Chapter 1050: Battle of Attrition
The drained giant python corpse meant that Qianye had been replenished, but replenishment also meant that he would need time to digest and couldn’t have gone far. At the thought of this, the Demoness’ killing intent subsided somewhat.
After some thought, her figure flickered and appeared in a different place. She began contemplating in silence as she searched through her own domain. Soon, she had confirmed Qianye’s location.
He was found out again within moments, but unexpectedly, he kept running through the woods instead of using Spatial Flash.
The Demoness was a bit surprised, but she quickly chased after him with a sneer. As she saw it, Qianye was courting certain death. All the Evernight races apart from the arachne were naturally fast, and the Demoness simply didn’t believe she would lose her target even without using any special abilities.
Was that Qianye out of origin power, or had he set up a trap?
The Demoness wasn’t in a rush to overrun him. She merely maintained a steady distance and launched constant ranged attacks.
Qianye slashed apart the black demonic ribbons with hands shrouded in scarlet golden flames, causing them to erupt into raging flames. It seemed as though Qianye had drawn a safe line between him and the Demoness. If the distance was shortened, he would use all sorts of techniques and take advantage of the geography to restore it.
This was actually a battle of attrition. Both sides were exhausting the same amount of resources for movement and battle, but the Demoness was draining faster as she had to maintain the vast domain.
The Demoness wasn't alone, though. She had a group of Evernight experts at her disposal, which meant that a single careless turn could land Qianye in an encirclement, and he might not be lucky enough to escape unscathed like last time.
Before long, this game of cat and mouse had taken the duo two circles around the Constellation Well. The Evernight experts had been left far behind by this point, and not even Anwen could catch up. Since Qianye stopped using Spatial Flash, the Demoness had also stopped leaving behind a trail.
At this point, the Demoness had noticed Qianye’s intentions. He wasn’t willing to leave the Constellation Well and let the Evernight experts gain origin blood. To the dark race, the best way was to hunt Qianye down with full force while having people like Edward and Basil enter the well. This way, Qianye would be left between a rock and a hard place—if he were to ignore it, then this battle of attrition would’ve become meaningless, but if he didn’t, he would be walking into an ambush.
For some reason, however, she didn’t instruct Anwen to make such an arrangement and only focused on chasing Qianye.
At this point, the two had been at it for over an hour. After noticing that Qianye was stalling for time, she stopped attacking from long range and would jump forward to intercept him from time to time. The two thus attacked from afar at times and would lock into a melee fight in others.
Discovering that the Demoness had changed her strategy to a head-on showdown, Qianye finally stopped running around the Constellation Well. He began running away at full speed, drilling through wherever there was an opening. He took full advantage of the forested landscape and changed his direction every few moments, making it extremely difficult to guess his trajectory.
Qianye moved like lightning and was as unpredictable as a specter, pushing his combat techniques and advantage in perception to their maximum. The Demoness would fall back several dozen meters with every little mistake, and that was enough for Qianye to activate Spatial Flash. Unresigned, she would immediately activate her movement arts and flash over to intercept.
This was when the difference between them would become evident. The Demoness would use a technique similar to void traversal inside her domain, causing her to fade out and become almost weightless. This increased her speed to an unimaginable extent, allowing her to cross dozens of meters in an instant.
The Demoness' technique was comparable to Spatial Flash over short distances, but the latter was at the true apex of spatial penetration, while the Demoness was just moving within a certain space. Despite that, she was able to keep up with Qianye, which went to show just how terrifying she was.
This movement skill of hers was simply too advanced. She required the demonic energy inside her domain to drag her forward and was also lacking in agility when changing directions. Comparatively, Qianye was using a clumsy physical skill comparable to that of wild beasts. His overall speed and his swiftness when changing directions were completely dependent on the strength of his step.
Qianye’s method was more suitable in the Great Maelstrom. The vegetation and rocks here were incomparably firm. He could hardly break the thicker branches no matter how hard he stomped. This meant that he could exert any amount of force, while the Demoness had to be careful. It wasn’t like in the outside world where she could just crash into the trees standing in her way.
An all-out collision might perhaps break an ancient tree in two, but she would also become dizzy from the impact. Besides, flattening a forest would cause too much of a ruckus, and the effects would be equal to firing an origin gun. Her current teleportation points were somewhat close and definitely incomparable to her peak status.
If they weren’t in the forest, the Demoness would’ve intercepted Qianye long ago. But how could everything go according to the ifs?
It would seem she was quite furious as she had given up on sensing Anwen’s group and was investing her complete attention on chasing down Qianye. The Demoness saw that, several times, Qianye hadn’t used Spatial Flash despite the opportunity to do so. He probably couldn’t activate the secret art anymore, and it was the best time to kill him.
Qianye moved like the wind, evading the Demoness’ killing moves at the last moment. He gradually fell into a difficult position, but he was neither flustered nor looked like he was in distress. He was paying attention to the Book of Darkness, waiting for the essence blood inside to complete refinement.
Most of the essence blood had been refined, and in moments, the process would be entirely complete. At that point, the essence blood obtained from the giant python would be pure enough for the blood core to ignite.
The Great Maelstrom was indeed a mystical place. In the outside world, the Book of Darkness only served to store essence blood and not refine it. Perhaps it did, but the degree was so small that it was almost negligible. Here, however, not only did the degree of refinement increase greatly, but the process was also very rapid. Something that would take an entire day outside would take little over an hour here.
This meant that the Demoness’ assessment of Qianye’s origin power status was completely off.
While paying attention to the refinement time, Qianye was also calculating his origin power and blood energy consumption. He was minimizing blood energy consumption and using his physical strength, reinforced with origin power, to do battle. He was never able to bring out his full power and was gradually falling to a disadvantage, but he could still hang on.
Just as he was like an arrow at the end of its flight, a streak of flowing light flashed across the cover of the Book of Darkness. The essence blood refinement process was finally complete!
Qianye let out a long howl as his Venus Dawn erupted, sending out a ring of origin flames in all directions and igniting hundreds of blazes. The demonic energy the Demoness had placed around them was swept clean.
Before she could lay down more demonic energy, Qianye stomped on an ancient tree, causing the massive tree to bend down. The terrifying rebound sent him flying like an arrow and away from the Demoness.
The Demoness smiled coldly because Qianye’s willingness to waste origin power was in her schemes. According to her plan, Qianye had no more power to use Spatial Flash, and the moment he ran out of origin power was when she would catch him.
Her arms danced about as she summoned several demonic threads in front of Qianye, which then formed an interweaving meshwork that would stop him. At the same time, her body turned into a beam of light and flew toward Qianye at full speed. A hundred meters took no more than a thought for her.
However, Qianye’s figure started to flicker in front of her.
The Demoness felt that something was wrong. Ignoring the drain on her demonic energy, she summoned dozens of demonic threads to tangle Qianye from all directions.
But Qianye’s silhouette became twisted and blurry, and then completely vanished. The demonic threads became confused after striking empty air.
Killing intent surged on the Demoness’ body. She looked about to find that Qianye had appeared a thousand meters away. She was angry because she had been tricked into making a wrong judgement, but she wasn’t flustered. Qianye still wouldn't be able to escape her grasp if he could only use Spatial Flash a couple more times.
The Demoness was only halfway toward Qianye when he had disappeared once more. She searched with all her might but was still a tad late. She found traces of Qianye a thousand meters away, but he was already activating his third Spatial Flash when she found him.
The Demoness’ body turned into a streak of light as she arced through the air and turned about. This time, though, she couldn’t find any traces of Qianye. Apparently, he had long since escaped.
She had no choice but to stop and scan the vast woods, but Qianye was nowhere to be found.
Her domain and perception were filled with a mess of moving creatures as the fight between the two had startled almost every beast in the forest. How was she to find Qianye in this chaos?
There were a whole lot of reactions to vampires, though, and most of them were aggregated in one place. It was clearly Edward and his subordinates.
“A group of useless trash!” The Demoness couldn’t help but curse. These vampires hadn’t realized that they had been enveloped in the Demoness’ domain. They walked on and on without knowing that their movements were all being observed. They were indeed trash in her eyes, but no one knew if the curse just now was directed at them.
It was at this moment that a new reaction appeared in her domain. Daybreak origin power had appeared in a certain direction. It was mottled and impure, but daybreak nonetheless.
The Demoness was beside herself in anger at the moment. Her figure arrived near the source of that daybreak origin power and produced countless demonic blades. With her perception and origin power, this attack was enough to slice the target into many pieces.