Chapter 2345: Final Battlefield
After Lin Hongchen got on board, Meow Meow flapped its Regalfiend Wings and wildly accelerated. Lightning blasted all over the place, sending even the metal bugs that had gone ahead bouncing around.
"Do you mind removing your Oldgod Ring?" Tianming asked with a whisper as he blocked it.
"No. It will protect me during a crucial time," Lin Hongchen said.
There was nothing Tianming could do about it. Alright. Unless I don't do anything at all later, there's no hiding that I killed Guchi Xiaoyin, even if people don't have any proof of it.?He pondered the consequences of the matter. The Infinitum Bodhimanda's nature wasn’t easily swayed. Given the chaotic and unexpected nature of the journey to the hive ancestral world, there was no way Guchi Xiaoyin's parents would be able to publicly demand Tianming's death no matter how prestigious his background was.
Tianming asked Lin Hongchen about the ring to check whether his current combat prowess had been revealed, and it was. He was now ranked fifteenth on the minor ranking, higher than Lin Hongchen and pushing him to the top of the Lin Clan's roster. Being able to rank that highly meant that he was more powerful than at least half of the strongest disciples from the Infinitum Regal Clans, especially considering how the ebons had taken up the top ten spots. Lin Hongchen had been ranked twenty-fifth before the fight and had fallen by one rank since. The change in ranking would surely mean shock and confusion from the audience outside. They were able to see how much Tianming had improved from Lin Hongchen's ring. It would no doubt be talked about as much as the death of Guchi Xiaoyin.
"Why?" Lin Hongchen said, eyes shaking as he looked at him.
"Why what?" Tianming asked.
"I don't believe that you could've broken through so many times in a row. That isn’t something that can possibly exist. So my question is: why have you been hiding your strength this whole time? You're clearly an astral god, so why don't you have a heptastar cosmic physique?" Lin Hongchen knew that many people in the mundus also had the same questions.
"Hahahaha...." Tianming just laughed and didn't bother to answer. He would keep them guessing. With his grandparents around, he no longer had to be worried about being dissected.
"Either way, your strength makes it incredibly likely that you'll obtain even more glory for the clan. The higher you rank at the end, the more prestige we’ll get. You’ve rendered great merit for us," Lin Hongchen said with a look of respect.
"I recall that Senior Lin Lingxiao caused quite a bit of commotion in the clan by ranking in the top five, right? I wonder what’ll happen if I get ranked first," Tianming said.
"First?" Lin Hongchen laughed. "The Swordgod Lin Clan hasn't obtained the top spot for a long time. If you do, you'll be a hero that’ll be endlessly praised for generations to come. But that's impossible. This event in particular is the most competitive one so far. Every single person in the top ten is scarily powerful."
"That bad?" Tianming recalled that Guchi Xiaoyin's eight low-sanctuary-class warbeasts were indeed powerful, but they had still been wiped out in that explosion. If someone like him was ranked seventh, those ahead of him—like Yi Taoyao—would be much harder to deal with. "By the way, how’s it going with the four skeletons?"
"I made no progress," Lin Hongchen said, embarrassed.
"You might as well give them to me."
"In your dreams!"
"Sigh, you're so narrow minded. Consider the bigger picture. I'm giving you a chance to ingratiate yourself with me, yet you turned it down."
Ying Huo popped out of nowhere again. "Holy crap, you're everywhere! You keep causing trouble all over Ebonia!"
Tianming sent it flying off again with another slap.
"We're almost there! I'm going to enter a sleep state in another ten breaths' time, so you guys keep running! I'm going to nap!" Meow Meow said, yawning. But before half that time passed, it slumped to the ground and slid across the mirror-smooth surface. By the time it reached the path's opening, it was already sound asleep.
"I swear, one day you'll give me an aneurysm." Tianming tossed it back into his lifebound space. It turned back into a small cat and peacefully slept in the vines of Xian Xian.
"Cat Bro... go rest... in peace!" The silver eggs gathered into a gigantic dragon head that sandwiched itself between Lan Huang's two heads. The three raised heads looked like sticks of incense being offered to the dead, causing Meow Meow to unconsciously clench its rear legs.
Tianming and Lin Hongchen continued charging forward. Even though Lin Hongchen had been defeated, he hadn't used his lifebound beasts in the bout; as such, he still hadn't fully admitted defeat yet. The two of them plunged straight into the void ahead.
"That’s...." Lin Hongchen's eyes widened with shock.
Tianming didn't seem that surprised, as Yin Chen had told him what was at the end of the road. He saw a gigantic black star in the void about a tenth as big as the moon. Its surface area could possibly rival the Oldgod Domain's. While the star wouldn't be considered large in the astralscape, it was probably the biggest thing within the void of this ancestral world.
So far, it seemed that, at most, four hundred participants would make it here. With that few people, they would be needles in a haystack if they went to a star of that size. Perhaps their lifebound beasts and warbeasts would slightly balloon that number, making them more obvious.
Before Tianming approached the star, he saw a few gigantic warbeasts charge into the black fog around it. The star was spewing out black fog like an inflating balloon. There were hundreds of openings on its surface expelling the fog. When he looked closer, he found that they were hexagonal as well.
If it's spewing out so much fog, it must be hollow inside. And those hexagons....
Before Tianming could finish his thought, Lin Hongchen exclaimed, "Why does that star look so similar to an order?" He was referring to the spherical honeycomb briquette.
"That's right!" Tianming finally remembered. The briquettes had many hexagonal holes all over them, based on their grade. Tianming touched the black fog and found that it was some kind of primeval source. It was so dense that it almost felt heavy.
"We're a little late. A lot of people have already gone down there. Some might even have gone into the hexagonal holes," Lin Hongchen said.
"That's right." Tianming felt a little apprehensive about the entire thing. Everything—from the hive that appeared in the Oldgod Domain to the nest inside the ring—seemed to look like the order of cosmic cartographers, and now an analog to the spherical honeycomb briquettes had appeared.
Is that the final battlefield? Who built it? Was it the queen bee, or someone else??He plunged into the fog together with Lin Hongchen, still holding that thought.
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