Life Game In Other World
Chapter 683: Talent Sequences 200: Orator (Looking for Monthly Votes - Long - )

Chapter 683: Chapter 683: Talent Sequences 200: Orator (Looking for Monthly Votes - Long Chapter)

He Ao rested his hand on the barrel of the gun and slowly stood up, looking toward the Shadow Cutter that was pierced behind him by the long spear.

The Shadow Cutter’s eyes bulged, staring blankly at him, his face filled with disbelief.

His surprise was frozen on his face, as if he had already lost his life.

But at that moment, He Ao abruptly sidestepped.

Whoosh—

A slender bone needle barely grazed his cheek as it flew past, striking a small door not far behind him, sparking dazzlingly.

"How could you..."

The rigid lips of the Shadow Cutter moved up and down, seemingly trying to figure out how He Ao had seen through his ’playing dead,’ or perhaps he wanted to ask why He Ao was not affected by the polluted murmurs.

However, he never got to ask his questions, for He Ao had already approached him.

In his eyes, there remained only the calm gaze of the elderly man, his deep pupils harboring the tranquility before a volcanic eruption.

He Ao reached out and gripped the spear’s handle in front of the Shadow Cutter, yanked the long spear out, and at the same time, he reached out, grabbed the Shadow Cutter’s chin, and twisted his face upward.

The words the Shadow Cutter intended to speak were all interrupted, and with difficulty, he squeezed out, "Don’t... please..."

However, his words had no effect on He Ao’s actions. Closing his eyes in an attempt to avoid everything, the Shadow Cutter’s eyelids were gently pried open by He Ao.

Even as he tried to look away, his peripheral vision still caught sight of the twisted lines drawn above.

At the sight of these lines, his body stiffened, and he began to convulse uncontrollably.

He Ao, holding the long spear, stepped back a few paces and calmly observed the Shadow Cutter.

He Ao’s previous strike, the Backturn Spear, had destroyed the Shadow Cutter’s core energy gathering point.

This blow severely injured the Shadow Cutter, causing him to almost lose control over his body, forcing him to release a desperate final strike, but it didn’t kill him.

Now, within the Divine Sense’s field of vision, the Shadow Cutter’s remaining three subordinate energy gathering points were flickering faintly, struggling to maintain the fragile life force of this body.

It was by seeing these energy flows that He Ao had been able to detect that the Shadow Cutter was feigning death, allowing him to dodge that sneak attack.

But he also knew that this was the Shadow Cutter’s last move.

The flickering, dim energy network signaled that the Shadow Cutter was standing on the threshold between hell and the living world.

And the gesture of He Ao ’tilting up’ his head was akin to standing by his side and lightly pushing him over the edge.

The Shadow Cutter did not regard the Polluted Monsters as the ’servants of gods’ proclaimed by the Evolution Acolytes, proving he had no belief in that so-called ’Divine Being.’

It was evident from the way he readily used the Divine Being’s pollution against He Ao without any hesitation.

Typically, followers of the Evil God would have some resistance to their deity’s pollution, or rather, because they continually and willingly suffer the Evil God’s pollution, they gain a certain ability to withstand specific pollutants.

The more devoted the believer, the stronger this resistance becomes. Of course, it could also be said that it’s because their resistance is stronger that they survived, received more of the Evil God’s ’Grace,’ and thus became higher-ranking believers.

However, the Shadow Cutter was not one of the believers behind those meandering lines. As an ’unbeliever,’ his resistance to the corruption of the meandering lines was not much better than that of a standard C-level individual.

In his heyday, he might have found a way to avoid or mitigate the corruption brought by these lines.

But, unfortunately, he was very weak at the moment, and his body and soul were not united as a typical Transcendent’s would be.

He had fused with Polluted Monsters to gain strength that surpassed his own level.

And all ’Graces’ come at a price.

Now, in the Super Memory’s vision, the ’shadows’ on the Shadow Cutter’s back that were originally well stitched together were now tearing apart violently as if provoked by something.

Faces from different people, phantom and evanescent, surfaced amidst those shadowy fragments, like people pressing their cheeks against a curtain behind a screen, desperately thrusting forward, squeezing the fabric. Yet, no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t burst through that curtain,

They kept tearing, ripping He Ao’s huge soul into countless entangled pieces.

And this rending, reflected upon their physical form in reality, was like arms surging within the Shadow Cutter’s very being, forcefully tearing open his corpse from the inside, shredding his flesh piece by piece.

"Go back! All of you, go back to where you came from! No!!! Don’t!!! Don’t!!!"

Twisted and ferocious expressions of pain emerged on the Shadow Cutter’s face as he tried desperately to snap the protruding arms, to stuff them back into his body, but in the end, more and more flesh was gripped and torn apart by those arms.

In a nearly instantaneous moment, this Transcendent, once so powerful he was invincible, was torn apart alive by his own hands.

The massive, dim, and twisted soul also shattered completely with the disintegration of the body.

Only when the last fragment of the soul dissipated did He Ao slowly exhale a sigh of relief.

The Shadow Cutter was strong, but he was not a purely power-based Transcendent. His most powerful skill was the Shadow Scissors, capable of destroying souls.

Those scissors were almost an undefendable lethal attack for those without any sort of ’Spiritual Sight’ or similar ability; they would have their souls sheared by the Shadow Scissors without even realizing it, losing their lives in the first encounter.

Fortunately, after awakening his Super Memory, He Ao gained the ability to peer into souls, enabling him to evade an attack from the Shadow Scissors, thus greatly weakening the Shadow Cutter’s most potent move.

Even so, the Shadow Cutter’s strength far surpassed his own; had he been slightly careless, he would be the one lying here.

Intense pain radiated from his waist and shoulder. He Ao tore off a strip of his shirt, walked over to the coat rack, and took out the quick hemostatic spray Sienzi had given him earlier. He sprayed it onto the wound and quickly bandaged it up.

If not for the support from Super Memory, Cito’s generally robust physical condition, and He Ao’s own strong mental will, these two injuries alone could have completely incapacitated him.

Even so, after everything was over, He Ao still felt a bit dizzy.

He looked up at the twisted lines above his head, the chaotic murmurings still echoing in his ears.

Those lines were sketched in extreme abstract chaos, yet He Ao could faintly discern that the author of these lines was trying to ’emulate’ some hills.

Moreover, these chaotic lines exerted an incredibly strong attraction on him.

It was like an engraving deep within his soul, an instinctual pull.

Under his gaze, the twisted lines seemed to ’come to life,’ writhing like worms.

He Ao felt a wave of strong dizziness hit his brain, supporting himself with his spear as his body swayed.

A slight breeze brushed against his cheek,

And he abruptly came back to his senses.

The ground under his feet seemed to have changed, from the solid concrete to soft soil.

Notes of music, as if echoing a chaotically played dance, reached his ears.

The dance tunes were disordered, bizarre, yet they seemed to harbor some extreme emotions, a mix of joy and sadness, longing and madness all intertwined.

He Ao raised his head to look around.

At this moment, his view was no longer of the hall on the seventy-seventh floor, but a dimly lit, purple ’hillside’, sprawling under the purple sky without any vegetation or buildings, stretching endlessly like the dunes in a desert, reaching all the way to the horizon.

This seemed to be some sort of ’secret realm’.

This wasn’t He Ao’s first time entering such a secret realm; he had previously entered what seemed to be the War God’s ’tomb’ in Rock City.

He calmed his thoughts, pushed aside the influence of the chaotic dance tunes, and successfully found the connection to his own body.

He breathed a sigh of relief.

This meant he could leave at any moment.

He lifted his head and looked ahead, where something deep in the hills was "attracting" him.

Compared to the graveyard of the War God he had visited before, this hill was much "gentler," without that twisted, insane consciousness trying to enter his body and return from hell.

He Ao lifted his leg and quickly headed in the direction of the "attraction."

Soon, he had climbed over the hill he was on.

And just as he stood beneath the hill, he had a feeling and looked back.

Then he was surprised to find that the hill he had just been standing on had disappeared. In its place were two smaller hills close to each other.

The landscape here was not constant.

He quickly withdrew his gaze and looked forward again, thankfully, the direction of the thing that was attracting him had not changed.

This unique feeling of attraction served like a compass, guiding He Ao through this unpredictable hill maze.

And he could feel that he was getting closer and closer to the thing that was attracting him.

After quickly scaling four consecutive hills, he could tell he was nearing the thing that was pulling him.

Finally, he climbed the last hill.

The scene before his eyes seemed vaguely familiar.

It was the same view he had seen from the first hill.

Had he circled back again?

No, that wasn’t right.

He paused for a moment, then immediately calmed his mind. He could feel that the thing attracting him was right beside him.

He slightly closed his eyes, attentively feeling that attraction from the soul, then slowly turned his body and stretched out his hand to touch a specific point behind him.

Boom—

The next second, the sound of thunder shook his eardrums. He looked up ahead as a flash of lightning descended from the sky, and purple blood instantly obscured his entire vision.

An endless chaotic waltz exploded in his mind, and absurd, twisted emotions surfaced in his heart.

Like a heavy hammer piercing the skull and crashing down on the brain, He Ao felt darkness sweep over him.

[Talent Sequence 128: Chess Master]

[Primary material: Ghost Singer’s Soul Core, Mind Banshee’s Brow Stone]

[Auxiliary materials: ...]

[Blending method: ...]

...

[Talent Sequence 200: Orator]

[Primary material: Eternal Fox’s tongue, Dark Giant’s core blood]

[Auxiliary materials: 100 milliliters of Sky Sea water, a segment of Writhing Forest’s heartwood, a petal of the Singing Flower]

[Blending method: Soak Writhing Forest’s heartwood and the petal of the Singing Flower completely in the water from the Sky Sea for 12 hours, then strain the water, and mix the crushed mixture of Eternal Fox’s tongue and the Dark Giant’s core blood with the strained water, heat constantly at 80 degrees for 36 hours, after which skim off the scum, and take the liquid from the lower layer.]

[Ritual: ...]

...

Talent Sequence 272...

The next second, the familiar blood-stained hall appeared in He Ao’s field of vision.

He did not catch the name of Talent Sequence 272, but he had known the name for a long time,

Talent Sequence 272: Super Memory.

He Ao looked up again at the distorted lines above his head, quickly finding among them that familiar signature, ’Listener.’

These lines were also drawn by that ’Listener.’

That ’hill secret realm’ just now seemed to be the ’Winding Hill’ described in the main quest.

This might just be the core of everything He Ao has been through so far.

The ’Listener’ who left these drawings, the Evolution Acolytes, the Pollution Cleaning Department, the Kajet Group, Night Hawk, countless pieces of information flashed through He Ao’s mind.

He still couldn’t connect all of these dots, he was missing a piece of the puzzle that could communicate all the threads, and he knew he was not far from that piece.

He Ao put on his coat and slung his backpack over his shoulder.

He looked up at the twisted lines above his head, then raised his long spear, swung it with a leap, and the sharp blade cut open the bottom surface of the drawing lines, crumbling canvas drifting down, destroying all the twisted lines.

The residual marks still seemed capable of attracting twisted pollution, but much less so.

Voices of people talking seemed to come from outside the door; the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Pollution Cleaning Department seemed to be getting the upper hand and were making their way to the seventy-seventh floor.

"Data copy successful."

At the same time, Eve’s voice echoed in He Ao’s ear, "Ejection escape device detected, the device is currently damaged, attempt repair?"

He Ao glanced at the small door flickering with fire at the far left end. Behind the small door was an ejection device that had been destroyed by the final blow from Shadow Cutter.

"No need."

He Ao shook his head, buttoned up his clothes, folded his knife back into his garment, then collapsed the gun back into the style of a walking stick.

He lifted his head to look at the window just broken by Shadow Cutter, sprinted to the breach, and with a leap, threw himself out.

Bang—

At the same time, the red door was pushed open, and YiXiya rushed in with her team. She scanned the hall quickly, saw the blood on the floor, and rushed toward the broken floor-to-ceiling window, "Elderly Sir!?"

Up in the sky over two hundred meters high, the elderly man with whitening hair was spreading his arms like a bird soaring through the Steel Jungle, cutting across the sky.

Almost the moment YiXiya reached the window, He Ao made an OK gesture behind him

The next second, his backpack unfolded, turning into a small parachute, stopping his descent and carrying him off towards the depths of the city.

Seeing this scene, YiXiya’s hanging heart relaxed.

She revealed a smile.

Buzz—

Just then, her wristband received an anonymous message,

[Look up]

She hesitated, instinctively wanting to look up.

At that moment, another new message arrived on her wristband,

Elder Cito: [Don’t look up]