Volume 3, Chapter 59 – Body and Sword (Two-in-One)

“I want to show you something.” Dr. Evan took a creased photo from inside his jacket and held it up toward Bai Xiang.

Bai Xiang focused and saw seven people in the picture, a group photo.

In the middle stood a middle-aged couple whose skin was darkened from a lifetime of labor. Beside them were five children of various ages. The oldest looked just over twenty, the youngest only a few years old, just up to the adults’ waists, grinning wide with a mouthful of white teeth.

“Everyone except me is dead,” Dr. Evan said in a low voice. “The people in the village had long suffered from those experiments. Before, it was just barely bearable.”

“Until one day they released a Demon Pool over the entire island. In just a week, we lost half our people… and the reason they did it was simply ‘to test its spread efficiency in a civilized setting’!”

His emotions spiked again. “I’ve suffered the greatest injustice in this world! I lost everything just to demand fairness and justice… and you say I have no right to judge?”

“If even I have no right to judge and carry out this sacred revenge, then who am I supposed to hand that authority to?”

“The federal laws that are nothing but decoration?”

“Or am I supposed to count on you Yu people to save me?”

“No! I’ll never trust you again!”

His eyes were bloodshot, his face twisted like a demon. “Arrogance… discrimination… even without me, this filthy world would still give birth to another ‘Bruce Evan’! One day, mankind will be buried in the pits it dug for itself!”

“So why not today!” He yanked a blood-red injector from his inner pocket and roared, “Why shouldn’t I be the one to personally—”

Pshk!

Bai Xiang’s figure flashed to him in an instant. Her sword came down from above in a single clean cut.

Dr. Evan’s voice and movements stopped dead. His body began to tremble; a thin red line surfaced from the top of his head down over his face.

This guy had probably hoped to win Bai Xiang over with his twisted sermon. Whether he truly meant every word or was just trying to buy time for the ancient demon’s resurrection, he had clearly chosen the wrong person.

To face injustice without resistance was indeed foolish, and indeed made you an accomplice to evil. With a proper seventeen-year-old girl—someone like Bai Zhuqing, for example—his speech might have made her pause and think, at least tie her up for a while.

But Bai Xiang had lived two lives. Her thinking had long since stepped outside that frame. She couldn’t be bothered with philosophical debates and certainly wasn’t going to walk into this kind of moral-blackmail trap.

What does your tragic life have to do with me?

There were plenty of pitiable people. Was everyone supposed to copy him and take revenge on the entire world?

Right now she was pure pragmatism and will-first. Good, evil, wise, foolish… if they stood in the way of her pursuit, there was nothing to discuss. The sword was the only answer.

“Heh… heh…” Broken laughter leaked from Dr. Evan’s mouth. The red line on his face grew thicker, blood seeping down along his philtrum and at the corners of his lips, making him look even more like a demon.

Suddenly—Bai Xiang felt a massive surge of malice sweep across her body. At the same time, the blood-red injector in Evan’s hand shattered, a tuft of crimson light bursting out of it and merging with his splitting corpse. In the blink of an eye, his skin swelled up with blood blisters, his clothing tearing apart under the strain.

Shff, shff, shff!

Bai Xiang didn’t choose to retreat. Instead, she swung her blade at close range, releasing a shredding wind funnel, grinding the twisted corpse into a smear of blood just as she would grind a demon beast.

But it didn’t change the end result much. That mass of blood slurry, transformed from Bruce Evan, continued to writhe—a huge droplet flattening itself out over the ground, spreading until it merged into the blood-mud outline sketched at her feet.

The next instant, a vast and terrifying qi presence rose from the plain. The enormous outline of the ancient demon seemed to come alive as the blood mud of its whole body began wriggling in unison.

He’d already finished it?

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Bai Xiang sprang into the air, rose to mid-height, and frowned down at the changing scene below.

A dull roar rolled over from afar. Looking out into the distance, she saw dust clouds billowing toward her—the endless sea of a demon tide.

From rhinos and elephants to ants and insects, every demon beast that had gathered along the Jing River was charging this way. Their eyes glowed a savage red, and they flung themselves forward without any thought for their lives. The moment they touched the blood-mud outline, their bones and flesh corroded and melted into it, becoming nourishment that fattened the shape. The outlined image grew larger and fuller, swelling from hundreds of meters on each side toward a kilometer in moments, and still swelling.

Bai Xiang had first tried to intercept the demon tide, to at least interfere. But she quickly gave up on the idea.

Tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands—of demon beasts. There was no way she could kill them all.

Narrowing her eyes, she watched the changes, witnessing the ancient demon picture grow more solid as the blood and mud from the demon tide poured in. In the end, it used flesh and blood as its pigment and heaven and earth as its canvas to draw a ferocious visualization image across the desolate land.

The moment the picture was complete, Bai Xiang’s mind shuddered violently.

In her imagination, she seemed to see another scene. The ancient demon in that visualization came to life, as if breaking through from two dimensions into three, arching its body and pushing its head out of the picture.

It was a colossal monster.

Its head alone was nearly a hundred meters across, crowned with a pair of thin, long horns encased in shell. Under the horns bulged fleshy tumorous lobes, each studded with dense, fine holes, and in every hole sat a single, darting eyeball.

Bai Xiang hung motionless in the air, as if her very soul had been stunned, while the giant insect head thrust right up to her. All those eyes on its face turned toward her at once, studying and examining her.

Hm?

A stab of pain shot through her soul. Bai Xiang suddenly felt as though several years had been cut from her lifespan.

What kind of thing… doesn’t even have a mouth on its whole face, feeding with its gaze?

Shi Ling… Shi Ling…

No wonder it could throw sun and moon out of order, plunging day and night into chaos.

Golden light flared in her eyes. Her soul’s anomalous ability surged, and the number of years on her life abruptly froze, no longer ticking down.

—!?

The gigantic insect demon clearly felt the change. The motion of its emergence from the visualization image froze as its curved upper body reared upright, seeming puzzled by what was happening.

“Ancient demon…”

“You don’t seem all that bright.”

The words had barely left her mouth when she swung Feixiang Heaven straight into that forest of eyes.

Scrrrt!

One cut, and Shi Ling’s head was split open by the sword-qi, the line of the cut running all the way down to the middle of its torso before finally slowing.

Scrrt, scrrt, scrrt!

Bai Xiang didn’t stop. Her sword-qi ground the insect’s head into paste. At the same time, the qi-formed giant Buddha appeared behind her, countless arms thrusting out to grasp the insect’s protruding segments, snapping and tearing them off with a series of cracks.

Eee—!

The thing was like a fusion of centipede and millipede. Even after taking such grievous injuries, it didn’t show any sign of flagging. Instead, a high-pitched screech came from the remains of its body, which convulsed and struggled wildly.

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The cry pierced time and space itself, reaching all the way to the Zhen’nan Circuit laboratory. The remaining “B2” containment object vanished in an instant, then reappeared above the battlefield, plummeting down to fuse with the torn body.

The moment that portion of essence blood returned to the main body, the insect demon’s qi presence exploded upward.

With a ripping sound, it hauled another section of body out of the ground-picture—a swelling length of black carapace and raised segments, its knife-like legs packed tight and rippling.

Bai Xiang was still shredding its upper body up ahead, but a sudden sense of danger rose in her chest. She flipped in midair, twisting her body and turning her head just enough to see a newly grown insect head skim past the tip of her nose.

So it did have a mouth.

Its mouth was built like a hinged kettle lid, the entire face full of eyes lifting up in one piece. Underneath were interlocking fangs stretching from the snout all the way down into the throat.

But I clearly sealed its wound.

Completing her full backward turn, Bai Xiang fixed her gaze on the demon. She saw that the new head had split off from a fresh section of its arched body.

So that’s it.

She remembered what Hannah had said when she’d first introduced the B2 containment object.

It was now basically confirmed that the B2 containment object was the essence blood of the ancient demon Shi Ling left in the human world. That essence blood inherited the main body’s divine abilities. Summed up, the four most prominent were “gaze pollution,” “evaporative hallucination,” “mind usurpation,” and “spirit-body division.”

It had the ability of spirit-body division, and now it was being constantly fed by the blood mud below. No wonder it could easily split off new extended limbs.

As for “gaze pollution,” that was probably just a downgraded form of its true major divine ability—

The one she had suffered from the moment they met: “if it sees you, it devours your time.”

That kind of domineering divine power made “gaze pollution” look almost polite.

Boom, boom, boom, boom!

Bai Xiang’s flash of thought lasted only a thousandth of a second. In the next heartbeat, the qi-formed giant Buddha re-coalesced. Countless fists, laced with sword-qi, slammed down on the demon’s carapace, pounding it into shredded blood mud.

Boom—!

The demon’s broken body crashed to the ground, shaking the land.

Its vitality was terrifying. It had no intention of giving up the fight. As it thrashed and heaved, another segment of its body was pulled from the map-picture below. Seen from the air, its total length had already exceeded a kilometer.

Bai Xiang’s qi-formed Buddha phantom was barely a hundred meters in size. Put side by side, it looked small and delicate, only emphasizing how enormous the insect was.

This won’t work.

A prickling warning rose in Bai Xiang’s chest.

In the data Dr. Evan had collected, there was a detailed description of the ancient demon Shi Ling. Its condensed appearance was “a body a thousand zhang long, with hundreds and thousands of belly-feet.”

And a thousand zhang meant…

One zhang was a little over three meters.

A body a thousand zhang long was over a thousand of those—a length of more than three thousand meters. What kind of giant was that supposed to be?

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Realizing this, Bai Xiang’s understanding of “ancient demons” shifted.

They did not exist within physical rules. Their length, their size, their divine abilities were all beyond common worldly imagination and understanding. They were true mythic monsters.

And this one, having devoured so much of the demon tide, was no easier to deal with than the demon tide itself.

Bruce Evan’s guess had been right.

A monster like this, once resurrected, was indeed a catastrophe the federations could not withstand.

All the sword arts and sword moves she currently had were basically meaningless in the face of a body that was both too large and too vigorous in its life force.

Bai Xiang stopped all attacks, her body slowly floating higher as she watched Shi Ling regrow the head she had shredded.

However…

A glint of excitement and resolve flashed in her eyes.

That didn’t mean she had no chance.

Eee—!

With the gap she had given it, the giant insect writhed and reared up, its two heads merging into one. Like a god of time, it raised most of its body into the air, lifting its head to let out a scream.

In an instant, the picture beneath it was bathed in blood-red light. Just like when the blood-sea spring had evolved, formation patterns lit up, and the springs of Zezhou, Qizhou, and the eight Circuits were all shifted here at once, overlapping again and again to form a spiraling, spreading blood abyss.

It was a spectacle grand enough to change heaven and earth. Countless stones were ground to fragments and sucked into the maw of the chasm, and even the clouds above were dyed red.

Faced with this apocalyptic scene, Bai Xiang calmed her mind. She ignored the bloody wind whipping her hair into a frenzy, raised her sword to her chest, and closed her eyes.

She couldn’t be sure whether it was because Shi Ling had just been resurrected or if it was simply its nature, but the thing seemed to run on brute instinct alone.

In other words, it had a very limited understanding of her. It only knew that its previous method no longer worked.

Which gave it only one choice.

Namely…

Vmmm—

Its body coiled like a dragon, the lifted segment entirely suspended in midair as a terrifying change spread over it.

Like mushrooms sprouting caps, the bulging eye-tumors from its head rapidly spread along its entire length. That forest of eyeballs now covered every inch of its body, without a single blind spot. Under this gaze, the earth’s surface crumbled to powder, the sky cracked and broke, and even intangible time—the long river of years—began to corrode.

This was a true “phantom-god” divine ability.

It was no longer just the god of living beings; it was the god of heaven and earth as well, drawing on the soul-power that drifted through the world, the energy that “Daoist Pulings” and federal labs alike had found so hard to harness.

This was a flesh-and-blood body interfering directly with the laws that governed the world’s workings.

Against power like this, all resistance was futile. Trees withered. The demon tide shrank. Mountains, rivers, plants, spirits—living or not, all were the same under this divine art. Their “gods” were fixed and devoured by a single, overwhelming power.

But Bai Xiang was unaffected.

She opened her golden eyes and seemed to see the insect’s gaze drifting around her.

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That gaze was almost tangible—dense golden bugs darting through the air, spreading in concentric golden ripples that washed over all things, washing over her sword and her body.

Something was trying to shake her will.

“Bai Xiang…”

“Xiang’er…”

“Big Sis…”

“Auntie…”

“This dull human world (this dull human world)…”

“Isn’t release better (isn’t release better)…”

Layer upon layer of echoes. Countless voices trying to coax her into letting go.

“Auntie?”

A hazy figure appeared before her eyes.

“Is immortality really that important?”

“Can’t you stop for a moment… and look at me?”

Bai Xiang didn’t waver in the slightest. She gripped her sword tighter, her gaze passing straight through the figure to the space beyond.

“Auntie!” the figure screamed.

“To you—what is immortality?”

Bai Xiang exhaled. “It’s everything.”

With that, she dove straight down. In a flash, she slashed into the demon’s body—not to destroy anything, but as if offering herself as a meal, throwing herself into its gut.

The feeling of corrosion spiked at once, rising at a geometric rate.

But this time, everything went differently.

From the moment the first thread of erosion entered her body, her inner Core on the path of qi turned into a black hole, seizing that invading soul-power and drawing it in without restraint, wildly, beyond all common sense.

It happened so fast that in an instant the vast vortex and all the power it dragged along compressed into a point and sank back into original stillness.

Hoo…

A light breeze brushed her face.

Bai Xiang floated alone in midair, looking down on a world with no aberrations in sight.

Under the drifting ash, there was only the blood abyss.

Only scattered splashes of blood.