Seeing Yang Kai blown away, the giant called A Da was startled. He hastily sucked in a breath toward where Yang Kai had been sent flying.
And then Yang Kai came tumbling back, limbs flailing.
A Da blinked, the anger melting from his face and replaced by a cheerful grin. As Yang Kai was sucked back, he pursed his lips and blew again.
The next instant, Yang Kai went flying once more…
Blow, suck, blow, suck…
In the vast emptiness of the starfield, A Da's hearty laughter echoed, like a child who'd just gotten a new toy and was having the time of his life. His eyes were crinkled almost shut with delight.
When Yang Kai was pulled back yet again, he swept his dragon claws outward and roared, "Enough! Cut it out!"
"Ack, ack, ack—" A Da, who'd been having a wonderful time, flinched at the shout. The air he'd sucked in wasn't spat out in time, and he ended up choking himself, breaking into a violent cough.
Yang Kai seized the opportunity and pounced on him, raining down a frenzied barrage of punches and kicks. In an instant, the thunderous sounds of impacts rang out without cease.
Yang Kai was practically fuming. Since the start of his Cultivation, he had never been made to look so utterly pathetic. No matter how powerful an enemy he'd faced before, he'd always been able to muster the resolve to fight—even if he couldn't win, he could at least flee. But before this giant, even running away was an indulgence. Instead, he'd been treated like a plaything.
Enough was enough. Even knowing he was no match, Yang Kai refused to endure it any longer. He charged in for a fight to the death.
A short while later, Yang Kai finally stopped, settling back into the giant's palm. He looked up, his eyes burning with accusations written in blood and tears, and through gritted teeth squeezed out two words: "You're ruthless!"
He had beaten A Da for quite some time, and the giant hadn't fought back or made the slightest effort to block. He simply took it all in silence. But such attacks had absolutely no effect on A Da whatsoever. Looking at his face, it was still perfectly intact—meanwhile, Yang Kai's own dragon claws were aching from the recoil.
A Da scratched his head, his gaze flicking back and forth between Yang Kai and the void, blinking rapidly, looking like a child who knew he'd done something wrong. Though he didn't quite understand what he'd done, he could sense that Yang Kai was angry, and he couldn't help feeling a twinge of guilt.
This comical sight stunned Yang Kai for a moment, and he couldn't help but laugh.
This giant called A Da was clearly a few bricks short of a wall mentally, yet his strength was so absurdly overwhelming it defied reason. What was the point of getting worked up over him? Wasn't that just asking for suffering?
Yang Kai laughed, and A Da laughed too—though his was a bit bashful, his enormous body trembling with the effort of it.
Suddenly, Yang Kai found the fellow much easier to look at and felt considerably less fear toward him. He spoke up: "What exactly are you?"
If anyone else had asked such a question, it would have been taken as provocation. Someone with a short fuse might have started throwing hands on the spot. But A Da couldn't have cared less. He simply held a finger to his lips, shrank his neck down, and whispered, "Shh, keep it down. You're so noisy."
Yang Kai immediately rubbed his hands together, hunched over in a conspiratorial posture, and lowered his voice: "Like this?"
A Da grinned broadly, though the smile was so terrifying it made Yang Kai's scalp tingle.
Suppressing the chill running through him, Yang Kai asked again: "What race are you? How did you get so big? And what is this place?"
What answered him was a rumbling sound like thunder, vibrating so hard it made Yang Kai's eardrums tremble.
A Da patted his belly and said with a pitiful look: "Hungry." That sound, it turned out, had come from his stomach.
Yang Kai couldn't help swallowing hard. Mostly because the way A Da said it—with his eyes fixed firmly on him—made him feel very unsafe. He wondered whether this fellow was planning to eat him. Given his behavior so far, probably not. Forcing down the urge to flee, Yang Kai coughed lightly into his fist: "Well, you see, the thing is, I may not be small myself, but there's hardly any meat on me. I wouldn't even taste good. You—"
Before he could finish, A Da turned his head to gaze at something far below, then wore an expression of shock and said in dismay: "It's gone!"
"What's gone?" Yang Kai frowned and followed his gaze. His pupils contracted instantly. Several tens of thousands of kilometers away in the starfield, a mass as black as ink was slowly writhing, shrinking.
Even across that vast distance, Yang Kai could still feel that familiar aura of primordial chaos and void.
A spatial rift!
That ink-black mass was nothing other than a stretch of void. He wondered—could that be the very place he'd escaped from? If so, it wasn't impossible.
But at this moment, that stretch of void was contracting rapidly. Within ten days or half a month at most, it would vanish entirely.
Just as in the Star Boundary, where the laws of heaven and earth repaired broken space, the same held true in this mysterious starfield. Right now, that rift was being gradually sealed under the mending hand of some unknown cosmic law.
The thought sent a shiver through Yang Kai. He'd been fortunate to escape when he did. If the rift had been repaired before he'd gotten out, he really would have trapped inside for good.
Following that logic, the location of that rift should be roughly where the Demon Realm had originally existed.
Not entirely certain, Yang Kai turned to A Da and asked: "What's gone?"
"The food… it's gone…" A Da's massive face was crumpled in misery, looking on the verge of tears.