Chapter 453
Ten seconds.
Fengyu Ming was struggling like a fish on the chopping block. His fractured bones protruded out of his skin, soaking his body in blood, unbearable to look at.
He cried desperately at the top of his voice, “No! You can’t kill me! I can give you whatever you want! Everything you want!”
Nine seconds. Eight seconds.
“I know the coordinates of several treasuries. I have discovered the residences of ancient Cultivators on two planets. I also know three top confidential smuggling routes. I can tell you all of them, as long as you set me free!”
Seven seconds, six seconds.
“Who are you? Who are you exactly? There is no grudge between us. Why do you have to kill me? Why?”
Five seconds. Four seconds. Three seconds.
“Just for those ninety ordinary people? You are crazy. You are a rabid dog, too! My father won’t let go of you. Storm Prison won’t let you get away with this! All the gangs on Spider Den will not let go of you!”
Two seconds, one second, zero.
The countdown reached zero and made a clicking sound before it suddenly bloomed into thousands of glamorous redness which blinked like fireworks and vanished very soon.
“NOOO! NOOO! NOOO!”
Fengyu Ming had totally gone crazy. He was rolling on the ground and uttering vague screams.
The rune arrays of the wind class hiding in the depths of the fuel transmission tube were provided with sufficient energy. They roared a dull sound and continued to rise.
As a result, a gradually-increasing attraction force came from inside the tube and pulled in Fengyu Ming together with his broken crystal suit.
Like a pig which was about to be sent into a mincer, Fengyu Ming struggled desperately. His right arm, which was his only working limb, clutched the wall of the tube, producing screeching noises, and left five clear traces of fingers. But it didn’t help, and he continued to be dragged deeper and deeper.
His screams became higher and higher as he was further swallowed into the tube.
Before he was fully devoured by darkness, he looked at Li Yao one last time.
Misery, desperation, hatred, rage… His countenance was so complicated that it was indescribable.
Li Yao stared back calmly, his eyelids absolutely still.
At the turn of the tube, Fengyu Ming made his last struggle.
The only result was that the immense attraction force dragged his flesh, bones, and internal organs out of his body through his wounds.
Fengyu Ming’s scream even dwarfed the roars of the four fully-functioning wind-class rune arrays.
After several seconds of stalemate, he might couldn’t hold on any longer. After a plump, his entire body was drawn to the end of the fuel transmission tube and fell into the burning crystal reactor.
The crystal reactor shook violently. Vague, intermittent moans seemed to be echoing inside it. But everything went peaceful again ten seconds later.
Li Yao checked the time.
Right now, only five minutes and thirty-two seconds had passed since he had hauled Fengyu Ming to the engine compartment.
His telepathic thoughts already sensed that a lot of crystal suits were crowding toward where he was and breaking through the blocked pathways at any cost.
Li Yao closed his facial cover. His face was replaced by three crimson crystal cameras in a triangular distribution, and he disappeared into the black smoke in the corner of the engine compartment.
Three minutes later, with an earsplitting explosion, the path to the engine compartment was finally cleared.
A bunch of space pirates immediately flooded in.
“Master Ming! Master Ming!”
“This is—”
The space pirates didn’t discover any traces of Fengyu Ming after a futile search. But they noticed that countless pieces of small magical equipment had been stuck to the walls, the floor, and the ceiling of the engine compartment, which were blinking with a vague brightness now that their triggering rune arrays had been activated. It was as if the unrested souls murdered by the space pirates had opened their eyes again and were staring at their killers coldly.
Furious flames burst out of the engine compartment. An explosion ten times more intense than the previous ones crushed the rear part of the starship with the tentacles of fire like a rampant animal.
The starship lost most of its momentum. Not only did it stop moving forward and start spinning, its spiritual shield exploded like soap bubbles under the burning sunlight. Even the internal lights of the starship had stopped functioning correctly.
Countless cabins fell into darkness one by one.
Although the cockpit had its own spiritual energy source, it was also caught in a cluster of dim fluorescence.
Li Yao crouched on the top of the cockpit and blended in with the darkness nearby like a lurking bat.
The cockpit was in a mess. Although operators of the starship were mostly at the Refinement Stage and Building Foundation Stage, they were all research-type Cultivators whose main jobs were to maneuver the starship instead of participating in head-on battles.
With the Mystic Skeleton Battlesuit, Li Yao was confident that he could take all of them down within one minute.
Li Yao was gazing at the center of the cockpit.
Surrounded by a world of darkness, a mainframe crystal processor that looked like a giant tree was standing in the middle of the cockpit, colorful and glittering.
Thick crystal wires extended in various directions like branches and vines, reaching every corner of the starship through the tubes on the ceiling.
It was what Li Yao desired most right now.
More precisely, it was the crystal chips of the mainframe crystal processor he was after.
They must’ve stored a lot of star maps of the Flying Star Sector, perhaps even including the secret routes and the temporary supply locations that were not known by the authorities.
For the space pirates, it was their biggest reliance to avoid the hunting of the Cultivation sects and raise chaos in the sea of stars.
In Star Lord Temple, the official star map was too shabby. It only marked several major star zones and star fortresses roughly, with a precision far from enough to guide a sailing starship.
If he could steal a secret star map from a seasoned space pirate, Sparkle’s range of activity would be greatly expanded, and it would be able to travel in the Flying Star Sector by itself without worrying about getting lost!
Staring at the space pirates below him who were running here and there like headless flies, Li Yao sneered and jumped down!
The blood saber was unsheathed. The sharp claw shined. The Triple-headed Six-barrel Vulcan Machine Guns rumbled like thunder. Li Yao swept through the cockpit like a storm and destroyed everything that he saw.
…
In the depths of the space, a starship bordering on collapse was voyaging stubbornly.
The starship was not just brimming with holes, it was more like a pile of garbage picked up from an ancient battleground and assembled carelessly, after which several immense power rune arrays were stuffed on the back of the garbage without much thought. The engine of the starship was spewing giant crimson fireballs one after another as if it were farting.
Despite its poor condition, the starship was rushing forward in dirty smoke, unconcerned that it could break down any second.
Every starship had a certain style when it was manufactured.
Some of them were elegant, some mysterious; some were aggressive, some simple.
The style of this particular starship was so distinctive that it cast enough visual impressiveness for people to know the word to describe the starship even though it had been damaged to this degree.
The starship was refined in the style of ‘fury’!
Anyone who saw the starship would inevitably mistake it for an angry bull.
It seemed safe to infer that the pilot of such a starship must have a pair of angry eyes and two fuming fists!
On two sides of the head of the starship, two great horns almost a hundred meters long stuck out like two sharp bull horns. Illuminated by the dim starlight, they were emitting dark-gold brightness. Rounds of blood stripes were carved on the horns, with complicated runes in between.
There was no telling whether the two giant horns were decorative or a piece of powerful magical equipment themselves.
However, one of the horns had been broken off in the middle with pale fractures. The other horn was also dinted with a lot of bruises, like a battle saber that was full of cracks.
Below the two giant horns, in the center of the cockpit that looked like a crimson sole eye, a middle-aged muscled man over two meters tall was sitting in the captain’s seat.
He seemed to have just been pulled out from a trash can. His face was dirty, and his grey coat was full of fractures, holes, corrosion, and dried blood stains.
His eyelids were sticky with gunk, as if he hadn’t shut his eyes for ten days and ten nights. Even his pupils looked dreary. But there were two deep dimples on his haggard face, making him appear to be grinning even when his lips were closed, if they were ever closed at all.
“Finally, I’ve got you filthy sons of bit*hes!”
When Storm Prison’s starship reappeared on the top right corner of the radar light beam, a series of data and information poured down like a waterfall, and two clusters of gold brightness beamed out of the giant man’s grey eyes.
“Brothers!”
The messy muscled man jumped up from the captain’s seat. It was only then that one could notice that below the grey coat were red-and-green beach shorts!
However, the guy seemed to be totally fine with it. He bellowed, his saliva spraying everywhere, “We’ve been chasing these bastards for more than two months. Finally, they have been pressed to the bed with their trousers torn away. We can do whatever we want right now!
“I know that we are running out of supplies and strength; I know that many of us have been seriously injured and their capability greatly lost.
“But I also know that everybody has been waiting too long for this day, just to tear those human-skinned scumbags to shreds!
“We will be engaged in ten minutes. Prepare for battle!
“Our spiritual energy has been drained. Our turrets have died, too. But these are just unimportant details that we shouldn’t worry about.
“Tell those scumbags with your swords, sabers, teeth, and fists—
“that the Great Horn Exo Society has come again!”
The messy muscled man roared and yelled. Bright green flames were flowing around his body and eventually consolidated into a crystal suit the same color. The most eye-catching part about the crystal suit was the giant dent on its right shoulder.
After putting on the heavy crystal suit, the messy muscled man looked like an infuriated rhino!
Five light beams were floating in front him, displaying the scenes in the assault cabin of the starship.
Almost a hundred sturdy, barbaric men were bellowing together with him, producing earthshaking thunders so appalling that one might be suspicious that the starship would be torn open by the soundwaves in the very next second.
Right then, a weird wave came from the radar light beam. Several rows of data bounced abruptly, too.
The messy muscled man was dazed for a moment. He zoomed in on the light beam, only to discover that a dazzling fireball had exploded in the front section of Storm Prison’s starship and blossomed gradually like a colorful chrysanthemum.
“What is going on?
“Those son of bit*hes have blown up their own cockpit before I can stab into their asshole?”
Lei Dalu, captain of the Great Horn Exo Society, wiped away a cluster of his eye gunk as he stared at the light beam and exclaimed in disbelief.