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That the unknown Ghost Cultivator could sense Lu Ye looking at them was sign enough that they were at least competent. But without any means to ascertain where Lu Ye really was, they did not want to risk revealing themselves further.
Moments later, the Ghost Cultivator was gone. Whether because of feeling insecure at being watched or something else, they had surreptitiously left the hiding spot.
Meanwhile, the iridescent cloud had stopped its advance at more than a dozen miles away from Lu Ye’s position.
He cast a gaze in the direction of the bright glimmering plumes, feeling a shiver creeping down his spine. That was where he was when the sighting of the Token of Providence event first started. If he had foolishly chosen to stay, then he would be just under the iridescent cloud now.
Whatever the matter was, he was glad that he had made the right choice or he would be in real danger.
[No, wait!]
Lu Ye remembered the last Token of Providence incident he witnessed. The iridescent cloud had released spates of Amulets in all directions away from it! No one would be at the bottom of the cloud because nothing would fall directly beneath the cloud!
[That means… I’m at the worst spot possible…]
[A dozen or so miles away from the iridescent clouds… That’s where the Amulets would fall…]
[Oh Heavens…]
Lu Ye was at a total loss for words at his own stupidity.
But it was too late for remedies. He could not afford to move an inch or he would expose himself. Everywhere around him, he could feel the presence of several Spiritual Power signatures, each carefully and deliberately distanced. Lu Ye did not even have to guess who they were: Cultivators who came for the Amulets.
The nearest one was perched atop a tree almost sixty meters away, looking up into the sky.
The only solution Lu Ye could come up with was to stay put. Only when the iridescent cloud started to disperse Amulets could he make use of the chaos to mount an escape.
He waited there, immobile and silent.
So did the others around him—the horde of Cloud River Realm Eighth- or Ninth-Orders nearby. There was no bickering or banter; everyone was poised to pounce.
Minutes passed in silence until Lu Ye heard a rustling susurration coming from the direction of the many-hued plume. It roiled and churned. What followed next was exactly what everybody here was waiting to see: ribbons of colorful lights shot out of the cloud like a mesmerizing display of a fountain of light as Amulets were spewed in different directions.
Whether Amulets were Gold, Purple, Blue, Green, or even White, no one knew which was which. The Amulets were not shining with their own respective colors when they first appeared. Only after flying for several miles would the Amulets finally emit the glow of their own colors.
Naturally, the strong would aim for higher-class Amulets while the weak could only stick to trying their luck with anything else easier and nearer.
But this particular Token of Providence event seemed to have attracted a huge following of Cultivators. The contest for the Amulets would most likely be a rampageous bedlam.
The Cultivators all watched with anticipation the many streamers of brilliant radiance zipping over their heads, each of them gradually fading to reveal the respective Amulets’ true nature. Requiring no further impetus, the multitude of Cultivators all rose as one, soaring into the skies to reach for the Amulets they were eyeing.
Some went up alone, others formed groups. It really was a veritable carnival, given how messy and discombobulated the humongous crowd in the sky was. Even so, more than half of the Amulets here had already been settled in the first few seconds before the free-for-all for the rest even began.
That was the cue Lu Ye needed. As everyone sprang into action, so did he.
Maintaining Glyph: Concealment needed slow movement equal to that of an ordinary person’s walking pace. He could not risk breaking his cover, therefore this was the fastest he could manage.
Lu Ye could sense the tumultuous undulations of Spiritual Power around him amidst a backdrop of frenzied skirmishes, where the amalgamation of snarls, grunts, and occasional wails of anguish resounded.
He did not need to turn around at all. Needless to say, the ongoing carnival of carnage around him was expectedly and understandably brutal and gritting.
If this were outside in the usual Cloud River Battlefield dimension, no one would have wanted to put their lives on the line just for a couple of Amulets. But here in the Carnage Colosseum, as soon as one realized that a fellow competitor of an Amulet was from an opposing faction, it would be a no-holds-barred deathmatch.
Lu Ye’s stealthy escape was steadily inching towards completion when a sudden blood curdling cry reverberated in the distance, rapidly drawing nearer and nearer until it swiftly shattered the otherwise growing silence, boring swiftly into his ears.
He jerked around just in time to see a blood-drenched Cultivator falling from the sky; clearly one of the defeated in the contest for Amulets. Someone must have struck him down and the amount of blood he had lost showed that he was heavily wounded. Especially since he was falling down from the sky without being able to regain any shred of balance at all.
There was one problem; he was falling straight into Lu Ye.
The precipitous fall made Lu Ye wonder if he could take the hit from that incoming human projectile.
Without any hesitation, he sidestepped immediately.
The swift movement caused Glyph: Concealment to fail and Lu Ye was exposed.
With a deafening bang, the man smashed into the ground, kicking up a dust storm of soot and smoke while he rolled again and again before finally stopping. Twice he tried to get up but to no avail. He was just too weak. He puked blood and scrambled to his knees, gasping for breath and his face as pallid as chalk.
Then his misty vision caught sight of a glow. The glow of a Battlefield Imprint on the back of another Cultivator’s hand!
[Someone’s nearby!] He realized. Then he noticed it. [A Grand Sky Coalition Cultivator!]
He looked up at once, his eyes meeting those of a bewildered and exasperated Lu Ye.
Lu Ye was just trying to get out of this mess only to get hurtled right back into trouble again.
The soft pale blue glow on the back of his hand was accentuated by the smog-filled ambiance like a beacon in a fog.
But there was no time for regret. Lu Ye swiftly recollected and propelled himself forward with the explosiveness of a predator lunging at prey, drawing Inviolable as he charged.
He did not know how powerful his foe still was; there was no time to think. But he looked badly injured, and since he was the only one to realize Lu Ye’s presence, Lu Ye could not risk letting him stay alive.
The stranger tried to clamber to his feet as he saw Lu Ye charge. But he was hurt during his skirmishes earlier and the fall had made the injuries worse. He could barely summon and focus his Spiritual Power and he could barely count the number of bone fractures all over him, making it almost impossible to get up.
But Lu Ye wasn’t going to wait until he got up and prepared to defend himself. He shot past the incapacitated man, his blade tracing a straight fiery arc across his throat.
With a petrifying shiver, the man stiffened, his lips quivering as if to speak although not a syllable came out.
A tiny red glow flew over and landed on the back of Lu Ye’s hand.
But he was quickly joined by another figure who landed abruptly beside him, the powerful signature of his Spiritual Power indicating that he was a Cloud River Realm Ninth-Order!
Shock and panic gripped Lu Ye as he forcefully swiveled himself to look at the back of the newcomer’s hand. That was when he finally calmed down.
Neither of their Battlefield Imprints lit up; they were both Grand Sky Coalition Cultivators.
The man peered at the dead body on the ground before he returned a glare at Lu Ye. Exasperated, he snorted, “Bloody thanks for stealing my kill, kid.”
That would mean that he was the one who had struck down the poor stranger and he had come down to finish off his opponent for good. But the kill—plus the Carnage Points—had fallen right into Lu Ye’s lap and he got to it first.
Lu Ye returned a blank look at him. He did not ask for it; it was the poor unlucky bloke who fell right in front of him and Lu Ye had no other choice but to complete the deed before he started to alert the whole Colosseum about his presence.
Nevertheless, the allied champion did not choose to begrudge Lu Ye any further. He quickly noticed that Lu Ye was just a Third-Order and frowned, “Get out of this place now before you get yourself killed!”
Lu Ye politely clasped his fist in formal greeting and turned around. He hurried away as quickly as he could this time, not even activating Glyph: Concealment.
The champion waited until Lu Ye was gone before he bent down and collected the dead man’s Storage Bag. Next, he pried open the man’s fingers and from inside retrieved a Blue Amulet.
He did not bully Lu Ye out of his just desserts; it was rightfully his all along.
The champion turned around. The pentachromatic iridescent cloud was churning once more. More beams of light sprayed everywhere from it, eliciting another round of Amulets whizzing in all directions. The champion took to the sky and rejoined the contest.
Lu Ye sped for almost a hundred miles without stopping. When he finally did, he looked back and saw the many-hued iridescent cloud now almost half of the girth of when he first saw it. The Token of Providence event had to be ending soon and the Golden Amulets would be appearing any moment now. To stay in the thick of the area now would be to get stuck between a two-sided royal rumble that would surely incur huge losses.
If only his cultivation rank was higher, then he would be able to join in the event too. He wouldn’t have to hanker for Purple or Gold Amulets; just the Blue or even Green ones would do.
But as a Third-Order, he would not be able to survive such a brutal pandemonium, especially by himself.
Lu Ye was about to turn around and leave when his gaze transfixed upon the Roster of Carnage.
The rankings on the Roster were changing with blinding speed. Several names vanished, giving way to others, indicating that these Cultivators have been slain or their names would not have gone missing for no reason.
Some would rise, signifying a triumph; while others fell several rungs as more piled higher to overtake them.
Then he saw a name at the fifteenth place on the Roster. A name that made the corners of his eyes throbbed uncontrollably.
[“Lu Yi Ye, Three hundred and seventy Carnage Points, one Golden Amulet”]
……
……
The last time he checked, his name was in the fifties of the Roster and as time passed further without him adding more kills to his belt, he was expecting his name to fall out of the Roster by another half-day’s time.
Yet here was his name, in the fifteenth place on the Roster, and his Carnage Points had now risen to as much as a whopping two hundred and fifty points compared to his former tally of a hundred and twenty!
[That’s impossible!]
Since the Carnage Colosseum began, Lu Ye had killed two enemies, and still, instead of falling out of the Roster of Carnage, he remained in the fifteenth place. At any rate, this was not an indication that the rest of the other contestants of the Colosseum were weak; most of the Rosters were Cultivators beyond the Seventh Order—Eighth- or Ninth-Orders at least.
That could only mean that the award of Carnage Points for killing a Cultivator far beyond one’s rank of cultivation must be very, very substantial indeed.
His first kill was a Fifth-Order; an enemy two ranks beyond his and that earned him a hundred and twenty Carnage Points.
The kill just now was a whopping two hundred and fifty points.
Lu Ye quickly made some calculations. That yielded the conclusion:
The unlucky bloke he slew just now was a Seventh-Order…
Cloud River Realm Seventh-Orders were worth fifty Carnage Points each. With the difference of four ranks between Lu Ye and the stranger he killed, that would multiply the amount by five times, making it two hundred and fifty Carnage Points in total.
[A Seventh-Order, eh?]
[Wow…] Lu Ye did not know what to say.
Just when he thought that his name would be dropping out of the Roster, it got propelled into prominence once more. There was no telling how long it would take this time for his name to plunge down again.
At the very least, Lu Ye was consoled by the fact that the Roster of Carnage did not reveal one’s rank of cultivation, or everyone in the Colosseum would see how a Third-Order’s name was smacked right in the middle of a bunch of Eighth- and Ninth-Orders. His name would stand out right from the first glance.
This reminded him of how he had got his name listed in the Spirit Creek Battlefield’s Roll of Supremacy at the rank of Heaven Seven, taking the entire Battlefield back then by storm.
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