The Era of Gods-Chapter 663: Hunting Neola

"This is....."

Two Sea Clan members who hadn’t even reached the First Level were currently watching the earth-shattering changes in the distance, shocked. It wasn’t until the tsunami drew closer and grew taller that they finally realized what was happening. They rushed to the wall at the back, and with a fierce punch, hit the alarm.

"Ding.....Ding.....Ding....."

The piercing bell echoed back and forth across the small island. After ringing five times, the island gradually erupted into chaos, with the residents fleeing from their original spots towards nearby houses.

An evacuation warning for the tsunami, issued by the town mayor, could also be heard in the skies above the island, urging the townsfolk to find shelter nearby.

The townspeople who had been fishing near the island’s seaside were now frantically dropping their fishing gear and running towards the town. One of them, as he passed by Lin Xiao, saw him with his eyes closed in meditation and shouted his name loudly, urging him to run. However, Lin Xiao seemed as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

The man wanted to go back and wake him but was startled by another thunderous noise coming from the distance, which whipped everyone’s blood and spirit into a frenzy, making them flee even faster.

This clamor also roused Lin Xiao. He looked up into the distance, slightly creased his brow, and muttered to himself,

"What the hell, they’ve been chasing for over a hundred years and still haven’t caught the person, utterly useless?"

He was very familiar with the explosion of blue light, having witnessed it more than ten times over the past hundred or so years. Neola, the number one fugitive of the Sea King Empire.

The Empire had been hunting for several hundred years, yet never managed to capture them. Over the centuries of his recluse, this number one fugitive had passed by his secluded island no fewer than ten times. In his opinion, that person named Neola didn’t even possess the strength of the Fifth Level, but the Empire had dispatched so many experts to capture them, including the personal intervention of Rank 6 Sea Kings, to no avail. It was quite embarrassing.

If he hadn’t decided to lay low, he would have wanted to capture this so-called number one fugitive to see what made them so holy.

Although Neola had passed by the island nearly ten times, there had never been a battle near the island. This was the first time that the fluctuations of a battle, causing by wizards above dawn level, shook the heavens and earth, creating a massive tsunami that surged toward the island. While other islanders scrambled for safety, he simply shook his head and closed his eyes again.

"Boom!"

A tsunami hundreds of meters high swept towards the small island, and the giant waves submerged the island, engulfing him.

When the tsunami passed, the island was in complete disarray. Yet, in the area where he was, there remained a patch of dry ground, as an invisible force field had kept the tsunami at bay.

But that wasn’t the end. After the first wave came a second, even taller tsunami, raging towards the island.

Lin Xiao paid no mind to how the islanders were doing. As long as they ran fast enough and took shelter in their basements, they were mostly safe—after all, it was just a tsunami, not a Superhuman Power.

He closed his eyes again, deciding that during this time it was better to focus on integrating more strength and advancing to Rank 7 sooner rather than later.

However, minutes later, Lin Xiao suddenly opened his eyes and looked towards the island, sensing an eerie fluctuation moving back and forth across the island, sometimes visible, sometimes not. Then, one by one, he sensed the soul auras on the island rapidly vanishing.

A flash of indignation crossed his mind, and he was about to take action when he sensed a dozen or so Empire’s enforcers rushing over, prompting him to sit back down again.

After arriving, these enforcers from the Empire didn’t enter the island. Instead, they swiftly scattered to surround it, throwing down metal pillars etched with patterns in different directions towards the island as fast as possible.

A Rank 4 Feathered Serpent appeared near Lin Xiao. After quickly throwing down a metal pillar and seeing Lin Xiao, it momentarily paused, then hastily descended to pay homage, saying,

"My apologies for the disturbance, Lord Lin Xiao. We are here by the Emperor’s command to capture a fugitive."

He looked up at him, and after a brief moment, said with an expressionless face,

"Hurry up then!"

Having said that, he lowered his head again.

In that instant, he vaguely sensed several formidable gazes falling upon this region. Doubtless, they belonged to the wills of several Rank 6 powerhouses.

Yet, none of this was enough for him to let them seal off the island. He knew that if they did so, the few thousand residents on the island were as good as dead. Having lived here for over a century, he had grown attached, but just as he was about to conceal himself and intervene, he sensed a dangerous omen.

If even he could sense danger with his current strength, there was only one possibility—the gaze of the Sea Emperor was also upon this region.

Even though he could not directly sense it, it had to be there. After merging with the True Body, inheriting all of its traits, the Extraordinary Ability of the Prophetic Art provided him with a definite warning.

In this world, only the Sea Emperor could make him feel threatened.

Just as the progenitor of the Crow World could replace the will of the world with his own Soul of God, so too could the Rank 7 founder of the Sea King Empire do the same. When he checked the Empire’s history, he found no record of the Sea King’s Death, and the Sea King lineage’s continuous rule over this vast Empire, which spans many worlds, and their firm grip on the imperial throne, was certainly not solely because the current Sea King was the strongest.

So...

He abandoned the idea of making a move. The Feathered Serpent Race powerhouse let out a sigh of relief; that glance he had received a moment ago had brought an extremely terrifying pressure crashing down on him, so intense that he felt it was even greater than when he had first met the Sea Emperor. It had caused him to involuntarily hold his breath during that moment.

Regaining his composure, he quickly activated the metal column he had put down, as a stream of white light shot into the sky, connecting with several other beams around the island to form a curtain of light that enveloped the entire island.

It was then that a dozen or so Empire powerhouses entered the island to begin the roundup of the fugitive Neola hiding within.

A dozen Rank 4 and Rank 5 powerhouses ganged up on an island to kill a Level 4 powerhouse with unspecified combat strength. Both sides fought without any psychological pressure, which was a catastrophe for the island’s residents. Within just ten minutes, not a single building on the island remained intact, and out of the several thousand residents, only a few were left alive after those ten minutes.

Lin Xiao watched all this with a cold eye and sighed.

The precondition for remaining hidden is not to compromise one’s own safety; if one’s safety is jeopardized, still harboring thoughts of hiding and acting upon them is nothing but cruelty to oneself. That is foolishness.

The few remaining islanders soon perished, and flashes of blinding light along with violent energy fluctuations transmitted from inside the barrier. Lin Xiao did not probe randomly nor did he know the specifics of the battle within.

But in any case, after this, he would need to find a new place to lie low.

On the island, a Rank 6 Dragon Whale royal roared as he transformed into his True Body—a gigantic Dragon Whale hundreds of meters long that spanned across the Void. Blue luminescence, like ocean water, swirled around the Dragon Whale, warding off the streams of dark blue light in the Void.

That dark blue stream of light came from a constantly morphing cloud of dark blue smoke on the opposite side—their quarry, known as the Shadow Child, Neola.

A total of three Rank 6 powerhouses were involved, one from the Dragon Whale Throne who was of the same Race as the Sea Emperor and two of the eighteen Sea Kings following the Sea Emperor’s orders to join the hunt.

These Rank 6 powerhouses were treated very differently than Lin Xiao. Not only were they not feared, they also held high positions and wielded great authority.

The reason was simple: one was of the same Race, and the other two were descendants of one of the founding Sea Kings at the beginning of the Empire, and naturally, they were treated differently than an outsider powerhouse like him.

Of course, the most important reason was that Lin Xiao had displayed Strength far superior to that of an average Rank 6 powerhouse, able to directly suppress the God Will of the Crow people, who had fused with the origin of the Crow World. This was what the Sea Emperor truly feared. Had he not lacked confidence, and had Lin Xiao not consistently demonstrated a complete lack of ambition, it was likely that the Sea Emperor would have sought to eliminate him long ago.

At this time, Neola demonstrated the Strength of a Rank 5, but in reality, he was steadfastly holding his ground against a joint pursuit team, which was spearheaded by three Rank 6 powerhouses and included over a dozen Rank 4 and Rank 5 powerhouses.

Facing off against the transformed Dragon Whale Throne, that dark blue smoke rapidly expanded—three hundred, five hundred, eight hundred meters, and soon exceeding a kilometer. The smoke transformed into a giant Shadow Dragon, which would be recognizable to any acquaintance as belonging to the Race of the Hunting Shadow Dragon Vincent, whom Neola had slain. The presence of the dragon rapidly intensified, and in a blink, it reached the rank of 6, opening its mouth to spray a thick stream of light toward the Dragon Whale.

The Dragon Whale was not to be outdone and spat out an even thicker breath of its own.

Surprisingly, though, what it spewed was not aimed at the Shadow Dragon but at the space next to it.

Initially, it appeared to be a deliberate act, but as both breaths were expelled, one indeed struck the Void while the other hit the Dragon Whale itself.

The protective flow of blue around the Dragon Whale faltered, stained with black and blue. The tainted area rapidly solidified, shattered, and scattered, as the black-blue began to adhere to the Dragon Whale, spreading across its body.

"You’re courting Death!"

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The Dragon Whale let out an earth-shattering roar; its huge body burst with terrifying blood Strength, scattering the dark blue assaulting it. The massive body retreated several kilometers into the high sky, emitting a series of forceful and cadenced sounds as the Void resonated in response.

The dozen or so Sea Clan powerhouses quickly converged on the Dragon Whale and merged into the blue light it emitted, their presences rapidly expanding.

Lin Xiao looked up at the sky above the island, sensing a will faintly condensing high above the island, remarkably similar to what he had seen back in the Crow World.

He hesitated for a moment, then threw away the broken fishing rod in his hand and walked away from the center of the island.

He had not gone far when he heard a deafening dragon’s cry from behind. A point of pure light converged in the sky and fell into the barrier, which quickly started to dissolve from that point and fade away. A vast torrent of blue burst forth, rapidly flooding the entire island, with a dozen figures rushing out ahead of the flood.

The torrent quickly subsided into the sea, clearing a kilometer-wide area before dissipating, and the sea that had been shot into the sky rushed back down without any force to support it.

But no one was interested in this spectacle; their attention was quickly turned back to the center of the island.

The thousands of meters long, massive dark blue smoke had shrunk to a mere two or three meters in size and had turned from solid black-blue to a semi-transparent grey-blue smoky color. This was Neola’s accumulated vast Soul Power over the years, and through the haze, one could barely make out a shadow constantly shifting within.