70: Chapter 70 Blood Splattered on the Rocky Slope

The young man with the crew cut forcefully suppressed the excitement in his heart, carefully controlling his breathing, terrified that his Qi might leak out.

He lay in ambush among the rubble, his movements light, slow, and stealthy as he quietly approached the newcomer who had just stepped into the Secret Realm.

His name was Ding Run, and he hailed from Beihai Province, one of the eight great provinces.

Although he was not from a prominent family, his family background was quite well-off.

Relying on his own unique talent, coupled with rare opportunities, his path of martial arts cultivation had been smooth sailing, advancing with great strides.

When he took the Martial Arts Exam, he achieved excellent results, ranking second in the entire province, and was admitted to the first-class martial arts university located in the Yunchuan Base City: Yunchuan Martial Arts University.

After entering the martial arts university, his talent was fully revealed, and he quickly stood out among the freshmen, becoming the undisputed number one and successfully obtaining one of the few spots in the school for Project Starfall.

Looking back at the past, he too had been young, frivolous, and arrogant, seeing everyone else as mere fools seeking their own deaths.

That was until he arrived at this Spirit Gathering Secret Realm yesterday.

He had thought that with his current cultivation, having one foot already in the Tiangang Realm, it would be no problem to fight for a spot in the top hundred within this Spirit Gathering Secret Realm.

However, upon seeing these Project Starfall members gathered from all over the country, he realized just how ridiculously wrong he had been.

"Since when... could twenty-year-olds in the Tiangang Realm be found everywhere?"

If not for his own superior perception, he would have likely been beaten out of the Secret Realm and miserably eliminated long ago.

In the Secret Realm, he had been hiding and dodging the whole time, occasionally taking care of some weak exotic beasts, but his ranking had never shown any improvement.

In order to take a gamble, Ding Run decided to head to Luanshi Slope, located in the northwest of the Secret Realm.

In the Spirit Gathering Secret Realm, participants are not encouraged to fight at any time or place, and simply taking out an opponent does not mean you can obtain their points.

After all, if the rules were truly that simple and crude, then just setting up a battlefield where participants could kill each other without actually dying would suffice; there would be no need to create such a complex Secret Realm.

Within this Secret Realm, the rules for obtaining points vary greatly depending on the area.

Luanshi Slope is one such special area with a unique point mechanism.

There are no exotic beasts here, only fragmented rocks and murderous intent lurking in the shadows.

This is a special area that each person can only enter once; taking out a person here allows you to obtain one-tenth of the opponent's points and one kill count.

When a participant leaves this area, additional reward points are calculated and issued based on the kill count they hold.

As early as the first day, those top Geniuses with truly unparalleled talent poured into this area, showing off their skills, crazily harvesting kill counts, and then leaving to head towards the core area.

At this stage, those who still enter this place are generally like Ding Run—people who feel they have no hope of entering the top one hundred with their current strength and are attempting to try their luck here.

As well as newcomers who arrived via random teleportation.

Although a newcomer's initial points are 0, that kill count is a very rare and valuable thing.

Even if you only have one kill count on you, that can be exchanged for 100 points.

And the more kill counts you have, the richer the final settlement rewards will be upon leaving.

"The Dao is inherently ruthless, so don't blame me..."

As he got closer and closer to the target, Ding Run felt the hand gripping the hilt of the blade at his waist trembling more and more violently.

He thought to himself, perhaps it was just because he was too excited.

He had been lying in wait here for a long time, originally intending to sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight, seeing if he could harvest some half-dead unlucky person.

Who would have thought that the people here were more insidious than the last.

Over half a day had passed, and there had been absolutely no movement.

Now, as luck would have it, he had actually managed to ambush a newcomer nearby.

Although this was his first time ever performing a sneak attack.

But as the saying goes, the first time is awkward, the second time is familiar; once he got close, he just needed to wait for the right moment to strike and slash the opponent's throat.

Don't be too nervous.

Ding Run kept trying to mentally prepare himself, but the trembling wouldn't stop; in fact, even his legs had started to shake.

"Something is wrong... nine times out of ten, something is wrong."

"It's too quiet..."

Sensing the abnormality in his body, Ding Run instantly suppressed his urgent urge to obtain points.

The intuition that had helped him turn danger into safety many times before came into play once again.

"With a living person standing here completely uncovered, am I really the only one who has noticed?"

"And this newcomer has been standing in the same spot ever since they came in, as if they were waiting for something..."

In an instant, he suddenly realized a key question:

"In the end, who is the prey?"

Just at the moment of Ding Run's hesitation, several powerful bursts of True Qi erupted from the piles of rubble not far around the newcomer.

In an instant, rubble flew, and three extremely fast figures lunged towards the newcomer with weapons in hand.

"This person is mine!"

"Get lost!"

"The Secret Realm's rules will determine who gets the kill count."

The weapons in the hands of these three were wrapped in almost tangible True Qi, like roaring beasts, as they lunged fiercely towards the newcomer.

Each of them couldn't wait to be the first to tear the other person to pieces in an instant.

"They are all at the first stage of the Tiangang Realm!"

Ding Run, hiding in the shadows, felt a lingering fear and secretly rejoiced that he hadn't rashly attacked just now.

Otherwise, he feared that he would have ended up as the prey they were fighting over, right after that newcomer.

Just as he was secretly terrified, without any warning, a dazzling bolt of lightning suddenly burst forth, the intense light instantly making his eyes ache.

At the same time, a sharp sound exploded, as if thousands of birds were screeching simultaneously, piercingly abnormal.

"Thousand Birds Absolute, Blade Transformation."

As Chen Moxuan calmly uttered the name of the Move, an extremely condensed bolt of lightning had already flashed past.

Those three figures attacking him from all sides, along with the weapons in their hands, were cleanly and decisively cleaved in two at the same moment.

A rain of blood sprayed across the sky, instantly dyeing the surrounding rubble crimson.

Their eyes still held disbelief; they hadn't seen what happened at all.

As their bodies collapsed to the ground and their vitality was about to fade away, their forms turned into specks of particles and dissipated into thin air.

In an instant, the three of them reassembled, safe and sound, at the initial location where they had been teleported in.

But before they could even react, a pitch-black crack suddenly split open behind them, instantly swallowing them up fiercely.

In this Secret Realm, a Martial Artist will not truly die.

Once they suffer a fatal injury, they immediately lose the qualification to continue participating in the contention, and are immediately forcibly teleported out of the Secret Realm, with their points then permanently fixed.

Of course, according to the special rules of Luanshi Slope, they also have to deduct the one-tenth of their points that were taken by Chen Moxuan.

Witnessing such a bloody and horrifying scene from close range, Ding Run's jaw seemed to freeze open, unable to close for a long time.

He finally understood that his body's previous trembling was not because of excitement, nor because of nervousness, and certainly not because of the others hiding in the shadows.

It was entirely due to this newcomer whom he had thought he could manipulate at will.

His intuition was screaming a warning: the newcomer before his eyes, who only had the cultivation of the Qi Refining Realm Ninth Stage, was actually a monster that absolutely could not be provoked!