Chapter 57: Wealth Makes You Reckless

"If you keep running, you'll be out of the forest."

The orange cat nimbly dashed ahead, with Xia Tianqiong in hot pursuit.

Unable to locate Liu Zhongjun for the moment, he had summoned the orange cat out again, intending to find the sealed zombie specter.

This thing was far more formidable than the head specter. If he could manage to get ten thousand zombie specters, he reckoned he could walk sideways through this place without a care in the world, no longer needing to be chased and forced to flee everywhere.

Yet the orange cat kept running, cutting straight across the forest and running all the way to the boundary without stopping.

Xia Tianqiong had previously found the forest boundary, where the outside was a desert. But this time, the landscape beyond the boundary was not a desert, but a barren, lifeless wasteland.

The ground was pitch black and completely bare, without a single blade of grass. Instead, withered and dead dwarf trees were scattered about, as if the earth had been scorched by a massive fire.

At a single glance, it was clearly an ominous place.

Hesitating slightly, Xia Tianqiong summoned five thousand head specters from the forest, having them accompany him into this wasteland.

The orange cat led the way ahead. After walking for about two or three minutes, a solitary little mound appeared before them, upon which a coffin painted with red lacquer stood upright.

The coffin was lidless, and inside lay a zombie specter with its eyes tightly closed.

Xia Tianqiong's target was this very thing. He took out a tael or two of gold and stuffed it into its mouth.

Immediately, many zombie specter clones appeared out of thin air beside the coffin. Counting them, there were twenty.

In other words, a single zombie specter required 500 underworld banknotes, which was five times that of a head specter.

Xia Tianqiong did not think it expensive; rather, he found it cheap. Just as he was about to take out more gold to acquire ten thousand of them,

at that very moment, a warning of danger came from the head specters in the sky.

Turning around to look, a troop of cavalry appeared on the distant horizon, galloping toward them.

As the distance closed, he could faintly make out that the horses were all skeletal steeds, with greyish-white bones covering their entire bodies and not a shred of flesh.

The riders upon them were also skeletons, yet they wore leather armor, wielded long sabers, and slung large bows over their shoulders.

It looked like a well-organized ancient cavalry force, and mounted archers at that.

At a rough glance, there were at least a thousand of them.

Still five or six hundred meters away, carrying a monstrous murderous intent, they charged forward at a gallop. A heart-shaking momentum washed over them, bringing an overwhelming sense of pressure.

Xia Tianqiong wanted to test their strength, so he commanded the head specters to meet the cavalry specters in battle.

Five thousand head specters flew in the air, dense and crowded like a dark cloud, sweeping toward the cavalry specters.

Their flying speed was also very fast. In the blink of an eye, when the distance closed to less than two hundred meters, the cavalry specters suddenly drew their bows and nocked their arrows.

A rain of arrows shot into the air, and instantly hundreds of head specters were blasted apart mid-air.

The dark cloud instantly thinned out somewhat.

Next came two more volleys of simultaneous shooting, blasting apart over a thousand head specters before the two forces finally collided.

Xia Tianqiong watched with full anticipation, only to see the head specters dive down from the air, opening their wide mouths to bite the bone-covered skeletal cavalry, yet it had zero effect at all.

They were completely incapable of inflicting any damage on the enemy!

This battle was impossible to fight!

The skeletal cavalry switched to their long sabers, cutting down a head specter with every single stroke, as effortless as slicing melons and vegetables.

Xia Tianqiong was somewhat disappointed. The head specters were indeed far too fragile; it seemed he still had to rely on the zombie specters.

However, the head specters had served some purpose, as they at least slowed down the speed of the cavalry specters.

"You really are a fool! To actually spend one million underworld banknotes to summon ten thousand head specters—what a sheer waste of money."

Liu Zhongjun's voice suddenly rang out from behind. This fellow was always so elusive, making it hard for anyone to detect him.

Xia Tianqiong immediately turned around and witnessed an extremely bizarre sight.

He saw Liu Zhongjun piggybacking on the back of a female specter draped in fluttering white clothes. The female specter had her tongue hanging out and her eyes rolled back, with her neck caught in a strip of white silk, the other end of which was suspended high up in the air.

Man and specter hung suspended in the sky just like that, looking as though they were hanging themselves.

Xia Tianqiong recognized it at a glance—this was a flying hanged-ghost, and a rather powerful white-clothed female hanged-ghost at that.

"Out of money to summon zombies now?"

Liu Zhongjun looked at the score of zombie specters beside Xia Tianqiong, assuming he lacked the funds to buy more zombies, and could not help mocking him. "If you hadn't bought all those head specters and instead spent it all on zombie specters, my skeleton army might not necessarily be a match for them."

"That's hard to say. How do you know I'm out of money? Perhaps I still have plenty!"

Xia Tianqiong did not make a move against Liu Zhongjun; he wanted to fish for more information. "There are quite a few specters around here, but it's a pity none of them are any good!

Didn't you say you were going to give me a surprise? Surely it's not the female specter beneath you, is it? I'm not interested in female specters at all, you can keep her for yourself!"

"Don't rush, you'll know in a moment. Look, your head specters have all been slaughtered."

In the time it took to exchange those few words, the five thousand head specters had been utterly massacred.

The thousand-plus skeletal cavalry launched another charge, heading straight for Xia Tianqiong.

Liu Zhongjun suddenly shouted loudly, "If you've got the guts, don't run! Let's see how these few zombies of yours can block my thousand-plus cavalry."

Xia Tianqiong frowned slightly—not because of the incoming skeletal cavalry specters, but because Liu Zhongjun's behavior was somewhat strange.

He knew full well that as long as Xia Tianqiong killed him, these cavalrymen would lose control, yet he still showed up here.

Under normal circumstances, he should have been hiding.

"Rest assured, I'm not running. Keep your eyes wide open and watch how I slaughter these skeletal cavalry of yours."

As he spoke, Xia Tianqiong took out ingots of underworld gold and stuffed them into the mouth of the sealed zombie specter.

A single ingot was worth ten taels, enough to summon two hundred.

He stuffed them in continuously, and a massive number of zombie specters kept appearing in the surrounding open space. Radiating outward with him at the center, in the blink of an eye there were thousands of them, and the number kept increasing.

"Underworld gold? You actually have this much underworld gold?"

A look of astonishment finally appeared on Liu Zhongjun's handsome face. He widened his eyes in utter disbelief.

What he found even harder to comprehend was that Xia Tianqiong seemed to treat underworld gold as if it were completely worthless, tossing it casually into the zombie's mouth without feeling a twinge of heartache.

One had to know that underworld gold was an extremely important resource for specter cultivation; among all the ancient families, only the most crucial figures were supplied with tiny amounts. Throughout his entire life, he had only ever seen it, but never used it.

Meanwhile, this only solidified his determination to kill this person and seize all the underworld gold.

While Liu Zhongjun was secretly resolving to kill him, the skeletal cavalry had already charged close, less than two hundred meters away, unleashing their customary opening volley of simultaneous archer fire.

Xia Tianqiong directly hid behind the coffin.

This object was protected by the power of rules, impervious to destruction by anything, making it the perfect shield.

As for the zombie specters, over ten thousand had been summoned, densely packing the area around the mound.

After a barrage of arrows, only a few dozen that were hit in the head exploded into pieces; those struck anywhere else on the body suffered no damage at all.

Under the control of Xia Tianqiong's mind, the zombie specters charged head-on toward the cavalry formation.

Over ten thousand zombies leaped forward simultaneously—a truly spectacular sight. With every single leap, the ground trembled along with it.

Seeing this scene, Liu Zhongjun was likewise deeply shocked.

The thousand-plus cavalry charged into the mass of over ten thousand zombies. At first, they directly trampled hundreds of zombies to death, but immediately afterward, their speed was forced down as they fell into the encirclement.

The skeletal cavalry's sabers were extremely sharp; as long as they struck the head, a single slash could shatter a zombie specter.

Yet the number of zombie specters was simply too great, and they could also spew corrosive black mist from their mouths.

With every zombie exhaling a breath, the black mist expelled by over ten thousand zombies converged into a mass of dark clouds that enveloped the entire battlefield, obscuring everything from view save for the faint sounds of bones shattering.

A moment later, the dark clouds gradually dispersed. A massive swath of zombie specters had perished—around two to three thousand of them.

Yet not a single skeletal cavalryman remained, not even a scrap of bone.

Liu Zhongjun had already guessed this outcome, but seeing it with his own eyes still left him shocked.

Xia Tianqiong glanced at the battlefield, then turned his gaze back to him. "Now it's your turn."

Hearing these words, Liu Zhongjun knew Xia Tianqiong was about to make a move against him, but he did not panic, nor did he self-detonate as he had before.

Instead, he remained calm and composed, piggybacking on the female specter and hanging steadily in mid-air.

However, he subconsciously glanced down at the ground, looking at his own shadow cast upon the earth.

Hidden within his shadow was the surprise he had prepared for Xia Tianqiong. The moment Xia Tianqiong teleported into his shadow just like before, he would undoubtedly be killed.

By then, all of his magical tools and artifacts, along with the underworld gold of unknown quantity, would all belong to him.

At this thought, his heart bloomed with joy, and the corners of his mouth curled up uncontrollably.

Yet abruptly, he saw Xia Tianqiong flick out that rope capable of binding people. The rope immediately flew into the sky, and the next instant, it suddenly pulled taut and straight, dragging Xia Tianqiong flying upward into the heavens.

He was soaring directly toward his direction.

Liu Zhongjun was stunned into speechlessness. So that hemp rope could not only bind people, but also carry people flying into the sky!

"How did you—"

"Why didn't I teleport into your shadow, you mean? Didn't you say it yourself, the same trick cannot be used twice in front of you.

I figured you must have prepared countermeasures, otherwise you wouldn't have waited here, trying to lure me into making a move. Am I right?"