Chapter 1170: Fear (I)

The Great Li king rushed over, he was furious now as well. A full set of boxing gloves appeared over his fists and he roared, erupting with twin punches. The void shattered from the blows!

He’d brought out the second boxing glove that he possessed. Ying Hongyue sighed at the sight. The Great Li king... was an idiot!

“Withdraw!” Ying Hongyue disappeared after a grunt. The immensely suffering Celestial Sword Immortal and others promptly scattered. Below them, large numbers of members from the three great organizations were being slaughtered!

Their leaders took some with them as they fled, but since there were tens of thousands of members, they saved less than one-tenth of the total number.

The Great Li king wanted to chase after the madly fleeing leaders, but Gan Wuliang hopped back to his side. “Don’t chase them! Ying Hongyue is going to fully let loose if you do. We need to wear him down bit by bit! We should go to Ash Mountain. These guys are probably headed west. Notify the marquis and have him seal off Divine Nation...”

The Great Li king frowned and looked at Gan Wuliang, saying after a beat, “Don’t stare at me. It’s uncomfortable for me to look at you! If this king was Li Hao, I would kill someone like you!”

“Therefore... Your Majesty is not His Lordship, are you now?” laughed Gan Wuliang.

The king sniffed and couldn’t deign to respond. He suddenly wondered if Gan Wuliang had been sent to him because Li Hao couldn’t stomach him either? It was an exceedingly uncomfortable feeling to have someone know what he wanted to do or say before he even spoke of it.

“Gan Wuliang, you should refrain from using this power as much as possible,” the king suddenly said. “Otherwise... death will be the only fate in store for you!”

“Thank you for your concern, Your Majesty...” Gan Wuliang smiled. “Not using it might cause even more worry. People might think that I have ulterior motives in mind by hiding my abilities.”

The Great Li king was at a loss for words. That was... true! Those who knew of his ability would also know that he wasn’t using it, wouldn’t that be more concerning instead?

This was quite a conundrum.

“Not to mention, His Lordship doesn’t care about this. Your Majesty is underestimating my lord.”

“Is that so?” The Great Li king was noncommittal and didn’t say anything further. He glanced in the direction that Ying Hongyue and the others had left in. “This person is a very difficult opponent. We’ve only eliminated some of his men after multiple encounters...”

“That’s enough!” Gan Wuliang grinned radiantly. “We’ll wear him down through a war of attrition until he’s all by his lonesome. His Lordship will be even happier when his old enemy is a stray dog roaming the streets!

“Even if we do have a chance to kill Ying Hongyue, we cannot do so without a plan. That might give rise to unexpected trouble. What we need to do is to cut off his support and break his limbs, so to speak. We need to turn all his years of effort and accumulation into nothing!

“It’s a good thing that he’s running to the west, but his people cannot get away! If he goes to the west... this person has ambition. The Moon God of the west may not be able to win against him. If he seizes the moon, he... will... restrain the Red Moon exalted emperor somewhat. That will actually decrease the marquis’ enemies.

“When he and the Moon God fight, the seal will not be affected if either one of them dies. And it is only because it is the two of them that this outcome is possible.”

The Great Li king furrowed his brows. Ying Hongyue was related to the seal, as was the Moon God. If the two of them fought each other, that would only serve to limit each other.

“Is Li Hao not afraid of putting his enemies together? What if the two decide to work together and become an even bigger problem for him?”

“They won’t be as difficult as an exalted emperor!” Gan Wuliang shook his head. “The marquis wants them to keep the exalted emperor in check. It’s better if Ying Hongyue wins. The Moon God is brash and impetuous and will more easily trigger the seal. If Ying Hongyue wins, he’s shrewd enough that he won’t trigger it. Hence, the marquis would rather he wins!”

“Li Hao knows about all of this in advance?” The Great Li king’s eyes widened.

“I don’t know... I mean that I myself don’t know. I’m just guessing. After all, if the marquis really wanted to kill Ying Hongyue, he might’ve done so a long time ago. Perhaps he sent me here in pursuit of that goal...

“There’s no need to guess the marquis’ intentions,” Gan Wuliang laughed. “Don’t misunderstand, Your Majesty, I’m just talking about my own speculations.”

The Great Li king remained frowning fiercely; he cursed to himself! He hadn’t felt this way about Li Hao’s side before, but now he felt that there wasn’t a single good person in the young man’s camp.

You lot can have fun fighting each other!

So long as Ying Hongyue left Great Li, the king didn’t care what happened to the rest of the continents. The sooner Ying Hongyue left, the sooner this other bastard would leave too. The king was quite uncomfortable with Gan Wuliang’s presence.

“Your Majesty just needs to help me with killing one of the other three leaders,” Gan Wuliang said. “I will leave after that. Of them, Yama will be the easiest because he’s kept so many emotions bottled up lately that he’s about to explode. Just the slightest bit of provocation will induce him to stay and fight. We’ll kill him at our next encounter!”

He turned back in the southern direction, at where Silver Moon was. Although it’d only been a few days, he knew that Li Hao would not sit idle. The young man certainly had new plots afoot. If he didn’t return quickly and missed a cultivation opportunity, he might fall behind the group again.

He needed to kill one of leaders as soon as possible and return home. Opportunities could be had everywhere these days, he didn’t wish to keep being tied down to Ying Hongyue. This person was a very thorny opponent and hard to kill. Gan Wuliang would be getting the short end of the stick if they fought. He was only occupying some advantages now because the other did not know him well.

The marquis probably wants Ying Hongyue to be forced to go west... right?

Gan Wuliang mentally snapped alert. Something undesirable might happen next time if he kept dwelling on this matter.

......

The Hao Cosmos.

A transformation of the void and a shifting of the stars. Li Hao moved the celestial bodies again and again, traversing the void.

After an indeterminate period of time, the world turned over with a loud rumble. The cosmos turned dark and all of the stars disappeared, as if entering a black chaos.

Li Hao panted heavily from exertion. He strode through the void and was suddenly met by wind, fire, thunder, and lightning. Light flared, darkness descended, the five elements erupted, and all manner of weaponry rushed out...

Li Hao smiled, an expression that quickly collapsed into a frown. It was too hard to fix the entrance!

According to what Capsize Sea said, there was a center to the universe. However, it was very hard to locate, so Li Hao temporarily gave up on it. But at the same time, there was a need to stabilize the entrance to one point. He couldn’t appear in a different location each time he tore through the void.

He could connect to the Hao Cosmos, but what would be the medium? Director General Wang and the others used their core origin dao, he didn’t have that. Stellaris was actually a good medium, but it had sadly broken. What could he use instead?

Li Hao looked through his storage ring. He had plenty of weapons, the strongest of which was the imitation of the Mirror of Wind and Cloud. The commander level armor that he’d just obtained was also nice, but hardly noteworthy.

He didn’t lack weapons, but he did lack truly formidable weapons. He wouldn’t be able to have a weapon be the medium then...

If a weapon won’t do, what about the physical body? If the physical body won’t do... how about a great dao?

What if he wove his supernatural characters into a river of great dao and created an opening in the Hao Cosmos that way? That would connect back to him and conduct the power of great dao into him.

He’d never contemplated the possibility before, but this was now firmly part of his considerations. He sat down cross-legged in the middle of the universe and contemplated how to weave a great dao. What kind of great dao would be more suited? What great daos would he need in the happenings to come?

Li Hao had temporarily set aside daos of attributes. He’d already given his five elements to other people, leaving only the wind, thunder, light, and darkness attributes, as well as the body dao meridian.

Should I use the body dao meridian?

With dao as the medium! Would that work? But if the enemy discovered it, would they break the great dao?

He imagined the sight of a great dao hanging overhead. It would be a steep and lofty existence to anyone else, unless he could fully conceal it and hide it in the void like core origin dao.

The attribute of darkness and body dao?

Could darkness obscure everything? The great dao originated from the Hao Cosmos and could pierce through the barrier, but the concern here was that an enemy might break it. That would shatter the dao meridian, which would be the equivalent of breaking the great dao.

Cultivators died when their core origin dao broke. While humans of the new age wouldn’t suffer the same, they also had more than one dao meridian. Having one snap wouldn’t result in their deaths, but their strength would be immensely affected all the same.

Li Hao tilted his head back and sank into deep thought. How could he secure the dao meridian so that others could not break it? He looked at the concealed dao universe in front of him. What if he used the dao universe as the source and moving water as the foundation?

Various ideas made him itch to spring into action. Someone had once said that so long as he was alive, he should give everything a try. Therefore, Li Hao waved his hand and summoned a large sword of dao from the sword sector. It swung down, creating a crack in the circular center.

The young man swiftly arrived and punched the crack, deepening it within the void.

A dao universe was exceedingly durable. The Saint-level Wu Peng had been unable to puncture it, but Li Hao easily did so. The young man was familiar with the layout of the dao meridians. One would never pierce through it by randomly flailing around.

Only if one struck the connection point of each dao meridian was there a chance to break through. It wasn’t possible to rupture the dao universe with haphazard hits.

The connection points of the dao meridians weren’t the locations of the celestial bodies either. Li Hao had moved them; dao meridians appeared where the stars first appeared. In this vast universe, one would never find the spot again after he moved the star away.

Perhaps only the young man knew where the original connection point was. Of course, if one was lucky, one might precisely strike the correct spot. But the odds of that... were very small!

He’d punched through the void to the world outside. It was a blurry expanse, so Li Hao couldn’t tell where it was. He’d just randomly exited to a place in the world.

Li Hao vanished from the Hao Cosmos and reappeared on a snowy mountain. Silver Moon needed to center around him and the entrance needed to fix its coordinates on him. They couldn’t be randomly determined.

He focused on the loop of celestial bodies in the Hao Cosmos as the center and created a connection between himself and the dao universe. They were one now and this would be his exclusive entrance in the future.

With a soft grunt, several dao meridians appeared inside his body. They were particularly thick and appeared to be like dragons. There were five of them—body, wind, thunder, light, and darkness!

The five dao meridians entwined around each other like five dragons circling in the air. He spontaneously drained the surroundings of their energy. Li Hao didn’t mind the reaction; he tilted his head at the sky, frowning at it.

The five dao meridians weren’t weak, but they weren’t enough!

Many weapons manifested in his storage ring and crumbled away into pure energy, melding int the dao meridians. That still wasn’t enough!

The five dragons devoured everything, but still didn’t feel durable enough. After some thought, Li Hao swiftly extracted a large quantity of Water of Life and large sums of ore. He didn’t know how to forge items, but that was alright. He might just have a higher degree of waste in the process, it didn’t matter so long as the end result was durable enough.

Weapons shattered and currents of energy fused together. A massive treasure seemed to have formed in the world. Life was born!