Despite being in complete darkness, the old prisoner could sense what was happening above his head with perfect clarity. To a warrior as powerful and old as he, this darkness might as well be as bright as day.
As the old prisoner stood up and brought his attention to the ceiling above him, the aether around him began to stir as he circulated his own. However, mixed into this wild circulation though, was the presence of another type of energy. One that clearly felt...stolen.
The prisoner drew back his fist as he came to this decision, the weird energy and his aether coming together into one discordant mess.
As if the two weren’t meant to be combined in the first place.
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=To be fair, Pathos, the two of us had been sealed for a rather long time. Its not too unbelievable that some mortal cultivator stumbled upon one of the past lords’ inheritances or sealed kaijin. What they do after that though...only the gods know.=
=Oh right...I do miss that kingdom’s blueberry tea...too bad they can’t grow on scorched earth.=
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<> Zhen Xun Tian shouted as she punched at the barrier blocking her way.
A concussive sound akin to two fists slamming into each other echoed throughout the room as a result of this punch, followed by the sight of her hand bleeding. However, this injury didn’t stop the Zhen Clan matriarch from punching the barrier again and again.
Since the very start of the Fallen Clan’s onslaught, Matriarch Zhen Xun Tian, Patriarch Zhen Shi and the 24th Imperial Prince, Jinju Yang, were trapped in the matriarch’s skybox overlooking the Zhen Clan arena.
These three old monsters were forced to watch on the sidelines as their friends, family and attendants were forced to fight for their lives against enemies that they could’ve easily defeated.
It was infuriating, to say the least.
Making matters worst, the barrier holding them in place was a [Purgatory Blood Prison] seal, which are usually designed in such a way that any attacks done on it would bounce back at the attacker with the same amount of force. This meant that if they tried to break the barrier by force, then the three of them could end up accidentally killing themselves with their own power.
Not all warriors cultivated their attributes evenly after all.
This fact, however, did not stop Zhen Xun Tian from continuously punching the barrier in an attempt to break it. Evidently, she was so caught up in this particular act, she failed to notice certain battles going on the other side of the aforementioned barrier.
Zhen Shi and Jinju Yang were tempted to assist at first, but they were afraid of getting hit by a stray fist and subsequently killed due to the power gap between themselves, as Aether Lords, and Zhen Xun Tian, as an Aether Emperor.
Granted, while she didn’t blame the two of them for not helping due to this gap, she did think that the two of them were being massive pansies.
Her attacks were merely love taps by her estimations.
Regardless, Zhen Xun Tian eventually stopped punching the barrier as she started to come around to the idea that continuing to do so was pointless and a waste of energy. That and because Zhen Xun Tian decided that now wasn’t the time for keeping any more secrets.
<> Zhen Xun Tian declared in a fed-up tone, <>
<> Zhen Shi and Jinju Yang shouted simultaneously at the matriarch’s statement.
<> Zhen Xun Tian replied. <>
Zhen Xun Tian took up a strange stance as she began to circulate her aether throughout not only her body and [Regalia], but also the aether tattoos that decorated her entire body.
As the aether circulated into one particular tattoo though, a stylized squid located on her back, an entirely different type of energy began to fill the room. An energy that had this unnatural tinge to it.
<>Jinju Yang complained as he physically recoiled from the strange energy coming off of Zhen Xun Tian at the moment.
’Wait a minute...I know this energy! She can use [Chaos], too?!’ Zhen Shi mentally exclaimed in shock at this sudden revelation.
After the encounter with that Grand Fisher guy all those weeks ago, Zhen Shi had been secretly doubling his cultivation efforts, but not in regards to his usual aether routine. Instead, he had been communing with the Lesser World Serpent spirit inside his body to better understand what the fuck [Chaos] was exactly. The frost giant hadn’t exactly been forthcoming in regards to how this stuff worked, so Zhen Shi had been going it on his own, more or less.
He hadn’t made much progress in terms of wielding it in more creative ways other than through basic enhancement, but perhaps watching how the Zhen Clan matriarch leveraged this energy would serve as inspiration.
<> Zhen Xun Tian trailed off as she channeled more and more aether into the strange tattoo on her back. As she did, shadowy constructs made of aether and [Chaos] in the shape of tentacles began to form around her, extending from her back.
The tentacles initially appeared to be flailing about, but as Zhen Xun Tian began to focus on a singular spot on the barrier, they began to stiffen like spears, the very ends of the tentacles pointing at where Zhen Xun Tian was about to punch with all of her might.
[Centurion Kraken Strike!]
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<> the Puppet Elder asked his cohort.
<> the Gate Elder replied with a flat expression.
The effects of the strange skeleton woman’s scream was...extreme, to say the least.
All those affected by the scream had ended up one of two ways.
On one hand, they wound up horribly injured as various body parts of their wounded up either looking rotten like a freshly killed corpse, looking withered like a mummy dug up from their burial, or had decayed to the point of turning into dust like many, many members of the long gone dead. Disturbingly enough though, the rest of the body was still somewhat healthy after this scream, so the wounded could feel practically every inch of their damaged flesh.
On the other hand, they just wound up dead as the aforementioned effects affected multiple body parts at once or the afflicted parts happened to be ones that were necessarily for living, like the heart, the brain or the liver. In the case of the guy who was blasted at point blank range with the skeleton’s death scream though, the effects were a touch more dramatic.
The skeleton woman had somehow angle herself in such a manner that when she used her [Scream if Damnation] on the poor sap she had ensnared, only the upper half of the man had become infused with death aether.
This results in a rather macabre scene, as the upper half of the man looked dried and withered like a body that had been buried in the desert sand, while everything below the belt appeared to be fleshy and lively.
To say this sight was nightmarish would be an understatement of the highest degree, as those who had somehow managed to escape the death scream, were now stunned silent and scared at the sight in an almost primal manner.
A feeling that got worst once the skeleton woman did something even more unnerving.
[Still feel incomplete...I need parts.]
Without releasing herself from the half withered body of her ensnared victim, the skeleton woman proceeded to remove several bones from them before incorporating them into her own body, absorbing the matching skeletal structures until she was satisfied.
She was just about to grab some bones to enhance her spine, when she suddenly sensed something familiarly terrible coming from the ground beneath her feet.
And she wasn’t the only one to notice.