A bloody grin spread across Ryu''s face as he immediately turned to the left and bolted with his fastest speed. When was the last time he had been forced to run away from someone so much more powerful than him? Probably back when he had first stepped onto the Pedestal Plane. But the woman that had left him in such a sorry condition had fallen so far behind him by the time he saw her again that he couldn''t even be bothered to kill her.


    This Pierthorn, though... he wouldn''t make him wait for long. He would have his head on a pike soon enough.


    Pierthorn noticed the barrier soon and guessed the same thing Ryu had. When he realized that the latter couldn''t run away, his eyes glowed with a fierce light and then he relaxed. He laughed into the skies as though he was a man locked in a cage for years that had suddenly been released. Why wouldn''t he relax? What chance did Ryu stand now? Especially since it seemed as though there was simply no one else in this region.


    He realized that soon Ryu wouldn''t be able to hold on. However, the moment he had this thought, he caught himself.


    His master had been an extremely cautious person. Despite being a Transcendent Sky God that even Omniscient Sky Gods were hesitant around, he only traveled with his clone and he never put himself in the line of danger if he didn''t have to. And yet, he had died simply because he had provoked the wrong person.


    He knew well what Ryu''s background was and who his Ancestor was. While Aika had been an unknown to his teacher, how could the same be said of Ryu? If he had all of this information and still somehow managed to fumble the situation, he would be worse than a fool.


    ''What can he use to escape me? Treasures? No, I''ve tried using my treasures here already, and yet I can''t access any of them. Even my alchemic pills, ones that I meticulously prepared, aren''t where I stored them. It''s obvious that this world wants you to rely on nothing but yourself.


    ''In that case, the only thing he could possibly use to hide from me would be a formation... but how could a World Sea Realm expert lay a formation that I can''t see through? So long as I catch the faintest fluctuations, he would be finished.


    ''The last possibility is hiding underground, Spiritual Sense doesn''t travel as far through the ground, but he doesn''t seem to be an earth qi cultivator, so he shouldn''t have any earth escape or fusion techniques, and if he tries to dig one the normal way, the residual effects would be too easy for me to spot, it would be even worse than the formation...''


    ''There''s got to be a pocket somewhere, anywhere,'' Ryu thought to himself.


    His senses couldn''t be spared to find a location. He was trying to run into one by luck, but he quickly found out how foolish that was. He needed a better method, something that would actually work.


    He grit his teeth, but then his eyes flashed with an idea.


    He stripped himself of his clothes and then tossed them out of the void.


    The moment this happened, his clothing and the rock overlapped and flashed. They both crumbled.


    ''Where is it?''


    Ryu couldn''t calculate everything as precisely as he could in the past, so he had suddenly lost track of exactly where his clothes had gone. He felt like he was suffocating, his mind about to reach the end of his rope when he finally found it an entire kilometer away from where he had been standing.


    He rushed into the hole that had been formed and collapsed, gasping for breath in the fetal position because the hole that had formed was only large enough to accommodate such a thing.


    He nearly passed out, but he bit his tongue hard.


    He couldn''t help but shake his head inwardly. His fortune was truly terrible.