Volume 3, Chapter 54 – Golden Core Dharmic Aspect(Double-Length)

Bai Xiang sped through the air, white hair streaming open in the cold wind.

The wind in the third month ought to have carried a hint of warmth, but the snow had only just stopped; the temperature hadn’t climbed back up yet. High above, the wind was like knives, sweeping past without mercy.

A membrane of qi wrapped around Bai Xiang’s body. It was a travel method she’d worked out while recuperating—not only could it shield her from wind and rain, it also meant that even while flying at high speed, she could take calls without the wind tearing her voice away behind her.

As she flew, she kept replaying the previous call in her mind.

“Five Divine Fetus cultivators—this is clearly the court being angered by what I did on this side. So much that they can’t even wait for that half-year agreement; they want to use the demon disaster as a pretext to press me down early.”

“They don’t have the intel network I do. They might know about divine-blood fiends, but they don’t necessarily know about the plan to resurrect Shi Ling .”

So the five Divine Fetus cultivators were mainly coming for her.

In fact, because they’d arrived so quickly, they might not even have been transferred from Yujing, but forcibly conscripted from the area around the southern region… and who knew if Kong An’s father was among them.

“If I run into him, I can at least try to save him.”

Bai Xiang thought silently.

She had no interest in being emperor, even less in raising banners of rebellion. But if the times really forced her to the point where she could only live peacefully by rebelling and becoming emperor, she wouldn’t mind doing a bit of “good.”

“The court’s patience with me will wear down with each clash. That half-year agreement may not mean much—it’ll really depend on when Qingping Dao and Suzhen Dao pull their Sword Lords back.”

“Master has obviously seen this too. Her hatred is higher than mine right now, but at the end of the call she didn’t say anything at all.”

Not normal.

Bai Xiang guessed Xiang Xian still had cards she hadn’t played.

So why not help her a little?

As for Kong An, Bai Xiang had also observed his temperament. Aside from being a bit wooden and rather slow-witted, it was clear his nature wasn’t bad. If she could pull Kong An over by rescuing Kong Tianbao, she wouldn’t just gain the friendship of Startling Bamboo Sword Dao—she’d also be able to expose this business of “the court conscripting cultivators and refining puppets” to the other Daos.

Even if she couldn’t get them to outright defect, she could still make the Daos and Yujing grow even more estranged in their hearts.

And even in the worst case, if Master wanted to sell favors on that front, the price she’d have to pay would be a lot lower. Truly, an extremely profitable deal.

There were only two problems.

First, how to find those five people.

Second, how exactly those puppets were refined.

As for what happened after taking the Saint-Transition Pill, Xiang Xian couldn’t say either, because once the Yuming lineage’s inheritance took effect, the transmission from master to disciple basically went with it.

It was originally something tragic—but by luck, they hadn’t had to take the pills, and so had escaped the misery of being controlled. Xiang Xian had sighed over blessing and misfortune being interwoven; her talk of puppets was only speculation.

If they turned out to be irreversible puppets, Bai Xiang wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold back.

Lowering her head to glance at the mountains and rivers below, Bai Xiang saw that each time she swept over some open ground, a blood-red sea would surge up from the forest.

Those were clearly demon beasts that had sensed her presence along the way and chased after her. She’d ignored them until now, and they’d already gathered in impressive numbers.

Time to clear a wave.

Her body paused in mid-air, her trajectory bending sharply as she dove back down, like a meteor slamming straight into the center of the demon tide.

With a booming crash, sword-qi and gale-force winds twisted outward. Torn lumps of flesh flew in all directions, shredded to bits. When Feixiang Heaven thrust its blade out, it was already entirely blood-red, once again showing the appearance it had worn when devouring blood-souls back then.

“You really seem to like this look, don’t you?”

Unconcerned with anyone else, Bai Xiang stood where she was, sleeves and hair streaming back. Her right hand raised her sword; the first two fingers of her left hand slid along the edge.

“Fine by me.” She gave the order.

“In battle, you don’t have to hold back on my account.”

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“Do whatever feels good to you.”

Vmmm—

Feixiang Heaven let out a quiet, excited hum, the blood-red along its blade growing even deeper.

A roar answered.

The demon tide had already converged from all around. Bai Xiang swept her sword sideways, slashing out a spreading ripple.

The thin blade cut through the air; if you listened carefully, it was a chorus of wails and ghostly cries, as if the resentful souls bound to the sword were screaming along with it. They clung to the ripple as it sliced through the bodies of the front rank of demon beasts and everything else in its path.

Only when it had cut through to roughly the third rank did the ring-shaped ripple suddenly erupt, turning into a dozen sword-qi tornadoes, each eight meters high, wildly sucking in the surrounding demon tide. The tornadoes were quickly dyed blood-red.

So that failed.

Bai Xiang shook her head inwardly.

She’d wanted to try imitating Startling Bamboo Sword Art, to see if she could use only the power of the path of qi to simulate a tornado.

For this strike, her plan had been to cut through the demon tide first, then have the tornado erupt and sweep back. As things stood, it still hadn’t worked; she clearly lacked knowledge in this area.

Was it because the nature of her sword-qi was too violent, and the control distance too long?

The sword-qi tornadoes played meat grinder for a few seconds while Bai Xiang stood in place, thinking, blood rain falling around her the whole time.

As soon as the tornadoes vanished, the gap they’d opened was instantly refilled by the demon tide. At that moment, she gently closed her eyes, recalling the tiny sword core sphere Bai Zhuqing had once condensed.

Memories of that night of thunder and rain and of Zhou Jing’an’s exchanges and clashes wove through, until finally the scene fixed on the end—on the illusory Aspect rising behind her as she looked down on Zhou Jing’an.

Right now, the nearest demon beast had already opened its bloody maw, the angle of its jaw just barely taking her head into its outline. It only needed to bite down a second later and it could take it off.

Bai Xiang opened her eyes. In the shadow cast by the demon beast, two golden lights flashed into being.

Chi-la—

One sword carved its body apart. With another sweeping slash, the sword-qi she stirred up sent the nearby demon beasts flying. Bai Xiang gathered her qi and focus, visualizing herself controlling the sword-qi as it condensed.

It should have been something like a sword-qi dragon or sword-qi tiger—but this time her target shifted direction. From behind her left shoulder, a half-transparent arm suddenly thrust out, formed entirely from spinning sword-qi.

On its first appearance, the arm was half a meter thick and four meters long. As Bai Xiang slashed at the demon beasts to her right, she directed the arm to fan its hand out toward the ones on the left. One grab, and the swirling sword-qi inside shredded them, turning them to mince with a harsh ch-ch-ch .

This worked nicely.

Her mood rose a little.

No need to slowly hack them down with the sword anymore.

Like someone who’d just discovered a new toy, Bai Xiang condensed another arm on the right. Sometimes she flattened the arms like giant wings, slapping through the demon tide; sometimes she tossed Feixiang Heaven up for one arm to grab, let it chop a few times, then let it go again as she leapt away. The two arms of sword-qi clenched together in mid-air, merging into a heavy hammer that slammed down hard.

Boom!

The hammer hit the ground and both rocks and demon beasts were flung into the air.

Bai Xiang caught her sword just in time, gave it a shake, and a wave of sound rolled out. The dozens of demon beasts closest to her popped like overripe fruit, swelling into clouds of blood mist.

“Yihu—xi!”

The wind played the melody, the hammer beat the drum.

A fine little piece indeed—“Sky vast and blue, earth boundless and blood-red.”

By the time she’d killed to her heart’s content and wiped out every last aberration, there wasn’t a clean patch of ground left. Within a radius of nearly a hundred meters, it was nothing but piled-up blood mud—no human, and even a wild beast wandering in would have retched.

“Boring.”

Bai Xiang flicked her sword aside and had a sword-qi arm catch it and slide it back into its sheath, then shot skyward again.

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At her current level, fighting these demon beasts no longer carried any sense of danger.

At most, she could use their numbers to grind away and test out different ideas; they couldn’t satisfy the craving for battle that ran in her bones.

What realm would a Sword Lord be in?

She really had been killing a bit too much; the thought came to her that she wanted to sample a Sword Lord’s strength right now.

“Mm?”

Her gaze fell on the ground ahead. Bai Xiang sped over and stopped dozens of meters above the surface, looking down to confirm that this was a village.

Mud-brick houses, wooden sheds, pigpens and cattle pens, and small fields beside them.

A creek slanted down from the north, passing right by this settlement—that was probably why they’d taken root here. Settlements had to be built where access to water was easy.

So why was no one here?

Dropping quickly, Bai Xiang walked the length of the village. The more she saw, the darker her expression grew.

The supplies were all still here.

The stored rice and flour, the jars of pickled vegetables and salted meat—all untouched. But there wasn’t a living thing to be seen.

No people—and not even cattle, sheep, chickens, ducks or other livestock.

The only traces left were dark red stains soaking into the ground, and blood spray patterns you could see every few steps.

Suddenly, Bai Xiang halted, then surged forward, crossing more than ten meters in a flash to stop before a shed.

Under the shed lay a heap of twisted corpses.

Without exception, they were skin and bone, as if their ribs had broken free of their torsos, grown several times larger, then turned into something like an insect exoskeleton. Each body kept only a shriveled human head like a skull, their bodies knotted together like a massive pile of centipedes.

The air reeked of pus and blood. The gore on the ground was layered several strata deep.

Bai Xiang didn’t shy away, stepping through the gore. Near the steps of the shed, she raised her head and looked at a pair of boots hanging from the eaves.

They were Jiang Lai’s boots.

The man had a rough temperament and no odd hobbies—except that he treasured these boots, saying they were a gift from his lover.

Bai Xiang stared at the boots for a while, then lowered her head to look again at the gore nearly up to the shoe tops.

Finally, she fixed her gaze on the shriveled human heads in that “centipede heap,” her eyes going a little blank.

“Shenming’s Bai Xiang?”

Someone suddenly called to her from above.

Bai Xiang lifted her head and saw, on the tiled roof of a house across the street, a sword-bearing woman standing there.

The woman was stunningly beautiful. Her black hair was tied in two loops at the back of her head, most of it falling straight down to frame a bright, lively face and a pair of peach-blossom eyes.

Her beauty was aggressively so—unlike Bai Xiang, who rarely showed hers outwardly. She displayed it openly and boldly, with a very obvious air of confident arrogance.

“Who are you?” Bai Xiang asked.

The woman answered directly. “Lu Qingning.”

After she spoke, she waited a few seconds. When Bai Xiang didn’t respond at all, she finally frowned. “Your master didn’t tell you my name?”

Bai Xiang said nothing. Lu Qingning narrowed her eyes with contempt. “Right, she’s nothing but a craftsman—at best an imperial physician. Not having heard of me is only normal.”

“I am the twenty-seventh Disciples’ Sword Chief of Suzhen Dao, ‘qi supporting the earth-aspect.’ You’d best remember that.”

Qi supporting the earth-aspect.

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Using one’s own qi to command transformations of the earth’s patterns—in other words, a geomancer.

Which meant her realm had already reached Divine Fetus.

Before Bai Xiang could respond, Lu Qingning slapped her palm lightly, and five shadows sprang out from behind the eaves.

Three were gray-haired elders in bamboo hats.

One was a palace-garbed matron draped in red gauze.

The last was a middle-aged man in armor.

The five clustered around Lu Qingning like bodyguards, silent and unmoving.

Bai Xiang immediately understood. “So those five even have someone driving them.”

“Oh?” Lu Qingning arched a brow. “Where did you hear that we were coming?”

“In this world, there are only a few forces capable of this. Either you’ve gotten cozy with the Feathered Ascension Sect, or you, like Yao Qingyuan, have thrown yourself in with outsiders.”

“On top of all the slaughter you’ve committed here…”

Lu Qingning snorted coldly and barked, “Shenming’s Bai Xiang! Do you admit your crimes?”

Bai Xiang looked at her. “And what crime would that be?”

“Defying the Sacred Will, that’s the first.” Lu Qingning’s brows tightened.

“Usurping power and seizing position, that’s the second.”

“Hoarding secret methods, that’s the third.”

“Consorting with outside evils, that’s the fourth.”

“And slaughtering the common folk!” Lu Qingning pointed at the gore beneath Bai Xiang’s feet. “That’s the fifth！”

“Five charges laid out together, and you still deny them?”

Bai Xiang chuckled. “Classic four-charges-plus-one… Suzhen Dao probably only cares about me hoarding that secret method.”

“And what if we do?” Lu Qingning snorted softly. “Whoever opens a new path in this world must send it to Yujing to be verified, researched and discussed, and only then is its fate decided. That’s the unspoken rule that’s always been in place.”

Bai Xiang nodded. “Which is why humanity has flourished without decline.”

“You’re quite reasonable, aren’t you?” Lu Qingning was taken aback. She eyed Bai Xiang, puzzled, then suddenly laughed. “In that case, I’ll give you a chance.”

“As long as you surrender yourself and let me cut your tendons at hands and feet, then pierce your shoulder bones, I’ll lead you on a tether to see my master. I can personally plead on your behalf—so not only will you keep your life, you’ll even get to keep that pretty skin of yours.”

“How about it?” She narrowed her eyes at Bai Xiang’s full chest. “I’m tired of the junior sisters in the Dao already… I could use a footstool of a slave.”

The word “slave” had barely fallen when she and the five figures shot forward together! Six swords rang from their sheaths, chopping toward Bai Xiang from all directions！

Dang—!

A resonant tone spread out like the peal of a great bell. Lu Qingning’s eyes flew wide and her jaw clenched, her face full of disbelief.

Her body was still hanging in mid-air, her blade braced against a blood-red sword—the Four-Sided Yu Sword Feixiang Heaven —while the other five swords were all blocked by five giant, half-transparent arms. Bai Xiang herself hadn’t moved at all except for the right arm holding her sword raised！

What is that?

Lu Qingning stared at the five thick arms in shock and uncertainty.

An outer Aspect?

Wasn’t her outer Aspect supposed to be the Startling-Spirit Cicada?

“First you sell redemption slips, then you force people to kneel and accept punishment.”

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“You think you hold human justice in your hands, and see everyone as a rebellious traitor.”

Bai Xiang slowly lifted her head, her tone as cold as the winds of the Nine Hells. “Sword Chief of Suzhen—only sixteen hundred years, and you’re already on the twenty-seventh one.”

“Does that turnover rate have something to do with liking to debase yourselves?”

There was no way Lu Qingning could swallow mockery like that. Her peach-blossom eyes flushed red in a flash.

She was just about to order the five to join her in unleashing a combined divine ability, when Bai Xiang moved first.

A twitch of the wrist, and the continuous vibrations flung Lu Qingning away. Then Bai Xiang lifted her sword upright into a sword salute, and with one move of Only Regret Summer Is Short , sent waves of sound rippling out, forcing the other five to flip away as well.

Then, still holding her sword in her right hand in the sword-salute posture, she formed a strange mudra with her left hand and pointed her index finger at the ground. Her left leg crossed over to rest on her right knee, and her whole body rose to float in mid-air.

Kill her!

Bloodshot veins burst in Lu Qingning’s eyes as she raised her sword, pointing it straight at Bai Xiang.

The three straw-hat elders took up a triangle above Bai Xiang’s head. Their sword momentum split into sand, snow, and wind… mingling with the falling rain of petals, while thunderbolts crashed down as well.

Five Divine Fetus cultivators—how would she block that ?

Lu Qingning stared at Bai Xiang with gloating fury, wanting to see with her own eyes how this overestimated, false “prodigy” would be ground to scraps by so many divine abilities.

But in the very next instant, her expression froze.

One arm lifted its palm; in its hand appeared a sword of lightning qi, arcs crackling around it.

One arm spread its fingers and seized a branch of sword-qi peach blossoms.

One arm snatched at the air and found a transparent gourd in its grasp.

One arm clawed at the void and dragged out a tornado whip.

In the blink of an eye, the lightning sword blocked wind and thunder; the peach branch plucked falling blossoms; the gourd swallowed golden sand; the wind whip scattered flying snow.

With each extra motion, the arms grew a little more solid; with each degree of solidity, a vague shadow covered their surface, making them look taller, larger, until they had a main body outline.

Once the four arms finished intercepting, they gathered all those “weapons” together and blocked the sword light, letting it explode right in front of them. Only then did the thing rising up behind Bai Xiang truly reveal itself.

It was a Buddha.

A two-faced Buddha.

The Buddha was huge, close to a hundred meters tall. Sword-qi had drawn the surrounding blood slurry back, dyeing the whole statue a crimson hue.

But that didn’t lessen its sense of mystery and terrifying pressure—if anything, it made the details of its body seem even more vivid and lifelike, as if the two pairs of closed eyelids on its faces might tremble and open at any moment.

It was exactly this:

Blood turning Buddha-light, qi turning cloud;

The Dharmic Aspect solemn, suppressing arts.

Two faces, fierce and kind, no joy revealed;

Only waiting for the sword’s song to reap the mortal world.

“Amitabha—”

Under Lu Qingning’s stunned gaze, Bai Xiang raised her sword and intoned the Buddha’s name, gently opening a pair of golden eyes.

“Esteemed donors, your anger runs deep. Why not let me take your heads?”

“It’ll count as settling a bit of karma.”