Volume 3, Chapter 30 – Current Situation 【1】

Before Yu He could finish, she hung up on him. Bai Xiang went downstairs, changed into a dark-black Daoist robe with trailing sleeves, slipped on a random pair of tall boots, didn’t bother with a waist sash, tied up her hair, and headed straight out the door.

Construction on the Zhen’nan Route had been going on for less than three months, but because they had pre-zoned a huge stretch of land, the so-called outer-suburban area was still some distance away from Tingyu Tower.

Bai Xiang had no intention of taking a car. She went back up to the viewing platform, leapt off, and in the blink of an eye, her figure vanished.

“The defense unit Yu He leads isn’t the Chilong Army, it’s made up of sturdy refugees recruited after the disaster and trained up,” she was analyzing the situation in her head. “They’re responsible for guarding the southern side—that’s the stretch of primeval forest closest to the Luohou region.”

Rumor had it there was a demon uprising over by Luohou?

If a Demon Pool spread from over there, just what level would it have to be for Yu He to be running around like this?

Yu He and his people were formally registered under the Demon-Subjugation Directorate, and the Demon-Subjugation Directorate in Qidi formally answered to the Qizhou State Chancery. To avoid suspicion, even though Yu He had already noticed there was something “off” about the method Bai Xiang cultivated, he hadn’t pried or asked too many questions about it.

Even so, he was still a veteran at Condensing the Aspect.

Back during Chilong No. 1 High’s “Shenli” incident, if they had thrown Yu He in there, even if he couldn’t completely wipe out the source, he could at least have slaughtered every last one of those transformed blood skeletons he ran across. His strength was plenty formidable.

Using her air-skimming method, Bai Xiang rushed toward the southern construction site as fast as possible. Entering from the gate, she immediately noticed something unusual about the atmosphere here.

In the past, with the “Zhen’nan Garrison” sheltering them and the earthen walls and gun emplacements all around, the laborers didn’t even flinch at the sound of gunfire and explosions—they all knew that as long as they could hear those sounds, it meant the threat had been stopped outside the defense line. Their own area was safe, and they could work with an easy mind.

But now it was different. The workers had all vanished from sight. As Bai Xiang walked, she looked around and found that they were either hiding behind dark green gauze drapes or crammed together inside unfinished buildings, poking their heads out every so often to sneak glances outside.

So the impact has reached the site itself?

Did Yu He fail to hold the line?

Her heart gave a sudden jolt, and she caught the heavy reek of blood again.

It was the smell of fresh blood and entrails. She frowned, stopped paying attention to the peeking laborers, and let her body float up again, skimming through the air. As her field of view expanded, she soon saw three corpses lying scattered across the construction site.

The three bodies were still relatively intact on the surface, but they all shared one common feature: their bellies had been bored to a mangled mess, as if something had driven straight in and savaged their organs, rooting and gnawing around, flinging filth everywhere.

Penetrating wounds.

Under the blazing sun, Bai Xiang’s brows tightened slightly.

No defense unit had come back to chase the attacker down, there were only three casualties, and the rest of the people were hiding, clearly in a posture of waiting for rescue… Putting all that together, they’d most likely already reported the situation to the defense unit, and the attack had just happened.

Rеаԁ oո KatRеaⅾіոɡСаfе

A sweep from above turned up no sign of the culprit. Bai Xiang couldn’t be bothered with a detailed ground search. She simply drew Feixiang Heaven and flicked its blade, sending out a resonant vibration.

Wummmm~~~~~~!

An invisible sword chant spread from her as the center, rippling across the earth. She channeled her soul power into it, so that every object the soundwave touched was marked and sent feedback back to her.

It was a sonar-like probing technique, and normal humans—even qi-path cultivators—simply couldn’t simulate sonar. Only someone on the Core realm on the path of qi, who was also proficient in Jade Spirit calculations and possessed soul power strong enough, was qualified to cast this technique.

When the first wave of information came back, Jade Spirit began building a scene model inside her inner body-scape. Every house, brick, cement sack, scaffold… even the slightly larger rocks were turned into models and set down in their proper places.

It was basically the same as the “divine sense” you read about in cultivation stories. Under this sort of probing scan, no demonic creature could remain hidden.

Very quickly, Jade Spirit sent a prompt to Bai Xiang: southeast, seventy-five meters away, an abnormal object squirming in a drainage ditch.

Taking the hint, Bai Xiang dove headfirst. Her dark-black sleeves tore the air with a harsh whistle, like a raptor stooping in a high-speed dive, not stopping until it had its prey in its claws.

“Screek!”

As if it too sensed the danger overhead, a triangular head suddenly reared up from the drainage channel. It turned out to be a vicious python demon over twenty meters long, its gaping maw lined with two full rows of knife-sharp fangs.

At best, this python demon’s strength was on par with the Forge the Sword realm in Sword Dao. Bai Xiang casually struck out and lopped off its head, then was about to rise back into the air to go find Yu He.

What she hadn’t expected was that the python didn’t die after decapitation. Both its body and its head spat a cloud of scarlet blood mist from the cut surfaces, and when that mist dispersed, a new length of head and body had grown out.

Regeneration?

The thick body had grown a new head… and the old head had grown a new body.

Although the freshly grown portions were thin and underdeveloped, this was regeneration all the same, and it was happening fast.

She paused mid-movement and swung her sword again, slicing both the large and small regenerated pythons lengthwise, wanting to see if they could still regenerate after that.

Hiss hiss hiss…

The pythons’ wounds spewed scarlet blood mist again. When it cleared, half a body’s worth of missing flesh had been filled back in.

It was just obviously nowhere near as thick and robust as the original bodies, leaving them looking grotesquely deformed, writhing in the ditch in a way that was downright nauseating.

Reαd оո КаtReαdіոɡСafе

Now I know why Yu He suffered a loss.

Bai Xiang lost interest in experimenting. She stirred her sword qi and churned all four pythons into blood mush—only to find that the mush was still trying to spit out blood mist. It kept twitching for quite a while before finally going limp, and her heart grew a shade heavier.

She recognized the python’s species. It belonged to the “blackwater python” branch of the python family, one of the more common demonic beasts in the jungles and swamps of the southern lands.

Its strength really wasn’t much. But if every demonic beast like the blackwater python could pull off this kind of die-and-revive routine, then firearms wouldn’t pose much of a threat to them.

With the thought of rushing to the rescue, Bai Xiang used her air-skimming method again, her figure flickering through the forest as she followed the sound of gunfire and artillery to the defense unit.

There was a clearing in the forest. Under the leadership of a few sword-wielding cultivators, the soldiers had formed up, three to four men per squad, using guns and ammunition to ruthlessly pound the attacking demonic beasts.

The demonic beasts were mainly a herd of black-mane boars, one of the most vicious group predators in the southern lands. Compared to common wild boars, they had awakened shallow intelligence, could climb trees, understood strategy, and the more accomplished ones could even use the quills on their bodies to unleash the divine ability “Quill Rain.”

Their varied skill set made them extremely hard to deal with. Several black-mane boars were using their hooves and tusks to scramble up trees, then raining down Quill Rain from above. One of the squads was pinned so badly they didn’t dare show their heads and had to rely on supporting fire from neighboring squads to hold the line.

Bai Xiang saw it clearly—many black-mane boars were taking hits from large-caliber rounds, their bodies torn open in huge patches of bloody flesh, only for their wounds to immediately puff out clumps of blood mist. In no time at all, they regenerated back to full health and went charging in again, vigorous as ever.

Monsters.

She said nothing, merely flashed forward to the front line and drove her sword into a boar demon’s throat, almost skewering it through entirely.

“Watch out…” The nearest squad didn’t recognize her at first and cried out in alarm on reflex.

But their eyes soon went wide as they watched that burly demonic beast, pierced through, suddenly begin to shrivel. In the blink of an eye, it was sucked dry into a desiccated corpse.

Buzz…

With a flick of her wrist, the boar’s corpse crumbled into dust. Bai Xiang raised her left hand in front of her and formed a hand seal, then turned her head and said, “Get back.”

The cultivator who recognized her immediately yanked the others down with him. The next second, a deafening crack rang out overhead, and their whole bodies tingled and quivered as if they’d been electrocuted.

When they looked back up, the clearing ahead looked like it had taken a direct missile hit. Not only was there a churned-up crater in the center, but the surrounding branches looked as if they’d been sliced through by a sharp blade, scattered all over the ground.

As for the demonic beast horde, it was basically wiped out. The black-mane boars lay in the crater, charred from head to hoof, their corpses crumbling one after another into black powder.

They really got struck clean through by lightning…

Reаⅾ оn ΚatRеαԁіոɡCαfе

The cultivators who’d seen it with their own eyes couldn’t help but click their tongues.

They had just personally experienced how hard this pack of “mad boar demons” was to deal with. To stop them from regenerating, they had to use bullets to grind their flesh and bones to pulp. To do what Bai Xiang had just done, you had to soak every last scrap of their flesh in lightning, thoroughly destroying the life activity contained within. The difficulty was more than a hundred times higher.

“Where’s Yu He?” Bai Xiang turned back and asked them.

“Still up ahead!” The leading male cultivator pointed out a direction for her.

Bai Xiang frowned. “Why isn’t he moving with you?”

“Because what’s over there is worse!” As he spoke, fear surfaced on the cultivator’s face. He shook his head hard. “You can’t look straight at it with your eyes!”

That’s… the principle of a Demon Pool?

Bai Xiang swept her gaze across the battlefield and finally noticed several desiccated corpses lying on the ground.

There was a Demon Pool causing trouble too…

She narrowed her eyes and flew off in that direction. Sure enough, along the way she saw more than a dozen desiccated corpses.

Most of them wore camouflage uniforms, and one was dressed in the black outer-sect uniform of the Shenming Sword Dao.

What daredevil thing came here to make trouble?

Losing disciples shifted Bai Xiang’s mindset.

Her flight speed doubled again. She shot through the forest like a streak of black light and went straight for Yu He’s position.

Yu He’s look right now was a bit ridiculous—he’d torn a strip of cloth from his clothes and tied it over his eyes. The staff-sword in his hand had turned, under the shaping of deep-violet demonic power, into a sword as wide as a door panel. He was chasing “empty air,” wildly hacking and slashing at it.

So this is how he looked when he called me?

Bai Xiang abruptly pulled up and began carefully observing the area around Yu He.

A thin veil of smoke drifted there.

The smoke was faintly tinged with blood, but unlike blood mist, it didn’t blanket a large area in hazy red.

Rеaⅾ οո ΚatReаdiոgCafе

If she had to describe it, it was more like incense smoke.

One wisp after another, curling gently upward.

“You’re here?” Yu He must have heard the wind and cupped a hand around his mouth to shout, “Find something to block your mouth, nose, and ears! …Why’d you hang up so fast when I called?”

You didn’t say the important part, and you’re blaming me for hanging up.

Bai Xiang ignored him and instead asked aloud, “The ‘demon logic’ of this thing targets the five senses?”

So as long as any of the five senses were interfered with, you’d get sucked dry into a corpse?

“It’s not that exaggerated!” Yu He yelled back. “The other places… that’s just to keep it from drilling straight in! …If you’re talking about that kind of interference… it only kicks in when you actually see it!”

Even as he spoke, he kept swinging his sword to drive away the curling smoke. The wisps moved as if alive, clinging around him and refusing to disperse.

Looking closer, Bai Xiang saw that he had cloth stuffed into his ears and nostrils as well.

The plugs in his ears were shallow, probably so he wouldn’t block his hearing too much.

Every time he hacked away for a bit and swept the smoke back with his sword wind, Yu He would take advantage of the gap to gulp a couple of breaths through his mouth.

Then the smoke would whistle back around him again, and he’d clamp his mouth shut and go back to wrestling with the thing.

Didn’t he just say you can’t look at it?

Watching this scene, Bai Xiang fell into thought.

I’m looking at it right now, aren’t I? So why is nothing happening?

“Mm…?”

Her tone lifted slightly as she suddenly noticed the air in front of her turning a little blurry.

Looking down, she saw wisps of smoke rising up around her body as well, coiling around her like long snakes. It felt like something inside them was taking shape.