Pov: Ryuk
Tomorrow morning, I would head east toward that Exile Village, find a place to deploy my Fallen Kingdom fragments, and begin building my rule in this savage land.
With that plan in my head, I slept deeply through the night.
When I woke up the next morning, I felt completely refreshed. The surging martial energy from yesterday's breakthrough had settled down peacefully in my lower abdomen, and all four of my arms felt lighter and more responsive than ever.
After eating two more jars of dried spirit meat from Morven's vault, I packed the remaining food into my Emperor's Storage. Before leaving the underground laboratory, I looked at my reflection in one of the tall glass cylinders.
Looking back at me was a tall, fierce-looking youth with broad shoulders, long black hair reaching down to my neck, and dark eyes surrounded by a faint golden ring. However, the most eye-catching thing was still my four muscular arms wearing the four-sleeved black leather coat.
"Wait a minute," I muttered, rubbing my chin with my upper right hand. "If I walk straight into a human village looking like a four-armed monster, they are definitely going to mistake me for a mutated corrupted creature and attack me on sight."
Remembering how paranoid humans in this world were about corruption, I searched Morven's wardrobe and found a large, heavy black cloak. Pulling the cloak over my shoulders, I crossed my lower two arms tightly against my chest underneath the cloak, while leaving only my upper two arms visible through the front openings.
Now, from the outside, I just looked like a slightly bulky young martial artist wearing a travel cloak.
Satisfied with my disguise, I walked up the stone stairs, pushed the boulder aside, and stepped out into the morning light of the Blackwood Forest.
Checking Morven's beast-skin map, I turned east and started running.
Now that I was officially a Grade 1 Martial Artist with the raw physical strength of forty adult men, my running speed was completely incomparable to yesterday. Every step I took pushed me forward seven or eight meters at a time, my boots barely touching the roots and rocks on the ground as I sped through the purple trees like a black phantom.
Any low-level Grade 1 beasts that sensed the aura leaking from my body didn't even dare to jump out; instead, they whimpered and hid deep inside the bushes.
In less than forty minutes, I covered the fifteen kilometers to the eastern border of the Outer Ring.
Slowing down my pace, I hid behind the trunk of a giant coal-black tree and looked ahead using my Eye of the Sovereign.
About two hundred meters in front of me was a rocky valley surrounded by a tall, crude fence made of sharpened black wood logs and stacked stones. On top of the wooden fence were watchtowers where several thin, rough-looking men stood guard holding iron spears and crossbows.
Inside the fence, there were around thirty or forty stone and wooden huts built close together. I could see women, old people, and men with missing limbs or scarred faces working in small farm plots or sharpening weapons.
As my golden-ringed eyes swept over the guards on the watchtower, floating status boxes from my Eye of the Sovereign appeared above their heads:
[Marcus — Former Grade 2 Martial Artist (Crippled dantian, current strength: Peak Mortal).
Loyalty: Neutral/Hostile to outsiders.]
[Garrick — Banished Soldier (Grade 1 Martial Artist — Initial Stage).
Loyalty: Neutral.]
"So Morven's notes were right," I thought to myself. "Even though Morven wrote those notes decades ago, the descendants and newcomers of this Exile Village are still surviving here."
Counting the life signatures inside the village with my eyes, there were roughly eighty-five people living inside this valley. If I could bring all eighty-five of them under my rule, combined with Yuki and the nine children back in the federation, my fourth system quest (Gain 100 subjects under your rule: 10/100) would reach 95 out of 100—practically completed!
Just as I was thinking about how to approach them and convince them to follow me, the ground beneath the forest suddenly began to shake!
THUD... THUD... THUD...
From the direction of the Middle Ring to the north, a terrifying roar echoed across the valley, shaking the purple leaves off the trees!
ROOOOOAAAR!!
On top of the village watchtower, the guard named Garrick turned pale and immediately rang a loud iron bell.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
"Beast raid! Everyone get inside the stone shelter! A herd of Iron-Tusk Rhinos is coming from the Middle Ring!" Garrick shouted at the top of his lungs.
Through the trees to the north, I saw a massive cloud of dust rushing straight toward the village's wooden fence. Leading the charge was a monstrous rhino over four meters tall, covered in dark red, blood-stained armor plates, followed by six smaller Grade 1 corrupted rhinos!
I used Dominion Scan on the giant rhino in the lead.
[Mutated Blood-Armor Rhino (Grade 2 Corrupted Beast — Initial Stage)]
[Description: A terrifying beast from the Middle Ring driven mad by bloodlust. Its hide is immune to ordinary iron weapons, and its charge can flatten an entire village.]
"A Grade 2 Corrupted Beast!"
Inside the village, panic broke out everywhere. The women and children screamed as they ran toward a cave at the back of the valley, while around twenty men—most of them either old, scarred, or missing an arm—grabbed their iron spears and rushed toward the wooden gate with despair in their eyes.
Among them, an old man with a long gray beard and only one arm, who seemed to be the village chief, shouted, "Hold the gate! Even if we die here today, we must buy five minutes for the women and children to seal the back cave!"
However, everyone knew that a wooden fence could never stop a Grade 2 corrupted beast. In the martial world, a Grade 2 beast had the strength of at least a hundred adult men and could absorb natural martial energy to harden its body like steel. The moment that giant rhino hit the fence, all twenty of these crippled guards would be trampled into meat paste!
CRASH—!!
Within seconds, the giant Blood-Armor Rhino reached the front of the valley and slammed its massive horn straight into the wooden gate!
The thick black wood logs shattered into splinters like toothpicks! Three village guards standing behind the gate were sent flying into the air, coughing out blood as they crashed into the dirt.
"Chief! We can't stop it! It's a Grade 2 monster!" Garrick screamed, his hands trembling as his iron spear snapped in half against the side of a smaller rhino.
The giant Blood-Armor Rhino snorted out two streams of hot white smoke from its nostrils, locking its bloodshot eyes onto the one-armed village chief and the fallen guards on the ground. Raising its massive front hooves, it prepared to stomp them to death.
The old village chief closed his eyes in despair. "Is this the end of our Exile Village..."
Seeing this scene from the edge of the forest, my eyes flashed.
In my past life and in this life, I hated seeing innocent families torn apart while I stood by helplessly. More importantly, these people were my future subjects! How could an Emperor watch his own subjects get slaughtered by a bunch of mindless beasts right in front of him?!
"If you want to rampage, you came to the wrong place!"
I didn't hide my strength anymore.
Channeling the vortex of dark-gold martial energy in my abdomen, I kicked off the ground with all my might!
BOOM!
The dirt beneath my boots exploded into a small crater as I shot across the two hundred meters in the blink of an eye, jumping right over the broken wooden fence and landing heavily in the gap between the fallen village chief and the giant Blood-Armor Rhino!
The old chief heard the loud thud in front of him and opened his eyes in shock. All he saw was the back of a tall young man in a black cloak standing calmly in front of the four-meter-tall monster.
"Young man, run! That's a Grade 2 corrupted beast!" the old chief yelled desperately.
I didn't look back. Facing the giant rhino whose massive hooves were already crashing down toward my head like a falling house, I realized that using only two arms wouldn't be enough to stop a Grade 2 monster head-on.
RIP!
With a surge of martial energy, I tore off the black cloak covering my shoulders, revealing my four muscular arms in front of the stunned villagers!
Before the villagers could even gasp at the sight of my four arms, the Beacon of Truth lit up in my mind, and I roared, activating the Four-Armed Asura Combat Technique at full power!
My legs sank knee-deep into the hard soil as I raised all four of my hands upward, catching the giant rhino's massive horn and front jaw with my bare hands!
CLANG—BOOM!!
A terrifying shockwave blasted outward, blowing dust and pebbles across the entire valley!
The four-meter-tall Grade 2 Blood-Armor Rhino—a monster with the strength of over a hundred men—was stopped dead in its tracks by my four hands! The veins on my four arms bulged like thick iron chains, and dark-gold martial energy flared around my skin as my feet skidded back only half a meter before locking firmly into the rock!
The entire valley fell dead silent.
Garrick, the one-armed chief, and all the surviving villagers stared with their jaws dropped to the ground, watching a four-armed youth hold back a giant Grade 2 monster with raw physical strength!