He approached the dragon with the will to fight to the death. The large blue hammer in his hand streaked through the void as it headed towards the face of the dragon.
The dragon also became serious and responded with its full power. After all, he was supposed to be the leader of this band of invaders. At least, the first invader had made this claim. So it thought that Loki should be taken seriously.
It opened its mouth as it activated all seven symbols of authority available in Oceania. This caused a small black dragon made of water and electricity to appear in its mouth.
Then the dragon roared at Loki. This made the small black dragon eject from its mouth and crash into Loki.
The power of the small dragon was 8(Cultivation Rank) × (8 × 4)Stats × (8 × 7)Divine Metacs × 1,406 million(Cave Heaven) × 10(Law Fragments, which is 201,564,160 units of divine power. This meant that the small black dragon was 2.38 times stronger than him.
Loki saw all of these clearly through the Power Shifting Ability. So he wasn’t surprised that the small black dragon destroyed the blue hammer in his hand upon contact. He also wasn’t surprised when the small dragon bore into his body and exploded within him with enough power to shatter his body.
The only person who was surprised by all of these was Money Body. The fact that Loki was being beaten was something he expected. What he didn’t expect to see was how Loki was capable of using the Divine Metacs of the four pathways.
As his brain tried to understand what he was seeing, he said, "First of all, he should only have one Divine Metac. He shouldn’t have Four Divine Metacs, and most of his power should come from the large Cave Heaven of his secret alliance."
"Secondly, he shouldn’t be able to use the Divine Metacs of four different pathways. He certainly shouldn’t be able to combine them and make them work together the way he is doing."
"Thirdly, he shouldn’t have a power that is nearly a match for mine. I am rank 8, and a very strong one, while he is rank 6, so I shouldn’t be barely 30% stronger than him."
"All of these are wrong. There is something wrong here. No, everything is wrong."
"Is he a Dao Lord playing around? Did I just offend a Dao Lord? Am I done for?"
While he was racking his head, he was still running as fast as he could. He had become a ball of golden light streaking through the darkness of space. So he was like a small star hurtling through space.
On the other side, Loki was taking a severe beating. He was fighting back as much as he could, but the best that he could manage was to prevent the dragon from overwhelming him with too much damage that he couldn’t heal fast enough.
This was not enough to change his fate whatsoever. He was still going to die. It was just going to take a while longer.
Even if he somehow survived, he would no longer have a moment of peace once what just happened becomes exposed. Even a Dao Lord might be interested in seeing what’s going on in the core of his Cave Heaven.
If he were fighting a cultivator like Money Body, he might have been confident of holding out until the enemy runs out of lifespan. But he wasn’t fighting a cultivator.
What he was fighting was a world king who had the support of a large part of the world. The minimum amount of lifespan that a large world possesses is 10 million. So he couldn’t be confident in outlasting the dragon king.
In fact, he didn’t want to outlast the dragon king, as that would only help Money Body’s plan succeed. So after fighting to his heart’s content, he activated the Rewind Metac and let it take him into the River of Time.
After he escaped into the River of Time, he finally relaxed. He sighed and said, "That was an even worse disaster than the first time. We didn’t even get to enter Oceania before everything went derailed. In both cases, Money Body was the source of the problem."
"For a while there, I thought that this attempt would be successful when I gained control of Money Body and Ant Hill. Of all of the things I could have expected, I didn’t expect him to hate me to the extent that he would rather sabotage the mission."
"You know what? I’ll consider that lesson learned. Then I will give this another catch. If I still can’t complete the mission with one more attempt, I will give up for now."
"I will take another mission to earn divine merit points. I already have 500 divine merit points from Forced Exchange, so I’m already halfway to the goal of 1,000 divine merits. Other kinds of missions won’t pay well, but I won’t need to work as much as I need to with 500 divine merit points already earned."
Because of this resolution, he decided to leave the River of Time early instead of letting the Rewind Metac carry him to the limit. This way, he would return to a point in the past when he possessed the 500 divine merit points from Forced Exchange.
When he left the River of Time, he found himself at the point where he had just finished plundering the three small worlds that he knew about from his days as a mortal.
These three worlds were the ones he gained from Lady Red and Hammock and the one he stumbled onto by chance. The last one was the world he used to make the Viper Fangs Metac.
He had just plundered these three worlds, and his Cave Heaven was only at 150 million square kilometers in size. So he still had the three Cave Heavens of the three money cultivators that he killed to loot.