Chapter 498 - Lords...

"This should be the place....right?" Hao Xuan muttered peeking through the thick canopy.

He was a little more than 60 kilometers away from the town right now, hidden among tree branches in the southern part of the forest.

In front of him were the remains of an old abandoned village. The buildings were mostly destroyed and what was left standing was covered in moss. The sun had set just over an hour ago and the cold had started to creep in.

Even Hao Xuan couldn't help but rub his hands to keep them from getting cold. It felt like the cold was seeking him out like a sentient being.

Time passed by rather slowly when there was nothing else for him to do. Another half an hour had passed but there was still no sign of the hunters nor the so-called beast that was supposed to be guarding the word of power.

So instead of wasting time, Hao Xuan took out the little black book and started "deciphering" it.

This time his progress was much faster. In an hour he had deciphered two pages.

Hao Xuan's bright green eyes glimmered in the dark night as he read what he had written down. The first page was titled: "Order within, Chaos without."

"What is your storm? That which keeps you awake at night, that which is always behind you, chasing you till the last breath, in fact, when it overtakes you, it will be the cause of your last breath. What.....will you do then?"

Hao Xuan's brow slowly knitted into a tight furrow. The more he read, the more confused he became. Rather than a straightforward technique or skill which he was hoping for, this seemed more like the ramblings of some wanna-be philosopher.

But with nothing else to do, he continued reading.

"With a ferocity beyond any foe I had ever met, the storm's tyranny left me senseless. I had ventured into the depths of my mind and soul to find peace, yet the storm even chased me there. It has followed me through the ends of the systems, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake."

"It battered me harder than the boiling chaos of my past misdeeds, driving me to the verge of madness."

"It was then that I finally gave up and let the storm take me. It brought with it a prickling feeling of stillness, much like I had expected, but it was within the eye of the storm that I came to the realization."

"The realization of what was right before my eyes from the beginning. All my life I had fled from the storm, chasing a peace that was always out of reach. But now I understand that we don't have to choose between the calm and the storm. In fact, to have either, we must have both."

"That was the day I first BECAME the Storm."

"Signed, The First Chaos Lord..."

It was like something had exploded in Hao Xuan's mind. An earthquake, the likes of which even reached his soul, shook his Mind Palace. The black book closed on its own and shot towards the center of Hao Xuan's brow, vanishing within.

A multitude of images and characters passed through his vacant eyes and formed a single black page that was visible only to him.

"Initiation of the Chaos Gates: Reach."

The Chaos energy inside his meridian started boiling, consuming all the others one by one, sending his body into shock.

Hao Xuan broke free from the invisible force that had taken control of him and leaped back, falling off from the tree. He took in a deep breath to refill his empty lungs.

*GAAASP*

"The...FUCK!" he couldn't help but yell out loud.

"What!"

"Who's there?!"

"Show yourself!"

Three voices came from the front. Hao Xuan didn't have time to process what was happening before he felt the cold steel of a blade around his neck.

Still out of breath, he looked up and saw the three faces staring back at him.

"Who is he?" one of them who was missing his right eye asked the one next to him, a middle-aged man with sunken eyes and a scrawny body.

"An alien, look at his mask. Just kill him quickly, the creature will come out soon," he replied coldly.

The third man much younger than the other two was in his late twenties perhaps and was also the furthest one away, looking around cautiously.

*Huff*Huff*Huff*

Hao Xuan still couldn't breathe properly. It was like something inside him was absorbing all the oxygen and he could barely focus.

The man with the one good eye nodded, "Alright," and swiped his blade across Hao Xuan's neck in one smooth motion, like he had done so many times before.