Returning to the Mysterious Era-Chapter 665 - Joining Forces To Turn Heaven and Earth Upside Down!
"Totem King Kassares?! Isn't that the supreme god from the legend of the Ten Thousand Mountains Totem Temple?" The Second General King, Blizzard Didak, knelt on the ground, trembling slightly.
The Will of Xiadu, leader of the Gate Organization, was far too vast and terrifying. Even though it was not targeting him, its mere presence made surrounding living things instinctively feel fear and collapse to the ground.
Even such a god of ancient legend has fallen... Who killed it?! Is it related to our Gate Organization's disastrous operation? I went to the scene. It truly was an extremely exaggerated show of destruction, like a divine war from religious legends. The terrain of the entire Lotak mining region had been altered. Countless subterranean mines had been shattered and mountains collapsed. The lingering aura felt like hell... Blizzard Didak lowered his head to the snow, thinking inwardly.
In fact, before coming, he had already guessed that the Miracle Garden operation would be on the scale of a world war. The Gate Organization might only have been a small wedge in their war. The true contest was between the two godlike silhouettes of that unparalleled war.
No. Rather, it was only that victorious Golem silhouette! It was not an enemy of the Gate Organization, but an enemy of Xiadu, the millennia-old existence behind the Gate Organization! Some great existence had ceased to hide and brazenly exposed itself to the sun, proactively declaring war on Xiadu!
Killing the Lord of Flooding Light was the first provocation. The fall of Totem King Kassares was the all-out shocker!
When he glanced up at the violent turbulence of Xiadu's Will at the moment, the sky over the icefield seemed to be boiled by hot water. It was utterly different from Xiadu's usual image of mysterious might. It had always been an obscure being who seemed in control of everything. One could even say Xiadu had lost its composure!
In the far north, high above, multicolored auroras flickered like dreamlike ripples. Various rippling tracks overlapped and amassed, forming a well-like outline within which a demon god's giant face appeared.
"Blood Vulture!? Was it him? Impossible! The one with the upper hand for millennia had clearly been Kassares. The origin of calamity was Kassares's home field that continuously replenished him, while Blood Vulture kept depleting his essence. If they were evenly matched at the start, Kassares should have been firmly suppressing Blood Vulture until he could not breathe by now..."
"Indeed, the gap should finally have widened beyond redemption. Kassares would have seized the chance to strike Blood Vulture and settle it with one blow. How? How could it be Kassares who fell? Detestable variables! Something beyond my control has happened..."
A long silence followed Xiadu's violent fluctuation. At the bottom of the Arctic Abyss, where magma and ice mingled, a blurred humanoid figure seemed between existence and nonexistence. It hovered in midair, motionless.
Below, within the searing magma, a huge scaled hand unfurled like a bizarre lotus seat. A dotted-line of hazy energy communion flowed between the humanoid and the scaled hand, hinting at fusion.
"I cannot leave... A hundred years ago, White Bird's strike forcibly shook me and my freed main body out of our fused state. I have yet to erase that perfected Thorn Feather Force in its ultimate burning state. I must purge White Bird's imprint before I can fuse again with my body and return... Thus, I can only spend part of my energy to rouse all idle Ultimate Dark Forms in the World of Calamity. Let them investigate, track, and even hunt down the murderer who killed Kassares..."
"Although Kassares has fallen, he was still the ultimate king of the totem line. No one could kill him without paying a grievous price. Blood Vulture, and even his helper, must be covered in wounds, barely clinging to life and perhaps already at death's door. I should seize this opportunity and strangle all these variables in the cradle..." 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂
As its thoughts faded, the hazy humanoid abruptly dropped from midair. It sat cross-legged in the palm of the scaled giant hand.
Buzzzzz...
A net-like wave surged to shroud the layers of the underworld. It was like an apple covered by wire mesh, breaking the flesh and reaching the surface of the core.
In the World of Calamity, the blood moon hanging high in the sky suddenly trembled as if two moons overlapped and flickered. Looking up from the ground, it was like a pair of ruddy eyes staring down.
"Totem King Kassares... has fallen... Blood Vulture Dominator Fist, and any helper he may have had must have been badly wounded. All Ultimate Dark Forms capable of moving, set out! Find them, hunt them, kill them! Carry out my will... Kill without fail!!!" A vast Will spread to every region of the World of Calamity with the mutation of the blood moon.
It echoed in the Pale Lands, the Silent Rain Zone, the Despair Skeletal Forest, the Pitch Black Mountains, the Scarlet Lake, the Rotting Marshes, and the Crystal Sand Sea.
In the boundless black-mud swamps fuming with rotting miasma, a crocodilian behemoth surfaced with a roar. Its back was like a mountain range with sharp teeth.
In a white forest layered upon layers, almost without end, a vast area suddenly swelled, as if the whole ground were lifted.
Thump!
A giant white skeletal claw stomped upon the earth. Then, the entire bone forest was carried off upon that giant shadow's back.
In the air, amid a surging rain, a strange manor sat among the mountains. A twisted black shadow with a hazy outline silently approached it. Moments later, the shadow left in silence, disappearing with the manor within the deluge of black rain.
Even in the depths underground, in the sky, and even in the deep Black Abyssal Sea, colossal figures which each represented a massive ecosystem, whose every breath affected the environment, now moved into action. They ended slumber or stopped healing. The endless energy within them boiled anew and surged toward a combative state.
Across the World of Calamity, Ultimate Dark Forms, one after another, advanced under the blood moon's guidance to encircle the place where the Totem King fell! This was an unprecedented hunt! This was even more serious than the siege to slay White Bird Holy Fist in past years!
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill...
***
"How is your state, Blood Vulture?"
"Better and better. My strength keeps returning. I can feel my peak gradually getting closer..."
An aged figure slowly rose to his feet in the center of a vast lake, amid mountains of corpses and a sea of blood. He flexed his hands lightly. Bones crackled and a terrifying aura wound about his nose. A dangerous scarlet gleam had appeared at the tips of the elder's withered hair.
This was precisely a sign of Blood Vulture Dominator Fist's power reviving. When all his long hair turned fully scarlet, that would be peak Dominator Fist!
"It is still too little. This whole lake of dark creatures could only slightly slake my parched essence. I need to kill more..."
Blood Vulture stood upon the round belly of a lake behemoth and looked around. Countless dark creature corpses overlapped and floated under the moon, forming a moving landmass on the lake.
Viscous blood exuded an overpowering stench from the gaps between corpses. Death was everywhere. It was a hellish scene. The only two alive were Blood Vulture Dominator Fist and Cassius.
Cassius sat cross-legged upon the horn of a kilometer-long serpent. The serpent's corpse trembled and convulsed madly, clearly newly dead. Its nervous reflexes still told of its recent terror.
Two scarlet streaks of light had descended from the western sky and slammed into the lake. In the next second, all dark creatures dwelling in the great lake howled in pain and fled frantically. From the tiniest bottom-feeders to apex predators, all felt the pain of being skinned alive and swallowed whole. Their bodies decomposed as every cell seemed gnawed by countless fine scarlet teeth.
In under half a minute, all the dark creatures floated up as drifting corpses. Hundreds of millions of lives had been annihilated in an instant.
Yet the instigators of all this, Blood Vulture and Cassius, remained utterly unmoved. They looked upon the floating corpses and the reek of blood with a perverse delight upon their faces, like gourmands seated in a restaurant eager to feast.
These two born killers seemed to harbor demons malicious toward life, clamoring and urging them on. It drove them to keep killing until taking life was as casual as eating or drinking. If dark creatures were the demons that ordinary humans feared, then these two were the demons that dark creatures feared!
Atop the mountains of corpses in the lake, Cassius pondered how to begin the Ultimate Fist's path of ascetic cultivation.
He asked the eager Blood Vulture, "Continue?"
"Continue."
A smile appeared on Blood Vulture's aged face, oddly feral from his many wrinkles. "At least let half my hair turn red. Then I will have enough strength to guard you. Then, nowhere within the World of Calamity would be off-limits. If it surpassed two-thirds, I would follow you even if you wanted to go to the Black Abyssal Sea to accelerate your cultivation..."
The offhand words brimmed with confidence. He looked at Cassius with gleaming eyes.
"If I can recover more than half, and you successfully complete the Ultimate Fist's path, perhaps there is something we can do on a grand scale..."
"Oh? What thing?" Cassius stood as he watched the bloodthirsty smile on Blood Vulture's face widen.
The Blood Vulture slowly turned, "You and I together, here... Kill until we turn heaven and earth upside down!!!"
Cassius started chuckling, then grew into a laugh that seemed to reverberate through the world.
"...Heheheh... kekeke... hahahahaha!"
Wild and unrestrained, it shot to the heavens.
"Good!!!"
Two scarlet streaks of light shot from the lake. They cleaved the dark sky and vanished into the distance. In the World of Calamity, black, white, and gray were the main tones, so the passage of time was not very evident. Only the ever-changing moon on the sky told of years passing.
The world had seen several Blood Nights and even a rare Moon Halo Night since the Totem King's fall. When the moon halo appeared, calamity beings went berserk, and a beast tide could arise with some probability. In some areas, a calamity miasma appeared, and a beast tide would surely follow.
However, during this Moon Halo Night, two unusual figures appeared around the miasma. They stood atop a mountain like rigid statues, wholly unaffected by the high-density miasma. They merely stood, watching the miasma grow and even merge with another.
An ultra-massive beast tide thus arose, blanketing both mountains and sky. It was as dense as a swarm of locusts.
"It's almost time..." The tall figure in a black coat suddenly spoke. "You or me?"
Beside him, the linen-robed elder whose hair was a third scarlet slowly raised his head. "Of course, me. Since I enjoyed your treatment, must I still have you act? It's not as if I'm a useless cripple..."
A blazing red vulture phantom covered the right half of the elder's face. A scarlet pupil lit and overlapped his eye!
"I most enjoy crushing bugs..."
Screee!!!
A pair of immense fiery wings unfurled to cover the sky, shrouding the colossal beast tide beneath their span. A gentle flap caused the earth to quake. Endless black smoke shot up as mountains crumbled amid the tremors. When it all cleared, every dark creature near the miasma was wiped out.
It was sheer annihilation.
Days later, in the same region, a colossal figure came to a halt. Up among the clouds, its planet-like cerulean pupils gazed at the earth.
Ruin was everywhere. Corpses were strewn across the wilds amid congealed blood.
"What a heavy lust to kill... Even more brutal than mine... One of the Southern Dipper's three Holy Fists... Blood Vulture Dominator Fist... Let us come meet you!"
