In truth, given Wei Zhao's utterly pragmatic style, if this had not been his first time inside the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Flood Dragon and his control over it still less than fluent, he would not have spared the other party the time for even those two idle remarks. He would have said nothing at all and simply beaten it to death, smashing and crippling it with reckless abandon, and worried about everything else afterward.

"Heh, you want to play at close quarters with me? I am the ancestor of close combat. Do you really think I would fear you?" The Brain-Eating Bug was furious, and its fury turned to laughter. That last blow had caught it off guard and cost it dearly, but when it came to grappling at close range, there was no spirit beast in all the world better endowed than it. From head to tail it was now a walking arsenal of every spirit beast's most closely guarded killing techniques. So what if Wei Zhao had transformed into a flood dragon?

Before the words had faded, a commotion ran along the serpentine body of the Brain-Eating Bug. It had originally possessed only two steel claws, and Wei Zhao had bitten one of them off. Yet in that instant six more claws forced their way out, so that at a glance it looked very nearly like a centipede.

Wei Zhao paid it no mind. Situated as he was within the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Flood Dragon, even his own temperament seemed to have been subtly affected; he felt far more aloof than usual. Earlier he had regarded the Brain-Eating Bug as a shocking and thoroughly troublesome thing, but now that he had taken flood dragon form, the gaze with which he regarded it was unmistakably that of one looking down from above.

It was an indescribable contempt, like a high-tier spirit beast facing a low-tier one. However the other might screech and clamor, it simply would never take it to heart, and the reason could be summed up in four words: not worthy.

"Die!" The Brain-Eating Bug was instantly and utterly enraged. That look, the look one gives one's prey, had always been its exclusive property. When had anyone ever looked at it that way?

The Brain-Eating Bug whipped its steel claws into a frenzy and lunged. On the surface, at least, its formidable flesh really did give it every advantage. Unfortunately reality was exceedingly cruel: neither its claws nor its tail stinger nor its wings won it the slightest advantage. In less than a second it was blasted down by a single sweep of Wei Zhao's tail, once more sinking deep into the mud, thoroughly and wretchedly stuck.

The Brain-Eating Bug still refused to believe it. The earlier loss had been due to surprise; this one had been because it had not yet taken the measure of its opponent's methods. Again!

This time it fell harder and was hurt more grievously. Not only did it lose another steel claw, but even its terribly dangerous venomous tail stinger snapped off. The venom upon it had no effect whatsoever on Wei Zhao; it was purely ornamental.

Domination. Complete and utter one-sided domination.

Duanmu Yu watched this mad spectacle and was rendered entirely speechless. Again and again the Brain-Eating Bug refused to believe it, and again and again it was savaged by the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Flood Dragon Wei Zhao had become, each time more wretchedly than the last. In the end, of its eight steel claws, three and a half pairs had been broken clean off, leaving only the last one tottering. Its venomous tail stinger was gone. One of the wings on its back had been snapped off as well. Its whole body was a mass of wounds, battered beyond recognition—a truly pitiful sight.

Duanmu Yu had even begun to feel a little sorry for the Brain-Eating Bug. Plainly it was an existence of invincible might, and yet it had run into Wei Zhao, a heaven-defying creature who could not be measured by common sense. The torturer had been forcibly turned into the tortured. This thing must not have checked the almanac before leaving home.

Indeed, the Brain-Eating Bug had not checked the almanac. In this land of the Ancient Trials it had always been an existence beneath one alone and above ten thousand. The lament of not having checked the almanac before going out had only ever applied to other people, never to it. Today was truly an accident.

It was too pitiful to bear watching, yet the Brain-Eating Bug still refused to believe it and struggled with all its might to fly up, its vitality a hopeless, bottomless quagmire of tenacity.

"You can fly on one wing? What talent!" Wei Zhao could not help but give it a thumbs-up. His hands, however, showed not the slightest mercy. With one crunching bite, he wiped out the one steel claw it had left, together with the wing.

The Brain-Eating Bug crashed into the mire once again. A moment ago it had been majestic and domineering; now it had become a mud loach outright. The fallen phoenix is worse off than a chicken—just so.

"Impossible! Impossible! Impossible!..." The Brain-Eating Bug was still thrashing madly in the mud, but both its wings were broken. It could no longer fly whether it lived or died. Close-quarters brawling was the ability it had always been proudest of, an existence hailed as invincible throughout the whole of the Ancient Trials—after all, even that lord was not of that school. And yet it had never imagined that today it would be brought down at Wei Zhao's hands, and by the very method it excelled at most, butchered in a brute contest of flesh and claw.

"Is it worth getting this despondent over losing to a flood dragon? Just how confident are you in yourself?" Wei Zhao could not help but be amused at the sight. He said this, but even he had not expected that the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Flood Dragon would possess such ferocious close-combat prowess. He had to sigh in admiration: the dragon race truly deserved its name as the invincible existence of the spirit beast world; this racial talent was simply merciless.

Of course, the formation of such one-sided domination was not entirely due to the flood dragon's ferocity. There was another important reason: this was not a pure physical body, but a half-primal-spirit body formed from the fusion of his primordial spirit and spiritual qi. Every claw and every bite that looked like a simple physical attack was in truth composed mainly of the profound and utterly arcane Five Elements and Eight Trigrams killing qi. Against a creature like the Brain-Eating Bug, which fought with pure brute force, it naturally seized every advantage—domination was hardly surprising.

"My flesh is invincible. Even the dragon race could not possibly be my match. Absolutely impossible!" The Brain-Eating Bug was still hypnotizing itself. Apart from a very few spirit beasts of ancient bloodline, the dragon race was the great mountain looming over the heart of every spirit beast. The vast majority simply bowed their heads and submitted willingly, but the Brain-Eating Bug had never thought that way.

Even if it could not rise above the dragon race, it should at least be counted among that very few. At least, that was what it believed.

But today Wei Zhao had shattered its fantasy with bloody fact. If even a conjured flood dragon could savage it like this, how much more so a true dragon? One had to remember that a flood dragon was merely a close kin born of the dragon race's crossing with serpents—it was still far from being a true dragon.