Seize the initiative!
The legacy that the Storm Duke was willing to sacrifice his life for, even if it meant living only 60 years, demonstrated terrifying power in this battle.
It's not that Qing Ji is weak, but rather that Duke Storm possesses too many advantages, to the point that no one can deal with him in a direct confrontation.
A physique far surpassing that of human cultivators, speed comparable to a knight, and godlike combat instincts—all these combined in one person led King Roosevelt to create a monster.
Duke Storm calmly said, "Do you think Black Spider can take him away? There are already thousands of assassins waiting to walk into the spider web barrier. Your sacrifice is meaningless."
Qing Ji wiped his mouth, but did not back down: "I just need to do my own thing. It's rare for me to trust someone, and I hope she won't let me down."
He tried to stand up, but his pelvis was broken and he couldn't.
“Foolish,” the Storm Duke vanished again.
A look of relief appeared in Qing Ji's eyes, and he secretly held a copper coin in his hand.
Forbidden item ACE-062, the trial coin.
Containment conditions: If the host dies while protecting others, a coin of judgment will be automatically tossed before death. If it lands on tails, the perpetrator will be judged. Those below Rank A will undoubtedly die, while those above Rank A will be bound by rules and will go blind.
This is the most suitable forbidden object for the Qing Ji lineage. They are born to protect the Qing Zhen bloodline, and their ultimate means is to exchange their lives for it.
The condition for containing this forbidden object is the life of its host.
Just as Duke Storm was about to smash Qingji's head with a single punch, an air explosion suddenly occurred in his path, blasting him back!
Duke Storm slid backward for more than ten meters, his feet scraping the ground. After coming to a stop, he looked at the tall building next to him as if nothing had happened. Li Dongze stood on the rooftop, deep in thought: "You are a demigod, and we are A-level. It shouldn't be shameful for us to team up against you."
Duke Storm looked up at Li Dongze: "Useless struggle."
In an instant, he leaped into the air, defying the laws of physics, and raced upwards along the vertical building wall!
Qing Ji's pupils contracted slightly. He noticed that the black boots on Duke Storm's feet were particularly strange. They looked old, yet they had withstood the battle of a demigod without being damaged.
Another forbidden item!
Now that things have come to a point of life and death, all the experts from the Eastern and Western Continents have brought out their most trump cards!
Li Dongze raised his right hand and continuously compressed the air between them, creating one air bomb after another. However, Duke Storm seemed to have divine assistance, dodging in advance time and time again. He sprinted vertically along the building walls and even managed to create a winding route.
One pane of glass after another shattered into dust behind Duke Storm, splashing onto the ground like a torrential downpour, much like the dust and sand kicked up by a car in the desert.
Knowing he was outmatched, Li Dongze immediately retreated, but Duke Storm was too fast, and he had nowhere to retreat.
The Duke of Storms, clad in a black robe, leaped up like a great owl and soared onto the rooftop.
Duke Storm threw a punch, but Ye Wan flashed out from behind Li Dongze and withstood the blow with a honeycomb-shaped imaginary yellow energy shield!
However, the honeycomb-shaped energy shield also shattered!
Three A-ranks made their moves in succession, but they couldn't even stop the Storm Duke!
At this moment, the spiderweb-like cracks on the ground began to heal little by little, as if this land had never been affected by the taboo. This world within a radius of ten kilometers was 'healing'.
Li Dongze flew backward, pulling Ye Wan along as they leaped off the twenty-first floor of the building. He shouted, "Qing Ji, the spider web barrier has been opened! Let's go!"
He and Ye Wan jumped off the building at the same time. Ye Wan opened her hang glider and pulled Li Dongze away into the distance.
Qing Ji hesitated for a moment on the ground, but finally opened the Shadow Gate. Someone pulled him inside from behind the gate.
The fighting has stopped.
The sandstorm has dissipated, the spiderweb cracks have disappeared, and the swarm of cockroaches has retreated underground.
Fires raged throughout the central capital city, leaving only devastation.
Duke Storm pressed the communicator: "Have you found the Joker?"
A hesitant voice replied through the communicator, "I'm sorry, Your Highness, we couldn't find him. Our encirclement failed. The enemy broke through from two directions, and the Joker most likely escaped from there."
Duke Storm remained expressionless. Once the spiderweb barrier failed, with the Shadow Gate and Key Gate in existence, it would be unrealistic to keep the Joker there.
Duke Storm stood on the rooftop, but showed no sign of disappointment.
The Fate Master has gotten everything he wanted.
When fates intersect, even enemies may not know what the Fate Master has plucked from the river of destiny.
What's strange is that after Qing Chen injected the medicine, the other party's figure gradually disappeared from God's perspective.
...
...
Black Spider carried Qing Chen on its back and quickly ran towards the edge of the spider web barrier with Yi.
However, Black Spider didn't wait for the web barrier to disappear. She whispered, "While the surveillance is down due to the sandstorm, let's get into my safe house and hide. I know the Fate Master; there must be another trick up his sleeve at the edge of the web barrier. It's not realistic to just force our way out. We'll stay in the safe house and wait until the storm passes before notifying Qing Ji to come and get us."
Black Spider brought Yi to the underground parking lot. She opened a maintenance door for the sewer system and carried the unconscious Qing Chen through the water.
After walking upstream for a full two kilometers, the black spider was groping for something on the wall.
Half a minute later, she found a stone brick and pressed it in hard. A stone door opened, revealing a large number of boxes wrapped in oilcloth.
Black Spider found a plastic bucket and poured the liquid inside onto the outside of the stone gate.
One asked curiously, "What is this?"
“It’s to mask the smell,” Black Spider said. “We just went against the flow of the drainage, so this liquid will mix with the sewage and float downstream, erasing all traces of our journey. It will evaporate completely in 5 minutes, leaving no clues.”
Entering the safe house, Black Spider finally breathed a sigh of relief. She carefully laid Qing Chen flat on a cot: "When will the boss wake up?"
Yi shook his head: "Uncertain, there's no information to refer to."
Black Spider sat beside Qing Chen. The cancer cells had completed their recombination, but Qing Chen still hadn't woken up.
Yi looked at the black spider and said, "My father once said that for that path, the reconstruction of the body is just a 'preface' before the beginning. Qing Chen's danger has only just begun."
The safe house fell silent. Qingchen lay quietly, clutching the black Eye of True Sight, his breath gone, as if he were already dead.
...
...
At Ginkgo Manor in City 5, the old patriarch Qing Xun looked at Qing Ji's miserable state and said, "You've suffered."
Qing Ji shook his head: "It's not hard work. It's lucky to have survived with such a wretched life."
Li Kerou, dressed in a white formal suit, had already summoned the mute servant to urgently treat Qing Ji's injuries.
Qing Ji asked, "Has Qing Chen been brought back yet?"
The old man calmly shook his head: "No, none of the four teams responsible for meeting him waited for him, but it doesn't matter."
Qing Ji, supporting himself, tried to get up: "I'm going to find him!"
Li Kerou said, "Even if you are an A-level expert, a pelvic fracture will require you to stay in bed for a month."
The old man smiled and said, "This is the best arrangement fate has ever made, so don't worry."
"And then what?" Qing Ji asked. "Will he be able to become a god?"
"I don't know," the old man said frankly.
"Hmm?" Qingji asked in confusion, "Can't you see fragments of fate using the Heaven and Earth Chessboard? Why don't you know?"
“It’s alright to tell you now,” the old man said. “The moment he finished injecting the potion, he began to detach himself from this world. Whether it’s the Fate Master or the Heavenly Chessboard, they were ultimately born from this world and exist by relying on the will of the world. Their rules can forcibly determine everything only because the will of the world allows them to do so.”
The old man said, “But things are different now. Qingchen no longer belongs to this world. He is a world in himself. Simply put, from today onwards, all taboos will no longer be useful to him, and will even be incompatible with him. The chessboard of heaven and earth cannot see his fate, nor can the Fate Master.”
The adjudicator cannot curse him.
He is not in the Virtuoso's God-like perspective.
He was no longer a chess piece on the chessboard of heaven and earth, but another world outside of that chessboard.
From then on, only Qingchen himself knew his fate.
Qing Ji was stunned: "Since you can't see it, why... what if he fails?"
"Why should I go to all this trouble to help him get to this point? I'm gambling, even though I'm not sure if I can win," the old man laughed.
"Then why were Li Shutong and Li Yunshou willing to cooperate with you?" Qing Ji asked.
The old man sat beside Qing Ji's sickbed, lost in thought, and said, "I have seen thousands of destinies with them, but no matter which destiny it is, the ending is always failure. Only the destiny we are facing now is something we cannot see."
In fact, before Li Yunshou faced his death with equanimity, he did not know whether the Eastern Continent would be victorious.
Thousands of methods have failed to save the Eastern Continent, and no one knows whether this last one will work.
No one knows whether Qing Chen can become a god, no one knows whether Qing Chen will live or die after this step, but these people with great courage have the courage to gamble.
In fact, those who sacrificed themselves for their destiny were more courageous than imagined. They did not choose victory, but after witnessing thousands of failures, they chose not to give up.
The old man laughed and said, "This is like the last meter of a sheer cliff. The rest is up to Qingchen himself."
Qing Ji: "What if he succeeds?"
The old man asked, "Then what about the Roosevelt Kingdom?"
Qingji: "What if he fails?"
The old man said, "At least we tried."
At this moment, Li Dongze, Li Shutong, Sanyue and others returned to City 5 through the Key Gate. Everyone's pupils suddenly contracted. Li Shutong was even carrying the half-dead Duke Phoenix in his hand!
This knight demigod actually captured a duke from the Western Continent alive!
But then they saw that Duke Phoenix's body was covered with cracks like those on porcelain, as if Li Shutong had smashed it!
The old man laughed and said, "A considerable harvest."
Li Shutong didn't ask why Qingchen hadn't returned. He had already seen the fragments of fate today and naturally knew that Qingchen's whereabouts were unknown. They couldn't find him, and neither could the Western Continent.
He threw Duke Phoenix on the ground: "He should still have a forbidden object on him to keep him alive; taking the forbidden object away will kill him."
March said, "Kill him, I'll interrogate him."
Li Shutong thought for a moment, then personally gouged out the eyes of the Phoenix Duke and handed them to Li Dongze: "Qingchen's friend, Shendai Yunluo, seems to need this thing. You can send it to him."
He searched the Phoenix Duke's body for a while and found a porcelain doll in the opposite arms. The porcelain doll was also covered with cracks, and the cracks on the Phoenix Duke's body were exactly the same.
The moment Li Shutong took the porcelain doll, blood immediately gushed from the cracks in Duke Phoenix's body, and he died.
But then, in March, he took out a wooden mallet and a wooden fish, sat cross-legged beside the corpse, and began to recite the opening verse of the Ksitigarbha Sutra in a low voice: "The supreme, profound and subtle Dharma is difficult to encounter in hundreds of millions of kalpas. Now I have seen, heard and received it, and I vow to understand the true meaning of the Tathagata."
In an instant, a green soul appeared on the corpse of Duke Phoenix, its gouged-out eyes empty and its expression blank.