Chapter 4931 — Utterly Discomfited

But Zang Zili was no fool, after all. After an instinctive moment of retreat, she quickly came to her senses: such evasion would only stoke the other's arrogance and make him stronger with every blow. Given enough time, she might truly capsize in a ditch.

"Courting death!" White flames gathered again over Zang Zili's palms, opening and closing into a long stream of fire as she sought to seize the moment and bind Wei Zhao, who had pressed in close, and kill him.

Unfortunately for her, before she could even strike, Wei Zhao had already flickered to the other side like a phantom. Setting aside absolute strength, if it came down to sheer combat instinct alone, a hundred Zang Zilis would not have been Wei Zhao's match. Her every movement was already within his expectations.

With her move falling through, Zang Zili immediately exposed a flaw—neither great nor small—yet Wei Zhao did not follow up with Thunderous Thousand Bursts. The same technique, used too often, would soon have its patterns figured out; besides, it was rare to meet such a pathetic specimen of the early Kaishan stage, so of course he had to take the chance to test his moves properly!

Chang Laiting before had simply been too weak; at the very most, he had barely managed to test four-series attribute martial arts before folding. Since the son was useless, then let the mother take his place—this was a fine opponent delivered right to his door.

Accompanied by a chorus of dragon roars, the Five Elements Killing Aura—Wei Zhao's ace in the hole from some time past—finally made its appearance. The other party was a Kaishan-stage titan, after all; to keep using four-series attribute martial arts would have been far too insulting. Five Elements Killing Aura, gathering the attributes of all five elements, was merely the starting point.

And what was more, this was no ordinary Five Elements Killing Aura at all.

Zang Zili had little combat instinct, but her eye was keen enough. At a glance she could tell that Wei Zhao's Five Elements Killing Aura was no small matter. Even if, at first sight, it did not seem as intimidating as the Thunderous Thousand Bursts before, when it came to profundity and subtlety, it was absolutely its superior.

"Paltry tricks!" So she said, yet her hands dared not slacken for an instant. She hastily sent a white fireball straight at the Five Elements Killing Aura, which moved like a flood dragon.

The two collided head-on, and everyone expected a thunderous explosion like the one before. But to their surprise, Wei Zhao's Five Elements Killing Aura did not so much as raise a fart of a stir—it was simply crushed flat by the other's white fireball.

From first to last, it did not even manage the barest drain on the enemy, let alone fight to a standstill as the Thunderous Thousand Bursts had done.

The onlookers were struck dumb. After the two spectacular exchanges before, they had unconsciously come to regard Wei Zhao as a formidable figure who could match Zang Zili—after all, in those two clashes he had not fallen the slightest bit behind; rather, he had been leading her around by the nose.

But this time, the gap in strength between the two sides was laid bare in an instant. This ruthless character from North Island might just barely trade a blow or two with Zang Zili, but no more than that—when all was said and done, he was merely of the early Xuan Ascension stage.

"Hahahaha! And here I thought you were strong—turns out you're just an embroidered pillow, pretty on the outside and useless within. Out of steam already? I haven't even warmed up yet!" Zang Zili sneered triumphantly at the sight.

What she failed to notice was that the Alliance Chairman and the whole company of Kaishan-stage experts of the Alliance Guard, hearing her words, all wore expressions of derision in unison. Had this woman still not realized the danger she was in?

For a Kaishan-stage titan to be so obtuse—truly pitiful beyond all measure!

"Heh. As you wish—now you can warm up to your heart's content." Wei Zhao smiled faintly.

"What did you say?" Only now did Zang Zili suddenly sense that something was wrong. Before she could make any response, dense ranks of hundreds of Five Elements Killing Auras abruptly materialized on all sides, in every direction!

Amid the unending dragon roars, Zang Zili's expression changed drastically. So that Five Elements Killing Aura just now had not been destroyed at all—it had been nothing but a decoy. And she, laughably, had taken it for the full extent of his strength.

"Let us begin. Show me how you warm up." Wei Zhao snapped his fingers, light as a drifting cloud, and the Five Elements Killing Auras encircling Zang Zili all launched their attack at once. The onlookers could not even see Zang Zili's shadow—only the dense mass of Five Elements Killing Auras drowning her out. The scene was enough to make one's heart quail.

Zang Zili was thrown into frantic confusion at once. Even if she hastily condensed white flames of the greatest intensity, she could only lock onto a few Five Elements Killing Auras within a given area at a time. To blast them all away in one go was simply unrealistic.

All she could do now was tear open a gap as quickly as possible and break out through it.

Wei Zhao did not seize the chance to strike again—not out of any deliberate leniency, but mainly because that move just now had drained every drop of true qi from his body. At this moment he could only use the jade pendant to swiftly replenish his true qi while carefully observing the situation, preparing for the next round of testing his moves.

"These are... phantoms..." Only after fleeing in disarray for a while did Zang Zili finally notice that something was off. Not all of these Five Elements Killing Auras were real—the vast majority were nothing but empty shells with the appearance and nothing else.

Mere empty shells had fooled a Kaishan-stage titan into spinning in circles! Zang Zili ground her teeth in fury. She had been made a public laughingstock by this brat!

The Alliance Chairman and the assembled Kaishan-stage experts shook their heads once more. True, this woman was an alchemist, and it was forgivable that her strength should be somewhat weaker than that of her peers—but for a Kaishan-stage titan's combat competence to be so utterly wretched was truly beyond words.

Most of them had seen at a glance that nine tenths of Wei Zhao's Five Elements Killing Auras were mere mist-shadows with no offensive power whatsoever. No matter how convincingly disguised, if one's insight was sharp enough, flaws could ultimately be spotted.

And even if one could not tell at a glance, the simplest logic would have sufficed: there was no way so many Five Elements Killing Auras could all be real. Given the intensity of this technique, a normal early Xuan Ascension expert would be at his limit producing five or six; here there were fully a hundred or more. Which were real and which were false could be deduced even with one's toes!

Only Zang Zili could be spun in circles by so simple a trick as Wei Zhao's mist-shadow version of the Five Elements Killing Aura. Any other Kaishan-stage expert present would have scarcely been affected by such a technique at all.

Even so, Zang Zili ultimately came to no harm. She was an early Kaishan-stage expert, after all; though she handled it in utter disarray, several times seeming on the verge of injury, in the end she still barely scraped through.