The instant that ghost face appeared, Zhao Kongcheng felt heaven and earth flip end over end. Vertigo like nothing he had ever known surged through him.
Brow locked, every muscle clenched, he barely managed to keep his feet.
In his vision, the world had become a spinning kaleidoscope—scattered, scrambled, without a single thread to follow.
"Damn it... so it can still use its Forbidden Ruins. I'm in it deep now..." Zhao Kongcheng muttered, and Wu Xiangnan's pre-battle briefing rose again in his mind.
"...Forbidden Ruins Sequence 176, 【Ghost-Face Geomancy】. Within its bounds, it deceives the senses of any creature at or below its own realm, inverting all spatial concepts.
"Inside the Geomancy, up and down, left and right, front and back shift at the Ghost-Faced King's will. Experience and willpower can resist it to a degree, but make no mistake—inside that domain, every means of attack you have is compromised, and your combat strength is slashed.
"So apart from the captain, who matches it at 'River,' no member is to engage the Ghost-Faced King head-on. To do so is simply to die..."
A thoroughly disgusting Forbidden Ruins indeed... Now that he was living it firsthand, Zhao Kongcheng truly appreciated how obscene it was.
So the captain had carved the Ghost-Faced King half to death inside this very domain?
He was a freak of nature too!
Zhao Kongcheng drew a deep breath—and slowly closed his eyes.
"ROAR-ROAR-ROAR!!!"
The bellow came from every direction at once; there was no fixing the Ghost-Faced King's position. The earth trembled faintly. Zhao Kongcheng could feel it—the King was closing in fast!
Where would it come from?
In reality—
Atop that grotesque ghost face, Zhao Kongcheng stood with his eyes shut, still as a statue, both hands leveling the blade at the empty air in front of him, brow knotted tight.
He hadn't noticed at all: the Ghost-Faced King had already slipped silently around behind him.
Inside Zhao Kongcheng's senses, sight, sound, smell, and touch were churning through endless permutations—as if he'd been stuffed into an industrial washing machine on high spin. False information flooded his brain, cutting him off from everything real.
The Ghost-Faced King's eyes fixed on the oblivious Zhao Kongcheng, and a bloodthirsty smile spread across the chalk-white ghost face.
It dipped its body—then burst through the curtain of rain like a colossal artillery shell, so fast its body smeared into afterimages, razor claws carving arcs of cold light straight at Zhao Kongcheng's neck!
It could almost taste it already—the hot gush of blood, the delicious drench of it across its body.
But in the very instant its claws were about to touch him, everything changed!
As if he had eyes in his back, Zhao Kongcheng wrenched aside, dodging the claw by a hair's breadth!
Then the straight blade in his hands swept a long arc through the rain—straight for the Ghost-Faced King's head!
CLANG—!
A shriek of impact. The Ghost-Faced King's hand clamped dead around the blade's edge—then one kick sent Zhao Kongcheng flying like a sandbag!
And yet even that could not hide the shock flooding its eyes.
It could not understand. How had he sensed the attack?
Zhao Kongcheng slammed into the ground with a grunt of pain, hauled himself up with difficulty—and couldn't keep the corner of his mouth from curling.
"Surprised? Bet you didn't see that coming."
Propped on his blade, Zhao Kongcheng laughed, and the laugh was pure mockery.
"That Forbidden Ruins of yours really is obscene. Any other day, I'd have walked right into it and died by your hand. Pity, though..."
He raised one finger and pointed at the sky. "Today, it's raining.
"You can deceive a creature's senses—but you can't stop rain from falling by gravity. Rain lands on my skin. Rain gives me touch.
"You can twist that touch, make me feel the rain hitting me from every direction at once... and from that, I can work backwards to the one true direction!
"Give me a single fixed bearing, and the rest gets a whole lot simpler."
Zhao Kongcheng barked a laugh, spat a mouthful of bloody phlegm, and—with maximum swagger—raised the straight blade and leveled it at the Ghost-Faced King.
"Not to brag, but if I had a Forbidden Ruins of my own, you'd have died eight hundred deaths by now!"
"ROAR-ROAR-ROAR!!"
The taunt worked perfectly. The enraged Ghost-Faced King came storming at him, and Zhao Kongcheng kept his eyes shut, reading the rain, predicting the angles of its charge.
DING-DING-DING-DING!!
Zhao Kongcheng and the Ghost-Faced King tangled in a whirl of blows. On pure combat instinct and hard-won experience, he actually traded strike after strike with the monster!
But that was the limit.
Under the King's full assault, flesh-and-blood Zhao Kongcheng soon began to fold. It found its opening and hammered a blow into his chest—two ribs snapped outright, and he was flung backward through the rain.
This time it took Zhao Kongcheng a full five seconds to force himself upright.
If the flat of his blade hadn't caught part of that blow, it would have killed him where he stood.
"Kah... koff, koff..." He coughed up mouthful after mouthful of blood, his face white as paper.
The Ghost-Faced King stood tall in the rain, gaze glacial, advancing on him step by step...
And then—a voice rang out from behind Zhao Kongcheng!
"Zhao Kongcheng! Zhao Kongcheng!!
"—ZHAO KONGCHENG!!!"
Zhao Kongcheng froze. That voice... sounded weirdly familiar.
Wait. That's not—that can't be—
He opened his mouth as if to answer. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he chose silence.
His eyes were a storm of complicated things.
...
At that moment, outside 【Unrestricted Airspace】.
Lin Qiye stood at the edge of the empty lot, hair plastered flat by the rain and utterly indifferent to it, hollering at the top of his lungs:
"Zhao Kongcheng! Stop hiding! I know you're around here somewhere!"
He finished shouting and stilled himself to listen. Nothing but the clamor of rain.
"Damn it. The bat clearly saw a cloaked man and a monster vanish into thin air right here—how can there be nothing... Did it really see wrong?"
Lin Qiye frowned, scanning in every direction.
Suddenly his gaze locked.
A dozen meters away, three odd signboards stood all alone in the rain.
Lin Qiye walked over, wiped the rainwater off one with his hand, and read the words aloud, quietly.
"Road closed ahead? Since when is this sign here? And... this arrangement is far too strange."
He stood thinking, head bowed—then something surfaced, and his eyes began to shine.
"He said it once, didn't he. His Forbidden Ruins is a support-type that hides battlefields... called something like... 【Unrestricted Airspace】?"
Lin Qiye studied the three signboards carefully, a smile rising to his lips—then threw back his head and bellowed again:
"Zhao Kongcheng! I know you're inside the Unrestricted Airspace! Open the door and let me in!!"
One second. Two...
Zhao Kongcheng's voice drifted out sullenly from somewhere behind the signboards:
"It's the middle of the goddamn night—skip dinner to take a stroll, why don't you! Piss off home!!"