only accept it. But the tragic part was that it did not end there, because as Achill continued walking through the desert, he got so lost that he could no longer tell east from west, north from south...

At first, he patiently continued walking through the vast desert wasteland for three more days. But when he reached that familiar pile of sand and rocks for the third time after those three days, he finally snapped completely! Was there really any need to mess with someone like this?!

Just as he was bottling up a stomachful of anger and was about to go mad, a medium-sized bandit group of more than two hundred people suddenly came racing over from the distance. And, as luck would have it, they passed right by him and decided to rob him while they were at it?

The outcome was obvious. Achill, who had been holding in a bellyful of rage with nowhere to vent it, did not say a word. He immediately treated them to an incredibly badass bout of Requip Magic, and only this small number of people remained.

Wondering where the other hundred-plus people had gone? Come on, where else could they have gone? To borrow Le Qi's words, they had all gone to kiss God's mother~ Well, she was probably kissed senseless by now, hahaha—

But don't think that made Achill a cruel, inhuman person. In truth, when it came to bandit groups who killed without blinking and had committed every evil imaginable, there was no need to discuss humanity at all. What bullshit about bandits being people too?! In Achill's eyes, that was all complete bullshit! Those were the hypocritical, pretentious idiotic words of bored people who were well-fed and had nothing better to do! Typical talk from people who had no idea what suffering was like!!!

Of course, that did not mean Achill enjoyed extremism or being cold-blooded and cruel. In fact, he had always been someone who acted as he pleased. It would not be wrong to call him both righteous and wicked. He always did things according to his own preferences and never cared whether something was right or wrong. That was probably because of his amnesia. Not knowing who he had once been and remembering none of his past memories meant he had almost no restraints on his way of thinking. So even after personally harvesting the lives of more than a hundred bandits, Achill still felt no psychological burden whatsoever.

The reason he had not simply killed everyone came down to three considerations. First, he did not know how to leave this damned place, so he needed someone to lead the way! Second, he had already vented most of his anger in the previous slaughter, so there was no need to keep killing. It held no meaning for him. As had just been said, he was someone who did as he pleased, and people who did as they pleased generally did not enjoy doing things that had no meaning to them at all. Of course, the earlier slaughter had held at least a little meaning—such as helping him cool off...

And the third reason was actually the most important one!

In his words, walking alone through a desert where not even a hair could be found was simply too boring. Playing a game of cat and mouse now and then could effectively help pass the dull time.

And that was how things had turned out like this.

"Ah, this is getting a little boring. Since I've already achieved my goal..." Achill continued following the group ahead from afar at an unhurried pace. Looking up at the faintly visible city in the distance, the corners of his mouth curled into a playful smile. He softly chuckled as if talking to himself, "Then you have no—"

"Use left at all..."

The moment his words fell, he lightly tapped the ground with the tip of his foot, and his body abruptly vanished from where he stood!

Flash Step!

"Sit upon the frozen heavens—" Achill suddenly appeared in midair ahead of the hundred-man group. Stepping on empty air, he stood completely upright in the void as though he were an emperor overlooking the world below. Seeing the extreme shock, terror, and deep despair in the eyes of the people beneath him, his brows seemed to furrow out of habit, and his expression became slightly solemn. With a casual wave through the air, a Zanpakutō that emitted a faint chill appeared in his right hand amid rippling spatial waves. Achill said calmly, "Hyōrinmaru—"

"Crash—" The crescent-shaped ice chain extending from the sword hilt swiftly coiled around itself, and freezing cold ice water immediately poured down upon the hundred-man group below!

In a single exchange! In only an instant, every bandit in the hundred-man group was frozen into lifeless ice sculptures! They had not even had time to react or resist before everything was over. Only the extreme terror and despair remaining on their faces seemed to recount everything that had happened here...

"To be able to enjoy a free ice funeral in the unbearably hot desert wasteland, I have to say..." Achill returned Hyōrinmaru to his Requip space and slowly descended from the air. Looking at the exquisite blue ice sculptures, he gave a playful tug of his lips and lazily chuckled, "You really are very lucky..."

With that, he turned and walked toward the distant city.