"Hahahaha, idiot, just keep eating dust behind me! With your trash skills, you'll never catch me in a lifetime!" Another voice rang out, supremely arrogant, showing no regard for Wuchang whatsoever. Not only that, he even referred to himself as "your daddy" and kept hurling insults and mockery at Wuchang.
The crowd was stunned, heads turning slack-jawed toward the source of the noise. Two streaks of light — one chasing the other — hurtled across the horizon. In the blink of an eye, they arrived.
"Gong Wenshan!" Yang Kai recognized at a glance that the one fleeing at the front was none other than the formation grandmaster Gong Wenshan.
In an instant, his mind pieced together what was happening before him.
Before the Temple of Seasons, Gong Wenshan had already incurred Wuchang's enmity…
After Gong Wenshan cracked the prohibitions sealing the entrance, he had actually seized control of those prohibitions to block Wuchang from entering, ruining his opportunity.
Wuchang had been decisive about it at the time. Realizing he could not enter the Temple of Seasons, he had simply turned and left.
But who knew — whether he had been lurking in the Two Seasons Mountain all along, waiting for Gong Wenshan to come out, or had simply stumbled upon him later by chance, either way, given what had happened before, Wuchang would naturally never let Gong Wenshan go. The grudge between them was firmly set.
Yet for reasons unclear, even someone as powerful as Wuchang could do nothing to Gong Wenshan, and had chased him all the way to this place.
While Yang Kai's thoughts churned, Gong Wenshan soared overhead and landed on a patch of open ground nearby. His expression turned solemn. He reached into his spatial ring and produced several jade tokens, muttering an incantation as he channeled his source power. The jade tokens dissolved into streaks of light that shot in all directions before vanishing without a trace.
At the same time, the area around Gong Wenshan seemed to undergo a sudden, subtle transformation. Everyone nearby could feel a palpable aura of danger radiating from that spot.
"Formation tokens!" someone in the crowd shouted.
No one knew exactly what formation's tokens Gong Wenshan had just deployed, but without so much as blinking, he had produced three or four of them in one go. His resources were clearly substantial — as expected of a disciple from a formation-bred clan. Things others could only dream of obtaining one of, he had in such abundance that he couldn't even use them all.
After deploying the formation tokens, Gong Wenshan did nothing more. He simply stood in place, panting heavily, and pulled a few pills from his spatial ring, swallowing them down.
Judging by his appearance, he had clearly been on the run from Wuchang for quite some days. His consumption had been enormous, and he apparently intended to take shelter behind the protection of his formation tokens to recover a little…
Boom…
Wuchang arrived right on his heels, landing roughly a dozen zhang in front of Gong Wenshan. His eyes blazed with fury as he stared ahead, his source power roiling to the brink of violent eruption, his entire body suffused with a ferocious, unparalleled violence that made no one dare come within a hair's breadth.
Warriors of slightly lesser cultivation felt their hearts clench with terror upon sensing that frenzied aura, their faces draining to white.
"Come out!" Wuchang bellowed. Though consumed by rage, he was no fool. The man had laid down that many formation tokens right in front of him and was standing there calmly — clearly he had absolute confidence in those tokens. Wuchang would not rashly charge in, so he could only shout from a distance.
"Come in!" Gong Wenshan replied in a slovenly drawl, even beckoning Wuchang with a wave of his hand, looking for all the world like a brothel madam coaxing customers through the door.
"You've got guts, so come out here!" Wuchang roared.
"You've got guts, so come in!" Gong Wenshan called back.
"Come out!"
"Come in!"
Everyone: …
"Aaaargh!" Wuchang was driven nearly mad. He couldn't help but let out a thunderous roar.
His enemy was right before his eyes, yet he was utterly powerless to do anything about it — and in front of so many people, no less. A man of his dominance, how could he possibly endure such humiliation?
Accompanied by his roar, two pillars of light — one red, one white — suddenly erupted skyward from his body like twin flood dragons, intertwining as they pierced through the clouds. They then spiraled back down, hurtling toward Gong Wenshan's position like falling meteors.
He had clearly lost all patience for trading barbs with Gong Wenshan. In a moment of fury, he struck.
Gong Wenshan, far from losing his composure, simply revealed a strange, eerie smile. With a single hand forming a seal, a dense, substantial barrier of light materialized three zhang to his side.
Boom, boom, boom…
The combined red-and-white energy slammed directly into the barrier. The barrier bowed violently inward, but then snapped back just as quickly, not only deflecting the blow but actually reflecting Wuchang's ferocious attack back outward. In an instant, violent energy scattered in every direction.
"Gong Wenshan, you piece of trash!"
"Screw your mother!"
"Are you out of your damn mind?!"
The crowd of onlookers erupted in panicked shouting. Seeing the savage energy surging toward them, they cursed loudly and scrambled to get out of the way. They didn't dare curse Wuchang, but they laid into Gong Wenshan with every foul word they could muster.
At the same time, Yang Kai's expression turned cold. Ignoring his injuries, he surged to his feet and thrust a hand forward.
In an instant, a pitch-black void appeared in the space before him — chaotic and primordial, like the gaping maw of some ravenous beast — swallowing the billowing energy whole.