Chapter 401: A Shocking Change and Assassination
Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
In this world, strong power was not a necessity to scare people, because sometimes an eccentric relationship was scary enough to put people on alert. For example, the relationship between the son-in-law and the mother-in-law. As an old saying went, the mother-in-law would always be more and more fond of her son-in-law as they spent more time together. However, only the son-in-law knew his honest feelings toward his mother-in-law.
Likewise, now, Zhou Bao was sitting in front of his dying mother-in-law, tortured by her intermittent mumblings that were thoroughly unrecognizable. He sat there solemnly as if he was an obedient pupil, not daring to make a single movement. What was even more awful was that his hand was still tightly gripped by Luo Xuehuan.
He felt his entire body go as stiff as a zombie while cold sweat kept oozing out vigorously. He forced himself to ease his expression, but his nose, eyes, and muscles above those parts, still cramped together, so he actually couldn’t hear any of the words she was saying. Then, the hand gripping his, gradually grew cold and the wailing of Yan Yunfei rang into his ears. At the same time, an extremely woeful Qi Power began to exude from Yan Yuntian, hanging over the entire bedchamber.
Again, the bedchamber was caught in silence.
Suddenly, Zhou Bao’s expression altered. It was almost a quarter-hour after Luo Xuehuan’s death. As a matter of fact, the death of a normal man differed from that of an expert. Generally, an expert shall have a strong body and a relatively doughty spirit, which rendered them less likely to die. However, for an ordinary person, their spirit and body were both delicate and interconnected, so they would stand or fall together. When the body got hurt, the spirit was hurt too. Thus, if death came for an ordinary person, their spirit would disperse at the same time as their body died. Occasionally there were some spirits with great willpower that could sojourn in the body for some time after it died, but ultimately it would still dissipate.
But being agonized over the illness for such a long time, Luo Xuehuan had long before craved for a death. Accordingly, when she died, her spirit dissipated in an instant, which meant she was totally a corpse now. However, after about a quarter-hour, a wisp of faint mist rose from the forehead of this corpse. This mist could not be detected with normal eyes, while Zhou Bao, with his Fiery Eyes that had a massive suppressing impact on spirits and the knowledge of Nine Changes of Heavenly Birds, including the Turtledove’s Claw that was a nemesis of spirits and divine thoughts, was highly sensitive to this spiritual power. Therefore, when he saw the creepy and mysterious spirit of the white mist, it occurred to him that this matter was not that simple—Queen Luo Xuehuan did not die of illness, but due to a curse.
Curse!
It was an eerie magic art!
Even large modern sects couldn’t get the hang of it, only a few wizards in ancient tribes, which hid in remote and thickly forested mountains knew about this less popular technique.
However, now he had discovered it in the imperial palace. In general, curses would have a direct impact on spirits, whose effect would be quite eerie and secretive in the eyes of ordinary people. But to Zhou Bao, it was not threatening at all.
A curse itself was not terrifying, but its eeriness and secretiveness were.
A man like Yan Yuntian, who had practiced the Way of the Emperor among the 3,000 Great Ways, possessed magnificent strength. Although on the surface he only had a strength at Level Seven, merely scraping in passing the threshold for being an expert, Zhou Bao was pretty sure that his actual strength was way more than that. It was highly possible that Yan Yuntian had a strength at the peak of Level Nine, which was on par with the past Northern Yuan Three Grandmasters. But he hid his real strength level flawlessly by using some unknown method, which was not an easy thing to do.
However, even with his strength at the peak of Level Nine, he could neither see the mist nor find out that his Queen had died due to a curse instead of an illness.
Thinking of this, Zhou Bao’s expression became grotesque. Seeing Yan Yunfei weeping on her knees beside the bed, he turned to look at Yan Yuntian, who was issuing deep sorrow from every part of his body. He suddenly felt somewhat depressed and could not stand one minute in this bedchamber. He got to his feet and wanted to go outside for some fresh air, but just as he walked to the door, it came across his mind that there were a bunch of people kneeling on the ground outside the door. It was indeed inappropriate for him to go out at the moment.
“What?” All of a sudden, his ears gave a gentle twitch, and a bright light flitted across his eyes. He abruptly looked back at Yan Yuntian, and almost at the same time, the latter, who was immersed in his grief, also raised his head and looked at Zhou Bao. Their eyes met, but instantly, turned away from each other. Without any hesitation, Zhou Bao rushed beside Yan Yunfei in a flash and wrapped her up with his dark golden Gang Qi. Simultaneously, Yan Yuntian took action too. He let out a howl of rage and shielded the corpse of Luo Xuehuan with his golden Gang Qi.
Boom!
A white light column with a width of over 100 feet, suddenly bombarded right onto the bedchamber from the sky.
Under the attack of this white light column, the roof of this bedchamber was immediately ripped apart as if it was made of paper. A roar of anger sounded out from the bedchamber, along with some rising golden light.
“Who, who has such guts!” Yan Yuntian bellowed.
The odd change happened so fast that nobody saw it coming. Those ministers kneeling outside of the bedchamber also stood up in shock. Looking at the light column that dropped from the sky, their brains all went blank for a moment.
“Assassin!”
A shrilling yell rang behind them. It turned out that the guards of this palace were the first ones to realize what had happened and had hurtled towards the bedchamber. However, before they could reach the gate of the chamber, they were thrown into the air by strong airflows that were being emitted from the chamber.
“Run away! Or do you want to die here?” A dark golden streamer shot out of the bedchamber and landed in the center of the square. They were Zhou Bao and, Yan Yunfei, who was thunderstruck and still muddle-headed.
Hearing the shout, all those ministers went haywire. Most of them scrambled to run outside, except for that purple-robed old man in the lead, Pei Tianming.
“What on earth happened?” asked Pei Tianming with a gloomy face.
“How could I know!” Zhou Bao looked very innocent. He was only paying a visit to his dying mother-in-law, not preparing to be buried alive with her dead body as a sacrifice. He would be overwhelmed by such an unexpected blow.
“Zhou Bao, what, what is all this?” Yan Yunfei finally came to realize the situation, with astonishment written all over her face.
“Seems that someone wanted to assassinate your dad and we happened to find ourselves in the middle of it.” Zhou Bao eyed the surroundings of the bedchamber, only to see that the whole place was ruined by the crash of that white light column and the golden Gang Qi. Waves of airflows produced by the collision between the Gang Qi and white light column had overturned all the cyan flagstones on the ground, unveiling many deep nicks underneath.
“It’s a formation!” Zhou Bao’s brows furrowed more tightly. With his eyesight, it was easy for him to discover that this was a newly-carved formation, existing for definitely no more than one year. Moreover, this was not a smart formation, whose function was also monotonous. When it was not in operation, it sent out no energy fluctuation, and that was why it was hard for ordinary people to discover it, as it was perfectly concealed under cyan flagstones.
Even Yan Yuntian, an expert at the peak of Level Nine, had not noticed that there was such an eccentric formation under his Queen’s bedchamber until it was launched.
Formations were actually divided into many categories, with each of their functions differed. But generally speaking, all formations mainly focused on defense. Don’t be fooled by the names of many killing formations, which sounded impressively murderous as if they could destroy the whole world, that wasn’t the norm.
Factually speaking, most formations were fixed at one place—They were not portable at all and neither were they set up temporarily. As long as the opponent never stepped into your formation, even if your formation could trap an Innate Deity, it would be useless. Let’s take the sword formation of the Golden Lights Cave in Qianyuan Mountain as an example. That formation was extremely powerful and brimming with murderous intent, whereas, if Zhou Bao had not entered the attacking range of that sword formation, it would have remained as a decoration there.
The same went for this formation. Comparing it with the one made by Golden Lights Cave in Qianyuan Mountain, this formation was much simpler, and Zhou Bao found out its secret with just one glance. But that was not enough. It was precisely because he had seen through its secret that he frowned so hard.
In most cases, the simpler the function of a formation was, the easier it was to break. However, if it abandoned other functions, the sole function it had would be extraordinarily strong. As was the case with the one sitting in front of Zhou Bao.
This was a formation for constraining space. Given that Zhou Bao had refined the Spatial Core in that mysterious grey space, it could be said that he had a fairly deep understanding of space, but that did not mean he could break the formation. The reason he easily escaped from it with Yan Yunfei just now was precisely that this formation was launched a short while ago, still with many flaws in it. But now that the formation had been fully launched, the surrounding space impediments were stronger and more compact than diamonds, and no flaws existed at all. If one wanted to go in, he had to break Space Ramparts. Facing those overlaid Space Ramparts, which looked as hard as diamonds, Zhou Bao lost faith in himself.
This was an intact space. You could imagine it as a house. If you had the key, you could open the door and enter it, which was just like using Zhou Bao’s Three Realms Division and Two Realms Fragments. If you didn’t have a key, but had enormous strength, you could break in through the door or even the wall, as if using Zhou Bao’s Yin and Yang Heavenly Sword and Great Fusion Technic. However, if you demolished the entire house, all its bricks would pile up together and form a sturdy construction—a thick and solid wall. Even if you had the ability to break in or open the door at first, you would feel helpless in front of this kind of wall. It called for a power several times, dozens of times, or even hundreds of times greater than you used to break in through the door and the wall. For now, Zhou Bao just didn’t possess that kind of power.
At that moment, what he saw was exactly such a wall, a thick and compact wall of space.