Chapter 4554 — Breakthrough! Late Golden Core
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
The only thing Wei Zhao found rather a pity was this: the omen, though striking and intense, had not once carried him through to a true breakthrough in any of his subsequent ordeals under the residual waves. It lingered forever at the level of an omen—it seemed he still could not force the pass.
Wei Zhao knew this restless, ready-to-break state would not last long. If he failed to break through before it faded, he would have to wait for the next omen to appear—and who could say when that would be? Cultivation was like rowing upstream: miss the moment when breakthrough should come, and one sinks into the mire, never to advance another inch. Such cases were far from rare.
"Wealth and honor are sought in peril. Looks like you'll have to take a bit of a risk." Ghost Thing advised.
"Understood." Wei Zhao nodded. Cautious as he had always been, he never refused the risks that were necessary. As things stood, he had only two ways to seize the momentum for a breakthrough. The first was to swallow the Golden Core fruit—but he had no intention of doing that. So it had to be the second: use the five-element killing auras already before him to force out a greater potential from his own body!
Anyone else would never dare such a thing, but Wei Zhao could. Since he could withstand the residual waves of the five-element killing aura, he could naturally go a step further and contrive to draw closer to it. The premise, of course, was that he must hold the balance perfectly—otherwise it would no longer be provoking his potential, but simply courting death.
Drawing a deep breath, Wei Zhao moved to a nearby cylindrical platform. On the one he had stood on before, the Five-Venom Marsh had merely grazed the top of his head; on this one, his whole body entered the marsh directly. Sure enough, a five-element killing aura beside him fixed its gaze on him at once.
If the Five-Venom Marsh overhead was a pond and these five-element killing auras were piranhas, then Wei Zhao was a live, writhing bait. Standing on the previous platform, that bait had still hung above the water's surface, so the piranhas' savagery was never roused—at most he got splashed now and then. But now the bait had been dropped straight into the pond, and the piranhas bared their fangs in an instant.
Perhaps because Wei Zhao possessed five-element spirit roots, in some sense he carried the same "scent" as these five-element killing auras, and so the auras prowling in the distance did not gather toward him. Otherwise, a hundred thousand lives would not have been enough to save him. Even so—just the one killing aura at his side was deadly enough.
Before, merely facing the residual waves of the five-element killing aura had left him in torment; now, face to face with the aura itself, his whole body shook uncontrollably. This was the instinct of a living creature confronting a lethal crisis—even had Wei Zhao wished to control it, he could not, unless he were already a dead man.
"Careful now. Don't overdo it!" At a moment like this, even Ghost Thing's heart was pounding. Though the suggestion had been his own, when it truly came to this instant, even he could not stay calm. He was on Wei Zhao's person, after all—the terror of that five-element killing aura was something he felt firsthand. One careless slip with this thing truly could kill a man, and if Wei Zhao died, he would be dragged down with him.
"I know." Wei Zhao answered in a low voice. In the same breath, the killing aura slammed into his body. Wei Zhao's teeth bit through his own lip and blood came, every muscle in him shuddering madly like chaff in a sieve. The tempering of the residual waves before had been like a thousand cuts; the agony now was a hundred times worse—and more!