Sage Monarch

"I'm Su Zhen, and you can call me Elder Sister. Since you two are new, you don't know how missions work, or the rules. We can forgive you for that, but if you don't follow proper etiquette from here on out, I'm afraid we won't be kind."

"Alright, enough chit-chat with the two newbies," the third child of Brahma said, the one named Wang Chen.

He had a very short sword in his hand that was almost a dagger. It glowed with dazzling light and was covered with complex designs that seemed formed by the souls of countless slain foes.

Even just looking at the dagger would cause most people to shiver with fear.

"This dagger of mine is called Soul Devourer," he continued. "The more people I kill with it, the more devilishness it builds up. Hopefully the two of you are the sensible type, otherwise you'll end up as deceased souls in Soul Devourer."

"Oh really?" Yang Qi said coolly. "Look, I know the Godmyth patriarch assigned this mission to the five of us, but he never said we had to work together. As long as I get my hands on those two hundred talismans, the mission will be a success. And what does that have to do with you three? You're already trying to bully the two of us because we're new. In fact, I bet you're hoping to use us as cannon fodder."

If they had at least made a pretense of being cooperative, he wouldn't have caused problems for them. But instead, they tried to take advantage of him right off the bat.

"Cannon fodder?" Luo Dan said, and he laughed. The other two joined him. "That's actually the perfect word to use. I take it you two don't like the idea? Well, too bad. You're going to be cannon fodder for us. You're going to find out where the imperial snakecharms are, and if you don't, you'll end up dead. Remember, we only have three years to pull this off. And if we fail, we're all dead! You see, the two of you really have no choice in the matter."

"Is that so?" Yang Qi said. "In that case, I'll just wait and see what happens." He and Hu Latu didn't spend time arguing or getting into a fight. Instead, they just vanished into thin air.

"Huh?" Su Zhen said. She took a step forward to try to stop them, but Luo Dan reached out and blocked her path.

"We can't lay a hand on them while we're in the institute," he said. "It would be bad if word got out about us breaking the rules. If they don't want to work for us, fine. But if they're serious about finishing this mission, they still have to go to the Regal Event Heaven, and in that case, they can't truly escape us."

"True," she replied. "My clan looked into those two earlier, and although their clan is respectable, they aren't anything special. They definitely don't match up to my clan. If we have to, we can use clan pressure to try dealing with them."

"Good idea. We can attack the problem from two angles! The problem is, three years just isn't enough time. If things weren't so rushed, we wouldn't need to go to all this trouble."

Tossing Soul Devourer up and down in his hand, Wang Chen snorted and said, "Those two really don't know what they're doing. I can't believe they were so rude to us. But what happens if we can't get them in line? How do we maintain our reputation then? Maybe we should just grab them and convert them into puppets to use as cannon fodder!"

"Absolutely, positively not!" Luo Dan said. "Turning them into puppets would be an open violation of institute rules. And a big one at that! Don't get muddle-headed because of that new three-year rule. There are other ways we can force them to work for us. Ways that don't violate the rules so flagrantly."

"Let's go. We need to come up with a plan to get those talismans. There are a total of one thousand up for grabs, and we need to turn in two hundred for the mission. That means that we can keep the other eight hundred for our own. I heard that King Heaven-Devourer's talismans can transform into a primal-chaos elder-snake that can devour immortal world essence! Then it converts the essence into Heaven-Devouring True Energy, which you can use to purify heterogeneous true energy. Think about it—if we could cultivate four of the five energy arts, we would be like Brahma Echo-Silk. In fact, maybe one of us could take the number one position from her."

"I have a good idea about what to do!"

With that, the three of them flew away.

**

"Damnation!" Hu Latu said, slapping his palm down onto the table in front of him, crushing it. He held a mirror in his hand, which they had just used to watch the conversation between the three children of Brahma. "Those three must die! They actually want to use my clan to threaten us!"

"In that case, I won't let them off the hook," Yang Qi said with a cold smile. "I'll curse them with my Wheel of Fate, which will cause their true energy to fade away and weaken them to the point where they bow their heads to us of their own volition."

Suddenly, eight streams of godlight sprang into being, spreading out like the tail of a peacock. Next, the Wheel of Fate appeared, causing the godlight to gradually transform into eight blurry humanoid shapes that resembled faceless puppets.

"Energy Convergence; Take Shape." He waved his hand, sending eight streams of true energy into the figures. Instantly, faces appeared on the eight puppets. Three of them looked like Luo Dan, Su Zhen, and Wang Chen, while the other five were the children of Brahma who had been assigned the mission to the Titan Emperor Heaven. Yang Qi grabbed them all.

"The Remote Dao of Heaven; Cycles of the Sun and Moon; Five Energies Face the Origin! Deprive Fate; Reverse the Cosmos; Invert Yin and Yang; Confuse the Seven Stars." As Yang Qi spoke the words of the curse, the puppets' facial features became more and more clear, then they even began moving and speaking.

Five of them appeared to be doing nothing more than sitting around talking.

In fact, as Yang Qi unleashed this daoist technique, somewhere deep in the institute, five children of Brahma were in the middle of a discussion. This was the group that had been assigned to the Titan Emperor Heaven.

One of them was a burly man who held a jug of alcohol that he constantly guzzled from. Laughing, he said, "We got such an easy mission! All we have to do is go take care of some unrest in the Titan Emperor Heaven. So easy! They could have sent some ordinary disciples from the Brahman Immortal World to do this. Why did they call on children of Brahma? It's like using a battle-axe to kill a chicken."

The man's alcohol jug was pitch black and metallic. Apparently, it contained an endless minor world inside, filled with sounds like that of ocean waves. Except, this ocean was made of alcohol. The man had thick eyebrows and angry eyes, with a broad nose that vaguely resembled a lion. His aura was so powerful that it seemed capable of devastating heaven and earth.

"We still can't take the situation lightly," said a young woman. "There must be something difficult about the mission for them to have chosen children of Brahma to handle it. That said, it's good we didn't get one of the really difficult missions."

"You're right. Some people were assigned secret missions that will definitely be extremely challenging. Ours is fairly straightforward."

"Exactly," one of the other men said. "Some of the missions were explained by the patriarch via divine sense, and you know those ones are going to be really hard. We definitely got one of the easier ones. Three years should be plenty of time. The Titan Emperor Heaven is only a first ranked immortal world, so weak that it's pathetic. We might as well just go overthrow the current government."

"Let's do it!"

"Yeah, let's get started right away, agreed?"

"The sooner we finish the mission, the sooner we can rest at ease. Considering they changed the assessments from every hundred years to every three years, it seems that some major events are coming our way. I bet the Godmyth patriarchs want to push our immortal world to the sixth or seventh rank. If they do, there will be a lot of new enemies to face. That's probably the catastrophe they're referring to."

"What? You really think our immortal world is going to reach the sixth or seventh rank? From what I've heard, there are a lot of benefits to rising in the ranks, with the big downside being that other immortal worlds will oppose you."

"Well, that's a given. If we rise in the ranks, we'll be able to take even more essence from the different members of the Thirty-Six Thousand Immortal Worlds Coalition, and that will reduce their lifespan. Of course, this is all speculation on my part, I don't have any evidence."

"Let's just get going. Leave the important stuff to the Godmyth patriarchs."

"Yes, let's quell the unrest and hurry back to work on our own cultivation. I heard that the Titan Emperor Heaven has a few god items! For example, there's an eye left behind from the ancient god Titan. We definitely have to get that."

"Exactly. Even the weakest places usually have things to loot. Leaving an eye like that in the hands of such a weak immortal world is like throwing a bright pearl out into the darkness."

"Okay, so we wipe out the imperial court of the Titan Emperor Heaven and install a puppet ruler. That won't be anything hard."

With that, the five of them flew out of the Brahman Institute and into a wormhole. Eventually, they were out of the Brahman Immortal World and flying through the universe.

One by one, immortal worlds sailed past them as they continued on their way.

"Arrggggghh!"

All of a sudden, the burly man with the alcohol let out an agonized shriek and doubled up in pain. In the blink of an eye, the surrounding spatial tempests bashed through his defensive empyrean energy.

1. Su Zhen: Su is a common surname, the same as Su Ming from the Er Gen universe. Zhen means "chaste".

2. Wang Chen: Wang is a common surname which also means "king, monarch, grand, great". Chen means "dust, dirt, earth, mortal".