"Kill the Dragon Emperor?"
Alex felt his heart skip a beat when he heard those words. He stared at the man in shock, trying to discern if any of it was a joke. However, his serious face made it plenty clear that it was not.
The man intended to kill the Dragon Emperor and he would go to any length to do it.
Even if it meant killing the ruler of another continent.
"You have quite the grand ambition," Alex said. "But… I'm not sure you will be able to do it the way you are right now. You will need much higher—"
Alex paused. He was about to say that they would need a much greater cultivation base than just this, but then he remembered that was the entire reason he was captured in the first place.
If not for that, he wouldn't have been here.
"Don't worry about our situation, Your Majesty," the man said. "You will just have to stay here until we have received the grand pills we are looking for."
Alex frowned a little. "Do you plan on letting me leave if you receive those pills?" he asked.
"Of course," the man said, his smile returning back to a gentle one. "We have no qualms with you. I doubt you will be here by the time we are ready to do what we wish to do."
"So you're just going to let me go?" Alex asked. "Even though you told me what you have planned?"
"Nothing a simple oath can't fix," the man said. "Relax, Your Majesty. As long as you don't do anything stupid, you will leave here with all your limbs intact. Now, you should rest and give our requests some thought. As soon as you make us some pills, we will let you go."
The man turned around to leave, but Alex wasn't done yet. "Wait," he said. "One last question."
The man looked back curiously. "What is it?" he asked.
Alex looked at the man, then to his two companions to the side, and finally back at the man. "How do you know about the Azure Dragon's death?" he asked.
The eyes of the two at the back changed, and while the leader tried to keep a calm expression, his face changed ever so slightly as well.
"So, I was correct," the man said.
Alex was taken aback. "You… didn't know?" he asked, panicking that he had just revealed something he shouldn't have. But then, the man knew that Scarlet couldn't come here. So… what was going on?
"Oh, I knew," the man said. "I just wasn't sure if you were aware or not. I believed you did, and I was correct."
Alex frowned a little. "So? How do you know about his death?" he asked.
The man gave an angered look as he spoke. "I was there when he died."
For the briefest of moments, Alex believed he heard wrong. "What did you say?" he asked again to confirm.
"I said I was there when the Azure Dragon died," the man said loudly, and Alex knew he heard it correctly this time around.
Alex felt his breathing grow faster when he realized what he was hearing. Had he finally found someone that could help him get answers?
"Do you… know how he died?" Alex asked, unable to hide the curiosity and urgency in his voice. "I want to know. I will make any pill you want if you can answer me that."
The man was surprised to hear such straightforwardness from Alex. He was taken aback by the desperation. This was the most ample moment to get what he wanted. Alas…
"I can't," the man said. "I am unable to tell you how it happened," the man said.
"Unable?" Alex asked for a moment before realizing what could be the case. "An Oath?"
"I can only tell you that I even know about His Majesty's death because you already know it. It bypasses the restrictions of our oaths through an unseen loophole. However, even then I cannot tell you anything else about the matter involved in this," the man said.
"Not even a little?" Alex asked. "Not even—"
His words stuck to his throat when a strong spiritual sense crashed over him. It crashed over all of them.
Alex barely managed to protect himself by strengthening his spiritual sea, but even then, the strength of the spiritual sense was so much that it made him feel as if his soul was being torn apart.
The two men behind the leader grimaced, while the leader himself frowned quite a lot as well.
Then, the very next second the pressure on Alex lessened. It lessened for him and him only.
"This is bad," the man said. "We've been found."
Just as the man finished speaking, the world lost its color.
Alex felt the air still around him for the briefest of seconds as something cut through it all. He could feel the Dao he was familiar with—the Dao of cutting—tear through everything in the surroundings.
Then at the next moment, the top of half of the mountain was obliterated away, giving way for the open sky to shine its light down onto the ground.
Alex felt terror like never before. The strength he just saw, the intent he felt, and the fear in his heart were something he had never experienced before.
Even around Immortals and Divinities, this was something he had never felt before as they never used their techniques around him. Even dying 100 times hadn't evoked the same reaction from him as it just had.
He felt the aura of multiple individuals go out in that single strike. People cried in pain, some ran away with tattered bodies, and some ran away just a nascent souls.
Alex could feel the aura of teleportation pop up around him as they all ran away as fast as they could. Only a handful of them remained, and those too were the strongest of the strongest in the group.
Alex and every other man and woman in the group turned to the sky to look at the sole figure that stood there.
The person was a tall man with flowing blue hair, a slight goatee, and a majestic blue robe that matched his hair. He held a similarly blue spear that looked incredible even from afar.
"Shit," the leader of the group said under his breath. "I didn't think we would have to fight him this early."
The Dragon Emperor was here, and he was here to rescue Alex.
"Yating," the man spoke from the sky, his voice monotone without a shred of surprise or disdain. "To think you and your band of traitors would be here. What do you intend to do with the King of the Southern Continent."
The leader pulled out his sword and pointed at the Dragon Emperor in the sky. "We meet earlier than I would have liked to, but that is alright," the man said. "I can judge the distance between us right now and see how far I have to improve."
The man swung his sword, sending a large flaming lion that ran all the way to the sky where the Dragon Emperor stood still.
The Dragon Emperor simply swung his spear a little and the flaming lion disappeared altogether. Not a wisp of fire remained in the snowing sky.
"So, you truly have gone against me," the Dragon Emperor said. "To think you were once a man I trusted the most. How has time changed you so much that you would go against your own oath to forever serve me?"
"You know damn well why," the man shouted, pointing his sword at the Emperor once again. "You are the one responsible for me becoming this."
"What you have become is an oathbreaker," the Emperor said. "I had no hand in that."
"Oathbreaker?" the man chuckled a little with no laughter in his voice. "That's a nice little thing to call us, isn't it? Thank you for the name, Your Majesty. We were just looking for one."
"You hear it, fellow Daoists? Henceforth, we shall be known as the Oathbreakers."
Everyone in the area suddenly gave a hearty laugh as they brought out every treasure they had in their storage. With the Emperor here, they had only two choices.
Fight or Run.
They chose to fight.
"Come on, my friends," the man named Yating said. "Let us show him that oaths are not the only thing we can break."
"YAAAAH!" everyone shouted and took flight as they rushed to fight the Emperor.
The Emperor stood in the sky with a cold look on his face. "You will try."
Dozens of attacks flew at once, all aiming for the Emperor. One attack was a green flying serpent, another a green scythe. Another attack was a million flying embers, while another was a sword slash that seemed to tear space in its wake.
The Dragon Emperor didn't falter in the face of the many attacks and simply pulled out a shield from his storage ring. He held the shield in front of him and slammed his spear onto it.
The shield roared with the sound of distant thunders as a gigantic illusory dragon head appeared from it and devoured the dozens of attacks in a single bite.
The dragon's head exploded into a million different pieces after it swallowed the attacks, but none of the force it had absorbed went back to the Emperor.
The Emperor didn't even flinch in the face of the explosion and simply primed his spear. He was going to go in for an attack next.
