Chapter 13: Pursuit into the Undercity

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With that remark from Leader, Li Bin finally settled down and looked around. Soon he noticed the strange point Leader had mentioned: this city had no mage tower.

Li Bin frowned and said, "It is indeed strange. Even a barbarian city full of magic fools would have a mage tower. How could this city not have such a building? Unless..."

At that moment he suddenly understood. He loudly called all the heroes over and explained his thought. "Naraku has fled, and the method of his escape is very likely some kind of mobile base. We must find him as soon as possible, or once he recovers, he will come back to trouble us again."

"That seems unlikely," Gro first said. "At the end of the campaign, my troops were always stationed outside the city, and I never saw any mobile base leave the city."

"That is exactly what I am thinking," Li Bin said. "I suspect that, like our Ghost Butterfly City, this city has a Graveyard Demon hidden underground. Naraku may very well have escaped into it." Though it was only a guess, his tone was utterly certain.

"Then let us turn the entire city upside down. We will definitely find the entrance to the Graveyard Demon," said Little Carter, who had done little in this campaign, speaking up loudly.

"No, that will not do," said Jessica. "I have heard of a variant of the Graveyard Demon that can evolve to move underground. Its speed becomes much slower, but it does not reveal itself."

"That is quite possible," Gro said after some thought. "But I do not think that is the case. Every mobile base of the undead has traces of negative energy. Even moving underground would be no exception. If Naraku used that method, he could not have escaped far. So I think either he has hidden the Graveyard Demon in the city and is waiting for us to leave, or there is some other passage."

Li Bin's eyes lit up at that. He immediately said, "You lot go and search right away. As you said, turn the entire city upside down."

His heroes went out at once to do the work. After the City Heart was taken away, this city would soon be finished anyway, so they had no attachment to it.

Before long, the fairly well-built undead city had been reduced to ruins. Yet the search was not fruitless; they found the method by which Naraku had escaped.

Naraku had indeed buried a Graveyard Demon beneath the city, but the direction of his escape was the underground world. In one corner of the city, there was a passage leading down into that realm.

Now that Naraku's direction had been found, Li Bin had nothing left to worry about. He knew the Graveyard Demon's movement speed well enough, and he had ample time to catch up to Naraku and defeat him.

Seeing that Li Bin intended to pursue, Little Carter was the first to speak. "Master, for this pursuit mission, please place me first in the battle order. I had no chance to show my strength in the siege just now."

"Battle order? You can discuss that among yourselves. I've already decided that I will handle the pursuit alone this time," Li Bin said with a smile. "As for the rest of you, follow our original plan and quickly take the remaining cities."

"This..." the heroes hesitated.

Seeing their expressions, Li Bin clapped his hands and said, "No more this or that. It's decided. Besides, I do not know how long I will remain in the underground world. You should hurry and help me conquer the land."

"Wait, Master, please let me go with you," Leader suddenly said.

"Why? Do you not know the whole assault will be much weaker without you?" Li Bin looked at Leader discontentedly.

"When I agreed to become your subordinate, you also promised me that you would not split me off for any excuse, did you not?" Leader said solemnly.

"Oh? Is that so?" Li Bin asked, glancing at him.

"What is wrong with that? Anyway, I am the one managing all of your bone dragon units, so I do not need to worry about troop sources at all," Leader said, understanding why Li Bin wanted the heroes to take the field.

"Very well then. The rest of you may sortie freely as planned. Remember, this is a campaign, and I can still obtain twenty percent of the total commander experience, so work hard for me." Li Bin waved the others away.

Only after the heroes had departed did Li Bin lead his personal guard and Leader's troops into the underground world.

This journey underground was entirely different from the last. This time, Li Bin's forces were at full strength, and behind them followed more than ten false bone dragons, so they advanced very quickly.

Before long, Li Bin found the traces left by the Graveyard Demon along its path. For some reason, wherever Naraku's Graveyard Demon had passed, everything had become extremely decayed.

With this clue, Li Bin raced onward and found the fleeing Naraku early the next morning.

At that moment Naraku, much as Li Bin himself had once done, was seated atop the highest point of the Graveyard Demon, directing its course of advance. However, his Graveyard Demon was entirely different from Li Bin's.

The whole Graveyard Demon covered more than two thousand square meters, yet aside from the crumbling entrance of the tomb, there was not even a single gravestone. All that remained were heaps of rotten filth, so repulsive that merely looking at them from afar made one feel ill.

But neither Li Bin nor Naraku cared about any of that. The two of them stared at each other from a distance for a long while before Naraku finally said, "Li Bin, do you truly mean to drive me to total destruction?"

"You could say that. I dislike any existence that can threaten me," Li Bin said coldly.

"Then very well. I should like to see what abilities you have to keep me here," Naraku said. He jumped down from the tomb entrance, pointed his enormous scythe at the ground, and shouted, "Come out, my servants..."

At Naraku's command, huge bubbles swelled across the muddy Graveyard Demon, and from the bubbles slowly crawled corpses coated from head to toe in rotten slime.

These bizarre corpses were about three meters tall, with extremely swollen bodies. Their surfaces were covered in layer upon layer of mud. They had no hands; where the right hand should have been there was a fleshy whip nearly ten meters long, while where the left hand should have been there was a short fleshy tube. They looked extremely strange.

Li Bin did not know what these bizarre corpses were for, so he sent out a mixed squad of level-six skeleton soldiers and corpse soldiers from his forces to test them.

That test was no trivial matter, and it startled Li Bin. Two iron corpse soldiers in the mixed squad were struck by liquid spat from the fleshy tube in the bizarre corpses' left arms, and instantly turned into a pool of green water.

Nor did the other troops escape the blows of the fleshy whip on the bizarre corpses' right hands. Two skeleton archers even strained with all their might and still could not drive the arrows in their hands into the skin of those bizarre corpses.

At this point, aside from moving slowly, these bizarre corpses seemed to have no weaknesses at all.

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