Volume 3, Chapter 60 – Epiphany

The peril of this battle was the greatest Bai Xiang had faced since her rebirth.

It was the first time something had pushed her this far. Even now, she still wasn’t sure whether her duel with “Shiling” had actually taken place in reality, or if it had only been the influence of “Illusory God,” something that ought to be counted as a battle of consciousness.

Because the battle had started the moment she saw that other “field of vision.” It had looked too much like a hallucination, and everything that happened afterward was merely an extension of that moment.

“Maybe it was real, maybe it was illusion.”

Murmuring, Bai Xiang’s hair fluttered in the wind as she lowered her head and gazed down at the blood abyss below.

It was over a hundred meters across, and inside the dark red rim lay rotting flesh, belching out purple-red mist.

This was no longer some minor thing like a “spring eye.” It could be counted as a true abyss.

If not for the fact that this thing existed, appearing on the real ground—happening in exactly the same way as it had in that hallucinatory field of vision—Bai Xiang truly wouldn’t have been able to pin down the nature of the battle.

Physical collision and merging of spirit and soul—she guessed the two had come together.

The three-kilometer giant worm had been real.

But it might not have existed in the time that had just passed.

To put it bluntly, given the kind of pressure “Shiling” had shown, the fighting power it had displayed was subpar.

Something that could devour spacetime, that could even shift and stack space out of thin air, was no longer something you could describe with words like how big or how long it was, how strong it was, or what divine abilities it possessed.

It was a “rule,” something that touched on the laws by which all things in the world operated.

Its power was enough to interfere with spacetime. If it had been the complete “Shiling” recorded in history, Bai Xiang wouldn’t just have been unable to use tricks; even in a pure physical clash, she wouldn’t have had any chance of winning.

So this should have been an incomplete demonic body.

The chain of logic went: based on the series of intel Hannah had described, one could infer that the ancient demons had indeed truly existed. But all traces of their existence had abruptly cut off around 540 million years ago. Either some mass extinction similar to an asteroid impact had erupted, or, from another level

——a power from the xuanhuan level of reality had interfered with them and forced them into hiding.

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Maybe they had slept for ages and died out… but maybe a portion of the ancient demons had passed their legacy down and had been trying all along to seek out the traces left by prehistoric civilizations.

With that speculation as a foundation, Bai Xiang tended to place the “divine-vein demons” in the role of “ancient demon inheritors.”

If not “inheritors,” then “scouts.” She leaned toward believing that the foreign divine-vein demons were guiding Bruce Evan into resurrecting the ancient demons, planning to use his hand to create chaos.

In reality, the essence blood of “Shiling” had only been that little. Even with the resurrection property of the blood-sea mist, which had allowed that essence blood to multiply rapidly in the real world and even devour hundreds of thousands of demon tides, it had still not been enough to fully revive the historical “Shiling.”

That was why, in the mental images, it had seemed so desperate. Even when Bai Xiang stopped suppressing it midway, it had never managed to pull its body entirely out of the Earth Visualization Chart.

It wasn’t that it didn’t want to; it just didn’t have enough energy. In the mental images, that had manifested as the inability to condense any further limbs. It could only maintain that posture.

In reality, it had shifted the spring eyes over to form this blood abyss.

In consciousness, it had manifested astonishing divine abilities and might, directly engaging Bai Xiang in a fight to the death.

This fighting style of its… had been an active incursion into her consciousness.

It looked like it was seeking its own death, but soul-type abilities didn’t have thoughts.

During this process, if Bai Xiang hadn’t actively realized this fact, her soul ability would never have taken the initiative to strike out and destroy “Shiling.”

If Bai Xiang hadn’t seen through the oddities in it, feeling that its performance was just a bit too absurd, the outcome of this battle would truly have been hard to predict.

Shiling’s Illusory God divine ability was too strong. It had truly reached the point of remolding the world and making illusion indistinguishable from reality.

Even at the very end, when Bai Xiang had already guessed the truth, this thing had still been able to simulate and conjure up all sorts of heart demons.

If she had hesitated even the tiniest bit, the ending might not have been the same.

At the last moment, she saw through the falsehood, took her own body as a sword, and with a resolve to perish together tried to slash into the worm’s belly and devour the other side… and she had indeed gotten her wish.

In reality, Shiling’s physical carrier had vanished. She couldn’t be sure whether it had been drained dry and shattered, or fallen into this great pit of an abyss. But its spirit—its soul power that had finally recovered a little with such difficulty—had been completely seized by Bai Xiang. Not only did it replenish in one breath the lifespan that had been devoured from her before, but on top of the little over a hundred years she’d had left, it had leapt up another chunk, straight to over a hundred and fifty years.

Was that little?

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Bai Xiang didn’t think so.

Silently recalling all the dangers in this battle, feeling the surging vitality and blood in her whole body, she suddenly let out a long, quiet breath.

Not counting her own cultivation, only outside forces. Only counting “turning an external Aspect existence into lifespan that in turn fed back into her body.”

In her life, this was the first such case.

A breakthrough from zero to one meant that her pursuit had finally locked onto a concrete goal.

It was a sigh of emotion.

Emotion at the fact that “in the end, one can gain something.”

And it was joy.

Joy at having her wishes fulfilled.

As complex emotions surged through her soul, Bai Xiang, on a sudden surge of inspiration once more, grasped from this harvest an even deeper truth of life.

“The flesh is the boat, the soul is the person.”

“The flesh is the candle, the soul is the flame.”

“The boat is ceaselessly corroded by the long river of years, and the candle steadily shrinks as it burns. What flows away in this process is all lifespan.”

“Then lifespan should be power.”

“Lifespan flows away with time, which means power flows away with it.”

“If you expressed the power a living being could use to interfere with the world as a specific numerical value, it would definitely not exceed its Heaven-ordained allotment—that is, its lifespan.”

With her mind running clear, Bai Xiang suddenly understood why the human race found the pursuit of longevity so difficult.

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If this was the truth of the world, then this was a lock Heaven had carved onto the body of the species.

Heaven’s will, the universe, rules, nature… however you chose to understand it, in the end it was a lock, a Heaven-ordained lock.

It wasn’t only carved at the cellular level; it also included the soul—the dao of Heaven had locked the upper limit of the human race’s soul growth.

If she, Bai Xiang, had never come to this world.

If her special soul had not broken that limit.

Then perhaps no one with a Heaven-ordained lifespan of more than 150 years would ever have appeared here.

This was also tied to allotment and choice.

For example, some elderly people were especially long-lived. Even without practicing martial arts or forging swords, they could still surpass a hundred years of lifespan. That was when “choice” hadn’t matched up with their “Heaven-ordained allotment.”

Because this part of the information was completely unknown—no one could, at the age of twenty, predict when they would die. External calamity, internal illness… there were so many variables when it came to life and death that no one could calculate them all.

But the path of qi could…

The Core on the path of qi was something Bai Xiang had created by referencing the “golden core realm” in the xuanhuan novels she’d read in her previous life.

She had felt that the Core on the path of qi should possess abilities similar to those of a proper golden core realm—that is, “when the core is formed, one knows Heaven’s mandate,” “with a single core swallowed into the belly, my fate is mine and not Heaven’s,” that it should be able to foresee one’s own lifespan… and so it truly did.

It possessed those abilities because “she felt it should.”

This was entirely because a world of its own had formed inside her body; because of her soul ability, there had been born what had seemed at the time not all that conspicuous, but now, in hindsight, was an utterly absurd, super-level miracle.

“In novels, when taking disciples, they test for spiritual roots. I’ll just test people’s allotted lifespans in the future.”

“But you have to have formed a Core just to get started. That’s a pretty high threshold for taking disciples…”

After digesting her insights, Bai Xiang picked up her sword and calmly looked at the hand with which she held it.

Known: Heaven-ordained lifespan = upper limit of power.

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With her lifespan jumping to 150, this restless feeling… maybe I really should go find a place to go into seclusion and cultivate right now?

A bit hesitant, Bai Xiang wasn’t sure whether she really ought to just leave this abyss below her alone.

Just then, a long sword rolled up out of the surging blood mist and flew over.

Its style was extremely similar to Feixiang Heaven, only broader and longer. It drifted swiftly to a stop before Bai Xiang, and a soul phantom appeared upon it.

“Amitabha…”

A familiar face—it was Chan Master Daokong.

This sword, meanwhile, was the third Zhenyuan sword embryo Bai Xiang had encountered, probably brought here by Dr. Evan.

“You had a chance to run. Why did you come back?” Bai Xiang fixed her gaze on Daokong’s face, feeling that his mental state was a bit too calm.

“This poor monk has never met you, Benefactor, but upon seeing the sword in your hand…”

Chan Master Daokong glanced at Feixiang Heaven, then closed his eyes and said, “I knew then that you and this poor monk were bound by fate.”

“What fate?” Bai Xiang raised a brow.

“Don’t misunderstand.” Sensing her killing intent, Chan Master Daokong said, “This poor monk knows he is no good person. Now that the situation is clear… some of my obsessions I have already let go of.”

“But letting go doesn’t mean there is no hope.”

“This poor monk knows where another sword embryo is being kept.”

At this point, he opened his eyes and looked at Bai Xiang.

“…Benefactor, are you not tempted?”