Chapter 374 Heaven Punishment
The dilapidated warehouse and the abandoned teaching building were hidden in the middle of the dense forest. On weekdays, there were few people here, so it was quiet and almost eerie.
They were the first teaching building and warehouse when the Sky Academy was founded. Later, as more and more students were enrolled in the academy, the teaching buildings and accommodation areas of the Sky Academy continually expanded, and the locations kept changing as well. By the time Zhuang Huayang became the principal, the area was officially abandoned, and the entire area nearby was also isolated by the woods, becoming one of the candidate areas for the team maneuver of the two academies.
It just rained.
The sun on the horizon shone through the dense forest, casting shadows on the ground. The forest was so dense that the sunlight in it looked like strips of light.
The forest was still wet due to the rain. The raindrops on the tops of the grass and trees fell slowly to the ground, making soft and yet dull sounds.
There were no chirps in the woods, only silence.
He walked cautiously through the woods, and faintly discernible sword intent wrapped his body. Occasionally, a faint blue arc of light would appear on him.
In front of him, the space between the trees grew wider and wider. He walked carefully. The warehouse and the teaching building had loomed before him.
He took a deep breath. Instead of relaxing, he became more cautious.
He looked back at the way he had traveled.
The woods were wet from the rain last night, but he had passed without leaving any footprints.
But some of the dew on the grass was broken and fell to the ground.
He frowned, flicking his fingers.
There was a sound of freezing in the air.
The ice layer that appeared suddenly was very thin, and it became a few drops of water in an instant.
The drops of water evenly fell into the grass behind him. The vapor was dense, and raindrops appeared on the grass.
He watched silently. He was not relieved until he could not find any trace of his passing.
The teaching building and warehouse in front were still quiet.
He lowered his body, moving faster, but began to charge more cautiously.
Ice and fire bloomed around him at the same time. The rain dripped from the tops of the grass and trees as he walked along and was then replenished by the dew formed by ice. He had passed by without leaving any traces behind him.
He went five hundred meters forward.
The woods became thinner. The warehouse and teaching building became completely clear in his sight.
He reached the edge of the woods.
The alertness in his eyes did not fade but grew clearer.
He didn’t know what was in the warehouse and the teaching building in front.
They could be one of his own.
But they could also be his enemy.
He had only one enemy, who was so powerful that he had nothing to say.
In this extremely simple maneuver where the conflict between the enemy and his allies was sharp, he, a member of a large crowd, knew what the warehouse and the teaching building meant.
They were the best and easiest gathering places to be found.
However, their enemy was a person who was only 22 years old but had the combat power of the Invincible Realm. With his enemy’s strength, he didn’t doubt the courage of the person to come here directly.
He stopped and began to move vertically at the edge of the woods, carefully watching every area and tree.
A scratch appeared suddenly on one of the thickest trees nearby.
There were a few more dots under that scratch.
He raised his eyebrows sharply and relaxed completely.
In this team maneuver, where more than one hundred people fought against one person, everyone entered the venue at different locations without being allowed to carry any communication equipment with them. Before a complete communication network was set up, their team advantage was actually not that great. It could even be said that they were fighting on their own.
Without equipment that could communicate at any time, some simple marks became the most efficient way to communicate.
There were four types of signals.
The scratches represented leaders.
The simple dots represented ordinary elite members.
The question mark indicated that the target had not been found.
The exclamation mark indicated that the target had appeared at the marked position.
What appeared on the trunk now was a scratch and six dots.
The appearance of these marks here sufficiently indicated that there were already a leader and six elite members in the teaching building and warehouse area in front of him.
There were only three so-called leaders in this maneuver.
Wang Shengxiao, Gu Hanshan, Jiang Shangyu.
The others were all ordinary elite members represented by dots.
Now, one of the three leaders had reached the assembly point with six elite members without fighting, which was almost the first step in integrating their teams’ strengths.
He smiled slightly, and while he was relaxed from head to toe, he took a subconscious step forward.
“What do these symbols stand for?”
A sound suddenly sounded, soft and gentle.
The sound was so abrupt and so close that it almost sounded in his ear.
Without any psychological preparation, the voice was extremely thrilling to him.
Indescribable coolness immediately came to his mind from his feet. His scalp was numb, and he instinctively burst out the accumulated lightning and sword intent thoroughly.
Dense bolts of lightning suddenly appeared with the sharp sword intent, and his large figure suddenly turned blue.
Nevertheless, before the dim blue lightning had time to spread, a gentle wind cut through the air.
In his line of sight, a slender but weak branch was casually waved toward him.
That was a branch that had been broken off a tree.
The branch was thin, soft, and long, with even a few leaves on the front end.
The dew on the leaves had disappeared, but the leaves were still moist and extremely green.
The branch that seemed unable to withstand any force casually swept into the lightning.
In silence, all the sword intent dissipated suddenly, the lightning that had not had time to spread disappeared in a trance, and then the thin and delicate branch fell on his shoulder.
The branch swung weakly at him.
It also fell on his shoulder weakly.
But in his sense, that branch was as heavy as a mountain, and suddenly it directly destroyed all his defenses.
“Bang!”
Suppressed by tremendous force, he fell uncontrollably on one knee.
“Crack…”
One of his stout, powerful arms suddenly snapped, and the bones of his shoulder shattered.
The branch still rested quietly on his shoulder, and because it touched something, the flexible branch bent.
The wind blew past, and the green leaves on the branch trembled gently.
He stared blankly at the branch, even forgetting the pain.
He had no idea where the force that completely crushed himself and directly destroyed his arm came from.
The lightning completely dissipated.
The sharp pain finally began to spread over the shoulder.
His eyes lost focus in fits and starts, and his face was pale. In his seemingly dim vision, a figure stood quietly before him, putting a branch over his shoulder, and looking at the scratch and six dots on the trunk ahead.
Black suit pants, casual leather shoes, short hair, white shirt.
The man stood silently, not arrogant, aggressive, or fierce. Instead, he carried with him an indescribable aura of devilishness, like a demon.
“Hmm?”
He got no answer, so he made a noise casually. Then he asked again, pulling back the branch, “What do these symbols represent?”
“Li Tianlan…”
The large guy covered his broken arm tightly and smiled wanly. Looking at the enemy who came from nowhere beside him, he felt that everything around him seemed unrealistic.
Li Tianlan glanced at him. The large man in front of him seemed familiar to him. He raised his eyebrows and asked, “What’s your name?”
The large man didn’t speak. With the huge gap in strength, he didn’t even feel humiliated, just stunned and incredulous.
In a trance, he still remembered the entrance maneuver three years ago in the spring.
When he first saw Li Tianlan in the entrance maneuver, he was kind, but in fact, he still overlooked him.
It had only been three years, but the other party had forgotten his name.
An expert at… the Thunder-shocking Realm?!!
He suddenly felt that in the eyes of Li Tianlan, he was a nonentity in the Thunder-shocking Realm.
“I’m Fan Haoyu.”
The large man said in a low tone, “We’ve met before in the entrance maneuver and the final battle in Heaven Capital.”
Fan Haoyu, a repeater of the Sky Academy, was the head of one of the seven elite teams in this cooperative combat.
Li Tianlan said after thinking for a while, “Oh, you are Yuetong’s friend.”
He shook the branch in his hand, thought again, and added, “Son of Minister Fan Tianyin?”
Fan Tianyin.
He was one of the core figures of the southeastern faction, the Minister of Security of Zhongzhou State.
“Yes.”
Fan Haoyu looked at Li Tianlan calmly.
He used to be familiar with Li Tianlan.
That was the same case now.
But their stances were different. No matter how familiar they were, they were enemies.
“Your dad saved your life.”
Li Tianlan said, “I won’t kill you. But Minister Fan owes me a favor. After the maneuver, I will take it at the right time.”
His tone was flat, without undulations.
Fan Haoyu’s mouth moved, but he didn’t know what to say.
The tone of Li Tianlan was so bland that he seemed to mean what he said.
He never said what would happen if the Fan family didn’t acknowledge it.
If they didn’t return him the favor when he went to get it, someone must pay with his life.
Fan Haoyu experienced Li Tianlan’s behavior style for the first time.
He was not ostentatious, domineering, or hysterical. He did everything blandly, but with an irresistible force.
“Your people are skilled at hiding. You’re the fifth person I’ve met all the way here. That’s too few.”
Li Tianlan raised the branch in his hand and brushed against the thick, marked trunk.
The branch bent without force.
But the thick tree suddenly trembled, then immediately split open, and finally, the trunk tilted toward both sides. The almost invisible sword intent swept through the tree. The lush canopy and the straight trunk suddenly became countless flying crumbs.
The debris had disappeared completely in the air before it hit the ground.
Fan Haoyu felt nothing but the freeze of his blood. He asked subconsciously, “What about the other four people?”
Li Tianlan walked past him and said indifferently, “They were not that lucky. None of them had a father like yours.”
Fan Haoyu sat on the ground in a daze.
The moment the branch in Li Tianlan’s hand shattered his enormous lightning and sword intent, all his strong will and pride seemed to have disappeared entirely.
Looking at the back of Li Tianlan walking into the teaching building, he did not have the so-called humiliation, only the most helpless powerlessness.
Li Tianlan kept moving forward.
As he was about to step out of the woods, he once again saw a marked tree.
Similarly, there was a scratch.
But the dots beneath it were slightly more.
Li Tianlan didn’t know what these marks represented.
But he had now determined that these marks represented how the other teams connected.
It also meant that the teaching building and the warehouse in front were no longer unoccupied and even had traps laid.
For Li Tianlan, knowing that was enough.
Li Tianlan walked out of the woods in silence.
There was an open space outside the edge of the woods.
The warehouse and the teaching building stood there in silence.
The morning sun shed freely on the open space, bright and warm.
Li Tianlan squinted at the warehouse and the teaching building and went straight ahead.
The branch was still in his hand.
He raised his hand and casually tore off a green leaf on the branch.
Wang Shengxiao could clearly see the movements of Li Tianlan.
There was no distance in the world of telescopes.
Standing high, Wang Shengxiao could even see every expression on Li Tianlan’s face, and he could count every leaf on the branch in his hand.
But he was not very joyful and excited.
Wang Shengxiao held the telescope and said in a flat tone, “Here he comes.”
“So quick?”
Jiang Shangyu, who arrived here almost at the same time as Wang Shengxiao, was meditating. Hearing Wang Shengxiao’s words, he opened his eyes surprisedly. “Hanshan has not arrived yet.”
Wang Shengxiao put down his telescope without saying a word.
He knew that Li Tianlan would definitely choose to come here, but he didn’t expect him to be so quick.
If Li Tianlan had come here ten minutes later, it would have made them better prepared.
Behind Wang Shengxiao, a burly young man stood up and said calmly, “I can stop him for a while.”
“Moxue!”
Wang Shengxiao frowned but didn’t say anything else.
“We have no choice.
The young man added calmly, “I must hold him off with my men. When all our men are here, you shall take care of the rest.”
Wang Shengxiao said, “You shouldn’t be a pioneer.”
Chen Moxue said lightly, “You and Jiang Shangyu are not pioneers, either.”
He was burly and sturdy, but his name was somewhat feminine. However, no student in the two academies of this year dared to look down upon him.
He was a young genius who was only slightly inferior to Song Ci and Jiang Shangyu in the hearts of higher-ups and was the leader of Blizzard in the Deep-sea Academy.
Meanwhile, he was a young genius who moved closer to Wang Shengxiao without hesitation after the latter joined the Phantom Palace. Even if he knew that Li Tianlan had the battle strength of the Invincible Realm, he never shrank back.
The role he played in this maneuver was also crucial.
Except for them—the people concerned, no one knew exactly what they had prepared for this maneuver in order to deal with Li Tianlan.
The lineup involving three young Chosen Ones was indeed magnificent. If they cooperated tacitly, and their fighting capacity added together, they wouldn’t be weaker than Li Tianlan.
But to be not weaker than Li Tianlan was not their goal.
What they wanted was a victory!
So in this maneuver, in addition to the three young Chosen Ones, Kunlun City and the Wang family of Beihai also prepared two sets of sword formations.
Kunlun City’s sword formations were well known in the Dark World.
But this time, among the two sword formations, one belonged to the Wang family of Beihai.
Chen Moxue played the role of the core figure in the sword formation of the Wang family of Beihai.
The Wang family of Beihai had the Heaven Punishment Troop, representing the most elite and terrifying conventional forces of the Wang family of Beihai.
In this maneuver, the sword formation taken out by the Wang family of Beihai came from the Heaven Punishment Troop.
It was also one of the hole cards for this maneuver.
Heaven Punishment Sword Formation, destroying heaven with a single sword move!
