In fact, if Luo Feifei hadn’t been holding herself back, she would have broken through to Tier Seven long ago.
Li Xiang immediately gave the orders: he and Luo Feifei would launch a frontal assault on the Exotic Beast’s main body while maintaining the rock wall and ice dome to prevent its escape. The others were to destroy the fourteen nodes on the lake’s shore.
The nodes were the fourteen tallest Huimba Trees on the shore of Boiling Lake. They blotted out the sun, making them incredibly conspicuous. Yao Yao, Zhao Xueqing, Lei Xiaohui, Lei Jiaming, Xu Xuan, Zhang Youyou, and Yaki Toto—seven in total—would each be responsible for clearing two nodes.
"Any problems?" Li Xiang shouted.
"None!" the others replied in unison, their voices firm and resolute.
Since Yaki Toto didn’t speak their language, Li Xiang quickly explained it to him separately. Yaki Toto thumped his chest, brandished his Battle Saber, and dashed toward the two nodes Li Xiang had assigned him.
The rest of the group also sprang into action.
Meanwhile, Li Xiang and Luo Feifei leaped into the lake, kicking up enormous, murky waves. Li Xiang was clad in his Giant Whale Saint Armor; he could traverse the deep sea, let alone a mere lake.
As for Luo Feifei, she was a water sprite. Once in the water, she was like a fish back in its element, several times more powerful than she was on land.
But the moment they entered the water, they felt the world transform around them.
...
The murky lake water, filled with decaying leaves, vanished. It was replaced by the fresh scent of pinewood. Li Xiang’s pupils contracted—the old, leaky house from his childhood, long since demolished, materialized before his eyes.
His mother, her face kind and gentle, had sleeves stained with mud from digging up ferns on the mountain behind their house. Raspberries, still covered in morning dew, tumbled from her bamboo basket. His father’s patched-up trouser cuffs were rolled up, with half an oak leaf caught in the fold.
’Is this that morning in the late spring of ’08?’
The memory was etched deep in Li Xiang’s mind. It was the last time he had ever been with his parents.
That afternoon, his parents had left for a faraway construction site. When disaster struck, they never returned. His grandmother had to bury her own children, setting up a cenotaph in their memory.
"Xiang’Er, quickly, try this. Your father climbed three cliffs just to pick these. They’re sweet and sour, so delicious." His mother fed him a berry by hand. The juice burst in his mouth, a sweet-and-sour sensation exploding through his nerves.
Li Xiang swallowed the raspberry and sucked in a sharp breath. ’Have I really been reborn, sent back to 2008? If it were possible, I would truly want to come back.’
"Dad, Mom, don’t go away to work. Please, don’t go to Wenchuan," Li Xiang said hurriedly.
"If we don’t go, where will we get money?" His mother shook her head.
...
Meanwhile, an ice crystal palace appeared before Luo Feifei. She was dressed beautifully in a pure white wedding gown, holding her White Tiger Sword. Then the groom appeared. It was Li Xiang.
The moment she saw Li Xiang, Luo Feifei quickly put her sword away. ’It’s our wedding, what am I doing with the White Tiger Sword? I’m the bride, not a wedding crasher.’ Her eyes crinkled into a blissful smile. ’I’m finally getting my happy ending with Brother Xiang!’
"Feifei, your Swordsmanship has improved again." Li Xiang walked over, embraced her, and kissed her. The realistic touch made her tremble slightly, feel faint.
...
At the same time, Yao Yao and the others also felt their worlds change.
"Yao’Er, let me test your Transformation Technique and Clone Technique," Li Xiang said softly, gently pinching Yao Yao’s smooth chin in a hotel room.
Yao Yao grew excited at once. With a shimmer, seven or eight different beautiful women appeared around them. If the room wasn’t too small to fit them all, she could have made over a hundred.
"Brother, which one will you choose? Or... how about all of us at once?"
"All at once," Li Xiang nodded excitedly.
"We’ll drain you dry~" Yao Yao giggled, her body burning hot as she led her many Clones to pounce on him.
...
Zhao Xueqing suddenly found that her Vine Technique had backfired.
The vines she manifested had gone out of control, binding her limbs and leaving her hanging in a rainforest in an extremely humiliating position.
Li Xiang appeared and reached out, grasping the flowering vine that grew from her tailbone to play with it. Her whole body trembled; it was one of her most sensitive spots...
...
"Dad, can I see that hatchet?" Back in the dilapidated old house in Li Family Village, Li Xiang suddenly grabbed his father’s calloused hand.
The anti-slip cloth wrapped around the hatchet’s wooden handle was clearly visible. He himself had wrapped that cloth five years later, a time when his father was already long gone.
Li Xiang’s fingernails dug deep into his palm.
His Earth Vein Perception Ability suddenly stirred a storm in his sea of consciousness—thirty meters beneath the stove, where he had buried glass marbles as a child, he could now feel the unique energy ripples of an Obsidian Ore Vein surging.
"This is all an illusion! Break!" Li Xiang reached out and grabbed the air. The 7,200-kilogram White Jade Golden Hook Eight Desolations Giant Python Rod appeared in his hand. He smashed it violently toward the sky, and the dilapidated old house was instantly shattered. Everything before him collapsed and vanished, and the fetid water of the real world churned around him once more.
Luo Feifei was right beside him.
On the shore, Yao Yao and the others had only stumbled half a step in the real world.
’It was just an illusion.’
The time they were trapped in the Illusion Realm was short, but like a Dream Realm, while little time passed in the outside world, it felt as if they had experienced many things over several hours.
Everyone broke out of their "dreams." Any later, and they all would have been parasitized.
The four women—Luo Feifei, Yao Yao, Zhao Xueqing, and Lei Xiaohui—all felt their faces burning and their legs a little weak. In their "dreams," Li Xiang had really put them through the wringer.
Fortunately, their Face Armor hid their expressions from the others.
The Ice Crystals gathering on Luo Feifei’s blade refracted an eerie spectrum. "The Exotic Beast is using the Geomagnetic field to interfere with our perception!" The extreme cold bursting from her Electric Light Illusion Armor spread rapidly across the lake’s surface. Beneath the ice, twenty-seven tentacles were dragging fourteen placenta-like objects down toward a layer of magma.
"Die!"
Li Xiang activated the Earth Pivot World Record, causing a fissure to rip through the earth. The lake water poured into the chasm, exposing the Exotic Beast’s main body at the bottom.
The creature’s Illusion raged, its Spiritual Energy tentacles whipping about. "Ignorant and backward natives of Earth, suffer the wrath of a noble race!"
Under its immense Spiritual Power, magma from the lakebed erupted, shooting toward the sky.
With a mere thought, Li Xiang erected a thick Basalt barrier to block the magma. Luo Feifei seized the opportunity to unleash Extreme Cold Star Burst, and a wave of frost spread out, freezing the lava.
Twenty-seven translucent tentacles emerged from the lava layer, each tipped with spiral mouthparts like a nautilus. Luo Feifei’s White Tiger Sword traced a path of Ice Crystals through the air. Its tip pierced a tentacle, which instantly exploded in a shower of frost.
At the same time, Xu Xuan’s Wind Blades destroyed the southeastern node, Zhang Youyou’s Fire Dragon Vortex incinerated the southwestern node, Lei Xiaohui’s Bronze Spear pierced the northwestern tree trunk, and the Corpse-Scented Amaryllis controlled by Yaki Toto bloomed in the north...
As Lei Jiaming’s 300-kilogram Big Saber shattered the final node, Li Xiang brandished his White Jade Golden Hook Eight Desolations Giant Python Rod. An Illusion of the eight-headed, eight-tailed Orochi danced wildly around it. Propelled by 220,000 jin of Giant Power and moving at an Extreme Speed of Mach 11, the 7,200-kilogram Saint Tier rod shot forward like a meteor, piercing the Mother Empress’s third compound eye.
System: "Detected Twenty-Seventh Tier Mutated Creature: Thousand-Tailed Nether Abyss Mother Empress."
From within the fluorescent ichor that exploded at the bottom of the lake, the Golden Hook pulled out a translucent Spirit Body.
The Thousand-Tailed Nether Abyss Mother Empress was in a panic. It had never expected that Li Xiang’s strange weapon—the Golden Hook—could actually harm its Spirit Body. It could compress itself into an Illusion, existing between the corporeal and ethereal planes and changing at will, which should have made it immune to physical attacks. This was the source of its confidence.
It truly panicked and tried to flee, but there was no way Li Xiang would let it escape. The Illusion of Orochi crushed and devoured it.
System: "Congratulations, Host, for killing the Twenty-Seventh Tier Saint Tier Mutated Creature, the Thousand-Tailed Nether Abyss Mother Empress. Reward: 2,700 Achievement Points, three portions of the Tier Thirteen Mutated Spiritual Medicine, Thousand-Beard Soul-Gathering Ginseng, and the Twenty-Fifth Tier Extraordinary Item, Nether Abyss Spirit Summoning Mirror."