Bian didn't waste any time taking out the Stone Knight after he found its core.
He eliminated it and turned his full attention to the other one, killing it too in record time.
When the last two Scorpion Golems were about to die, Bian didn't step forward, but stayed still, carefully searching for their assailant's cores.
He managed to find two before the last and final Scorpion Golems were killed.
With them gone, all four Stone Knights turned their attention to Bian.
"Four at once, that hardly seems fair."
Bian quipped, then let out two True God Killing Slashes, one to the left and another to the right.
The Stone Knights at the extremes were killed off, but the last two knights did not mind.
They were not living creatures who would have run to preserve their lives. They both charged at Bian, constructing all sorts of weapons from their dust cloud.
Right at this time, Bian heard a faint ringing in his ears.
He looked back, but didn't see anything, which made sense, because his Emperical Aura hadn't scanned any life forms approaching.
Regardless, he felt a dangerous presence would be upon him soon and might even be watching him. His face instantly changed colour.
"An Executioner!"
***
Executioner Yellow stood far, far away from the valley, standing just a few feet away from the boundary of the Emperical Aura.
With her feet on the ground, she could more or less tell what was happening in the valley.
"Only two Stone Knights left? Those guys were hard to kill and impossible to replicate. I thought only Red would be able to kill them, but it seems I was wrong."
She let out a chuckle at the end.
She couldn't sense Bian, who constantly remained in the air, but judging from the state of the walls and floors, she was sure he was a swordsman.
One with a very powerful attack that could cut through anything.
Rushing here, she was prepared to go in, golems blazing, and finish off the anomaly, but on getting here she remembered the reason she left her strongest guards here.
No one could possibly open that door, not even an Executioner, without some sort of Crystalliser access card. The actual requirement to open the door was way too ridiculous.
Instead of rushing in and killing the anomaly, she figured she might as well wait for him to open the door, maybe even bring out the goods before killing him.
It took all her patience to stand still, but her clones were there to talk reason to her.
***
Back in the valley.
A red sword light beheaded the last Stone Knight. The knight collapsed into a plume of dust as it fell, finally bringing peace and quiet to the valley.
"Luckily, a practitioner of the Dongxuan Sutra doesn't need to take in air from their nose alone."
The dust alone would have been enough to chase away living creatures, however it hampered Bian in no way.
Not his sight, nor his breathing.
He transferred the new souls he had gotten to the Altering Brush, raising its counter to 870 out of 1500.
"Still a long way to go."
Bian tried to get back some souls from the Altering Brush, but of course that didn't work. He already knew the Solum Mirror couldn't directly absorb souls from things, especially from a living body, it could only do so to spectral creatures.
"So I can only directly absorb souls. If I could send the mirror into a person who had consumed thousands of souls though, it would be a real feast."
As Bian approached the door, he was nervous of the looming threat. Yet nothing had happened yet.
After flying for a while, he reached the door and confirmed it was Crystalliser technology, but one unlike anything he had ever seen before.
The door was inlaid with one hundred shallow pockets, arranged in a precise, almost ceremonial grid.
In each of those pockets was an item Bian hadn't expected to ever see. It was one of the random questions he had nurtured in his school days.
A die with a hundred sides.
"A Zocchihedron. A hundred of them."
Bian suddenly remembered one article he had come across while working for the Saints Hall.
When the highest authority of the Crystallisers wants to prevent access to a room, they leave a backdoor for anyone lucky enough to enter.
If a person can get a hundred on all hundred dice at the same time, the door would open for them.
Bian had thought it was just a joke, yet here stood the door, meant only for the highest authorities.
There was a lever to pull beside the door, presumably to roll all one hundred zocchihedrons at once.
"There's a one in a hundred chance of getting a hundred in one zocchihedron. To get a hundred on all hundred, that's one chance in a hundred raised to a hundred.
That would be a decimal point followed by one hundred and ninety-nine zeros, effectively impossible in any physical sense.
If the universe rolled those dice once every second since the Big Bang, I still wouldn't expect it to happen even once. This is just cruelty shaped as hope."
Bian shrugged his shoulders, activated the Emperical Will, and pulled the lever.
"Oh, so you don't have a way to access the door either, what a shame."
A feminine voice echoed through the valley. Bian suddenly observed hundreds of golems stealthily moving under the ground, approaching him in every direction except his front.
A woman entered the range of the Emperical Aura. She stood still, yet approached Bian at breakneck speed.
The ground itself was pushing her forward. Bian suddenly felt a wrongness in the earth around him. The ground, which was supposed to be neutral, seemed to be favouring her and opposing him.
"Earth element Executioner, from that hair, I'd assume you're Executioner Yellow." Bian awkwardly said, trying to stall for time.
"Is that you, Sherlock?" Executioner Yellow let out a chuckle.
Bian didn't glance at the door, but he was waiting for the zocchihedrons to stop spinning, he had to buy more time.
"Do you mind if I ask you a question, before I kill you, of course."
Bian shrugged. "Sure."
"How did you kill the Undying Knights? I thought only overwhelming firepower could destroy them, but," she paused and looked at the different cuts around the valley, "you seemed to have done so with a blade."
Bian put on a pondering expression for a short time before answering, "They have a core as small as a speck of dust, all I had to do was destroy that core with a sword strike."
"Ha ha ha!"
Executioner Yellow let out a hearty, belly laugh. She laughed for almost a good minute before she could calm down.
"Are you trying to tell me that you cut that minuscule particle among the ocean that surrounded it? The chances of that happening are lower than the chances of you opening that door.
And trust me, I would know, I've tried to open it thousands of times."
Bian scowled before he responded, "Just because it's impossible for you doesn't mean it is for me."
"What!" Executioner Yellow wiped the smile off her face and studied Bian intently. Surely he couldn't be serious.
Her sudden change made Bian wonder if she was pretending earlier or was bipolar.
"There's a reason I'm called the anomaly, right? I might not have known at first, but the stronger I got, the more I understood.
I'm just better than the rest of you all. That is why I became the one who hunts those sent to hunt me.
And that is why I can do things no one else can."
Bian was slowly building up doubts in Executioner Yellow.
'Did he really kill them with a sword? That should be impossible. Then the door..."
Clank!
As the door clicked open, Bian was already in the motion of dashing towards it.
The ground beneath his feet disappeared, yet that couldn't hinder him as he immediately switched to using the Phoenix techniques, flying into the door.
A shadow appeared beside him in an instant. Yellow had propelled herself forward using the ground like a supercharged spring.
They made eye contact for an instant as they entered the door together. Bian immediately went for the chess table.
As his hands touched the pieces, they turned to beads of light and flew into his head.
[Acquired Chess Piece: King+1]
[Acquired Chess Piece: Queen+1]
[Acquired Chess Piece: Pawn+3]
A moment later, Bian heard a different announcement play out.
[King Piece Set: Self]
The words flew over his head as he saw Executioner Yellow bringing down an armour set.
He had never seen one before, but he was sure that was a geno armour.