91: Chapter 91 A High-Stakes Gamble with the System Shop

"Tear them to pieces!"

In mid-air, the Cult Deacon, stepping on a dragon skull, keenly noticed the black-robed youth sitting cross-legged in the center of the high ground.

Although he didn't know what that kid, who didn't even have any spiritual energy, was doing, watching that group of Kyoto Prodigies—who had already mentally collapsed—willingly form a circle to protect him, a flash of malice crossed the eyes beneath the Deacon's mask.

"Trying to pull something in my Blood Sacrifice Array? What a pipe dream! All forces, advance! Leave no one alive!"

Accompanied by the Deacon's roar.

The overwhelming tide of high-level beasts, like an inverted black tsunami, crashed violently into the flimsy defensive line temporarily formed by the students!

"Bang!"

This was merely the first, most direct collision of flesh and blood.

The dozens of ordinary students standing on the outermost perimeter, whose cultivation was weaker and whose spiritual energy had long since dried up, didn't even have time to swing their weapons before they were sent flying by the massive bodies of the 3rd Order Shadow Demon Wolves.

"Ahhh!"

The screams pierced the sky.

More than a dozen students were torn in two mid-air by several leaping exotic beasts. Hot blood, mixed with severed limbs and broken arms, fell like a bloody storm, splattering directly onto the faces and bodies of the students behind them.

The defensive line was instantly torn open, creating a huge gap.

"Hold the line! Hold it, damn it!"

Jiang Feng wiped the gore from his face, his eyes bloodshot. He pushed [Iron Body] to its limit, his massive body advancing instead of retreating, and he smashed his fist hard into the face of a 3rd Order exotic beast that had charged in.

"Crack!" The beast's skull shattered, but immediately after, the claws of two other beasts raked fiercely across Jiang Feng's back, bringing up two eye-catching sprays of blood.

"Get lost!"

Lin Qinghan appeared beside Jiang Feng. Her face was deathly pale, and she slashed continuously with her broken sword.

"Extreme Cold Ice Domain!"

Even though the Law of Frost within her body had begun to backlash against her internal organs, she still gritted her teeth, overdrawing her life force, and forcibly released waves of Absolute Zero Sword Qi, freezing the leaping exotic beasts into ice sculptures.

Jiang Feng's Titan Giant Bear iron fists and Lin Qinghan's frost Sword Qi outputted power crazily at the front, forcibly stabilizing the crumbling formation.

However, there were too many exotic beasts.

Kill ten, and a hundred more surged up.

Students fell one after another. Wails, chewing sounds, and the noise of breaking weapons blended together.

This temporarily patched-together defensive line of flesh and blood became a cruel, merciless meat grinder within just one minute. The humans' living space was being continuously compressed and eroded at a speed visible to the naked eye.

"I have no strength left..." A scion of a noble family knelt on the ground in despair, his long sword clattering to the floor.

The next second, a gaping maw bit off half his body.

Blood flowed down the slope of the high ground, gathering into an eye-catching stream that ran downwards.

And in the very center of the defensive line.

In that small patch of ground, guarded desperately by his peers with their lives and flesh.

Su Chen sat cross-legged on the ground covered in broken rocks.

He kept his eyes closed and shut off his hearing. The splashing blood, the shrill screams, and the roars of the exotic beasts were all forcibly blocked out of his consciousness.

"System, open the shop panel."

A dark red holographic interface popped up in his dark field of vision.

Su Chen glanced at the balance in the top right corner: [Current origin points: 4950].

This was his entire fortune.

Facing this desperate situation with no chance of survival, and facing the Wuzong Realm Deacon above who was supported by an altar, cultivating step-by-step no longer had any meaning.

He had to forcibly raise his physical Realm to an extremely terrifying level to carry the trump card he was about to unleash.

"Open the special consumables section."

Su Chen gave the order quickly in his mind, his gaze locking precisely onto the dazzling array of goods.

"Exchange for [High-Order Qi and Blood Purification Potion]."

"Exchange for [Rokushiki: Life Return Ultimate Enhancement Liquid]."

"Exchange for [Military Ration Pill: Chakra Limit Expansion Powder]."

The System's mechanical voice responded quickly:

"Ding! Deducted 1500 origin points, [High-Order Qi and Blood Purification Potion] successfully exchanged."

"Ding! Deducted 2000 origin points, [Life Return Ultimate Enhancement Liquid] successfully exchanged."

"Ding! Deducted 1400 origin points, [Chakra Limit Expansion Powder] successfully exchanged."

"Current balance: 50."

As the three crisp notification sounds faded, the thousands of origin points Su Chen had risked his life to accumulate in the wilderness over the past half-month were squandered in this moment!

This was a life-or-death gamble that exhausted all his resources, leaving no way back!

"Swish."

In Su Chen's palm, two test tubes containing an unknown liquid and a black pill emitting a pungent medicinal odor appeared out of thin air.

These three items were all specially modified by the System, potent Breakthrough drugs custom-made for his body, which had fused multiple dimensional power Systems.

Su Chen did not hesitate at all.

He raised his hand, poured the two vials of potion and the black pill into his mouth all at once, and swallowed them.

"BOOM!!!"

One-thousandth of a second after the potions entered his stomach.

Su Chen's body jolted violently, his fists clenching the fabric on his knees tightly.

A terrifying energy, indescribable in words, was as if a small sun had been detonated directly inside his stomach!

"Hot..."

This was the first thought that flashed through Su Chen's mind.

Immediately after, this "sun" transformed into countless streams of scorching magma, rushing down his esophagus and crazily surging into every meridian and muscle of his body!

Su Chen completely released the Realm he had been deliberately suppressing within his body.

His Martial Artist Realm Qi and blood boiled instantly upon encountering these three violent medicinal powers!

"Rumble!"

A dull sound like thunder came from within Su Chen's body.

The violent blood-red Qi and blood were like a dead volcano that had been suppressed for ten million years, finally erupting. His skin turned bright red, and even the surrounding air was violently distorted by the heat of this Qi and blood that was about to burst out of his body.

According to the common sense of the High Martial World.

A Martial Artist's Breakthrough involves continuously expanding their Qi and blood outwards, condensing Qi into Protective Aura, forming a thicker and stronger Protective Aura.

But Su Chen did not do this.

"It cannot disperse outward."

Su Chen gritted his teeth, bulging, hideous veins popping up on his forehead.

"The Qi and blood expanding outward is too flimsy. What I want is extreme density!"

Su Chen's tightly closed eyes trembled slightly, and he let out a hysterical roar in his heart.

"Armament Haki!"

"Give me... reversal!!!"

The Armament Haki, usually used to cover the skin's surface and form hard black armor, stopped flowing outward under Su Chen's near-masochistic control.

Not only did it stop flowing out, but this profound, extremely domineering power of will instead poured crazily into his body!

Su Chen transformed his high-level Armament Haki into an invisible, extremely cruel microscopic grindstone!

Inside his own body.

Using this black grindstone, he took that violent Qi and blood that was crazily erupting and trying to expand outward, the boiling muscles and bones, the expanding Meridians...

And crazily compressed, crushed, and reorganized them toward the nuclei of his cells and bone marrow in the deepest part of his body!

This was an inhuman torture that went against biological instincts.

"Crack... crack, crack, crack..."

Su Chen's bones, caught between the inward crushing of the Haki and the outward expansion of the Qi and blood, became the most tragic sandwich, emitting a series of unbearable, spine-chilling groans.

The pain of forcibly suppressing and tempering his body with Haki was definitely no less than the ancient execution of death by a thousand cuts.

"Urgh..."

A suppressed groan squeezed out of Su Chen's throat.

His pores began to be unable to withstand this terrifying internal pressure.

Fine beads of blood seeped out along the surface of his skin all over his body, quickly dyeing his tattered black combat suit dark red.

A mist of blood steamed around him.

But he sat there, his body like an iron Buddha welded to the ground, not swaying in the slightest.

The extreme pain was exchanged for a crazy leap in the quality of his body.

[Life Return Ultimate Enhancement Liquid] accelerated the tearing and healing of his cells.

[Chakra Limit Expansion Powder] forcibly widened his spiritual Sea of Consciousness and the width of his Meridians.

And the [High-Order Qi and Blood Purification Potion], under that invisible Armament Haki grindstone, forcibly compressed and purified his original 1st Order Qi and blood to a high-dimensional density that ordinary people could not understand at all.

2nd Order.

2nd Order Peak.

Still climbing!

Su Chen maintained a deathly silence amidst the extreme pain.

He blocked out all external interference, turning himself into a blazing, self-forging Breakthrough furnace, launching a desperate charge toward a higher dimension of life.

In front of the defensive line.

"Pfft!"

Jiang Feng was struck in the chest by the tail of a 3rd Order "Rot-Poison Wyvern".

Even with [Iron Body] protecting him, this strike still shattered his ribs. The fat man sprayed a mouthful of blood, his body flying backward like a kite with a broken string, slamming heavily into the ground less than two meters in front of Su Chen.

"Jiang Feng!"

Lin Qinghan forced back a few Shadow Demon Wolves with her sword, retreated to Jiang Feng's side, and pulled him up.

"I... I'm fine..."

Jiang Feng spat out a mouthful of bloody foam and stood up unsteadily. The Titan Giant Bear phantom on his body had completely dimmed, and his whole body was covered in claw marks deep enough to see bone and charred black from venom corrosion.

Lin Qinghan's situation was no better.

Her right hand holding the sword was shaking violently, and her white combat suit could no longer be seen in its original color.

The surrounding defensive line had been compressed to the limit.

Of the more than a thousand students who had originally stepped out, only less than three hundred were still struggling to hold on. The rest had all been turned into severed limbs on the ground during these few minutes of meat-grinder-like bloody battle.

"Can't hold on anymore..."

An A-grade Genius looked despairingly at the beast tide ahead that was stepping on the corpses of their companions and continuing to swarm up, their long sword clattering to the ground.

In mid-air.

The Cult Deacon, stepping on the dragon skull, looked down at all of this from above.

The eyes beneath his mask suddenly narrowed slightly, his gaze piercing through the layers of figures and landing on the black-robed youth sitting cross-legged at the very back of the defensive line, covered in blood.

"That energy fluctuation..."

The Deacon felt the aura of the terrifying qualitative change taking place inside Su Chen, a flash of surprise crossed his eyes, which then turned into extreme, cruel mockery.

"Actually delusional enough to try and force a Breakthrough in the center of the battlefield? And with this kind of domineering Breakthrough method that's almost self-detonation?"

The Deacon shook his head and let out a hoarse, loud laugh.

"A pipe dream."

"Even if you are a once-in-ten-thousand-years Prodigy, today, you will die for me in this quagmire."

The Deacon slowly raised his right hand, his fingertips aimed at Lin Qinghan, Jiang Feng, and the others who were struggling to hold on below.

"The game should end now. Crush them."

"Hiss—!"

Following the Deacon's command, the S-grade Poison Python phantom behind him, dozens of meters long, suddenly raised its huge head.

The poison python opened its gaping maw, capable of devouring everything, and transformed into a dark green bolt of death, bringing with it the earth-shattering pressure of a 4th Order Wuzong Realm, crashing down from mid-air toward the remaining student defensive line below!