Chapter 4010 — Heavy Losses

Hong Zhong simply pressed down with one hand, and of a sudden a blinding golden light blazed beneath him; a vast phantom hand materialized out of thin air and met those dozens upon dozens of densely packed water arrows head-on, crushing every last one of them down by sheer force!

Wei Zhao was left staring slack-jawed at such strength. He could plainly sense that the power behind those water arrows rivaled his own true-qi bombs—dozens of water arrows meant dozens of true-qi bombs, and gathered together, what terrifying force was that? And yet Hong Zhong had suppressed the whole volley with a single move!

In daily life the man seemed quiet and unobtrusive, the very picture of a genial old elder who made his fortune through harmony; who would have thought that once he set his hand to action he would prove so brutally overbearing and stunning? Truly, the real person shows no face—Hong Zhong was a man whose depths ran deep indeed.

One palm suppressing dozens of water arrows—under the impact of such peerless aura, even the flying spirit beast beneath their feet nearly got caught in the crossfire, struggling for a good while before it finally managed to steady itself.

Yet hardly had one wave subsided than another rose.

The flying-fish volley had barely been settled when a strange sound suddenly rose in the air—at first hearing it seemed a woman's song, and at the second it resembled the Zen chants of ancient Buddhas, concealing profound mysteries within, so that one felt from the very depths of the soul an instinctive shudder, and with it a swimming of the mind.

A divine-sense attack! Wei Zhao's whole body gave a sudden shudder. His cultivation was still far from sufficient for attack or defense on the level of divine sense, but he understood it well enough; even if he had failed to react, the ghost fellow would surely have warned him—and this time it was the ghost fellow who had taken the blow for him of its own accord.

"Careful! This is the siren's song—it destroys the divine sense!" Hong Zhong called out in urgent warning.

Sirens were among the most eerie and powerful of all known sea beasts. Small of body, far from the ferocious aspect of ordinary sea beasts, and possessing no real destructive power, they nonetheless bore a racial gift most troublesome to deal with: the annihilation of divine sense.

So dreadful was this gift that even a top-tier expert like Hong Zhong found it a severe headache. With his strength he had no fear of protecting himself, but to shield at the same time these several people beside him whose strength fell far short of his own—that was stretching him to the limit.

What was more, he had just expended himself suppressing dozens of lethal water arrows with a single palm, and this was precisely the moment when Hong Zhong's strength ran thin. This sort of relayed coordination between the sirens and the flying-fish schools was enough to spell death for anyone.

The siren's song struck without warning. Unlike ordinary attacks, this divine-sense assault was all but impossible to guard against; even though Hong Zhong had already thrown his full strength into shielding them, he still could not keep all three of Wei Zhao's party whole. The two lieutenants of lesser strength went rigid almost in an instant, their eyes vacant and pitch-black—the unmistakable sign of divine sense destroyed by the siren's song.

Disaster! Hong Zhong's heart lurched. The siren's song wrought destruction upon the divine sense that was absolute; once struck, there was no remedy—unless one were a master like Zhang Lifeng, perhaps, there might be a way. Seeing the two lieutenants as they were, it was plain they were finished.

And so it proved. Struck by the song, the two lieutenants had their divine sense destroyed and were reduced to living corpses on the spot, dropping stiff as boards from the back of the flying spirit beast.

Hong Zhong did not reach out to save them—first, because he truly had no strength to spare for it at that moment; and second, because even had he saved them it would have been useless. To this day there had never been a single case of anyone surviving after the siren's song had destroyed their divine sense.

What astonished Hong Zhong greatly, however, was this: Wei Zhao, whose strength was several degrees weaker even than the two lieutenants, had not followed them into that wretched fate. On the contrary, he stood calm and unshaken, seemingly untouched altogether.

Hong Zhong could not help but marvel inwardly, and his estimation of Wei Zhao rose another notch. He had meant to shield Wei Zhao from the siren's song, but the protection he could extend was strictly limited; Wei Zhao had received no more care than the two lieutenants, and yet here he stood without a scratch—passing strange indeed.

Little did he know that Wei Zhao's own divine sense and spiritual power had always been extraordinary, and that he carried with him a master capable of regenerating the primordial spirit. The ghost fellow could well be called a grandmaster in the realm of divine sense; this paltry assault was nothing worth mentioning.

Yet before Hong Zhong could finish his marveling, the flying spirit beast beneath them gave a sudden lurch, then began to veer drunkenly, tilting this way and that as though it might plunge at any moment.

Hong Zhong and Wei Zhao both paled at once. This was the boundless open sea: below there was not a single spot to set foot, and countless vicious sea beasts lurked in the depths. To fall here—even one of Hong Zhong's strength would face certain death, to say nothing of Wei Zhao, who had only reached the middle stage of Foundation Establishment.

"It will not even spare the flying spirit beast—it means to see us dead without fail!" At this critical juncture Hong Zhong ground his teeth hard, resolved to risk everything in one desperate gamble, and threw the whole of his divine sense into the struggle, straining with all his might to hold the siren's song at bay for the flying spirit beast.

Seeing this, Wei Zhao quietly signaled the ghost fellow: if it truly came to the worst, he would have no choice but to beg the ghost fellow to intervene and save them—after all, they all sat in the same boat, and once the flying spirit beast perished, every one of them would die.

Of course, that was the last resort. Unless it came to the very final moment with no alternative, Wei Zhao would never dare expose the ghost fellow's existence before Hong Zhong; this secret was a matter of grave consequence, and the two of them were not yet close enough for that.

Fortunately, once Hong Zhong threw his full strength into it, the flying spirit beast struggled awhile and at last steadied itself again, and Wei Zhao breathed a sigh of relief.

He had thought they had finally escaped calamity, but no—just at that moment another volley of water arrows came streaking up from below, forcing Hong Zhong to hurriedly free his hand once more to suppress them. This time, however, it was not nearly so clean and crisp as before.

Hong Zhong's stunning strength still succeeded in suppressing the vast majority of the arrows, but one slipped through the net—a single water arrow came whistling straight for the flying spirit beast's wing!

By then it was too late for Hong Zhong to react. And once the flying spirit beast's wing was injured, there would be no flying out of this boundless sea at all—no village ahead, no inn behind, nothing but death here.

Bang! At the final instant, as they watched helplessly while the flying spirit beast was about to be struck, a powerful palm-shaped true qi came crashing into the water arrow—it was Wei Zhao's doing: the twenty-third stance of the Frenzied Fire Eight-Trigram Palm!

"Beautiful!" Hong Zhong's eyes lit up at the sight. Wei Zhao's strike had not suppressed the water arrow outright, but it had succeeded in altering its course, deflecting it just a fraction so that it grazed past the flying spirit beast's wing.