Chapter 66: Old Debts
Held in Laira’s arms, at a height of nearly a hundred meters, Ethan looked down at the ground and was silent for a long time.
The pitch-black sea of puppets below was still churning out of the stone gate, spreading in every direction like a creeping oil stain. Only from up high did he see its true scale. Not hundreds. Thousands.
"What in the hell is this place, anyway?" Lěng Ruò Yān muttered, both hands still gripping Laira’s arm tight.
Ethan didn’t answer. Because his gaze had just been drawn by something else.
To the northeast, a few miles from where they were, light was flashing continuously. The blue light of ice, the golden light of metal, and the flares of all sorts of different abilities.
Someone was fighting down there. Fighting hard.
Ethan narrowed his eyes, and in that moment, he saw a familiar black wooden flying ship listing in midair, one corner of its hull already broken away.
Down there, Xue Ji was extremely annoyed.
She had meant to lead the seven youngsters to find a few Blind Boxes, let them get a taste of training, and conveniently pick up a bit of fortune along the way. It was a simple plan, a safe one, nothing that needed to be complicated.
And yet out of nowhere, a whole sea of wooden puppets had come crashing in.
"City Lord! On the left!"
Xue Ji lightly flicked her sleeve, and a current of cold air swept across. Three puppets lunging in were immediately frozen stiff in midair, then dropped to the ground and shattered into pieces.
But immediately, five more filled the gap they’d left.
Each of these puppets was, in truth, no cause for concern. In terms of power, each was only equivalent to a Bronze Tier 9 Awakened. To Xue Ji, killing a hundred of them was no more than dusting off her hands.
The problem lay in the fact that they were as numerous as ants, and they knew no fear.
Not one puppet knew pain. Not one knew retreat. For every one that fell, three more immediately climbed over its corpse and charged on, their lifeless wooden faces not changing expression by even the slightest degree.
"City Lord, they aren’t afraid of ice!" one youth shouted, his voice already edging into panic. "I froze them, but the ones behind just trample over them and rush in!"
Xue Ji gritted her teeth.
It was true. This lot was only wood. They had no blood to freeze, no organs to damage, no nerves to feel the cold. Her ice could stiffen them, but it couldn’t frighten them into scattering.
She turned her palm upward, and a colossal current of frigid air radiated out.
In the blink of an eye, a vast stretch of ground ahead was blanketed in ice. The ground, the air, even the ancient stone pillars, all froze solid, and over two hundred puppets were sealed inside that thick layer of ice, becoming motionless statues.
It was an astonishing move, enough to make any Gold-tier Awakened wary.
But the puppets kept flooding in.
They crawled over the layer of ice, slipped and fell, stood back up, then crawled on. Their numbers were so great that the colossal field of ice held them back for less than ten breaths.
And in that span of time, a piteous scream rang out.
A youth in black was dragged down by three puppets, the brass-yellow curved blades falling on him again and again. By the time Xue Ji managed to send ice over to save him, he was no longer moving.
Then another scream, from a different direction.
"Fall back!" Xue Ji shouted, her voice for the first time losing its usual lazy air. "Everyone onto the ship! Retreat!"
The black wooden ship lurched upward, the five surviving youths scrambling up onto the deck, every one of their faces drained white.
"City Lord..." a girl asked, trembling, her eyes still red. "Why... why are there puppets in a place like this? I’ve never heard of a whole army of marionettes inside a ruin before."
Xue Ji stood at the prow, her eyes looking down at the pitch-black sea of puppets below, her gaze pensive.
"I’ve never heard of it either." She said slowly. "But looking at this situation, I can guess at a few parts of it."
She pointed toward the black stone gate still ceaselessly disgorging puppets.
"Do you see that gate? It isn’t the lair of a pack of wild monsters. It’s a storehouse. Someone made these puppets, stacked them inside, then sealed it up. And someone capable of making thousands of puppets, each carrying the power of a Bronze Tier 9 Awakened..."
She paused, then spoke a name that made all five youths change color.
"Very likely, this ruin is the dwelling of a Marionette Master. And judging by this scale, at the very least one of the great powers at the highest level of that path."
"A Marionette Master..." one youth swallowed. "The craft that was lost long ago?"
"That’s right." Xue Ji nodded. "Marionette crafting is the most expensive path of cultivation, the most difficult, and also the one most abandoned by the world. Because raising a Marionette Master costs far too much. The materials, the time, the resources, no clan could bear it. So gradually, no one walked that path anymore."
She let out a soft sigh.
"But if a Marionette Master truly did walk it all the way to the end, then the things he created..."
She didn’t finish the sentence.
Because right at that moment, the ground below shook once more.
From inside the black stone gate, something else came crawling out.
It stood over ten meters tall, its body like a colossal spider, with eight long legs of glossy black wood driving into the ground each time it stepped. On its main body, in place of a spider’s head, was a human face made of wood, as large as a whole door, its hollow eyes staring straight up at the sky.
And following behind it was a batch of puppets entirely different from the last.
These puppets stood about two and a half meters tall, their bodies encased in armor of ivory white and deep purple, with as many as four arms, each hand holding a longsword. Their faces wore metal masks, and in the center of those masks was a patch of blue crystal glowing, like a single eye.
The instant these four-armed puppets appeared, the pressure in the air immediately changed.
"Careful!" Xue Ji shouted. "This lot is completely different!"
She had barely finished speaking when one four-armed puppet sprang off its feet and launched into the air, shooting straight up to the ship’s altitude in the blink of an eye. Four longswords slashed down at once.
Xue Ji flicked her hand, and a thick wall of ice rose up to block.
Crack!
The wall of ice shattered.
Xue Ji’s expression changed slightly. She hurriedly fell back, at the same time releasing a current of frigid air to freeze that puppet and knock it down to the ground. But that single clash alone was enough for her to recognize the problem.
This puppet carried at minimum the power of a Silver-tier Awakened. And down below, there were at least two dozen more of them.
Plus that ten-meter colossal spider besides.
While she herself, under the seal of the ruin’s law, was left with only the power of a Gold Tier 9.
For the first time since stepping into this trial space, a cold feeling rose in Xue Ji’s chest.
"City Lord!" a girl screamed in despair. "The hull’s been struck! We’re going down!"
Up above, Ethan had witnessed the whole thing.
He looked at the black wooden ship listing in the air, at the four-armed puppets launching themselves skyward in droves, at the colossal spider raising its eight legs high.
And he was silent.
"Ethan?" Laira turned her head. She knew what he was thinking, because she had seen it all too.
"I’m calculating." Ethan answered, his voice dry.
He truly was calculating.
If he left now, no one could blame him. He had no ties, no friendship with those people. Down there were a few dozen Silver-tier puppets and a ten-meter wooden monster. Charging into that mess was the act of a fool.
More importantly, he had traded a great deal to become an invisible man.
He had burned his energy nearly dry to alter the law of the ranking board. He had borrowed the Bone Demon Serpent’s name as a screen. This whole trial space now believed the one at the top of the board was a colossal snake, not a Bronze-tier Awakened.
That shell was the thing keeping him alive.
And if he made a move now, that shell was as good as shattered. Because Xue Ji had already seen Laira with her own eyes outside. All it would take was a single rain of red fire arrows falling, and she would immediately guess who had done it.
All his effort, poured down the drain.
Ethan weighed it very quickly, and he understood perfectly well what he was about to lose.
Then he remembered something else.
He remembered that moment out there, when the Harpy Queen had driven him into a corner, when Laira’s shoulder was torn open, when all that was left to him was risking his life on Disintegration. And then a ship came flying in, a woman in black standing at the prow, spinning a hairpin in her hand, speaking a few lines and sending the entire Harpy flock packing.
She hadn’t saved him out of pity. She had simply found it a nuisance and casually swatted a fly away.
But whatever the motive, the result was unchanged.
If she hadn’t been there that day, he would be inside a Harpy’s belly today.
Ethan let out a long breath.
"Damn it." He muttered, his voice full of resignation. "I hate owing people."
"Laira."
"Mm?"
"How much energy do you have left?"
The dragon quirked her lips, her red-orange eyes flashing. "Enough to burn that pile of scrap wood to nothing."
"Then burn it."
Ethan opened his eyes, and the eye on his forehead flared bright.
[Eye of Truth.]
The whole battlefield below immediately faded into two colors, black and white. On the bodies of the few dozen four-armed puppets, on the eight legs of the colossal spider, countless red points flared up all at once. The brass joints at the shoulder. The energy thread connected at the nape. The glowing core hidden behind the chest armor.
Puppets had no flesh, no blood, but they had structure. And anything with structure had a weakest point.
Beside him, Laira blinked faintly, and all that information immediately flowed into her mind.
She spread both arms wide.
In the sky above a vast stretch of ground, countless red points of fire began to condense, denser by the moment, until the entire sky above the battlefield was dyed a brilliant red, so bright that even those on the ground had to lift their heads to look.
Xue Ji, standing on the deck of a ship about to fall, looked up.
And her pale gray eyes, for the first time since stepping into this trial space, showed genuine astonishment.
Because she recognized that red light.
"It’s that dragon from before..." she said softly.
Laira swept her hand down.
And the rain of fire came pouring down.