Chapter 765: Sinister Spirits

At present, Fang Yi wasn't strong enough to be able to use that temporal energy directly; he had to mediate it with his genetic energy instead.

By combining it with his wind- and thunder-attuned genetic energy and affixing the combination to his spear, he was able to accumulate power through his attacks. With sufficient power, he could form a wheel of time, each of which would increase his perception of time by one second.

In other words, in a single second, Fang Yi would be able to perform two seconds' worth of attacks. A single second might not seem like much, but it might well be the determining factor in fights at Fang Yi's level.

A single additional second of movement would shift the tempo of the fight toward Fang Yi, and Fang Yi's wheels of time could continue stacking on each other and raising his attack speed to unfathomable levels.

This was the new technique that Fang Yi had been working on since his fight with Zhang Lie.

"I was hoping to use this technique to surprise Zhang Lie, not expecting to have to resort to it so quickly—but we are in the third realm, after all."

By then, Fang Yi had layered twenty wheels of time on himself, and he was moving so quickly to an observer that even his speech became a garbled mess. No one knew what he was saying. He attacked at an unimaginable rate: his spear left so many afterimages behind it almost seemed like a trail.

The entire sky seemed to be filled with black cloth and bandages as more and more wheels of time appeared behind Fang Yi. At the beginning, it had taken Fang Yi a whole minute of attacking to generate one wheel, but now, it only took three seconds.

When Fang Yi got to thirty stacks, the afterimages of his spear melded together into a true trail. His arms were shadows, invisible to the naked eye, and he was surrounded by strips of black cloth and bandages that were testament to the number of black spirits he had killed.

Suddenly, a black spirit surrounded by dark energy appeared. It was twice the size of the other black spirits, and the black cloth bandages around its body waved violently like snakes. It gave off a strong sense of foreboding as it attacked Fang Yi with its cloth.

"You must be the leader of the black spirits!" Fang Yi cried out, breaking into a grin.

The black spirit didn't respond. It waved its bandages around like a scythe, which Fang Yi easily dodged with his enhanced speed. The bandages on the black spirit spun in a spiral and twisted into the shape of a corkscrew that shot toward Fang Yi.

A dragon's roar resounded through the air like peals of thunder. Wind and storm combined and crackled at the tip of Fang Yi's spear. His spear, which looked at that moment like an electric drill, struck the black spirit's corkscrew.

Fang Yi's attack was faster and naturally possessed more penetrating power.

His spearhead shot straight toward the black spirit, whose corkscrew-bandage suddenly split apart into the form of a whip.

However, Fang Yi was prepared. With the thirty wheels of time at his back, the black spirit's sudden transformation was easy for him to adapt to.

Rather than charge forward recklessly, Fang Yi took a step back. The black bandages cut the ground like a blade of wind; luckily, Fang Yi had reacted in time, or he would have been severely injured.

Once the black spirit realized that it wasn't a match for Fang Yi, the bandages on its body split apart and linked with those of the other black spirits. It pulled the hundreds of black spirits remaining on the battlefield close.

Fang Yi, realizing that something was amiss, immediately struck. His black spear left thousands of afterimages behind as he attacked the black spirits' combined form like a storm.

Out of the combined spirits emerged a flood of black bandages which clashed against Fang Yi's spear. As the combined spirits moved, they gave off a huge cloud of black smoke. More and more wheels of time appeared behind Fang Yi's back.

The spear moved so quickly that it was burning up from the friction. Its surface turned red-hot as Fang Yi forcefully defended against the spirits' attack. Meanwhile, the combined spirits morphed into a gigantic black spirit, dozens of meters tall. Its body was swollen with a few human-sized lumps.

As it raised its hand high into the air, thousands of black bandages shot out of its body and fell toward Fang Yi like raindrops.

"[Born of Lightning, Swallowed by the Wind]!" As Fang Yi shouted, his spear traced a half-moon in the air, surrounded by an aura of time.

The spear pierced space and time, its tip descending into the void. Everything froze and turned gray: the gigantic spirit, as well as the bandages shooting down toward Fang Yi. The only color—the only movement—in the world came from Fang Yi.

The thirty wheels of time to his back radiated light as they fought off the onslaught of frozen time.

Compared to when he was in the second realm, Fang Yi had improved by so great a margin that it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call him a new man entirely.

Not only was he able to move his spear in the space of frozen time, he was even able to move his body now as well. Though he was still only able to move slowly, the speed at which he moved didn't really matter when everything else was frozen.

Fang Yi stabbed his crackling spear into the gigantic black spirit, and the grayness broke. The world snapped back to its colored form as time began to move again. The wind and lightning at the tip of Fang Yi's spear burst in an explosion so spectacular even the human and draconian guards on the wall had to shield their eyes.

The gigantic black spirit exploded.

Fang Yi had thought that he would be able to kill the black spirit in one strike, but the black spirit proved to be even more stubborn than he had expected.

A huge hole had been blown out of its chest, and he could see the sky on its other side. However, even so, the black spirit wasn't dead. A huge cloud of black smoke emanated from its wound, and the black cloth surrounding its body began to heal the massive hole.

The bandages on the black spirit began to twist and transform into something even more sinister as parts of its body were revealed. Fang Yi saw row after row of sharp teeth, within which emerged babies' cries, so shrill he couldn't help but cover his ears.

𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Even the guards on the wall, far away, had to do the same thing.

Eyes appeared out of the skin revealed by the shifting bandages—not just on the face of the black spirits, but all over their bodies. On the other hand, where its eyes should have been located, there was only a singular purple iris.

The eyes that dotted its body had no sclera or pupil, only an eerie green glow amidst the darkness which seemed to be directed straight at Fang Yi, at those who walked amidst darkness...