Chapter Ninety-Seven: Did the Balls Burst?

“Huh? How did you do that? Why doesn’t it hurt at all?” Li Ren stared at the clear scratch on his arm. He thought about it for a long while, but in the end he still asked in confusion.

“If you keep talking nonsense, I really won’t care about your damned egg anymore,” Landis barked. Li Ren immediately fell silent and did not dare to say another word.

No one knew what Landis had been thinking, but she had actually come up with such a method. She managed to scrape bone dust from Li Ren without needing a single drop of blood. It was truly a brilliant and inventive trick.

Fortunately, the eggshell was already covered in cracks, so there was no trouble getting the powder to seep in.

And so, under everyone’s eager gaze, Landis began her secret art.

Li Ren held the enormous egg in his arms. Through the bone dust scraped from his body, the two began to connect, and countless glittering threads started to rise from them both.

Everything coming from Li Ren was black: wild, arrogant lines that danced through the air with a haughty defiance. By contrast, the egg emitted a faint starlight, and the black threads rising from Li Ren seemed to provoke it into aggression.

The two forces faced off in midair, then erupted into violent sparks. Whenever they collided, both sides generated torrents of annihilation.

By then, Li Ren’s mind had already been emptied of all thought. The sheer loss of his life’s source alone was enough to make him feel a tearing agony that split him apart.

As his essence kept diminishing, it was like his soul was being ripped apart over and over, his original spirit consumed without receiving even the slightest replenishment.

If his soul were to be completely exhausted before any replacement could be supplied, then he, Li Ren, might truly vanish from this world forever, leaving not a trace behind.

Fortunately, the annihilation between the two finally changed.

Amid the ceaseless destruction of black light and starlight, a strand of black thread tinged with silver began to form slowly from the place where the two forces met.

Though slow, it was still being created.

Under the influence of Landis’s secret art, all of Li Ren’s life essence had been drawn out, and the same was true of the egg’s, though very little had remained to begin with.

Compared with the egg, Li Ren still held an overwhelming advantage. In the end, through the prolonged annihilation between the two sides, Li Ren finally gained the upper hand.

The newly formed essence, black threaded with starlight, was infused by the remaining essence within Li Ren, becoming ever deeper in color. Though the starlight still remained, it could no longer escape being reduced to a subordinate presence.

When the last trace of essence had finally completed its transformation outside the body, the tension that had long been held in Landis’s chest loosened slightly.

Only she knew how dangerous that moment had been.

If not for Li Ren’s good fortune, this round of annihilation might truly have left him with nothing at all in this world.

Though it sounded like a long time, in truth it had all been accomplished in just a few breaths.

Landis split the newly formed essence and poured it back into Li Ren and the egg. This life-and-death task was finally brought to a close.

Not long after, the flame of the soul in Li Ren’s eyes, which had gone dim and nearly vanished, began to burn again.

He swayed where he stood and nearly collapsed on the spot.

“Ah, I’m dizzy. I feel like I’ve lost too much blood. No, no, Shadow, hurry and help me up. I can’t take it anymore,” Li Ren muttered, reeling with vertigo. Without looking closely, he instinctively reached forward. Under normal circumstances, Shadow would indeed have been standing there, but this was no normal circumstance.

Standing beside him now was Landis, who had just finished casting the secret art and was at her weakest.

The result was that the two of them, through a cruel twist of fate, ended up colliding there. Like a rough-and-ready man, Li Ren threw an arm around Landis’s shoulder, but he had not reckoned with his own weight. Landis could not support him, and the two toppled together. It was only after Li Ren crashed to the ground that a faint trace of clarity returned to his mind.

When he saw Landis beneath him, he immediately knew something was wrong. But in a flash of inspiration, he kept up the act of being weak and cursed, “Shadow, are you trying to die? You actually tripped me. I’ll get my revenge on you!”

Then he rolled his eyes, extinguished the flame of his soul, and lay on the ground pretending to be dead.

Shadow and Lania had witnessed the embarrassing scene unfold before them. Then they saw Li Ren so shamelessly pretending to be confused and insane, and Landis’s beautiful face instantly flushed crimson with rage. She did not even turn back before disappearing from where she stood.

“My lord, wake up. Landis is gone,” Shadow said softly, as if speaking too loudly would let Landis hear as well.

“Hm? She’s really gone?” Li Ren’s soul-fire opened in his eyes.

“Yes, she is.”

“Good, good.” Li Ren sat up with a thump and scratched his head out of habit.

“Is Landis angry?”

“That’s hard to say. You know the Queen’s temper. I think you’d better apologize properly to Her Majesty later,” Shadow advised kindly.

“That makes sense. I’ll do that when the time comes. But since she’s not here right now, I suppose it doesn’t matter. She probably doesn’t need to be present for the remaining steps anyway. Let’s first release that culprit and take a look,” Li Ren said in agreement.

The three of them said no more nonsense. At once, they placed the egg, which Li Ren had already completed the ritual of claiming, into the Field of Death’s Petition.

As Li Ren’s authority was issued, countless souls were forcibly drawn into the egg. Rather than being taken in, it was more like the giant egg was devouring every soul here.

The soul storm caused by the frantic absorption nearly formed a vortex, and the number of souls in the Field of Death’s Petition began to drop sharply.

The speed of the decline was astonishing. To put it in the most unexaggerated way possible, every single second, it was as if one Lania had been alive and eaten by that giant egg.

Fortunately, the process did not last long. If it had, Li Ren might have genuinely decided he no longer wanted this thing.

Even so, it still swallowed a full three hundred million souls before stopping.

The turbulence of souls finally ceased, and the giant egg returned to its original state.

The enormous cracks on the surface had completely vanished. Beneath the smooth, lustrous shell, it seemed as if some powerful life form was beating within.

The three of them stared fixedly at the eggshell before them. Then, with a sudden boom, the shell bizarrely exploded, shattered into countless fragments, and scattered in all directions. After a flurry of chaos and confusion, something strange appeared in its place.

Hm? Strange?

Well, not exactly. It was just that the contrast was too much for everyone to accept at once.

They had at least expected something as impressive as a Holy Dragon Knight. Instead, out came such a little thing, and it even had roughly the same bearing as its master. It truly was worthy of being a pair formed after a successful bond!