Moreover, although Odin was immune to Lu Mingfei's King's Domain, he had no King's Domain of his own. He did not seem like a living creature at all, but something closer to a Deadpool.
But could a Deadpool this powerful really exist? His strength surpassed both Norton and Constantine!
Lu Mingfei faced him from a distance. The mountainside beneath their feet had been utterly destroyed, leaving only ash and shattered earth and stone. Raindrops scattered by the gale finally fell, and pale steam rose from everywhere except their bodies.
Lu Mingfei flicked his wrist. The edge of the Bloodhound's Fang vibrated at high speed, and the red flames coating it suddenly flared, blasting a shock wave through the surrounding air.
Flame, Heal Me
Flame, Protect Me
Flame, Grant Me Strength!
With his current authority, Lu Mingfei could freely use his mind to imbue fire with abstract concepts. These Word Spirits cast upon his body were all high-level ones, granting him vitality, reinforcement, and protection.
New dragon scales covered his body. His bones grew and reshaped rapidly, cracking like a splitting glacier, while a pair of black wings spread behind him, blotting out the sky.
Trailing arcs of lightning, the black figure charged forward and clashed with Odin. Meteor-like streaks of flaming sword light instantly swept across the ruins like rain falling upward into the sky. Three miniature suns rose, creating a daylight in which no shadows existed.
Odin struggled to parry the Bloodhound's Fang with Gungnir while also fending off the phantasmal flaming blades materializing in the air around him, the flaming sword light, King's Flame, and a pitch-black prison of scorching incineration...
Gungnir's meteor-like streaks of light could only be used for defense. Even then, Lu Mingfei's blade kept wounding him. Hideous gaps melted into his dark-gold armor, and blue-black dragon scales showed beneath his burning, carbonized shroud.
The spectator was secretly alarmed.
She tried to imagine facing the monster in the mirror herself, silently calculating her chances of victory. In the end, all she felt was profound unease.
The Secret Party actually possessed combat power of this caliber!
Even knowing that those powers came from the twins of fire, a Dragon King's body and a Dragon King's Heart were two different things. No human had ever achieved anything like this.
That clever, cunning older brother had been right. This guy was a new god.
He was extraordinarily dangerous, yet his body held an enticing secret powerful enough to change the world.
"Your little puppet doesn't look like he can last much longer. Aren't you going to act?" she asked softly.
"Don't rush, my dear sister," the voice in the mirror reassured her. "An opportunity vanishes in a flash. Naturally, we must make the most of it."
Lu Mingfei and Odin had moved out over the sea. The ice beneath their feet first shattered into countless pieces, then flipped and piled up like dominoes under the high-pressure shock waves, forming a tsunami of snow-white ice that rampaged onto the shore like a blizzard.
Odin was in a wretched state.
Only two Fell God Flames remained. One had exploded and nearly melted half of Odin's body, but his regenerative ability rivaled Lu Mingfei's. Some kind of supercell resembling nanomachines repaired his body at a visible rate, even regenerating his destroyed armor.
Lu Mingfei spread his wings, and fierce winds held him high in the air. The dark clouds overhead had scattered in the aftermath of their battle, revealing not the sky but a gray light somewhere between brightness and darkness. This confirmed that they were indeed inside a Nibelungen.
Chu Zihang had said he entered Odin's realm in China. Now it seemed Odin might have a lair in Italy as well.
Odin stood on the water and looked up at Lu Mingfei. Beneath his mask, his Golden Eyes were indifferent and cold.
He waved a hand, and countless black "spikes" immediately sprouted from the sea's surface. From a distance, they looked as fine and dense as down, like hair growing from the ocean.
Every strand was a black silhouette with glowing Golden Eyes. They all raised their heads, and tens of thousands of lights abruptly illuminated the sea, as though the galaxy had fallen into the water.
Chapter 93: Fate
A vast army of Deadpools stood silently on the sea, just as the prophecy foretold.
"During the twilight of the gods, the sea will split open, and a great ship made from the fingernails of the dead will rise from its depths, crowded with the departed. That is the army of the Land of the Dead, waging war upon the living."
Lu Mingfei dove, breaking the sound barrier and raising a wall of water several meters high from the black sea strewn with broken ice.
He paid no attention to the Deadpools. Odin was the only target in his eyes.
The Bloodhound's Fang struck Gungnir again, while behind him, a Fell God Flame exploded against the sea's surface.
This was the Fell God Flame that had absorbed most of the battle's aftershocks. Amid a thunderous roar, a wall of water rose like a mountain surging from the sea, and the surrounding water level visibly dropped. Countless Deadpools were swept into it, torn apart by seawater, scorching heat, and shock waves.
The Deadpools' shattered bodies turned back into seawater. Soon, less than thirty percent of Odin's army remained.
Odin held Gungnir horizontally and met Lu Mingfei's powerful spinning slash head-on, using the recoil to accelerate away from him.
Lu Mingfei stopped pursuing. A wall of water rose between him and Odin.
The wall was not merely water given shape. It incorporated some kind of alchemical technique that changed the black seawater's physical properties. Although it remained fluid in form, when Lu Mingfei tried to slash it, the Bloodhound's Fang felt as though it had plunged into solid metal, meeting tremendous resistance.
Lu Mingfei had seen similar technology in the Eternal City.
The swordsmen of the Eternal City used the Nox Flowing Sword, an oddly shaped weapon with a blade resembling a small sickle. It was a hardened weapon forged from liquid metal derived from Silver Tears. In battle, its needle-thin blade could temporarily turn fluid and swing like a whip.
Lu Mingfei could control fire to evaporate the wall directly, but water naturally countered fire. It would be a thankless waste of effort, so he chose to fly into the sky.
Only once he was high in the air did he discover countless walls of water rising and closing in from every direction. Even overhead, rain had gathered into a curtain of water. It was unmistakably a cage nearing completion.
His bony wings whipped up a storm, and he escaped dozens of water walls in the blink of an eye. Yet as he flew toward land, neither the harbor nor the town on the mountain came into view.
Only now had this Nibelungen truly taken shape. It was neither an elevated highway in a downpour nor a town in the depths of winter, but a boundless sea.
Unless Lu Mingfei evaporated every last drop of seawater, these endless water prisons would never stop.
He summoned the final Fell God Flame and detonated it somewhere overhead. The sky abruptly lit up, and the water curtain above buckled under the strain, bursting open into a great hole.
Lu Mingfei flew straight through the vast clouds of white steam toward the heavens.
Sure enough, just as he had expected, Odin was not the ruler of water. He was merely borrowing the sea to cast this Ultimate Word Spirit. There was not enough water in the sky. Rainwater and seawater forcibly drawn upward could not seal Lu Mingfei in, and he soon reached the space above the clouds.
That half-bright, half-dark light was not the boundary of the sky. Lu Mingfei passed through the dreamlike luminous mist and reached the true sky.
He stopped abruptly, finally feeling a flicker of shock.
This Nibelungen had no concept of a sky at all. An upside-down sea covered the entire firmament, as though this were a world inside a mirror. Two boundless oceans faced each other from above and below.
Identical walls of water surged from the sea overhead.
Xia Mi felt a trace of horror.
A Nibelungen was essentially an alchemical labyrinth. The defining trait of such a labyrinth was that it had to contain a rule allowing escape. This was the foundation of its creation, and even its gatekeeper could not violate it. The rules varied from labyrinth to labyrinth, some complex and others simple.
The more complex the rules, the more readily flaws appeared. The simpler the rules, the more effort it took to break through them.
The Nibelungen displayed in the mirror was now so simple that it consisted of almost nothing but sea and air. That meant it would be difficult to solve its puzzle through clever shortcuts.
It resembled not a labyrinth, but a specially built arena designed to hunt the King of Fire.
"Sister, the time has come for us to work together in earnest," the voice in the mirror said leisurely. "I suspect you still have doubts. Allow me to clear them up."
Xia Mi remained silent, waiting for him to continue.
"You needn't worry that there's something wrong with my Alchemical Domain, because what it-" The voice in the mirror deliberately paused before revealing the answer. "-manipulates is fate."
"Separating cause and effect?" Xia Mi had guessed part of it.
"When his thread of fate loosens." The voice in the mirror did not answer her question. "Enter through the 'door.' I know you left a mark on him."
"No one can control fate. Not even you," Xia Mi said softly. "What do you want me to do? Kill him?"
"That's up to you, sister. You take his spirit, and I take his dragon bones."
Lu Mingfei stopped trying to escape. The cage of seawater closed around him layer by layer, forming nested, sealed spheres. Finally, the spheres merged into the ultimate prison.
Lu Mingfei tried to locate Odin. Using alchemy or a Word Spirit on this scale would surely leave him weakened.
He could not evaporate all the seawater, but he could briefly escape this place and fight a final battle with Odin.
Far out on the sea, Odin raised his spear toward the heavens. Dark clouds churned overhead, and lightning repeatedly struck the spearhead. It began to glitter like some kind of crystal.
Before him stood a water prison stretching from sea to sky. It was an enormous, smooth sphere, its surface reflecting the gray realm of light overhead. Where it touched the edge of that luminous "sky," it actually vaporized into a wisp of cloud.
All the Deadpools raised their weapons in silent celebration, as though this were a grand ceremony.
At last, Odin swung the spear. His movement was light and graceful, less like a warrior killing an enemy than an artist moving a brush to paint a strand of a girl's long hair blowing in the wind.
Gungnir truly drew an intricate pattern in the air: a flower sketched in lightning. The instant it bloomed, its lightning patterns radiated freely outward, and faint white-violet currents reached from the spearhead into the depths of the water prison.
At the same moment, Lu Mingfei sensed an electric current connecting to his chest. Wreathed in fire, he evaporated a passage through the water prison in the direction from which the lightning came.
"Now!" someone roared.
Xia Mi activated the Alchemical Domain in the mirror further.
A tangle of intricate, disordered patterns suddenly flashed before Lu Mingfei's eyes. Those snake-like, writhing lines affected him for only a brief instant, yet changed everything.
He had just burst out of the water prison when he slammed into the sea like a stalled aircraft, throwing up towering spray and steam.
Odin halted his throwing motion. For some reason, the lightning representing the fate of death had already dissipated. Gungnir could not lock onto its target.
Either the target was dead, or... that fate did not belong to this world.
Golden lightning rose from the sea. Within it, Lu Mingfei's figure slowly stood up, and pure golden flames flowed along the Bloodhound's Fang.
A Note on Going Premium
Before I knew it, the book had reached 200,000 characters, and it was time to go premium. Thank you so much to everyone who has kept reading this far.
All I can do is apologize for the release schedule. It is purely because of work. I won't vent about the details here, but I do want to make one thing clear: I've spent almost all my leisure time writing this book. I definitely haven't been slacking off.
I had to work overtime today too. I might be the only person uploading right at the deadline for going premium...
As for the story ahead, I've already outlined this book all the way to the ending, and I'll do my best to finish it.
Finally, thank you again to all the readers who supported the book during its initial release with your continued reading, tips, monthly votes, and recommendation votes. Without your support, this book would never have made it this far!
Chapter 94: Trapped in a Dream, Mysterious Golden Flames
With his head resting on his arm, Lu Mingfei woke from a long dream and thought groggily, Why hasn't the class bell rung yet?
The class bell?
He abruptly lifted his head. The sunlight outside the window was dazzlingly bright, making him squint.
The sensation felt deeply unfamiliar. He vaguely felt that light of this intensity should not have been so dazzling, but he could not explain why.
That's just how human pupils work. Once they've adjusted to darkness, they struggle when exposed to light again.