Chapter 343 — Shi Jin vs. the Void Emperor

"Huh? He just went in? That eager?" Watching Ji Feng vanish into the ruins in the blink of an eye, Heavenly King Zou and the others who had just arrived were speechless.

"Hahaha! Now all the genius top-tier Masters of the sequence rankings are gathered here." At the sight, President Wang laughed heartily too.

A pity, though, a real pity: even these top geniuses could not clear the Void Emperor Ruins.

But there was no helping it. The Void Sandalwood had been bred for the Void Emperor, and bred after the Legendary tier at that; there was no way the Monarch pet beasts of these top-tier Masters could beat it.

The one hope of victory was not entirely absent, however: it lay perhaps in the challengers' ability to strengthen their pet beasts with their tamer talents, and by that means overcome the Void Sandalwood.

"Senior Shi Jin!!" At this, Fang Lan, who had been trailing along at Feng Jin's side, could not have been happier at the sight of Shi Jin.

Memory water drops, memory water drops, Shi Jin had promised her a whole bottle of memory water drops and still had not given it to her!!

"Fang Lan." Shi Li—Fang Lan had been lodging here these past few days to investigate her connection with the Void Emperor Ruins; unfortunately, she had turned up nothing so far.

To get to the bottom of it, this little girl, who had no contracted pet beast and did not even count as a trainee beast tamer, had even gone into the ruins once.

She had marched right up to the Void Sandalwood and asked whether she carried the Void Emperor's bloodline.

And then she had been driven out by the Void Sandalwood.

As if it cared whether she did or not.

It had smashed more than a few princes and princesses back in its day.

It would not even spare the Void Emperor's own sons and daughters.

Why should it care about a bloodline that turned up centuries later?

What was more, the Void Sandalwood could not make a judgment on this thing either, so the process ground to a halt once again.

Even when Fang Lan resorted to some heavy-handed string-pulling, arguing that she might well be the one who had summoned the Void Emperor's relic and that the Void Sandalwood had awakened on her account, it showed her not the slightest courtesy.

"Enough of this nonsense. If you want the Star-sky beast egg, defeat it!"

Such an impossible deadlock left Fang Lan aching with the conviction that archaeology was simply too hard.

"You are Shi Jin!" At that moment, someone was even more agitated than Fang Lan.

In the crowd, the old principal of Void Capital University's beard flew about his face, and smoke all but poured from his nostrils with rage.

He knew Fang Lan, of course; she was the prodigy daughter of a professor at his own school, and in all likelihood a future student of Void Capital University.

And then one morning he had seen, plain as day, Feng Jin taking Fang Lan around the place, the two of them as thick as a grandfather and his granddaughter. What was this? What sort of decency was that?

Hearken to the Voice of History!

The old principal of Void Capital University had never imagined that the one to summon the Void Emperor's relic would turn out to be this slip of a girl, Fang Lan.

What galled him beyond bearing, though, was that Ancient Capital University had stolen a march on them. When Fang Lan told him her dream for the future was to test into Ancient Capital University and become an archaeologist, the old principal was struck dumb.

He pleaded with her again and again; Ancient Capital University had an archaeology department too, and its mechanics department was far and away the superior one. It was no use. Working on Fang Lan's parents got him nowhere either, and to this day he did not even know the reason.

After all, Shi Jin had asked those who knew of the ancient mechanical phantom beast project to keep it secret for the time being.

So for now, the likeliest motive for Fang Lan to join Ancient Capital University was Shi Jin.

After all, at the national tournament, Shi Jin had crushed the most gifted mechanic alive, and he had done it in the capacity of an archaeologist.

"Ahem, ahem. Principal Xie." Seeing the thinning-haired old principal of Void Capital University, Shi Jin offered a rather stiff greeting; they might well end up colleagues in the Eighth Bureau one day, so best to be friendly, best to be friendly.

"Ah!" Principal Xie sighed. Damn that Jiaqi. Was he not just a little better-looking? He could not fathom what girls these days were thinking, to go chasing after such a shallow reason...

"Chairman Wang..." Since this was his first time here, Shi Jin greeted each of the bigwigs he had not met before, one by one.

The bigwigs all answered with smiles and laughter.

"Special training finished?" Feng Jin looked at Eleven, the ice panda on Cen Yu's shoulder, unable to grasp what sort of training Shi Jin had put the iron-eating beast through to turn it into this. Still, narrowing his eyes, he could indeed sense the change in Eleven. Definitely stronger...

"Finished. I will be heading off to challenge the Void Emperor's relic shortly." Shi Jin looked up.

"Then we are in for a show today." Zou Yun chuckled. First Ji Feng, now Shi Jin, two newcomers were going to challenge the Void Emperor's relic, and he could already picture the pair of them slinking away in crushing defeat.

Zou Yun firmly believed that no beast at the Monarch level could possibly defeat that Void Sandalwood.

He was not alone in that belief; several other Beast Masters who had tried their hand firmly believed it too.

In all, the Void Sandalwood had four super-tier racial skills, every one of them with mastery approaching the Perfect grade.

Its lower-tier racial skills were numerous, all Perfect, all refined to the point of genius.

And it was itself a freak of the space attribute.

The Void Emperor had even used all manner of spatial resources to reinforce its base energy value to ten million.

Under such conditions, no one could hope to win short of pouring a legendary resource into a Monarch-level beast to boost its base attributes, then also keeping pace more or less in the number, quality, and mastery of its skills, being well suited to fighting the space attribute, and enjoying powerful talent bonuses from its Beast Master.

But the top-tier masters within Donghuang could hardly have such depth to draw on. Those who did had long since broken through to the Legendary level; who would still be messing about at top-tier master?

The Donghuang Association knew this perfectly well itself, which was why it was already weighing whether to pool the Association's strength to forge a single invincible Monarch-level beast for some master and send it against the Void Sandalwood. The Star-sky beast egg, after all, held no small attraction and research value for the Donghuang Association as well.

...

The Void Emperor's relic.

"So you are this round's challenger."

"You know the rules, I take it. One on one. Neither side may employ external items, but you are permitted to use your Beast Master talent."

"There is no limit on energy during the match. Defeat me, and you pass the trial."

Out of the darkness strode a creature two meters tall, pitch-black from head to toe and gripping a pair of great blades, a thing akin to a mantis, and it fixed its gaze on the long-haired young man before it.

"I know them."

Ji Feng nodded. The ban on external items and resources was, in truth, for the challenger's sake.

Otherwise, in this relic the Void Emperor had built with his own hands, if the Void Sandalwood were to invoke the relic's power and its standing as master of the relic, even a Totem-level beast might not come away the better for it.