Chapter 2384 - Assault of the Ball
Moments before all that happened...
"Holy fuck fuck fuck!" No words could better describe Tianming's state of mind than those. After he was sent to the eye-shaped divine astralship, his vision completely blacked out. While he wouldn't die right away, he was completely done for. Yet he didn't stop wracking his mind for a way to escape, either. Even so, he knew that there was nothing a young person like him under the age of a hundred could possibly do to escape from hundreds of powerful cultivators who were mostly masters of the soul. He was nothing but a powerless infant to them.
While their orders couldn’t suppress him, they could easily use other methods to take care of him—Chi Hun, especially. He had acted especially quickly, immediately triggering the takeoff sequence of the ship the moment they’d entered.
Lin Yun came over and offered to hold Tianming by the back of his neck. While it was merely the hand of an old person, it was a hand that would decide whether he lived! "Lin Feng, you’ve committed a grave sin and been excommunicated from the Swordgod Lin Clan. You’d better accept your fate and punishment at the hands of the ebons."
While the one speaking was a member of the clan's council, Tianming refused to believe he represented the interests of the clan. "You alone can’t stand for the whole clan. Your act will only be considered as an act of betrayal."
"Impudence! You really have a shitty upbringing for you to dare to talk back to your seniors! That's another mark against you!" Lin Ziqing said, glaring at Tianming.
"That's enough," Chi Hun said. He already had Tianming in hand, so there was no point in employing unnecessary force. He had his eyes glued to the ring around Tianming's neck instead, and reached his hand out to take it.
He won't kill me for now. If he really wants to take away the monster inside the ring at the same time, I might have to thank him for it! Tianming decided not to resist, not that he could even if he wanted to.
Soon, Chi Hun's hand came into contact with the ring. He seemed stunned. "What in the world?" He grit his teeth as he applied more force, causing the ring to shudder. However, it didn't expand or contract at all. Even he was unable to control it!
"Rex Mundi, we just have to cut his head off to get the ring," Lin Ziqing floated the suggestion. Given how tightly the ring was wrapped around Tianming's neck, forcefully pulling it off would shear away his head; there was no way he would survive that.
Tianming made sure to remember how cruel and callous the two seniors from the Lin Clan were.
Chi Hun merely ignored her, as his actual mission was to retrieve Tianming. Yet he wanted the ring as well. That was what his son, Guchi Xiaoyin, had obtained before Tianming had taken it. While he wasn't too pained by the loss of his son, as he was still young enough for not too much to have been invested in him yet, Chi Hun did feel an interesting pull from the ring. It probably had something to do with how rapidly Tianming had improved. While Chi Hun was already in the top ten of the entire Infinitum Mundus, he no doubt wanted to make further progress... and the ring might be the key to that. But if he didn't kill Tianming, he might not be able to get it.
His eyes narrowed as he began to hold the ring with both hands, ignoring Tianming's pained look as he attempted to widen the ring. The amount of cosmoforce he had was far too terrifying, and merely being in its vicinity caused Tianming's neck and face to bleed. The neckring seemed to struggle against Chi Hun.
"So there's actually something in this world that even I can't forcefully subdue..."
Right as Chi Hun said that, Tianming felt the presence of Huang Qi.
"Hmph." It seemed that it was intent on sticking to Tianming no matter what; at least until his hand grew back so that it could be released! Chi Hun's forceful attempt angered it. "Ignorant ant, you seek nothing but trouble for yourself."
Even Chi Hun could hear those words, much to his shock. He widened his eyes and looked around. "Who said that?!"
Right after that, the ring suddenly contracted, slamming into Tianming's body. He felt a huge shockwave coming.
"Huh?" The moment the ring began compressing, intricate patterns spread throughout the area around him and the hexagonal holes all over his albi suddenly released a black miasma! His albi began to rotate and orient themselves. Tianming could feel them aligning themselves by connecting the hexagonal holes together, forming a brand-new structure. It was like a defensive mechanism had been triggered. "What in the world is going on?!"
Then, every single albus in his body expanded billions of times in size! His astral discs and minor stellar charts couldn't be seen at all. Instead, his black albi had completely changed into a different form. They were no longer based on human flesh and blood, but instead something like a kind of astral mineral. Were he to describe to others what was happening to him, they wouldn't believe him in the slightest.
It was definitely something Huang Qi had unleashed! Tianming was still alive and conscious. Like others who knew no better than him, he witnessed as his body turned into a black star with a surface area comparable to that of Archaion's. He had transformed into the Order Relic that had been integrated into his body! "What the... I turned into a ball!"
Ying Huo and the rest were in his lifebound space, completely unaffected. No doubt, the ebons around him were far more shocked than he was. Tianming's body had expanded so quickly that it triggered an explosion. The Order Relic was larger than the divine astralship, so Tianming's body expanded all the way, crushing the walls of the ship and pushing all the rubble into the divine astralship formation from within. Lin Yun, Lin Ziqing, and the hundreds of ebons around them were pressed hard against the formation, the force of the impact causing them to vomit blood. Lin Yun and Lin Ziqing had even been flattened into pancakes!
Tianming's ears were assailed by countless weird cries in an instant. Eventually, the divine astralship formation could no longer hold up against the force of the expansion and shattered as the Order Relic grew.
Chi Hun and some others were lucky enough that the expansion hadn't smashed into the nova source of the divine astralship. Had the formation around that been shattered, the resulting supernova might have killed all of them. Instead, they were sent flying off through the holes in the ship. That kind of damage could still be recovered, fortunately.
More than half of the crew had been sent flying out, while the other half were almost pressed into a flat, bloody mess against the insides of the ship. Had they not been elite astral gods, they would have died from being crushed. But even though they had survived, it would still require time for them to recover. Even after that, they would be in a weakened state for a long time, as the structures within their body would be scrambled. Lin Yun and Lin Ziqing pitifully cried out in their flattened state, losing much of their energy through their blood. When they began falling off the insides of the ship, they gradually regained their human forms, though they remained completely bloodied.
"What the hell happened?!" Lin Yun said with a hoarse voice, a few of his teeth gone.
"How would I know?!" Even Lin Ziqing was flabbergasted. Her face had been flattened and was incredibly ugly to behold. Despite all that, they still survived, a testament to the hardiness of cosmic cartographers. There was a good reason most of them had lifespans of thousands of years. As long as their cosmic atlases were still intact, the astrons that made up their body could eventually regain their former shape. Still, they had still sustained proper damage, hence how distraught they were.
"Over there!" Lin Yun saw the Order Relic hovering above Ebonia.
"Is that what Lin Feng transformed into? Not even astral gods can turn into stars!" Lin Ziqing shrieked, spewing blood all over the place.
"Where’s the rex mundi?"
"He should be in the other direction. I think he was sent flying by the explosion."
At least that would spare him the fate of being flattened. Nobody knew that this was even a possibility. Tens of other ebons had also been flattened, with many of their fauna worldstones crushed. The warbeasts within them didn't get a chance to react and had been crushed to death, as they didn't have heptastar cosmic physiques.
"We have to help the rex mundi!"
......
"What. The. Fuck." Tianming found that he could even roll his body around. He had become a ball in the truest sense.
"Grandpa! Grandma!" After the divine astralship had been blasted apart, he soon caught sight of Lin Xiao and Dongshen Yue. Their eyes were bloodshot from seeing him taken away, but the sudden explosion gave them renewed hope. Little did they know that the ball was actually their grandson.
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