Chapter 863 Decay of the major families (1)
Chen Gutian stood weakly, still wearing a genial smile on his face that wouldn't think he was the one with a massive gaping hole in his chest. His aging face seemed to be aging even more as his white hair turned into a faint translucent color looking like it was a web string and not hair. One could feel his life draining out of him.
"I can .....see why..... Xue'er admired you so. At the clan..... I doubt .....there are .....many... with your level of talent.." Chen Gutian said in between labored breaths.
"I admired him too... at some point.." Chen Zholan slowly said as he removed Chen Gutian's sword that had impaled him in the chest. He ended up coughing up blood as he removed it.
His body looked worse than Chen Gutian's, with deep lacerated wounds that revealed bone covering almost every part of his body. Just like Chen Gutian, his aura seemed to be rapidly declining, though his was less severe than that of Chen Gutian.Fôllôw new stories at novelhall.com
Save for those two the whole platform was blanketed by a heavy silence with looks of shock coloring the bulk of those present, particularly the elders. Almost every single one of them had their eyes wide and their jaws to the floor with a couple of them having pale, petrified faces.
There was a look of disbelief on their faces, understandably so after what they had seen, considering Yang Qing and Yu Gen looked slightly surprised while Chen Zian, even though he was silent, he had this solemn look on his face as he looked at Chen Zholan. His eyes became grimmer as he recalled the scene from earlier.
Chen Zholan's final attack was the cause of it all. His final attack had been brilliantly fast and terrifyingly sharp to the point that most of the elders couldn't track it with their eyes, and for Chen Zian, he felt were he the one facing off against it, surviving with devastating injuries was the best he could have hoped for.
When he did, it was well worth the hardship and pain he went through to master it as it was one of the impetuss to helping him master sword intent along with surviving the mastery of the fifth leaf. However, what he truly appreciated about it was its destructive force. Its power rivaled that of someone who had a basic mastery over the sixth leaf.
Just with that move alone, Chen Zian was confident of facing off against the two supreme elders who had not mastered it, despite both of them being at the quasi-palace stage.
"He mastered it.." he muttered with bitterness in his tone.
The bitterness wasn't out of envy that Chen Zholan had mastered it in a much shorter time frame than he did, but out of sorrow and deep regret for the loss to their clan in the loss of a true talent.
They managed to produce two talents in the same generation gifted enough to master the four leaves into one at such young ages.
He couldn't help but feel like he had eaten a fly as he imagined the future the Chen clan would have had with those two at the helm.
Earlier, he had bemoaned the loss of Chen Xue and wanted to murder Chen Zholan because he was the cause of it, but now, seeing the potential Chen Zholan showed, whatever anger he had was washed away, and all he had was a deep regret at the rot in their clan that it ended up pitting two stars against one another, and harbored clan members who would nurture pill slaves and human cauldrons just to get ahead.
At the rate things were going, the Golden Bamboo Pavilion or the other rising noble families wouldn't have to plot against them, they were already doing a fine job by themselves.