"She escaped, huh?"
Ardena narrowed her eyes as she studied the devastated forest edge, the trees having toppled or blown into splinters. Craters filled the ground, but there was no sign of her erstwhile opponent. Murderous Crow was long gone.
With a sigh, she turned and proceeded toward the city, wanting to check on Tong Xue, Hao Ren and Qin Ying. After a few steps, she paused for a moment before coughing out a mouthful of blood.
"Ardena! Are you all right?"
Tong Xue, Hao Ren and Qin Ying showed up, but this time, they were accompanied by Sylvie and Silvia. The fairy sisters had sensed the battle had taken place through their telepathic link with me, but I hadn't summoned them because I doubted their presence was necessary. Furthermore, because I wasn't the one fighting, my automated summoning defense system didn't activate at all.
"I'm fine," Ardena assured them, waving away help from Sylvie and Silvia. Tong Xue, Hao Ren and Qin Ying didn't recognize her because they hadn't met her before. On the other hand, Sylvie and Silvia were familiar with her by now. Ardena scowled. "Murderous Crow is even stronger than Lelith Maledictx. Her escape will spell trouble for civilians."
"What should we do?" Tong Xue asked.
"Isn't it obvious?" Sylvie sighed and supported Ardena despite her protests. "Bring Qin Ying and Ardena to the hospital. They need to get their wounds treated."
At her instructions, the others nodded and went about their duties swiftly, giving both Ardena and Qin Ying a hand as they forcibly brought the protesting girls to the hospital. While they were going wherever they needed to be going, Murderous Crow was fleeing deeper into the forest – right in the opposite direction.
She suddenly froze and looked up with wide eyes before bursting out in laughter.
"Ha ha…ha ha ha ha ha!"
I pushed my glasses up my nose as I smirked. "Shall we pick up where we left off earlier?"
"Are you sure about this?" Murderous Crow sneered. "Wouldn't you be ashamed of taking advantage of my plight? What about your code of honor? Are you not afraid that you will violate it?"
"Normally, I would agree with you, but I don't really care too much about honor. I know for sure that if I let you escape, you'll return to kill even more people. I'm a practical person. I'm not going to let my so-called honor result in the unnecessary deaths of innocent people. besides…" I grinned. "You've violated copyright laws."
"Huh? Copyright?"
"Yeah. Lethal Blood Transmutation, wasn't it?" I raised an eyebrow. "Do you really think I wouldn't catch that reference? Are you trying to rip off Xuan Tian Crow from The Celestial Zone? Man, I feel old – the Singaporean manhua series has been published almost thirty years ago now. But that doesn't mean no one has heard or read it. It might be obscure in the global sense, but it's pretty famous in Singapore, you know? Or was."
"What the hell are you talking about right now?!"
I shrugged, cocking my head to listen to enraged voices. "Oh, and the existences from beyond the fourth dimension want me to kill you. They're screaming about how I'm a pathetic main character if I let you live, and how annoying it will be if you keep coming back like a cockroach in later chapters. They say that I'll be stupid to spare your life now because you'll surely return to take revenge on me later. Normally, I would ignore those juvenile edgelords because, quite frankly, if I can't defeat you when you challenge me next time, then I probably deserve to be killed by you. However, it's not just my life at stake here. As I said earlier, if I let you go now, you'll kill a lot of innocent people. people who's unrelated to me, people who's related to me…you're known for being a homicidal psycho who conducted mass murders. Screw honor, I'm not going to have mercy on you just because you're injured. Besides, Ardena is the one who defeated you. She can have the credit and honor. I'm just an executioner…someone to clean up the mess. No one has to know."
"Heh." Murderous Crow chuckled. "I might be seriously injured, but do you really think a kid like you can defeat me?"
"No, I know." I waved my hand. "If you're expecting me to engage you in a sword duel like Xue Wu did, then you're sadly mistaken. First of all, I'm not risking another close shave with copyright infringement. Secondly, I'm a summoner."
Murderous Crow's eyes widened when she felt the intense heat of nine fireballs. Before she could move, she was incinerated by a torrent of flames. With a shriek, she cleaved the inferno apart with her hastily conjured Annihilator, but her body was scorched, her flesh charred and blackened in several places. Kicking off the ground, she launched herself at me in one desperate attack.
Xiao Huo kicked her in the gut and sent her flying. As Murderous Crow stabbed her heavy sword into the ground and pivoted about to confront her new opponent, a huge paw from above smacked her down. Da Hai, now a Mega Blast Tortoise, crushed her under his hand.
Crying out in pain and rage, Murderous Crow unleashed her demonic qi to shove him aside and kept him at bay with a swing from her Annihilator. Da Hai blocked her blade with his shell, but she planted a foot on him and kicked herself off. Spinning into the air, she slashed at Xiao Huo before my nine-tailed Fire Fox could launch a new volley of fireballs, interrupting her technique and diving below her. Xiao Huo spun around, but she wouldn't make it in time to intercept Murderous Crow before she reached me.
Then a clawed talon swatted her from the side. Murderous Crow reflexively parried, but the sheer force of the blow flung her across the forest, smashing her body into trees that broke apart from the tremendous impact. She disappeared under splinters and wooden debris, laying immobile and prone, unable to evade when Xiao Huo Long unleashed his flamethrower attack to set her ablaze.
Miraculously, she survived that. For now. Rising unsteadily to her feet, she leaned on her Annihilator and glowered at me defiantly. Most of her body was gone, her flesh having sloughed off and exposing raw muscle and bone. She was practically at death's door, but I had a feeling she hung on to the last remaining thread of her life to impart several words of wisdom.
"You…you have so many Earth-ranked spirit beasts at your disposal," she hissed weakly, unable to believe what was happening. "Even if that elf bitch didn't injure me seriously…even if you have fought me when I was at my full strength earlier, you would still have most likely won."
I shrugged. "Maybe? But Ardena wanted to fight you herself, so I let her. I honestly don't care who gets the glory as long as you are defeated."
"W…who the hell are you?! Not only did you improve so quickly and gotten to Earth rank in such a short time, you are also capable of taming so many powerful Earth ranked spirit beasts? I've never heard of anyone like you from the orthodox cultivation sects! I know spirit beast taming is a recent and newly founded path, a technique that has only just been developed in the last year or so, but even so, I've not heard any rising stars or promising prodigies like you!"
"I'm not from any orthodox sect." I shook my head and sighed wearily. "And I have no obligation to tell you anything about myself."
Before Murderous Crow could reply, Xiao Huo and Xiao Huo Long burned her. Even as she was slowly incinerated to death, she began laughing.
"Ha ha! I have not lost! You and I are the same! We are birds of the same feather!"
"Perhaps," I conceded. "I'm not hypocritical enough to call myself a righteous or orthodox cultivator or whatever. Nor am I some edgy juvenile trying to pretend to be a villain or a demon lord when I'm not. I just do what I think is best for myself, and I don't care what you, other people, or even the existences from beyond the fourth dimension say about me."
The orthodox path, the demonic path…screw all of that. I was walking down my own path. Other people could label it orthodox or demonic or whatever, but what mattered most was that I truly believed in my own path that I was forging for myself.
I wasn't some ruthless edgelord murder hobo who indulged in mass slaughters, kill every single person who offended me or prevent them from "taking revenge" or whatever nonsense the existences from beyond the fourth dimension rambled about in the comment section. And I wasn't a saint either. My hands were stained with blood, and I wasn't going to justify it or cover up my sins with pretty words. If there was a threat to my friends and family and innocent people, such as Murderous Crow, I would eliminate it. But I wasn't going to pretend that I was a hero or ally of justice for doing so. Conversely, I wasn't some selfish evil villain who only cared about myself and turned a blind eye to those who needed help. I honestly didn't understand the nonsensical rhetoric about leaving the weak to fend for themselves and allowing them to die because it was their own fault for being "weak" or "useless." I wasn't going to treat other people like "burdens" like what the edgy existences beyond the fourth dimension often did by labeling other characters as trash and burdens and demanding that the protagonist not save them and leave them to die. Like, wow, chill, dudes.
The whole point of society was to pool our collective strengths and help each other, to strive for a world that was close to equality as possible. I wasn't naïve enough to think that such ideals were easily achieved, and I was aware that not everyone was good. But just because you had bad people behaving wildly in society doesn't mean that I had to do the same. The goal was to be better than such people.
I watched impassively as Murderous Crow was cremated. Her corpse was burned into nothing but ashes. As the soot of her remains were blown away by the wind, leaving no sign that she ever existed, I turned away and returned to the city. My spirit beasts fell in tow beside me silently, gradually fading away as they were teleported back to my dungeon.
They didn't judge me or hold me to some weird standards of morality. Honestly, humans and sentient species such as elves were probably the only ones who defined morality or whatever. Animals and spirit beasts didn't care about what was "right" or "wrong." They only cared about taking whatever action that provided them the highest chance of survival. They didn't debate and argue over right or wrong, good or evil. That said, the justice system was an extension of the human species' way of survival. By locking up criminals who would otherwise threaten the lives of innocents, we were preserving the survival of those people who would otherwise be endangered by such dangerous elements. So morality wasn't "useless" or "impractical" unlike what some edgy juveniles claimed.
Seriously, those people calling for a return to the "law of the jungle" and "survival of the fittest" would probably be the first people to die if society was to descend into anarchy. As a species, humans were strongest when united and working together.
"Jun Wen! Where did you go?"
My friends were waiting for me in the hospital. I had dropped by to check on the statuses of Ardena and Qin Ying. They were fine, and it turned out that Qin Ying had managed to keep Murderous Crow at bay with her defensive techniques, by focusing all of her qi into defense instead, which allowed her to survive. Ardena had suffered quite a few wounds, but they were mostly superficial and would heal after some rest.
"I went to finish off Murderous Crow." I turned to Ardena and bowed. "Sorry about that. I hope you don't mind, but I wasn't trying to steal your kill or anything. She was far too dangerous of a threat to leave alive."
"No. In fact, I should thank you for that." Ardena smiled and shook her head. "I was worried that she would escape, survive, and then return to wreak havoc on innocents later. In fact, being a demonic cultivator, I wouldn't be surprised if she healed herself by sucking essence from people or draining them of their blood. More lives would have been lost if you hadn't done what you did."
"Thank you." I lowered my head.
"Well, enough about that," Ardena said, waving my apologies away. "Now that we've eliminated the threat of Murderous Crow, we should focus on the task that I came all the way to Hua Xia for."
"Which is?" Tong Xue asked impatiently. She raised an eyebrow, but decided to get straight to the point.
"The spirit beast waves," she replied. "We have reason to believe there might be an alternative space from where they are emerging, besides that interdimensional rift or the usual natural habitats, and my mission is to locate it. I wonder if you might have any ideas?"
My blood turned cold. To my horror, I found out that there was only one other place that came to mind when I heard her words. A place where spirit beasts originated that wasn't the other dimension or natural habitats in the real world like forests and seas?
It could only be the Celestial Labyrinth – the same space where my dungeon, as well as countless other dungeons, resided in.