Chapter 4093: Shedding Skin and Life

"No matter how exquisite a leather-work may be, it cannot conceal rotting flesh and bone. What I see is only flesh corrupted by time, and souls sunk and rotting within desire."

The Great Witch of Chaos said sternly, and the barkeeper-looking tanner raised his glass toward Xia De and Viego:

"Fortunate ones like you, who were born with such fine leather-skins, of course find it hard to understand why these people would willingly trade with a being like me for what seems like a useless outward appearance.

But that doesn't matter—jealousy and vanity are the original sins carried from birth by intelligent life. Some care more about appearance, some about wealth, some about power, some about who stands beside them."

It drained that cup of wine in one gulp:

"Do you know? Tanners who come from the 【Leather-Works Salon】 all possess very special abilities. We can sense whose skin is more suited to being made into leather-works, and we can easily discover those most beautiful leather-skins.

The closer I get to you, the more I can perceive that the two of you have human skins so suited to being made into leather-works. Just thinking that I could drape your leather-works over my own body, feel that warmth from within, display that beauty from without—even I cannot help but give rise to thoughts of vanity."

As it spoke, it raised the small knife held in its left hand. The knife collided with the silver moonlight that had already arrived before it, yet this time the blade capable of cutting through space failed to shatter the moonlight.

Boom!

In the tremendous roar, the tanner was sent flying by that moonlight; the barkeeper-looking leather-work on its body split apart in an instant. And as the middle-aged-gentleman-looking tanner tried to escape, chains appeared from behind the moonlight and bound directly around its waist.

Hermes has the ability to sever the 【Great Sin Chains】, but the tanner clearly did not possess that ability. It immediately shed its current leather-work like a snake, using its relic properties to slip free of the chains, only to be bound by a second chain that followed right after, wrapping around the body of a middle-aged noblewoman.

"Spatial Stabilization Halo!"

"Chaotic Echo!"

The tanner shed its skin once more, the small knife in its hand trying to cut through space, but where the blade met space it struck out sparks. The nearby space seemed to have become the solid walls of a vault, and the stable space completely cut off any possibility of its escape.

The third Great Sin Chain had now flown in. After the small knife collided with the chain, that blade was sent flying by tremendous force, embedding itself at an angle into the ceiling where it continued to hum and vibrate.

This time the chain did not bind the tanner, but pierced directly into its chest. Although whether relics count as life in the strict sense has no definitive answer in academic circles, most humanoid relics do indeed possess vitality.

The relic's life fire-seed was also tainted with Whispering elements, and after the chain extracted it, the energy flowed ceaselessly into the fire-seed source within the mark on Xia De's palm.

The tanner's current outward appearance was that of an old woman with a head of silver hair, and that leather-work actually deteriorated rapidly because the fire-seed had been extracted:

"What have you done!"

It tried once more to break free of the chains through "shedding skin," but the chain piercing its chest passed straight through every layer of leather-work on its body, and the shedding ability was thereby restricted.

Xia De, holding the great moonlight sword, walked toward it. The tanner, gripping the chain with one hand, confirmed it could not break free, so as the Whispering elements spread, all the corpses lying on the ballroom floor rose up together.

It was not that the corpses had been revived as undead, but that the leather-works had taken control of the corpses. Every corpse here was equivalent to one of the tanner's avatars, and the strength of each avatar was tied to the power of the leather-work.

They lunged toward Xia De, but from behind Xia De came a low shout:

"Chaotic Torrent!"

The torrent of chaotic-colored light released by Viego instantly annihilated the monsters enveloped within it, but footsteps were coming from all directions. The number of leather-works stored within this oil painting was clearly not limited to those before their eyes, and to fight a "tanner," the hardest part was never its own strength, but just how many leather-works it actually held.

Crack!

Rolling thunder exploded from high above; lightning surged in through the window, illuminating the interior of the ballroom where the yellowish glow was growing ever more pronounced.

The Outsider even felt that the current scene was very much like a nostalgic old-fashioned horror film, except in this world probably only he knew what a "film" was.

The fire-seeds extracted by the chains seemed inexhaustible, and within a mere half-minute the tanner had already split apart three leather-works. Even without its small knife and held by the "Great Sin Chains," it could still fight Xia De with the cooperation of the surrounding corpses.

All manner of arcane arts and Zhou Fa, even the innate abilities of different races, were employed by the tanner. All these abilities came from the leather-works it wore; deeply fused leather-works would not only give the wearer some of the original owner's habits, but also grant the corresponding abilities.

Xia De appeared to be fighting only one person, but in reality he was fighting a vast collective that had survived from ancient times; he even saw the other party use what seemed like the power of a Demon Hunter.

The "Tanner" is the highest-ranking existence within the 【Leather-Works Salon】, and every recorded tanner has had the power to stir the peace of an entire region. The opponent's method of combining multiple powers together also opened Xia De's eyes, but thanks to the first-strike advantage created by the "Great Sin Chains," Xia De actually had not fallen into a disadvantage.

Moreover, he was not the only one here.

Viego was not at Xia De's side. The witch had lifted off the ground and floated in the air; ice and fire, light and shadow, order and chaos, enlightenment and Whispering—multiple mutually contradictory powers were kneaded together to form several chaotic-colored orbs of light suspended above her head, which pulsed light downward at a fixed frequency.

The Chaotic Torrent severely impeded the outward perception of everyone including the tanner, and neither Xia De nor the tanner had time to attend to outside matters.

Arcane art clashed against arcane art; the cool moonlight and the terrifying Whispering elements annihilated each other. Thunder lances pierced through body after body, moonlight slashes split the barriers made of leather-works, and the Great Sin Chains were still ceaselessly extracting life fire-seeds from the opponent's body.

"Just how powerful is this thing's vitality?"

One of the four chains bound the tanner, while the other three assisted Xia De in blocking the corpses trying to approach from all sides. These corpses wore only a single layer of leather-work; once their vitality was extracted, the leather-works they wore would also lose their activity.

And as the chains extracted fire-seeds from more and more corpses, the nine Great Sin Spirit runes seemed to sense something. Xia De, wholly focused on the battle, did not carefully attend to this feeling, but gradually he too realized what the chains had sensed:

"If I can keep extracting this kind of life fire-seed without stopping, I might very well obtain a new Great Sin rune related to leather-works."

Corpses streamed ceaselessly into the ballroom, yet the battle had long since ceased to be confined to the ballroom. Xia De's and the tanner's fighting blew a hole through the ceiling, expanding the battlefield to the second floor.

Then Viego went on to shatter the ballroom's wall, revealing the yellowish outdoor scene outside the building.

Destruction of the building on such a large scale naturally also triggered abnormal changes in the document-level relic itself. The Whispering elements contained within the scene gradually grew restless, until Xia De, fighting the tanner in the second-floor corridor, noticed that the yellowish scene was fading bit by bit, until it turned black and white.

So at the end of the corridor behind the tanner, a female figure appeared, head bowed, her face hidden behind long black hair. This meant that this document-level relic had completely lost control.

But after "Vengeful Spirit Martha" appeared, she still did not dare approach the two who were fighting and releasing all manner of arcane arts. As she hesitated and finally walked toward the tanner, two corpses wearing leather-works burst out from the closed doors on either side of the corridor, so that vengeful-spirit-like woman turned and ran at once, and the surrounding colors also shifted back from black and white to yellowish.

Even though this was "Vengeful Spirit Martha's" home ground, she too did not seem able to contend with a tanner who possessed countless leather-work collections.

And Xia De's and the tanner's battle soon returned from the second floor to the first, and the fighting came to an abrupt halt at that point.

It was not that Xia De or the tanner had gained a decisive advantage, but at a certain moment the yellowish scene shook violently, and then came a woman's wailing voice as if from within the walls of the house.

Viego thought this meant the oil painting was about to fight desperately with the "outsiders" within the painting; with such severe elemental upheaval occurring inside a relic, even the most stable relic would lose control because of it.

But the next second, a giant's fist reached in from behind the wall Viego had just destroyed, and then that hand, painted with red nail polish, grabbed Viego in its grip. The second giant's fist, amid a tremendous roar, smashed the wall beside Xia De and grabbed him in its palm as well.

The two were thus carried out of the house by two giant hands and lifted into the air, and after breaking through some indistinct boundary in the sky, the surrounding yellowish, rather nostalgic colors abruptly vanished, and normal night returned.

Viego stumbled and nearly failed to keep her footing; when she came back to herself she realized she was holding Vanessa's right hand, while Xia De was holding Vanessa's left.

Before the three of them there was no house in the barren mountains at all, only an oil painting floating in the air. Yellowish light seeped out from the picture, and Viego could even see that the side of the house in the picture had two large holes in it, and inside those holes, dense crowds of people stood there as if searching for something.

Yi Lu Na and Hilris were jointly casting spells to stabilize the relic; the Chosen One's power of balance stabilized the restless Whispering elements, while Hilris held an ancient crystal whose core was a black point of light but whose interior was threaded with blue and golden radiance.

The angel-level relic 【Core of the Old Days】 was likewise emitting a yellowish glow, and Viego was stunned for a moment before she understood:

"Vanessa, was it you who 'pulled' us out of the painting just now?"