Guo Yuqing was right. The situation Jiang Qiubai was facing was rather gloomy.
As he went all out in that desperate fight, Jing Qiubai was too weak to stand on his own feet and had to be carried on the back of that two-tone eyed weird dog. He had lost an arm and a leg. Stumps of white bones were exposed in the air. He had also lost a ton of blood, so he was very pallid at the moment.
The only part of his body that was still intact was that handsome face.
“If you can’t beat them, just run for it. But you insisted to play the hero and take on the two all by yourself. Now, you got one arm and one leg chopped off. Are you brainless or what?” Grumbled the two-tone eyed dog. “Plus, I saw you only cared to protect your face. Is your face the Achilles heel? Hey, don’t die! Get a grip on yourself and stop bleeding. You’re smearing my sleek fur.”
Jiang Qiubai became short of breath and started coughing.
“I did want to fu*king run for it! If I discarded you three— a girl, a fox, and a dog— I would have long been out of their reach!”
Beside him, Shangguan Yuting looked unease. She hastily tried to stop the bickering. “General, stop goading him, please.”
At an earlier time when they were on the run, the dog disclosed that its name was General.
“What a brazen name!”
“Woof! Had it not been for the fact that the girl carries that brat Li Mu’s aura, on no account would I help you out. Now, I am also on the run like a hunted dog. Woof! Woof!” Barked General. The dog had a thing— it never stopped nagging the others. The saying “a filthy mouth cannot utter decent language” probably referred to its mouth. Although the dog engaged itself in noble deeds, it never uttered anything nice to hear.
At that complaint, Jiang Qiubai finally could not bear it and refuted, “What do you mean by… eh-hem… saying you are like a hunted dog. You are… eh-hem… a dog in the first place.” He kept coughing up blood as he remarked.
Shangguan Yuting clapped a hand over her forehead with embarrassment.
“The vibes of the man and the dog seem to be rather incompatible. The two start to argue the moment they converse.”
From previous conversations, she had learned that the weird dog called General did know about Li Mu. It claimed that Li Mu was a man-pet it took in. Later, the man-pet got lost, and it had been searching for its man-pet since then… “How could Brother Mu be the pet of a dog? The dog is really full of nonsense.”
“Yo-ho, you can still talk back to me? Not fully dead yet, huh?” General then refuted, “Why don’t you tell us where we shall go now?” It felt the aura of their hunters were getting steadily closer.
“We go to the Everlasting Heaven,” Jiang Qiubai grumbled and rolled his eyes. “Follow my instructions and move along!”
He showed them the way with great effort.
“Woof, we’d better speed up!” General yelled, its body rocking back and forth. As if it had made up its mind, the dog began to swell like a balloon. Soon, it became nearly as large as a pony. It barked, “Missy, mount my back…” Well, if Li Mu were there, he might punch the dog to mince because of that remark.
With Jiang Qiubai and Shangguan Yuting riding on its back, the dog picked up speed.
Truthfully, it was a little scared.
Because in the last fight, though it bit off half of the sissy Wave-making Master, it took a stab of the Evil Sword Demon and nearly got its waist snapped by the Wave-making Master’s Water Whip. That did put the danger in perspective… Therefore, it knew it had to run for its life.
“I should know better than to come along!”
“Perhaps I should just wait for dear Li Mu on the snowy pasture.”
“I wonder if my concubines— those robust female white wolves— will behave themselves when I’m absent.”
General deliberated those questions as it fled.
“How I wish my little Li Mu can hurry over soon! If not, I might really be cooked into a dog-meat hot-pot when those guys catch up with us.”
Carrying Shangguan Yuting and Jiang Qiubai on its back, General bolted on like a wild dog that just got rid of the leash.
Moments later, a thread of water light and a jet of sword light pelted to the spot they dawdled in the tunnel as if two flashes of lightning.
Then, the two beams of light materialized into two figures and landed on the ground.
The two were precisely the Wave-making Master from the Great River and the Evil Sword Demon from the Diancang Faction.
“He is crippled now, so how can he run so fast?” Asked the Wave-making Master. He seemed a little woebegone. He was wrapped in a shining layer of faint blue water, which looked like a layer of gauze. What was left of that ripped-open palm was still bleeding.
For the Nine Superbs, their bodies could rapidly recover from any cut even if all the flesh was lost. Normally, when half of a palm was lost, it could grow back with a stir of his mind. But curiously, the hand gnawed by that dog just wouldn’t heal. That aroused the killing intent in the Wave-making Master. When had he ever been so wretched?
Gu Bansheng, the Evil Sword Demon, also got a tooth-mark on his heel, which was covered in scarlet blood.
Nobody would believe this. Two of the Nine Superbs in the World were bitten by a dog!
At that moment, the two looked… simply like two thieves who got caught right on the spot. They could not be more miserable than that.
“There is something funny about that stupid dog… When I catch it, I’ll drink its blood, eat its flesh, and grind its bones to dust!” Said the Wave-making Master through tightly gritted teeth. His efforts to keep a dispassionate mind like the rest of the Nine Superbs were instantly thrown to the wind.
Though he had no idea that he was not the first Superb who had lost his manners before the dog.
“Save all the nonsense. We’ve lost their tracks. There are too many odd tricks in the Wolf Temple… Now it’s your turn to summon the immortal.” Gu Bansheng, the Evil Sword Demon, said coldly. He then tossed to his partner a wolf-shaped black-and-red sculpture the size of a palm. The material of the sculpture looked quite enigmatic.
“Immortal, please show us the way.” The Wave-making Master lifted a hand and caught the sculpture. After a moment of hesitation, he clenched his teeth, grabbed the sculpture in one hand, and donated his Sage Genuine Qi into the object. As wisps of his Sage Genuine Qi flew into the sculpture, part of the blood on his palm was sucked into it as well. After that, a blast of wondrous energy was squirted out of the mysterious wolf-shaped black-and-red sculpture. It transformed into a black-and-red wolf, which leaped over their heads and hurtled towards the place where Jiang Qiubai and the others just disappeared.
“Over there!”
Gu Bansheng, the Evil Sword Demon, dashed after the black-and-red wolf.
The Wave-making Master joined him at once.
That the two had succeeded in entering the Wolf Temple before Jiang Qiubai to waylay him was solely attributed to the help of that sculpture.
If they had not had that object, how could they put Jiang Qiubai into such a fix in the Wolf Temple which was bestrewn with numerous tactical deployments, forbidding jinxes, natural traps, and a labyrinth of zigzagging tunnels?
As to the one who granted them the sculpture… he did not belong to that world.
Heroes had been cooped up within the fence for too long.
That world was the fence.
So, regardless of the price, the two were determined to give it a try.
Life was too long for them. They already got sick of waiting. Thus, they preferred to take a risk.
Their hunting task was carried out at intervals. The two took turns to donate their Genuine Qi and blood to that mysterious wolf sculpture and managed to tread on the heels of Jiang Qiubai and the others. Several times, they almost caught up with them, but eventually let them slip through their fingers once that weird dog and Jiang Qiubai fought back as a team.
As the seek-and-hide game went on for about ten hours inside the Wolf Temple, finally, they saw the tunnel ahead was basked in bright light. It appeared that there was no way for the targets to hide anymore.
They burst out of the end of the tunnel, passed a door that already swung open, and came to a world full of sunshine.
Outside the tunnel was an intriguing world.
Shafts of sunlight rotated. Two suns and two moons were hanging above the horizon at the same time. Below were endless clouds, as if the place was floating in Nine Heaven Gates.
Pieces of shapeless white jade were drifting in the void and stretched to the distant white clouds like a flight of stairs. When the two looked up, they saw a palace-like spectacular golden building half-hidden half-revealed in the distance. They could not make out its complete appearance, for white clouds blocked part of it from view.
“We’re finally here!”
“The legendary Everlasting Heaven!”
The Wave-making Master and Gu Bansheng both looked overwhelmed by wild joy.
It was rumored that on the four forbidding lands of immortals and demons on the Divine Land one could find the roads leading up to the outer world. The reason that the Wolf Temple on the primitive pasture had remained as one of the top nine Holy Clans was that it controlled the passage leading to one of the four forbidding lands for immortals and demons— the Everlasting Heaven.
Countless people had once tried to get into the Everlasting Heaven through the Wolf Temple, but they all went back in frustration. After all, the Wolf Temple had powerful tactical deployments that could kill immortals and demons and one of the Nine Superbs guard it. The Wave-making Master and Gu Bansheng had also coveted the secrets in the Everlasting Heaven, but they knew their chance to force entry was dim. But on that day, they realized the opportunity was right before them. That was why the two sworn enemies buried the hatchet and sneaked into the pasture together.
At the moment, the real Everlasting Heaven was finally before their eyes.
“Let’s go.”
The two climbed the floating white jade stairs and lost themselves in a sea of white clouds.
The Spiritual Qi there was extraordinarily rich. The laws of heavens and earth were also extremely distinct. Despite all their marvelous adventure experiences, the Wave-making Master and Gu Bansheng could not help exclaiming.
They spent two whole hours climbing the white jade stairs before they reached that resplendent palace suspending in the Nine Heaven Gates.
The dark red walls of the palace stretched to as far as the eye could see, which seemed to be trying to reach for the two suns and two moons from both sides. In front of them, at the end of the floating white jade stairs stood nine gates painted mainly in gold and red. Those were the Nine Heaven Gates. At the foot of the largest golden gate in the middle, Jiang Qiubai, Shangguan Yuting, and the two-tone eyed weird dog called General were huddling together in silence, as though they were waiting for something to happen.
“The gate to the Everlasting Heaven is not open yet.”
“Good! It’s not the opening time.”
Gu Bansheng and the Wave-making Master were elated at the scene.
As it was still too early for the gate of the Everlasting Heaven to open, Jiang Qiubai and his company could not get in. They were basically trapped there. Like turtles in the jar bottled-up, they had no way to escape. Killing intent was flashing in the eyes of the two Superbs. They could first finish off Jiang Qiubai and his company and enter the Everlasting Heaven unobstructedly. That was perfect.
Almost at the same time, Jiang Qiubai and the others also caught sight of the two Superbs who had been chasing after them.
Leaning against the golden gate in the middle of the Nine Heaven Gates, Jiang Qiubai let loose a sigh.
“They sure have something to show them the way. Otherwise, they could not have found the Nine Heaven Gates within such a short time…”
That was what puzzled Jiang Qiubai all the way there.
“There is no map showing the passages and tricks placed in the Wolf Temple. Those who left the Wolf Temple have no knowledge of the true route to this place. Even though senior fellow apprentice Guo Yuqing once took command of this place, when he left the Wolf Temple, his connection to the temple was cut off and so he can no longer control the temple. Further, my senior fellow apprentice will never disclose our secrets to the Holy Clans in the extreme south… So, what went wrong on earth?”
“Master Jiang, the game is over.” The Wave-making Master slowly advanced on him.
Gu Bansheng halted when he was a hundred meters away from him and said, “We’ve suffered as much as you have. But in the two-on-one fight, you don’t stand a chance. Master Jiang, I advise you to take your life by your own hand, given your status as one of our Nine Superbs and your top martial arts cultivation. We have also been to the top level, so we won’t stoop so low as to insult your body. Don’t worry, we will give you a decent funeral.”
Jiang Qiubai seemed to have hitten a dead end.