Beastmaster of the Ages

There was nowhere for the Eightpart Pantheons to hide, and they couldn't hunt Tianming down even if they wanted to. It was a cycle that simply couldn't be broken, much to the rage of the Eightpart Pantheons. All Tianming had to do was kill them, as many as possible; the more of them he killed, the bigger the provocation.

"The eight factions have reigned for far too long and naturally don't like to be challenged. It won't take much to get them all riled up." Tianming, his two lovers, and Yin Chen made for quite the efficient combination.

A year passed in a flash as the killing continued nonstop. Eventually, the death toll reached around a hundred thousand cosmic gods. Even if most of them were lower-level ones who couldn't even block a single strike, losing them still significantly bled the Eightpart Pantheons. And Yin Chen was the one who made it all possible. Otherwise, Tianming would only be swatting a few flies at a time and could fall prey to the many attempts to lead him into ambushes and traps.

No other group of three could achieve what they had, and most certainly because they didn't have Yin Chen. So it wasn't entirely a matter of the forces of the Eightpart Pantheons being laughably incompetent. Yin Chen was simply far too epic, able to calculate the relative power on both sides and make snap decisions to strike or pull back, using Tianming like a nicely sharpened blade to cut through enemy ranks with surgical precision. While he couldn't take them all on at once, he had no issue dispatching tens of them each day.

I didn't think the initial three hundred thousand would become a million even after I killed a hundred thousand of them.... He didn't understand how that was even mathematically possible, but the real reason behind the mass deployment was the rage and wounded pride of the Eightpart Pantheons as a whole. The youth ignored the warnings of their seniors and volunteered to join the fight, all of them wishing to be the one to be the hero that put a stop to Tianming's dastardly campaign. He had become the public enemy of all the geniuses in the Eightpart Pantheons.

The increase in the number of people here is troubling.... Yin Chen had gotten him to go on killing sprees nonstop lately. The enemy had learned and stopped dispersing their forces so widely. At every fortress, there were at least ten thousand cosmic gods who protected each other. Many cosmic gods of ninth level or stronger were also stationed at each fortress. Quite a few of them were from imperial lineages that were stronger than Tianming. It started with only a few hundred, but that number ballooned to a thousand after a year. With so much power at their disposal, Tianming's ability to run circles around them was greatly hampered.

"Without Yin Chen, I wouldn't be able to achieve even a hundredth of what I have." Tianming was quite aware of that fact, even as the missions grew more difficult.

"If you think of it another way, the reason they're huddling up is because they've grown truly fearful," Zi Zhen said with a smirk.

"They're afraid, but they simply won't leave. Even more are coming—they must be feeling a lot of inner conflict," Moran said.

"What do we do now? It's gotten way harder." The two of them looked at Tianming, waiting for the head of the household to say something.