Beastmaster of the Ages

"I heard that Her Majesty was too careless last time, and it gave that brat a chance. This time around, we won't underestimate our enemy and make sure he gets it for good."

"That lowly scum from the world below was able to cause a hundred thousand gods to mobilize. This could go down in history."

"It'll end quickly when the time comes. Everyone is assigned to a certain area. No matter where Tianming flees, all he can do now is kneel and beg for mercy."

"We really can't overestimate him enough. He's a monster the likes of which has never been seen before. Maybe his level was high to begin with and he was only making up for the lack of energy using our stellunar source."

"I heard that he was even able to fake his age. He's actually a few hundred years old."

"That's right. He might not be a genius after all."

Those were all rumors that Sovereign Xi had spread. With the death of Liu Qinghuan, she discovered that Tianming really didn't want word of his talent to spread. That happened to align with her own goal of using him up without attracting Orderia's notice, so she got normal folk to spread those rumors and make sure nobody would connect him with Qingyu. As for the non-divine moonrace who had heard about him coming from the chaos skyjail like Qingyu, they were all dead.

By now, the normal folk of the Divine Moon Realm had undergone a complete change in their understanding of Tianming. They now considered him a centuries-old monster from the world below who tried tricking the sovereign, only to be found out. After that, he destroyed the formation core to escape.

A full hundred thousand elites had gathered. In actuality, only a few thousand ascendants would have been enough. She had deployed so many both because she could afford it, and because she wanted to be triply sure things wouldn't go wrong. Letting the rage-fueled Prince Fengyue lead the army was just the icing on the cake.

......

As Tianming and Meow Meow blitzed through the skies, the Divine Moon Realm began growing bigger and bigger in their vision.

"We're here." Without another word, Tianming had Meow Meow enter the lifebound space while he himself entered the Prime Tower. The tower crashed into the ocean of the Divine Moon Realm from the moon's gravity; half of the moon was actually covered by water that was filled with stellunar source. It glowed with a warm moonlight, making it look really dreamlike. Even a single drop of seawater would be precious ambrosia to the folks from the world below. Not to mention, there were quite a lot of water-type divine hazards within.

Once the Prime Tower entered the ocean, it sank without a sound. Tianming and all four of his beasts began symbiotic cultivation. With his Lifesbane Will growing by leaps and bounds, it could help his Imperial Will control the flow of astralforce. Within every single albus in his body, the Prime Tower-shaped Lifesbane Will became more and more corporeal and approached the sword-shaped Imperial Will in power. The heavenly and divine wills greatly expanded Tianming's mental space. He was like a vortex, relying on the Prime Tower to absorb all of the stellunar source within the seawater and nourish the infernaldiscs, primoridialdiscs, genesisdiscs, and radixdiscs in his body, helping them all expand and grow. Using his four Primordial Chaos Beast codices, he was absorbing the stellunar source at a ridiculous rate, greatly increasing the energy concentration in his body.

Meow Meow was so fast that it had managed to lose their pursuers for some time. Tianming spent the next eighteen days absorbing the stellunar source. Without it, he couldn't grow no matter how powerful his wills were. In another half hour, they finally finished.

"We're at the Pentarcanic Sky level!" Apart from that, his Lifesbane Will had grown so much that his astralforce was infinitely close to the sixth level already. "If I hadn't run into that eleventh-level opponent that time in the pagoda, I would've reached the sixth level already."

He had reached the limit of astralforce his wills could control, so absorbing any more stellunar source wouldn't be effective. Like someone who had eaten his fill, if he continued eating, his stomach might burst.

"Let's hope we'll be able to handle what's coming at us. I wonder how many enemies Sovereign Xi will send? As long as it isn't more than a thousand and they're not too spread out, I'll be able to manage."

Tianming and Meow Meow left the tower; they had to return to the Flameyellow Continent.

"That woman is really insidious. To force you to submit, she might even send out tens of thousands of gods to deal with you. There's no way you'll be able to kill them all if they come to destroy the Flameyellow humans," Ying Huo said.

"I wonder if they've left yet." He still hadn't gotten any news from Feiling, so there was a good chance they hadn't left. Knowing how many people he would be up against was crucial. "If we go a little faster, we might be able to intercept them in the astralscape. Let's just hope they haven't sent too many." It was easier to locate people out in the cosmic aether, after all.

"The pursuers should be here at any minute, given their speed," Meow Meow said.

"No worries. They have nothing they can hold me back with. All I need is to shake them off again." Tianming wasn't the least bit worried about them; they hadn't managed to touch him in the past twenty days.

The key still lay with Ye Lingfeng and his dynasty. Hurriedly, Tianming and Meow Meow charged out of the sea, only to run into life-threatening danger. The sky above him was completely dark, as if a gigantic monster was descending toward him, covering up the entire sun. It looked circular and seemed to stretch out thirty thousand meters.

Tianming saw a large, black cauldron above him. It came slamming toward him at a staggering speed the moment he popped out of the ocean. Eventually, it swallowed him as it slammed down to the depths of the ocean. The opening of the cauldron was completely sealed shut, and no light was able to come in at all. A lot of seawater and dust was swirling around within. Tianming was completely trapped, not having expected the pursuers to have something like this; he didn't think his moment of carelessness would cause him to fall prey to it.

"Wait, isn't this the Heaven Cauldron?" He quickly stabilized himself and Meow Meow; inspecting the shape of the cauldron from within, discovering that it was really similar to the Heaven Cauldron at the Taiji Peak Lake.

"What Heaven Cauldron? This is a grade-four divine artifact, an orderian cauldron. It's a treasure that Orderia bequeathed to Her Majesty. We've been tasked to use it to capture you!" said a sly voice that reverberated through the cauldron.

They hadn't had any chance to use it when they were in the cosmic aether. What they didn't expect, however, was that Tianming would return to the moon to cultivate. At the last minute, they managed to deploy the cauldron above Tianming and trap him within a sealed battlefield. Not only that, the cauldron could also attack the targets trapped within.

It began rumbling as the three divine patterns within it shone bright. There was one pattern from a divine ore that reinforced the cauldron's structure, and two from divine hazards that powered the cauldron. The divine ore that was used to make it was called Perpetual Obsidian. It had more than four hundred tribulation patterns and thirty thousand saintly heavenly patterns spread out like a net across the structure, forming a grade-four divine pattern that determined the grade of the cauldron as a whole. The other two divine patterns were only grade three, but were really destructive as well.

The combination of the divine ores and hazards caused an explosive chain reaction that further increased its power. Even pills made using divine herbs and divine hazards only amplified the patterns' effects additively, rather than multiplicatively.

The orderian cauldron started activating, causing the divine patterns to shoot out five beams near Tianming. Each beam shone on a person, all of whom Tianming felt were incredibly powerful.

This is the ability Brother Ouyang used as the cauldron's defender! It increases his combat capability, right?

It looked like it worked the same way. Tianming also recalled that Great Emperor Xuanyuan said the Heaven Cauldron was something he had borrowed. There were two keys that had to be returned to someone else. In other words, had the Heaven Cauldron come from Orderia? Or was it just identical to the orderian cauldron?

Questions like these were pointless for now. He looked up and asked, "Who are you?"

"Her Majesty's weapons, the Pentamoon Slayers," all five said in unison.

Tianming noticed that all of them were identical in both appearance and aura, like quintuplets. However, all of their bane-rings seemed to have different colors.

They were five tenth-level ascendants! They were in fact quintuplets and were said to be telepathically linked, which allowed their combat prowess to rival an eleventh-level ascendant. Not only that, their power had been even further boosted by the orderian cauldron.