Spirit Crystal Warrior? Wiping Out Half the Beast Tide

The Black-Scale Demon Wolf's aura was immense — powerful enough to place it squarely at Third-rank Chief Grade.

Nothing less could have let it outpace the rest of the Beast Tide so dramatically, closing the distance on Lu Yuan and his squadmates.

Its body blurred into a streak of shadow as it hurtled across the open clearing before the cave.

But the moment it crossed into that space, the Electromagnetic Binding Field seized hold of it. Electric current crawled across its body, crackling and biting.

The field couldn't root it in place, but it sheared away a significant portion of the wolf's speed.

The wolf surged toward Lu Yuan — and before it could even attack, a sharp light kindled in his eyes. Black Steel Force, White Jade Spirit Body, and Mechanical Load all activated at once.

With the Strength Serum and Wild Force Talisman already running through him on top of that, his raw power at this moment was the equal of any Third-rank Chief Grade.

Facing the wolf robbed of most of its speed, Lu Yuan brought his greatsword down across the beast's scale-armored neck.

**BOOM!!**

Scales shattered. Blood erupted. The wolf was hurled backward — faster than it had come in — its enormous body, nearly four meters at the shoulder, slamming to the ground hard enough to shake the earth.

Groat and the others stared wide-eyed, the color draining from their faces.

"That's — that's insane!"

Yang Qiu couldn't contain himself.

"That wolf's aura — Third-rank Chief Grade, right?" Groat said. "A beast that powerful, and it just got swatted away like nothing? Just how far has Lu Yuan's strength actually gone?"

Ding Wen exhaled and cracked a grin. "Why lose sleep over it? The stronger he is, the better our odds of walking out of here alive."

The others nodded.

With the Black-Scale Demon Wolf dead, more beasts came charging in.

Black-Blade Hunting Leopards. Steel-Horned Scale Dragons. Storm Demon Tigers. All manner of creatures poured through, each radiating a terrifying aura. The weakest among them were Third-rank low-level Chief Grade; others pushed into mid-level, and a few were high-level.

Every beast that crossed into the Electromagnetic Binding Field slowed, converging on Lu Yuan in a crush of Spirit Power and bared fangs.

Lu Yuan swept his greatsword in wide arcs, each impact detonating against the beasts' attacks in ear-splitting crashes. Some strikes he slipped past with a sidestep. A ball of searing crimson fire that came from range — that one he simply absorbed.

The reverberations tore through the forest. Under the assault of Third-rank beasts, the ground fractured and cracked, the surrounding cliffs trembling faintly. Fine dust rained down from the cave walls, pattering onto Groat's group.

None of them noticed.

Every eye was locked on the cave entrance, on the spreading wash of red firelight, hearts hammering.

Then — white spirit-light surged. A shockwave of force erupted, snuffing out the crimson flames, and Lu Yuan stood revealed, exactly where he'd been.

He stood perfectly upright in the cave mouth. His skin looked slightly scorched here and there, but his aura remained as fierce and unbroken as ever.

"He's fine! Oh thank god!"

"That's our Lu Yuan — what an absolute monster!"

The relief that broke through Groat's group was electric.

Stacie swept her Staff in quick strokes, sending ribbons of green healing light drifting over Lu Yuan, trying to tend his wounds.

At the entrance, Lu Yuan paused mid-combat as the healing washed over him. He blinked.

He hadn't actually been hurt.

With every defensive buffer stacked, his resilience had climbed to a frankly terrifying level. The sly Blazing Mountain Cat's fireball had felt like little more than mild warmth — maybe a touch of scorched skin at most. The White Jade Spirit Body's passive regeneration could handle that without any help. He didn't need healing.

Still, Stacie was trying. He wasn't going to wave her off.

That exchange had given him a much clearer read on just how solid his defenses were.

He fixed his focus on the most dangerous target — the Steel-Horned Scale Dragon — and adapted his approach to the rest: dodge what he could, tank what he couldn't, and drive his greatsword at the Scale Dragon blow after relentless blow.

The Steel-Horned Scale Dragon had the silhouette of a velociraptor, with a single silver horn jutting from its brow. Under normal conditions it would have been dangerously fast — agile enough that Lu Yuan simply couldn't have tracked it.

But it was caught inside the Electromagnetic Binding Field.

With the field throttling its speed, Lu Yuan was just barely faster. Barely was enough.

Under his unrelenting offensive pressure, the Scale Dragon was pushed back onto the defensive. After more than a dozen exchanges, his greatsword found the creature's skull.

**BOOM!!**

A deep gash split across the Scale Dragon's head. Blood ran free.

Not a killing blow. The Scale Dragon's hide was far harder than the Black-Scale Demon Wolf's had been — the wound was severe, but not fatal.

Injured and wild with rage, the Scale Dragon snarled and threw itself at him again.

Lu Yuan watched it come, one eyebrow ticking up slightly. *A Third-rank high-level Chief Grade, even with everything running — I can suppress it, but not kill it outright.*

He could grind it down. His Spirit Power had no real bottom, and he could simply outlast every beast here. But that wasn't the approach he had in mind.

*If suppression isn't enough, I'll just throw a little more at it.*

Inside the cave, Groat's group watched Lu Yuan hold off nearly ten Third-rank Chief Grade creatures simultaneously, something hollow and ashamed knotting in their chests.

"Damn it. If we were just a little stronger, he wouldn't have to do this alone."

"He's holding all of them by himself. Can he actually sustain this?"

Then — Lu Yuan's left hand produced a white talisman.

It flared, erupting into a column of white spirit-light that drove straight into the Steel-Horned Scale Dragon.

The beast had no time to react. The light struck, and a thick layer of frost visibly crystallized across its body in an instant.

*Ice Rime Talisman (Second-rank 100%): Lord Grade talisman.*

This was one of the talismans he'd claimed from the Aier Mechanical Ruins.

He had no shortage of them.

As a Second-rank Perfect Lord Grade talisman, it packed considerable power — but the Steel-Horned Scale Dragon was Third-rank Chief Grade, and the frost was already cracking and splintering within moments.

Lu Yuan didn't wait to watch. The instant the ice formed, his sword was already in motion.

Heavy Slash after Heavy Slash, each strike loaded with Black Steel Force and Mechanical Load, hammered into the Scale Dragon's neck. Blood erupted. Ragged wounds tore open.

The beast went flying, crashing down hard on the open ground outside.

Lu Yuan wasn't fully satisfied.

*My offensive output is still a bit lacking,* he noted. *I should look for a powerful attack-type Transcendent Gene — or start picking up some strong offensive Body Technique or Spirit Technique.*

Something for later.

Right now, there were still beasts in front of him.

Seeing the Steel-Horned Scale Dragon go down, Groat's group felt a spark of genuine elation.

Another impossible thing from Lu Yuan.

But before the feeling could settle, distant roars erupted in waves from deep in the trees, and the ground began to tremble.

The delight on their faces turned to stone.

"The Beast Tide — the main tide is closing in!"

"What do we do?"

They looked at each other. No one had an answer. They were pinned inside a cave. What options did they have?

Lu Yuan felt it too. His expression didn't change.

Beasts were already flooding out of the forest, pouring toward the cliff face in an unbroken dark tide.

He didn't move.

*The cave entrance is only so wide. The Chief Grade beasts are still blocking it. Everything else will have to wait its turn.*

He went back to work, systematically cutting down the remaining Chief Grade creatures.

Third-rank low-level Chief Grade he could kill cleanly with his current power. Third-rank mid-level cost him genuine effort. Third-rank high-level required patience — grinding them down.

Grinding was not on the agenda.

He began pulling out talismans, deploying them with surgical precision, dispatching each Chief Grade beast in rapid succession.

Groat's group had been bracing for the Beast Tide. Now they simply stood inside the cave with vacant expressions, watching.

Lu Yuan was rewriting their entire concept of what was possible.

A Second-rank Lord Grade against a Third-rank Chief Grade was supposed to be a brutal uphill battle, wasn't it?

And here was Lu Yuan — Second-rank *low-level* Lord Grade — standing immovable under a coordinated assault by a whole pack of them.

If it were only that, they might have convinced themselves it made sense. Exceptional Gene Armament, stacked buffs, sure — they could almost accept it.

But then Lu Yuan started throwing talismans like he was dealing out playing cards.

Every single one visibly rocked a Third-rank Chief Grade beast to its core.

How precious were talismans like these? At an Auction House, each one would easily fetch hundreds of thousands — possibly tens of millions — in Second-rank Spirit Crystals.

They watched, and somewhere in the back of their minds they counted. Ten. Lu Yuan had thrown ten of them.

*Ten. That's millions in Second-rank Spirit Crystals.*

*How much money is that??*

The legendary Spirit Crystal Warrior — that half-mythical figure people joked about, a warrior so obscenely flush with resources they could simply buy their way through any fight. Was that actually what they were witnessing?

Groat's group had gone completely numb.

Once Lu Yuan started throwing talismans, the Chief Grade beasts couldn't hold on. Every few seconds, another one fell.

The original cluster was gone before long — and the replacements surging up from the wider tide to fill their spots met the same fate just as quickly.

But even as the Chief Grade fell, the Beast Tide refused to break. Thousands of creatures, packed dense and screaming with blood-rage, kept throwing themselves at the cave entrance.

The remaining beasts didn't even reach Chief Grade — the strongest among them were Third-rank Boss Grade. Against Lu Yuan at his current power level, he didn't even need talismans. With every buff running, the Electromagnetic Binding Field throttling their movements —

He went through them like a scythe through wheat. One swing, one kill.

Bodies piled outside the cave entrance, knocked back into the mass by the next wave, making room for more to charge in and die.

From inside the cave, Groat's group watched with hollow eyes.

Then Groat's communicator buzzed.

He snapped back to reality, checked it, and his face split into a wide grin.

"The Vanguard is here! Less than a kilometer out — they'll reach us any moment!"

The others looked at him with profoundly odd expressions.

Groat blinked. "What? Aren't you relieved?"

Yang Qiu pointed at the steadily dwindling horde.

"...Captain. Do you actually think we *need* the Vanguard right now?"

Ding Wen wore the same strange look.

"I'm pretty sure Lu Yuan could wipe out this entire Beast Tide by himself."

Tang Ji and Stacie both nodded.

Groat: "..."

His expression went rigid. Unsettlingly, he thought they might have a point.

He cleared his throat. "You can't say that. Lu Yuan's Spirit Power isn't infinite — when it runs dry, what then?"

That landed. Everyone brightened.

"Right — if his Spirit Power runs out, we'd be in serious trouble."

"The Vanguard's timing is actually perfect."

"At least Lu Yuan has some kind of ceiling. He's still technically a normal person."

At the cave entrance, Lu Yuan was steadily working through the horde and had started to feel vaguely bored.

*I really need a wide-area Combat Technique,* he thought. *If I keep getting into mass engagement situations like this, I can't just hack through them one by one every single time.*

*That would be genuinely exhausting.*

He filed it away — both powerful single-target offense and wide-area crowd control were priorities that needed addressing.

Then he caught what his squadmates were saying behind him.

His mouth twitched.

*My Spirit Power doesn't actually run out.*

If he truly had to, he could kill every last beast in this entire horde. It would just take time.

One per second. Sixty per minute. Looking at the numbers here, he'd be at it for a solid hour of continuous swinging.

His head swam at the thought.

Still — the Vanguard was on the way. No reason not to earn a little extra military merit before they arrived.

Lu Yuan reached into his storage and produced a handful of black spheres.

One hand still working his greatsword, he lobbed the Psionic Bombs out with the other.

**BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!**

Second-rank Perfect Lord Grade Psionic Bombs. The detonations were not subtle.

Beasts dropped in entire swaths, blown down like fields of grain.

The blasts jolted Groat's group out of their conversation. They looked over —

And went numb all over again.

Yang Qiu's mouth worked silently. His face crumpled with anguish.

"Stop! Stop, please! Those Psionic Bombs are *not* for this — you save those for when your life is actually on the line! Do you have any idea what those are worth in Spirit Crystals?!"

He looked close to tears.

He wasn't alone. Every face in the cave wore the same pained expression.

Psionic Bombs like those were things you clutched tightly when death was at your door — actual treasures you protected with your life. And Lu Yuan was casually lobbing them into a crowd of beasts.

Just to blow up a few hundred in one shot?

Was that *actually necessary*?!

After throwing a dozen or so, Lu Yuan reconsidered. The efficiency genuinely wasn't great. And the Beast Tide had already lost close to half its numbers.

The remaining creatures were faltering. The relentless charge hesitated, and something other than blood-rage entered the horde — the beasts at the rear began pulling back.

Lu Yuan had done the impossible: one person, alone, half a Beast Tide.

At that moment, a cluster of powerful auras materialized in the distance, moving to encircle the horde from multiple directions.

The beasts felt them approaching. From deep within the pack, the dark-red-furred beast — the one with the single horn jutting from its crown and twin jet-black antennae — let out a thunderous roar. As if responding to a command, the rest of the horde turned and began to scatter.

Lu Yuan's gaze tracked to the source of the roar. His eyes found the dark-red beast.

Something shifted in his expression.

Deep inside him, the Evolution Cube gave a faint, unmistakable pulse.