The Divine Martial Stars

The Moon Sentinels renewed themselves for another charge.

“No buts. Just do as I say.”

The curt remark signified the end of the conversation. Li Mu lunged forward.

The golden shield overhead evaporated. Li Mu flung his arms forth. Luminous chains of gold spouted from his palms, shooting forward and, in just the blink of an eye, shredding the dozen-or-so Moon Sentinels at the forefront into nothing but cinder-like dregs of energy.

Unstoppable and invincible.

“Gods… Powerful… That’s impossibly powerful…’

Still unable to recover from the initial shock, Xiao Jianfei could barely describe his shock and awe.

Only the General-class officers in the military wielded such might!

But he was not the only one still gripped by shock. The rest of the other armor-clad Trailblazers all gawked with disbelief.

“How could this be… He’s this powerful?!” Ye Ying’s eyes were the size of saucers.

“Damn… That leaves me so far, far behind…” Lin Jingxin remarked lazily, although he too was very much surprised. “Who is he, really? His power and magic… Wicked…”

Despite being no strangers to wondrous feats and epic battles, the two captains could hardly disguise their marvel. “Is this really a Chosen One who is only just four months since his birth from a Class-One Tree of Eternity?!”

“Go! Head back to Oststern quickly! I’ll hold them off for as long as I can, but it won’t be long!” cried Li Mu as he manipulated the Four-Blade God-Killing Broadsword chains, slaying more Moon Sentinels, “No time to lose, Lieutenant Xiao! Quit dawdling and go! But keep Feng and the others safe! Their well-being is paramount!”

“B-But… Very well, my friend! May you be safe and survive this!” Xiao Jianfei muttered, “I shall hope to see you again at Oststern! Live through this and you’ll be my best friend!”

It took one second of hesitation for him to decide and he quickly left with the rest of the Trailblazers.

As a military man, he believed in camaraderie above all else, but he too understood the need to be pragmatic.

From the looks of things, Li Mu could very well hold off the Moon Sentinels while escaping to safety. Their staying here would not only hamper Li Mu from unleashing the entirety of his abilities, but at the same time, they would only be his baggage and potentially incur more unnecessary losses.

“Best of luck, my friend,” Lin Jingxin transmitted a telepathic message to him.

To Li Mu’s surprise, even Ye Ying too communicated to him secretly, “Take care of yourself and don’t go beyond your limit.”

Li Mu cracked into a grin.

That could be the closest one would get to becoming a friend of the proud and aloof female captain.

Feng and the others, however, could barely say anything. They were whisked up by the Trailblazers who ran as fast as they could before they could convey any final words.

They were still very much perplexed at how powerful Li Mu really was. The last thing they expected was how so much more powerful and dangerous he was than the entire contingent of Trailblazers put together. As the Trailblazers carried them on their backs, they could only look back and watch as Li Mu and the Lunar Specter vanished into the distance.

Clank! Clank! Clank!

The stormy weather showed no signs of going soft on the weary and hurrying soldiers.

In the meantime, Li Mu was churning up a storm of his own. A whirlwind of Four-Blade God Killing Broadsword bolts of his making was ripping the Moon Sentinels into pieces of crimson confetti.

A smile formed on his face the moment he was certain that the Trailblazers and the villagers were well out of sight.

“Well, they’re gone, at long last,” he mused.

He has been having his eyes on the remaining Lunar Gems since the moment the Trailblazers decided to just leave them. He magicked all twenty crates of the Lunar Gems away. No one would know what happened to the Gems. As far as the Trailblazers were concerned, the Gems were gone—left here to rot or reclaimed by the Moon Monarch and his Sentinels. With these Gems, he could use them to exchange something else valuable.

After all, Li Mu was sure that as with every else, money is what makes the world go round.

“KILL HIM! KILL HIM NOW!”

The Moon Monarch was none too pleased to see Li Mu swooping away the last of his Lunar Gems. With a bestial roar, he swung his scepter and set loose another phosphorescent tide of red to further strengthen the remaining of his one-thousand-strong Moon Sentinel army, directing them to attack and kill him at whatever cost.

Undaunted, Li Mu wasn’t eager to leave just yet.

He wished to buy Ye Ying and Lin Jingxin more time to escape.

But on the other hand, he wanted to observe the Moon Monarch a little longer. A strange foreboding told him that the night was still young and there was more to the mysteries of Lunar Specter than meets the eye.

Almost a half-hour passed.

More than one thousand deadly Moon Sentinels but barely five hundred remained by the time Li Mu was done with them.

Apoplectic rage swirled in the eyes of the Moon Monarch.

“BLOOD! I NEED BLOOD!”

He roared.

The remaining Moon Sentinels, now numbering up to four hundred plus at most, broke into two companies. One continued the attack on Li Mu while the other homed in on another group of targets: the horde of beasts still indulging in the Deluge of Illumination, showing not even the slightest interest in the wraiths.

The beasts were slaughtered, and their blood drenched the soil that sprawled all around the Lunar Specter.

The air ranked with the horrific tang of blood.

That was when Li Mu was with his own eyes how droplets of blood would rise into the air like rain rising from the ground and ascending back into the skies, devoid of weight and gravity as if the hands of Time were turning backward, and gliding towards the Lunar Specter where the Moon Monarch was waiting. Beads turned into streams and streams turned into a huge and chaotic web of sanguine strands interlacing and weaving around each other before every one of them reached the Moon Monarch.

“He’s sucking their blood?! So that’s why they’re only killing the beasts and not the wraiths! Wraiths don’t have a corporeal body, so they don’t have blood!”

Li Mu muttered almost to himself with dawning comprehension.

“But if the Moon Monarch has all the blood he needs, then most obviously he’ll become stronger! He’ll be harder to deal with then.”

Li Mu realized, deciding that a change of plans was in order.

He must do something—something fast, something hard, and something decisive!

The Four-Blade God-Killing Broadsword chains were just finished shredding the Moon Sentinels who were just about to surround Li Mu. Next, they began whirling so fast that they took on the spinning shape of a rotary bit for boring. One so huge and glimmeringly aureate as it rotated rapidly like a spinning top.

“The Whirling Lance of Golden Dragons!”

Li Mu cast it into the air and soared up after it, driving it straight at the Moon Monarch.

The Moon Monarch snarled and thrust his scepter.

A gigantic dome-like luminescence—a morbidly blood-like counterpart of the shield that Li Mu had conjured just now—appeared in midair.

BOOM!

The air rippled like a layer of water hanging in the sky.

Li Mu was blasted away, his Whirling Lance shattering into countless little bits and pieces of golden flecks.

“Gods, that’s powerful!”

That was the first thought that flashed into his mind.

There was no doubt: the Moon Monarch was way more powerful than he was.

Yet that begged one question: why was he leaving the fighting to his men instead of himself? With his powers, he could have easily intercepted Ye Ying and the rest of the Trailblazers from leaving.

“Unless… he can’t leave the ship…”

The possibility occurred to Li Mu as he remained levitating in midair.

He made a couple or more tries and with the help of his spiritual senses, he began to pick up the signs.

The Moon Monarch was not only confined to the Lunar Specter, even his ranged attacks, once reaching well out of the peripherals of the ghostly ship, would weaken precipitously. That would mean that his being able to stop that gigantic sword just now was just pure luck; if this were on the Lunar Specter then he would have been dead already.

But would that mean that he would be safe so long as he refrained from stepping back onboard the ship?

Not really.

Something told Li Mu that once the Moon Monarch has had his fill of fresh blood, he might be able to step off the Lunar Specter.

The Moon Monarch would be somewhere near the Great Way Realm, by Li Mu’s reckoning. At that time, he would be even luckier if he could survive an onslaught from such an indomitable figure for anything beyond ten seconds. Dangerous would just be an understatement and even the Trailblazers and Oststern in its entirety, despite being more than a hundred miles away, would be attacked.

The possibility of all that happening played right before Li Mu’s eyes like a vision.

“Is this some kind of predictive premonition?!” he wondered.

Being transported to Molderad had helped Li Mu to fully master and embody all twelve levels of the arcane Xiantian Skill discipline and coming here to the Battlefield of Chaos where the ambient Spiritual Qi is so rich had assisted in his full assimilation of the discipline. Strangely, his spiritual sight has remained in the Eye of Flaws stage, although his fighting here had, in one way or another, triggered a new ability besides detecting flaws and weakness: a sixth sense-like intuition.

“Well, if that’s the case…” he grunted.

Li Mu decided that it was time he dished out his final ace.

“The Rings of Heaven and Earth!”

Li Mu cried as he channeled his power into the rings he wore on his left wrist.

Immediately, he felt as if a black hole had just bled every ounce of his power. The sudden depletion of his magic rendered him dizzy while the Rings of Heaven and Earth tore out of his hand and glided to the sky, growing bigger and bigger like a pair of humongous doughnuts before crashing down on the Moon Monarch with the force of a breaking dam.

BOOM!

The claret-red dome-like shield shattered.

The Moon Monarch desperately snarled with obstinacy, trying to wave his scepter as if to conjure something else.

But it was too late.

No amount of desperation and defiance would sway an Emperor-class weapon such as the Rings of Heaven and Earth nor did the Moon Monarch ever think that Li Mu would have such a potent relic in his possession. The impact of the crashing monstrosities engulfed even the Moon Monarch, bashing him straight into the bowels of the Lunar Specter before he finally vanished into a puff of white.

RUMBLE!

The leviathan vessel split into half with a long and deafening groan that sounded like its final death rattle amid rotten and decrepit shards and splinters spraying everywhere, the wreckage crashing into piles of wooden flotsam on the ground at last.

“Gods in Heaven!?”

Li Mu himself was flabbergasted.

“What the heck was that?!

“Is this really how powerful these Rings are?!”

When Old Swindler taught Li Mu the way to utilize the Rings of Heaven and Earth, there was no chance on Earth to actually practice using them. This was the first time Li Mu had tested it in combat and he did not expect the Rings to be so effective if not deadly!

“Back.”

Li Mu waved a hand.

The Rings flew back to him like a pair of obedient pigeons harking to his call, shrinking rapidly in size, and slid easily back into his wrist.

“Splendid.”

Li Mu was delighted.

Other than the caveat that using the Rings would expend almost nine-tenths of his power, he was rather pleased with the rings’ effectiveness in battle.

Reminded of how his power is almost fully spent, Li Mu quickly summoned his Four-Blade God-Killing Broadsword chains. But the Moon Monarch really was gone, along with the groups of Moon Sentinels who were about to close in on him and were busy slaying the poor beasts and animals respectively. Every single one of them had vanished, dissipating into the night breeze like stardust.

“Are they really gone? For real?”

Li Mu exhaled with comfort.

All of a sudden.

Whoosh!

A jet of blinding and radiance luminescence shot from within the wreckage of the Lunar Spector and streaked like a long and shining belt across the night sky before it was gone miles and miles away.

An anxious Li Mu thought of giving chase. But with his power now exhausted, there was little he could do.

RUMBLE!

What remained of the Lunar Specter smashed into smaller pieces and particles as if the magic that had been sustaining it was gone. Utterly gone.

And with it, the wreckage of the vessel which had been a magnificent ship more than a thousand years ago had been ignominiously reduced to just mounds of lumber debris.

Up in the sky, the blood moon phenomenon was over. All that was there in the air was the same silvery orb as if its red macabre counterpart had not existed at all.

The stench of blood in the air too was fully lifted.

So was the Deluge of Illumination, which had abruptly ended.

“Is that it? Is it finally over?”

Li Mu was finally relieved and was about to leave when—

Shimmering sparkles of light spiraled over the mounds of debris, basking in the moonbeam shafting down to the ground. The sparkles joined in one another, their radiance growing and growing into a crescendo that ended with the sudden materialization of a man with a long beard and hair. As his visage grew clearer, Li Mu recognized who it was.

The same Moon Monarch he had just defeated with the help of the Rings of Heaven and Earth!

“How is he not dead yet?!”

Li Mu’s face contorted with horror.

“Peace, young one. I mean no harm,” said the glowing phantom of the Moon Monarch with a serene smile on his face. His clear gaze and jovial look juxtaposed the enraged monster he was just minutes ago. “It’s been a thousand years… Thank you so much for lifting the curse, young one. You have freed the Children of the Moon from the curse that had imprisoned our souls in the clutches of demons for so long. The Children of the Moon shall forever be in your debt.”

The one-thousand-strong Moon Sentinel army reappeared behind him.

They no longer radiated the bloodthirsty and savage presence they did before, looking instead calm and tranquil, beautiful and fair in their glittering mail and armor, not unlike the elves Li Mu had seen from the stories on Earth.