Strongest Among the Heavens
Chapter 376: Gūniáng

Chapter 376: Gūniáng

The rage of battle was simmering. The rebel and the Royal Guard were reaching the predicted climax. Dasha had set the stage perfectly. So far, the players were performing their parts to perfection.

Underneath his feet, the fire roared down through the stairwells, a ravenous beast devouring everything in its path. Wooden beams cracked and splintered, collapsing with a deafening crash. The building coming down, so too did Dasha. Bit by bit, the building collapsing and lowered and lowered.

A young girl tried to pull her younger brother towards the exit, but a wall of flames blocked their path. She screamed for help. The adults around her were too engrossed in their own battles to notice. Her brother’s cries echoed through the smoke-filled air as she tried in vain to find another way out.

Dasha glanced over his shoulder at the smoke and the screams. His Qi Sense was semi-effective in the smoke. Certainly not omniscient yet fully aware of the hell he unleashed.

The fire consumed multiple floors, the heat intense enough to melt the paint off the walls and shatter the windows. Flames licked at the wooden beams, sending sparks showering down like deadly rain. The residents had been screaming for help this whole. From the start, however, it was too late.

Dasha had cut off their escape routes. They were all trapped them in a hellish inferno.

Parents tried to shield their children, using their bodies as barriers against the encroaching flames. Siblings clung to each other, their faces streaked with soot and tears. The heat was unbearable, the smoke suffocating. Desperation turned to horror as the realization set in: there was no way out. Every exit, every window, it was blocked or destroyed or too high to jump off of.

Something was always there.

In one room, an elderly woman sat in a chair, her eyes closed as the fire consumed the building around her. She had seen too much in her life to fear death. She simply waited, accepting her fate.

In another, a man pounded on a locked door, his fists bloody and raw. He screamed for help, his voice hoarse from the smoke, but there was no one left to hear him. The fire had turned the building into a tomb, and its residents into the doomed occupants.

The roof beneath Dasha continued to creak and go down. He stepped forward, a foot in the air. He waited, he waited...

BOOM!

...then he jumped. This building served its purpose. Now, it was time on.

***

A blur ran amok. A supreme source of Qi that had fallen meek and avoided combat. Hair in a bun, breathing in panicked exasperation from the battle and the wounds on his cheek and leg slowly stitching themselves. The white hanfu of Princess Liuying’s personal guard whipped back as his Qinggong dissipated. All could witness her personal crest drawn upon the long back and the sash, its seductive beauty marred by blood and tears.

Of all that had been tossed in this battlefield, the blur was perhaps the strongest.

Of all that were running, the blur ran untouched.

BOOM!

BOOM!

These explosions were not natural. These explosions were not caused by battle or the monsters. They were erupting from the ground.

Something was wrong.

Gūniáng ran, his thoughts and his heart and his wounds in disarray. He dashed into an alley, only to face the corpse of three werewolves and a phoenix. A team of fighters had already killed them.

But then the corpses began to light up—

BOOM!

The alleyway, the building, the three fighters responsible for killing it, and the Royal Guard’s right arm were swallowed up.

But he survived. Gūniáng ran through the smoke, gaping wounds on his knees and stomach weighing him down.

Already, his left arm dripped with blood, half-torn by the ringed hand of Wang Lun. In light of the explosions, of the potions and bombs he found in that bar, he ran. Gūniáng ran as far and fast as he could. In his usable arm lay a singular potion.

The sole piece of evidence hinting toward the identity of the man that dared to insult the princess.

"The princess must—"

Gūniáng collapsed. A Cultivator of the Late Core Formation and a master of Reverse Breathing, he should have traversed the marketplace in seconds. Reverse Breathing, in comparison to Tu Na Breathing, conceptualized building up Qi and then spreading it to the limbs in equal, powerful amounts. If only he had Qi to use. His Qinggong was exhausted from Wang Lun’s chase and bombs, placed by the rebel during the battle, had scorched his feet.

...although it was strange. Why bother with bombs when the rebel had never used them? Why attack when his bombs were so carefully placed?

"Maybe..." His eyes looked up. Some distance away was the end of the alleyway. "Maybe it wasn’t Wang Lun that placed those bombs....!"

The Royal Guard wondered if perhaps the bombs had intentionally placed there by the insurgent responsible for all this carnage. But how? How could the insurgent see so far? Predict so much? Neither Future Sight nor Foresight could do anything remotely close to this.

Gūniáng forced himself up and saw a glass of gray drop.

"Poison—!"

It had already struck and blown up on his face. He coughed and splattered. His Internal Healing was already wiping it away. He pushed himself without any arms, the potion tightly gripped in the sole remaining digits.

His eyes meet darkness and a glimmer of light.

Footsteps. Gūniáng remained still. All of a sudden, he became aware of the silence; of the stillness and fading explosions.

"We meet at last." The darkness left, leaving a tall figure donned in a Venetian mask. "I am glad you can hear me. The poisons that entered your system were a combination of various plants and toxins I bought here from the impoverished here. Think of it as the will of the people."

Gūniáng’s knees buckled. His vision turned red from the seeping blood. If it was one or two or three or fifty poisons, he could have washed it away.

But a hundred? A hundred at once? A hundred that twisted and became stronger? A hundred that merged and became thirty? His healing turned insufficient.

The royal guard dropped into the land of humans.

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