Volume 2, Chapter 103 – Inheritance (2)

Her sword was still too heavy, too forceful. And to Yao Qingyuan, the blood-sha swirling around it was its own kind of spiritual pollution; he had to divert a huge portion of his attention to resisting the wails whispering in his ear.

This kind of contest couldn’t last. Just like this step—his footing slipped on a depression he hadn’t noticed, and his entire posture collapsed.

Clang—shkkt!

Feixiang Heaven shifted from blocking to slicing, dragging its edge downward, and before Yao Qingyuan could recover his stance, one stroke lopped off both his hands.

Slice!

The blade rose again, driving straight into his chest.

Shkkt!

She drew it back and flicked it up into his throat.

Hssst!

Her sword continued its upward climb, from throat to crown, neatly completing a cranial surgery for Yao Qingyuan.

Thud!

The body toppled backward. A black shadow lunged from the split in his skull, trying to flee.

Bai Xiang had been waiting for this. With a pinch of her sword seal, four thunder-dragons coiled together into a prison net, forming a sphere of violet lightning that sealed Yao Qingyuan’s split soul inside.

“Ah…!! Aaaah!!!”

Having your soul scoured again and again by lightning was no ordinary torment. The thunderball was filled with shrill, miserable screams.

Bai Xiang still needed to refine him to pry into his memories. She immediately recalled the lightning sphere, reached in with her left hand, and pinched down. Yao Qingyuan’s screams cut off at once.

What the hell even is that?

This demoness… did she just eat His Highness’s split soul?

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Hiding behind a broken wall, Xu Zhe felt his soul fly out of him. He spun around to run.

A tearing sound split the air behind him. When he looked back, he saw Bai Xiang fling that blood-soaked demonic sword. The blade streaked straight toward him!

Even at this distance, he felt as though his qi presence had been locked. No matter what he did, there would be no dodging.

“Ah!”

Cornered between life and death, Xu Zhe was going to fight. He roared, a wash of purple rising in his cheeks as he poured every last shred of demonic power he could muster into his treasured sword and hurled it at Feixiang Heaven.

Clink!

The two sword tips met for the briefest instant. Then, with almost no pause at all, Xu Zhe’s treasured sword was pierced through from its tip by Feixiang Heaven. The blood glow skewered straight through the entire blade and continued into his brow.

Thud!

He cast Bai Xiang one numb glance, then his body sagged, knees folding as he toppled face-first to the ground.

The blood sword stood at an angle behind him. Wisps of remnant soul drifted out of his corpse and flew of their own accord to the sword, coiling around it, and were slowly absorbed.

Hm?

Seeing this, Bai Xiang was a little surprised.

She stepped forward, drew the blood sword, and examined it carefully. It pulsed with waves of excitement, as if on the verge of some transformation.

Just like me…

She narrowed her eyes.

The souls of mortals were weaker than cultivators’. “Tens of thousands of grievance souls” sounded like a lot, but in truth it was about equivalent to several hundred human or demon cultivators.

Even so, that wasn’t little. Perhaps it was a case of quantity producing a change in quality, or perhaps Yao Qingyuan’s split soul had some special mystery. In any case, after Bai Xiang had devoured and refined all of it, the lock that had been stuck tight above her head… finally loosened, just a little.

A true qi core seemed to be right before her eyes now. It was like she was finally seeing the door, and a crack had opened between the panels. A few more shoves and she could step through.

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Closing her eyes, Bai Xiang sank into the progression of her path of qi.

The equivalent of several hundred cultivators’ worth of soul accumulation.

If you added in all the pills she’d swallowed indiscriminately, and the many top-tier methods she’d practiced, for a path of qi cultivator to reach this point, under normal circumstances it would take at least a hundred years.

She’d done it in a matter of days.

This was beyond unbelievable. Perhaps only those human emperors of ancient myth, those “heaven-appointed, sword-town-rivers-and-mountains” sovereign heroes, had cases like this—and even then, only in legend.

And if you added “opening a new path” on top of that…

Then there were none.

In all of history.

Not a single one.

“You won’t change anything!”

Yao Qingyuan’s curse still echoed in her ears.

The corners of her lips curved in a slight smile. Bai Xiang opened her eyes, revealing a pair of demonic golden irises.

She walked back, picked up the treasured sword Yao Qingyuan had used, and laid it alongside Feixiang Heaven.

She had actually noticed it earlier; the specifications of the two weapons were quite similar.

They were both Han-style swords, and the more Feixiang Heaven touched the other blade, the more intense the excitement she felt from it.

That made Bai Xiang suspect that this sword had also been reforged from a “Zhenyuan Sword embryo”.

What would happen if she put them together?

She watched as the blood color swirling around Feixiang Heaven grew thicker and thicker… It was as if it had a life of its own, surging and winding up around the other sword. Amid the other blade’s trembling and metallic cries, it slowly corroded it away, turning it into an ugly, mangled stick.

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Once it was done, Feixiang Heaven sent a wave of “seeking praise”, its blade trembling with a clear, ringing note.

Not bad.

Bai Xiang gripped it, feeling the greatly increased toughness and sharpness, her fingers gently stroking the hilt.

It was starting to resemble her, just a little.

She looked around. Large parts of the area had become ruins.

Among the remains of the small building and the rubble ahead, she could faintly see more blood arrays beneath. They hadn’t dissipated with the death of their originator. Instead, they were slowly changing, sinking, forming a deep pit at the center of the array.

From the fragment of Yao Qingyuan’s memory she had absorbed, Bai Xiang knew this was the “spring”.

Yao Qingyuan wasn’t truly dead; he still had his main body, and Qiyun Circuit still had all his demon followers under his control.

Now that Chilong Circuit’s crisis had been resolved, I should immediately assault the Core realm and then rush to support Master as quickly as possible.

Lifting a leg, she settled into the stance of Sword Contemplation, laid the blood sword across her knees, and swallowed all of her remaining pills.

To condense the qi core—this was her one chance.

Boom…

Swish…

Blood roared through her body, and together with her heart current, it sounded like great rivers and seas surging.

All the fluids in her body accelerated their circulation at this moment. In her inner body-scape, the invisible qi core grew ever more condensed.

But it still felt like something was missing.

A hair’s breadth.

The smallest sliver.

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Just that tiny bit kept the qi core from fully forming.

“Xiang’er.”

Suddenly, Bai Xiang heard Xiang Xian’s voice in her ear.

At a time like this… she was, naturally, surprised. But she quickly steadied her mind and traced the source of the voice and intent—astonishingly, it came from the flame-shaped vertical mark between her brows.

This was… spirit-pointing?

“I trust you’ve already guessed it. This is an intent left in your consciousness through the spirit-pointing method.”

“If you’re able to hear this, your cultivation must already be very high. You’ve surely surpassed your teacher by now, and that makes me very pleased…”

“By this point, your teacher should already be dead.”

“Don’t think about avenging me.”

“Keep cultivating.”

“Until you become a Sword Lord, do not descend from the mountain.”

So this was… Master’s last words, left through spirit-pointing?

Bai Xiang’s lashes trembled slightly.

She had a vague guess as to how everything would unfold from here.

“I have one last thing to give you.” Xiang Xian’s voice went on.

“It’s the fundamental method of our Yuming Dao.”

“The Demon Pool we condense… is the ‘Dao Master’s true spirit’.”