The canister, repurposed as a mortar shell, spun with immense force, hurtling toward the blazing figure charging forward.
The iron canister slammed into Hong Haocheng’s shoulder, flesh instantly exploding upon impact.
The scorched boy was hurled back into the flames by the sheer force, rolling across the ground like a broken doll, one arm torn from his body and flung away.
“Ha, haha, hahahaha. Mess with me, huh!”
Ruan Jiancheng laughed wildly, cursing.
“Just a newcomer, a piece of trash who chose to coexist with Demonic Nightmares. Dead now, aren’t ya!”
But Ruan Jiancheng’s maniacal grin gradually faded.
Because the man on the ground, now missing a shoulder, was trembling as he used his remaining hand to push himself up, his muscles twitching and swelling.
“Why… attack… me…”
A hoarse voice rang out from within the flames…
Cheng Yunze studied the scene with grim focus from his sensory perception.
Even a person so gravely injured could still manage to stand.
……
[I obtained 257.7N.]
In the flames, Hong Haocheng felt his mind grow hazy. He hungered for blood, and yearned for that delicious… trajectory vein, within the blood!
He opened his blood-red eyes, staring ahead like a beast.
Suddenly, countless twisted lines emerged behind the trembling figure after the earthen cannon blast.
After taking two steps forward, a bizarrely shaped iron can phantom came charging again with a roar! Hong Haocheng kicked off the ground, his toes lightly rising, tilting his body sideways to brush past the iron can streaking past his shoulder as he charged forward.
“What, missed!” Ruan Jiancheng stared in disbelief as the figure lunged toward him.
The muscles beneath the man’s skin bulged, like a leaping panther.
Boom! Ruan Jiancheng was instantly sent flying backward by an immense force, and he felt that nearly two hundred years had been erased from him.
The two crashed onto the ground with thuds.
Ruan Jiancheng pressed down fiercely on the man, sneering, “Haha, bet you didn’t expect this. This isn’t Earth anymore; your attacks are completely useless against me…”
Even as he spoke, Ruan Jiancheng guiltily swallowed a mouthful of saliva.
Because the beast-like gaze before him stared back with an icy presence that felt utterly devoid of pain.
Hong Haocheng opened his mouth.
“The taste seems rather ordinary…”
“Taste?”
Ruan Jiancheng shifted his trembling gaze to Hong Haocheng’s charred, severed shoulder.
At the place where his left arm had vanished, a faint phantom of an arm had emerged, and it seemed to be pulling at certain energy threads like pinching thread ends, connecting Yang Cheng’s now missing arm to the other man’s own body.
……
In a car racing away in the distance.
Cheng Yunze’s gaze, which had been fixed on the scene, instantly sharpened.
“Psychic ability?!”
In the financing broadcast, investors betting on Ruan Jiancheng across the city erupted in frantic jeers.
{The one fucking striking f**k he’s dead meat!}
{Quick, divest!}
On the back seat of the sedan, a foreigner with disheveled hair immediately bit his lip firmly, silently withdrawing his earlier investment of a few hundred years of timeline granted to Ruan Jiancheng.
[I will withdraw the 500N invested in Ruan Jiancheng, with 20% timeline loss. 400N duly reclaimed.]
Ruan Jiancheng, by now driven nearly mad, scrambled to his feet from the ground, trying to flee.
*Tug!*
“Ah!”
Ruan Jiancheng felt an indescribable, horrifying sensation of being pulled, rising from the depths of his soul. He couldn’t help but fall to the ground, covering his face and rolling around, screaming.
“Sssshhh, sssshhh.”
Ruan Jiancheng’s just-lifted head froze in place as his eyes rapidly became dazed and dull.
“Captain!”
Within the flames, one of Ruan Jiancheng’s teammates finally crawled out from the explosion. Covered in a golden glow, he stared in shock at the scene before him.
The right arm crafted from the energy projection of the distant scorched man grabbed, as if pulling a tangle of yarn, that which connected to Ruan Jiancheng, began stuffing it unceremoniously into his own mouth.
“Ah! You killed the captain… and with such severe injuries, you’re still standing. What are you, a demon?”
The scorched boy suddenly turned his head, revealing a face like roasted meat.
“Temporal Order, Three Thousand Five Hundred Years—what does this mean?”
Zhang Miao, covered in golden light, stepped back in fear and stammered,
“Th-three thousand five hundred? Ah, you’ve taken all the endowments the captain obtained?!”
Hong Haocheng gradually regained a bit of consciousness. He had been flung by the explosion earlier, and amid the violent tremors, he felt he had passed out.
But as he woke slightly, he found that he had devoured a person’s soul. It wasn’t quite a soul, actually—what he consumed were just that person’s traces and a few fragments of memory.
Yet, these, like the information exchanged with Little Xu earlier, were mere snippets—as fleeting as hearing a soul’s murmurings, quickly fading away.
At that moment, Zhang Miao, staring at Hong Haocheng, trembled all over as countless jagged lines flickered across his chest.
{Don’t kill this Red Model guy.}
{Kill him now—this bastard can’t be kept alive.}
{Can’t be killed. He attacked you first, so it’s fair enough to be countered. This one’s rare; don’t act rashly.}
{Hurry, accept my endowment and take out this new Red Blush ace!}
Zhang Miao was drenched in cold sweat.
{Kill!}
{No kill!}
{Act now!}
{If you do, I, the Thousand Blade Team, wipe you out!}
Zhang Miao was intensely nervous—he had never been treated like this.
[Wang strives to endow me with full rights to temporal order of 3000 N, with 7-day validity.]
[Li Feng wants to endow me with 4500 N of full temporal order validity, with 30 hours left.]
[Zhu Qianming wants to invest 5000N full-authority time sequence in me, effective for 1 day.]
At this moment, hundreds of people wanted to invest in me, including some big names I usually only knew by reputation. But the demands they gave were in complete opposition to each other.
Both sides were threatening me—what was I supposed to do?!
……
A Demonic Nightmare car sped along the road. On both sides, countless figures walked around, paying no attention to the vehicle. These people were phantoms from Earth that only appeared on this day.
“Boss, this newcomer has already awakened such strong model capabilities. Should we eliminate him?” someone in the car asked gravely.
Cheng Yunze’s eyes held an indescribable expression.
“Find him first. If he can use model abilities, it means his parasitic Demonic Nightmare hasn’t died yet. Let’s hurry!”
The galloping Demonic Nightmare car’s speed increased by a hair.
……
The charred Hong Haocheng stood up. He sucked in the last line of energy, silently watching Zhang Miao, who was struggling to stand ahead.
[I have obtained 17,500 miles of Sail-Ink Drawing.]
[We have obtained 3,521.7N.]
“Why did you attack me?” Hong Haocheng’s hoarse voice asked him.
“You… catalyzed a parasitic Demonic Nightmare.”
Hong Haocheng looked at the constantly flashing color on the circle in front of the other man’s chest, then lowered his gaze to his own. Right now, several red jagged lines extended within his own gradually changing circular emblem, but they struggled to fully manifest, as if still developing.
Hong Haocheng looked up and said:
“I am red, you are white… Just because our colors are different, is that why you attacked me?”
Moment after moment, voices canceling each other rang out in his mind; just from uttering two sentences, the thousands of year’s worth of Time Sequences he had just acquired had been reduced by decades.
At the same time, another voice rose in his heart.
It kept crying out painfully with a “ya yi,” like an infant in desperate need of protection.
Hong Haocheng turned his head to look at the explosion site of the airplane.
Inside, two figures were still struggling. They had not died yet due to their extended lifespans, but the impact of the blast had severely damaged the parts of their bodies not fully protected, unable to get up and leave. Little by little, flames and high heat kept draining their Time Sequences.
A wave of indifferent emotion drove Hong Haocheng to walk toward the airplane.
“Wait, my name is Zhang Miao. I want to become your teammate.”
Seeing that his opponent was not continuing the attack on him, Zhang Miao gritted his teeth and said.
Both sides were threatening him, and all because of this man standing right before him!
“Oh?” Hearing this, the charred Hong Haocheng turned his head toward the man: “For… what.”
“Because you need a guide to get familiar with this place quickly, and I can do it!”
Hong Haocheng’s body ached unbearably, and the strange power that sustained him was rapidly fading.
With no time to explain much, Hong Haocheng, while he could still move, quickly walked toward the smaller flames. Passing by a few iron rods, he scooped them up casually and hurled them at the two struggling figures in the cabin opening. The rods pierced into their bodies.
[We have gained 112.3N.]
[We have gained another 44.6N.]
Only then did Hong Haocheng look at his own single arm and hand—why had he made such a decision without hesitation?
Zhang Miao ran over and said with difficulty, “Let me go in there too!”
If Zhang Miao still didn’t realize that the other party had acquired some extraordinary special ability, he would have thought himself too foolish!
Just from the reactions of those contacting him, it was obvious that the other’s Demonic Nightmare ability was certainly special beyond measure.
Mediocrity or becoming the right-hand man of a powerful person—this choice was the moment of decision!
No matter what, he had to take the gamble!
Hong Haocheng, standing before the gaping hole of the plane, turned his head to look back. Mustering his last bit of strength, he nodded and then stepped into the rest cabin ahead.
Leave a Reply