Chapter Ninety-Four: The New Unrivaled Legion

In the past few days, Liu Wen and the others had all been ordered by Ma Yi to remain in the villa and not go outside. What was happening beyond those walls was not something any of them wanted to witness; the sight was truly horrifying. Even Tie Zhu and Er Ha had joined the frenzy of devouring and slaughter. As for Ma Yi, he stayed calmly atop the mountain, devoting himself to the refinement of his martial techniques. Whether it was his slashes or his Void Shudder, he was constantly perfecting them. The fact that this trial had been taken so seriously by the ancient human race alone showed that it was no simple matter. If Ma Yi did not diligently hone his abilities, then this time he might truly face grave peril.

What puzzled Ma Yi even more was something the Butcher had once said: that human beings from the past would return. Though the remark had been made only in passing, it left him wondering. If earlier generations of humanity had come back, what had they been doing? And what had happened to those who had left? Many questions from the past had been resolved, only to give rise to new ones.

Why had generation after generation of humanity come here? Was life on Earth not good enough? And to cross the starry sky, one would at least have to be at the level of Heaven’s Mandate, wouldn’t one? Although the Butcher had spoken of several tiers of power, Ma Yi still did not understand how those levels were attained. Even now, he himself had no idea how one was supposed to reach the tenth tier. His own rises in strength had always depended entirely on chance.

At present, aside from his ordinary slashes, Ma Yi had also developed Star Rain. It was a close-range piercing technique that could, in an instant, strike an enemy from multiple angles. In one-on-one combat, it was still quite practical.

Piercing Strike was, at the moment, Ma Yi’s strongest single-target attack. It gathered all power into one point, driving a spiraling current of force that produced multiple tearing effects upon impact. Moreover, the strike itself was extremely fierce, and the spiral current gave it even greater momentum.

Sky-Cleaving Sever was an area-of-effect technique. From Ma Yi’s own position, it swept across nearly a two-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc, unleashing a formidable slash that could instantly send away every enemy rushing in to surround him. If the opponent was not strong enough, they might even be cleaved in two on the spot.

These were Ma Yi’s applications of his slashing power. For the time being, these three were all he had devised, and all could be considered ranged techniques.

As for Void Shudder, Ma Yi normally used it in battle by enveloping his weapon with it to inflict layered damage on his enemy. Void Shudder worked like an electric motor, vibrating incessantly. What seemed to be a single strike actually contained hundreds or even thousands of consecutive blows.

Armor was another application. Though the body appeared motionless, every second the constant vibration of the skin created an invisible shell around the body, one that protected it like armor. Ordinary weapons, if not powerful enough, would be rebuffed several times a second by this vibrating armor. Even powerful attacks would be gradually weakened by repeated vibrations before they could truly reach Ma Yi’s body.

Before, Ma Yi had always felt as though he were being watched, which was why he had not used Void Shudder at all when fighting Xiao Hong.

Burst Advance was much like the kind of flight used by human evolvers. It was precisely because of this flight technique that Ma Yi had been inspired to develop Void Shudder. One method was to repeatedly stamp against the air to generate tremendous thrust; Ma Yi’s method relied on changes in vibration amplitude. Because the frequency was so rapid, it could also produce a flying effect. With Burst Advance, Ma Yi could control the amplitude and speed of his vibrations to achieve sudden acceleration and abrupt stops. Even in the eyes of experts of the same rank, he could seem to appear in any corner in an instant, giving the impression of teleportation. In a moment of crisis, he could instantly leave a dangerous area. At present, however, each Burst Advance carried him less than fifty meters. If he encountered a large-scale, powerful attack and was unable to chain Burst Advance quickly enough, he would still be injured.

Thousandfold Impact was a technique that fully exploited the principles of Void Shudder. It greatly increased the amplitude of the vibrations, allowing several attacks to land on the enemy in an instant, all of them concentrated at a single point. It was, without question, the strongest move for breaking through armor, and its power grew even more terrifying in proportion to the user’s own strength.

Ma Yi was not a man who hoarded his skills. He taught Tie Zhu and Er Ha every technique he had developed under Void Shudder. Compared with Ma Yi’s flexibility in using them, however, Burst Advance and Thousandfold Impact were only at the beginning stages for the two of them; they had not yet fully mastered them.

What was more, after learning Burst Advance, Tie Zhu and Er Ha somehow understood the technique, yet still could not fly. This left Ma Yi deeply confused, and he had never been able to figure out the reason. Even so, their jumping ability had increased severalfold. They could leap hundreds of meters into the air in a single bound. After transforming, when they applied the technique to the wings of flight, they became even more formidable than Ma Yi himself, able to cover several hundred meters in an instant. If they kept it up, their flight speed would surpass Ma Yi’s by several times. Even Ma Yi was envious of that, for such speed was truly astonishing.

The Human Coalition Army also continued to monitor Ma Yi’s movements closely. From time to time, they would contact him by radio. The people under Ma Yi did not know how to use radio equipment, but the maids he had been given included specialists from the military, so they handled radios with ease. Though these women were Ma Yi’s servants, they had once served the military, and it was only natural that Ma Yi might regard them as possible spies. For that reason, Li Li gave them all a thorough lesson, making sure they understood what could be said and what must never be spoken.

Once the upper ranks of the Human Coalition Army learned that Ma Yi had achieved a crushing victory, they finally understood his strength. He was not someone they could afford to entertain schemes against. They therefore settled into maintaining a good relationship with him and did their best not to leave him with a poor impression. After all, according to the reports sent back by the spies they had planted on Ma Yi’s side, Ma Yi was a ruthless killer who did not even blink when taking a life. If he was in a bad mood, he might even eat people. In any case, he was said to be unpredictable: when he was happy, anything could be said to him; when he was unhappy, a single glance from you might be enough for him to devour you whole.

After frightening the Human Coalition Army into submission, the final cleanup on Ma Yi’s side had also reached its last stage. He did not know exactly how many zombies had been swallowed in the process, but those remaining numbered nearly two million, and that did not even include his original subordinates.

The two million surviving zombie warriors were all at least at the fifth tier. Under such an enormous initial base, there had naturally been many high-level zombies. Now, amid the process of mutual devouring, the weak had been consumed by the strong, giving rise to even stronger beings. Those zombies that had already been formidable had also become stronger still.

Not to mention anyone else, Tie Zhu and Er Ha were prime examples. Tie Zhu had successfully devoured a massive number of zombies and broken straight through to the early stage of the ninth tier, after which he found it almost impossible to advance any further. He had actually consumed even more than Er Ha, and because he had originally been somewhat weaker than Er Ha, he had now caught up with him, leaping across an entire realm to become a ninth-tier early-stage existence.

Hammer, Pursuit Wind, and the others had also become peak eighth-tier existences, and reaching the ninth tier was only a matter of time.

In this terrifying feast of devouring, within the original Unparalleled Legion alone, more than thirty peak eighth-tier zombie warriors had emerged, along with over a hundred eighth-tier late-stage warriors, more than five hundred at the mid-stage of the eighth tier, and over a thousand at the early stage of the eighth tier. Within the original Unparalleled Legion, the lowest-ranked members were already at the early stage of the seventh tier. It could be said that with this force alone, Ma Yi might very well be able to sweep across all seven continents.

Though their strength had been gained through forced devouring and evolution, that was simply the nature of zombies. They were born to become stronger by consuming others. In the future, so long as they were fed at the right time with the right prey, it would not be impossible for any one of them to reach the tenth tier through devouring alone.

Xiao Hong’s former high-level subordinates had also all been eaten by Tie Zhu and Er Ha. The number of newly born powerful beings was not small either; there were now no fewer than fifty peak eighth-tier existences alone. These would all be dispersed and integrated into the new Unparalleled Legion. Originally, Ma Yi had intended to build another force, but after thinking it over, he decided that too many units would only create confusion. It would be better to continue expanding the Heavenly Demon Army and the Heavenly Valor Army instead. In that way, the two armies would grow even stronger, and since Tie Zhu and Er Ha were gradually gaining experience in command, they found it easier and easier to manage them.

As for Xiao Hong, he was now Ma Yi’s mount and, in his spare time, the security chief of the villa district. A vast area at the mountaintop had been specially left for him to rest in. Of course, what Xiao Hong loved most was having others wait on him. For that reason, he had reasoned his way into obtaining more than twenty peak seventh-tier zombie warriors from Ma Yi to serve him personally. These had all once been his subordinates. Considering this fellow’s terrifying appetite, Ma Yi also specially selected a hundred speed-type warriors to supply his food. These hundred warriors could also be counted among his men. At this point, Xiao Hong no longer had any additional forces under him. The two million warriors, naturally, were divided between Tie Zhu and Er Ha.

At present, the Unparalleled Legion ruled the entire P City, and its military strength had swelled to an astonishing two million four hundred thousand. The weakest among them had already reached the early stage of the fifth tier, while the high-end combat power had risen to a level that was downright horrifying. Not to mention anything else, even the enforcement squads under Tie Zhu and Er Ha alone were enough to crush a corpse tide numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Each enforcement squad was composed entirely of peak eighth-tier warriors, thirty men to a squad. It could be said that the legion’s absolute elite was concentrated there.

As for the other peak eighth-tier warriors, they naturally served as high-ranking officers in the army. After consulting Ma Yi, Hammer also became one of Tie Zhu’s thousand-man commanders, leading an elite unit selected from the Heavenly Valor Army to form a spearhead force. In truth, Ma Yi had originally planned to have Hammer take a thousand men and handle security for the villa district. But after this large-scale battle, it seemed that some fiery instinct in his blood had awakened all at once. He was dead set on charging into the front line, and in the end Ma Yi had no choice but to agree.