Chen Xu once again released his mental strength, enveloping every contestant and forcibly transferring them to the ten tournament worlds near the center of the golden spiral.
After another wave of world-spinning nausea, the teleportation ended.
This time, having learned from their previous experience, the contestants reacted quickly. They drew their weapons and fell into defensive stances to brace for any sudden attacks.
However, the surroundings were completely empty, with no sign of any undead or demons.
Just as the contestants breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that the eliminations would be free of those minor mobs that posed no fatal threat but forced them to divide their attention—
Roars began to echo one after another, reverberating across all ten worlds.
“Roar!!!”
“Wh-What is that sound?!”
“Don't tell me we have to face this kind of monster in the eliminations?”
After waking up the seven Demon Kings, Chen Xu held back his laughter and put on a solemn, serious front to transmit his voice to the contestants.
“Contestants, welcome to the First Grand Assembly of Transcendents of the Myriad Worlds, Transcendent Rank eliminations phase.
“In this phase, you will not have to face those boring, ant-like, annoying minor mobs. Instead, you will only have to face the pursuit of seven terrifying monsters comparable to the Demon Kings of Hell.
“Of course, the strength of the seven Demon Kings has been sealed, with less than one-ten-thousandth of their power unlocked, making them roughly equivalent to those newly entered into the Legendary Rank.
“Therefore, who knows? There might be some lucky souls among you who can slay a Demon King and claim my hidden reward!
“However, the objective of the eliminations is to filter out the final ten contestants, one for each tournament world.
“Thus, these seven Demon Kings are merely catfish meant to accelerate the pace of the match. Your ultimate goal remains to eliminate your other opponents and ensure your own survival.
“Contestants, I wish you the best of luck. Do your best and enjoy the match!”
At the same time, Tie Gelei began his introduction in the livestream room.
“According to the latest data received by our on-site reporters, those seven terrifying roars were emitted by seven horrific, powerful Hell Demon Kings comparable to the Demon Kings of Hell.
“Uh, not the Hell Demon Kings of the past, but brand-new Hell Demon Kings created by the great Lord of the Undead, the host of this Grand Assembly of Transcendents, Lord Chen Xu.
“The strength of these Hell Demon Kings has been restricted to the entry level of the Legendary Rank. It is said that if anyone can defeat any of these Hell Demon Kings during the match, they will receive a hidden reward provided by the Lord of the Undead.
“As for what exactly this hidden reward is, perhaps everyone can look forward to seeing if any contestant can challenge a Hell Demon King and unveil the mystery of the hidden reward for the myriad worlds' audience.
“Next, let us turn our gaze back to the battlefield!”
Young God of Magic: Hahaha, Legendary Rank. These little guys are in for a treat.
Please Call Me Top Scholar: That really is his style. While others put catfish into a fishpond, this esteemed lord directly throws in a flood dragon.
Black Magic Master: Hahaha, too true.
As pioneer contestants of the mage tower, Please Call Me Top Scholar and Black Magic Master had interacted closely with Chen Xu and naturally had plenty of thoughts on the matter.
Seeing the plight of these Transcendent Rank contestants now, they couldn't help but find it rather amusing.
The livestream chat was also flooded with gloating bullet comments. For the vast majority of the audience, out of the hundreds of millions of contestants, they only supported a select few.
They only cared about contestants from their own worlds, those who practiced the same power system, or at most, someone of the same race.
Back on the battlefield, the Transcendents who had survived the grueling trials quickly made their decisions.
They had to quickly search for other nearby contestants and eliminate them before those terrifying Hell Demon Kings showed up.
Otherwise, once the Hell Demon Kings started moving, the presence of such terrifying monsters would introduce an immense number of variables.
Matchups they could have easily won with their raw strength might take an unexpected turn due to the wild card that was the Hell Demon Kings.
The Little Flame King, the Daoist of Clan Corpses, another paladin from Heaven, an ascetic monk, a martial artist from a subordinate world of the Universe Martial World, and a cultivator from the Immortal Realm—these geniuses of the myriad worlds all began to move, intending to seize high ground and secure a visual advantage.
At the Transcendent Rank, except for a few who were exceptionally gifted with naturally powerful mental strength, most Transcendents still relied primarily on their naked eyes for scouting.
Several of the hot favorites to win quickly occupied the high ground, taking the initiative. Peering down from above, they had an unobstructed view of everything.
What followed was a brutal hunt.
Among them, the Daoist of Clan Corpses performed the most spectacularly.
He placed his coffin on the ground, lit three sticks of incense, performed three prostrations and nine kowtows, his expression solemn.
“Seventy-seventh generation descendant of the Corpse-Driving Lineage, Clan Corpse Branch, requests the ancestors to leave their resting place! Assist this junior with all your might to claim the crown, so that our Corpse-Driving Lineage and Clan Corpse Branch may flourish!”
As he finished speaking, the paper money caught fire and fluttered across the sky.
In the next instant, the coffin began to shake violently.
Bang!
The coffin lid was either blasted away by something inside or pulled aside by the Daoist of Clan Corpses.
Without the coffin's suppression, one zombie after another flew out, quickly crowding the small hilltop.
“Wow, we can see that the hot favorites list is shifting in real time! Especially for the contestant Daoist of Clan Corpses—with every zombie that flies out of his coffin, his ranking surges upward.
“It seems that now that we've reached the eliminations phase, the contestants are finally bringing out their trump cards one after another.
“Clan Corpses... what an apt name. With so many zombies, judging by their faces, they really do look like members of one big family.
“Tsk, tsk. The myriad laws of the worlds are truly profound. One is never too old to learn.”
Tie Gelei provided his commentary at the perfect moment. This time, he was speaking from the heart; this unique method of raising and refining corpses inherited through a family line was something he was seeing for the first time.
Even Li Hu, who was sitting beside him, praised it.
“Indeed, after watching the tournament for so long, I've finally seen something interesting. Refining corpses from one's own family can be considered a form of inheritance in disguise.”
“Hmph. A mere parlor trick.”
Unlike Tie Gelei and Li Hu, Kunpeng did not like the corpse-refining and zombie-rearing system.
In its eyes, when the living creatures of the myriad worlds died, they should stay dead. Their lingering souls should obediently drift to the Land of the Undead and become undead, rather than remaining in their original worlds as zombies.
If everyone copied this, wouldn't the Land of the Undead run out of new undead? That would never do.
But whether Kunpeng liked it or not had no bearing on the situation on the field.
The star contestants unleashed all their methods, instantly eliminating a large number of opponents.
The eliminations had only just begun, yet the number of contestants had already plummeted from one hundred million to seventy million—a drop of nearly a third.
However, the weaker Transcendents quickly found a way to break the deadlock.
They knew that the star contestants were exerting sudden pressure because they wanted to thin out the numbers before the seven Demon Kings appeared, thereby preventing any unexpected incidents.
After all, without any variables, the final rankings would not differ much from what Miracle had predicted.
But once a variable was introduced—especially a massive one like the Hell Demon Kings—nothing was guaranteed.
Thus, the weaker contestants began to band together to resist the hunts of the star players.
Not a single Transcendent who could stand out from trillions of people was a fool. They all understood perfectly well that under the current circumstances, cooperation was the only way to maximize their benefits.
Consequently, there was no backstabbing here, only rare instances of mutual assistance.
There was even a group of humans, beastkin, and yokai guarding a Zerg queen, relying on her shared neural network to battle the star contestants.
This cooperation that transcended races, worlds, and supernatural systems actually produced a synergy where one plus one was greater than two, catching the star contestant, the Little Flame King, completely off guard.
“Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss!”
“Gu Master, what is this bug saying?”
“Big guy, the queen says we should protect her and retreat together. The current terrain isn't suitable for fighting the Little Flame King.”
“Bah, what Little Flame King? I'm the living King of Hell! We've almost beaten him out of his elemental form. If we don't chase him now, when will we?”
“Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss!”
“What is this bug saying now?”
“Hey, aren't you in the shared network? The queen says that the Little Flame King in front of us isn't his real body, just a fake body made of fire elements. If we don't leave now, once his real body arrives, we'll be in big trouble since there's no water or ice here.”
“What! It's just a clone! Everyone, retreat!”
Without a second thought, the giant martial artist turned around, hoisted the five-meter-tall queen onto his shoulders, and ran toward the rear.
“Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss! Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss!”
This reckless action frightened the queen, causing her to hiss in panic.
“Big guy, you're going the wrong way! Run east, there's water vapor over there!”
“I'm not wrong! Only a fool would run east. The aura to the east belongs to my crazy senior brother—you know, Feng Buji, the Mad Demon King who's currently ranked third.”
“Uh, let's run south then.”
“Hiss, hiss.”
Just as the group was retreating toward the south, fate played a massive joke on them.
The ground ahead suddenly began to tremble violently.
A terrifying aura erupted from the fissures in the earth.
“Roar~~~ I am... Duriel!”
Rate on N.U.
