Volume 3, Chapter 96 – Dark-Heaven Shinu, Sole Sovereign of All (Double-Length)

So it really came.

She had known they would never let her hear all these secrets for free.

The moment the doors slammed shut, this confrontation had already been decided. Bai Xiang did not waste a single thought on surprise. Her windbreaker billowed and her figure abruptly vanished from where she stood.

“Immeasurable Mahabuddha…” Xuanyi cried a Buddha-name. His deep voice seemed to take on substance as it spread out with the circle of darkness shrouding him, meeting Bai Xiang’s sword-light head-on.

Clang.

The two forces met in midair, ringing like metal on metal, and the impact produced a membrane of compressed air that detonated with a sharp blast.

So he did have some skill after all.

Her probing strike had done nothing. Bai Xiang’s heart sank a little. She knew that if he dared to raise a hand against her, he had to be fully prepared.

He should know her battle record.

Whether he had heard from the Feathering Sect that she had defeated five Divine Fetus cultivators and Suzhen Sword Head Lu Qingning in a row, or knew that after discovering the Hidden Field Orifice she had fought the “False Sword Lord” Qin Wuyang to a standstill and even suppressed him for half the fight.

Even if he knew none of that, her street battle with the Tyrant Warrior two days earlier had been completely out in the open. The traces of that fight were there for anyone to examine.

Given how deeply the Mahabuddha lineage had infiltrated all of Luohou, whether through rumor or satellite footage, they should have been able to estimate what level of power she possessed, at least get a rough idea.

Under those conditions, Xuanyi still dared to take it on himself to trap her in the great hall and tell her secrets, and to try to “persuade” her and then move against her when that failed. That meant he was extremely confident in his methods, so from the moment she struck, Bai Xiang did not dare be careless.

The situation now was nothing like when she fought Lu Qingning.

Even leaving aside the point that sheer numbers were meaningless without reaching a certain realm, that had been inside Great Yu. Golden Cicada Temple, the Feathering Sect, and other forces were all being pressed down by the court and did not dare lift their heads. The power they could wield inside the country was clearly not comparable to what they had here.

Then there was the matter of time.

She already suspected that the Mahabuddha was a real living being, and that like Golden-Light Treasure-King Buddha it came from an ancient Illusory Realm.

As time went on, the constraints of severed Heaven-and-Earth pathways were slowly weakening. That much could be inferred from the way Blood Sea kept expanding and extending its influence.

It followed that as this process deepened, those mighty beings from the ancient Illusory Realms would also gradually regain influence over the main world. It was entirely possible for them to send in powerhouses on par with Qin Wuyang or even Chu Weiping.

Or simply, as their own “influence” increased, to temporarily strengthen originally weaker followers up to that level.

Like Xuanyi right now. He felt very strange to her.

Locked on by Bai Xiang’s ever-vigilant sense of qi presence, his realm was at most Purple Core, perhaps around his seventh Core tribulation.

He was not even a Divine Fetus, yet he was using that eerie black qi to meet her Core qi-origin head-on. That clearly had nothing to do with his own cultivation realm and meant some other power was helping him.

In almost the same instant, Bai Xiang thought of that wisp of black qi produced when she recited the Dark-Heaven Scripture of Saving the Suffering and Delivering the World.

Was that black qi possessing him?

When she crushed that black qi she had glimpsed star-filled cosmos and heard the screams of living beings, mixed with hatred and venom. Could that have been the Mahabuddha’s true body, a strand of its descent?

The thought had barely formed when Bai Xiang saw Xuanyi lift his head and give her a faint smile.

The old monk was a Luohou “barbarian” with slightly dark skin, but his white brows and beard gave his face a rather kindly look. Yet this smile pulled his lips into a warped curve, like an inverted crescent moon in the dark, and red light suddenly flashed through his eyes.

!?

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Bai Xiang was in the middle of suppressing the black qi and facing it down when a spike of warning shot through her heart. She shifted a step to the side ahead of time.

Zzzt.

The next moment, a blood-red beam lanced out from Xuanyi’s eye sockets, nostrils, and open mouth all at once. It nearly brushed her shoulder as it tore through the air, sliced through the walls and ceiling like a beam saber in a sci-fi movie, and cut the entire great hall in half.

What in the world…

To manipulate demonic power like this, he actually…

She had no time to marvel. A new jolt of danger thudded in her chest. She looked up and saw a massive shadow blotting out the light overhead.

Bricks and stone were already pattering down. The hall was about to collapse. The torch flames all around leapt wildly, together revealing a “giant of black light” slowly rising in the center, its shadow cast over the multicolored ancient murals and writhing constantly.

“I am asking you one last time!” Xuanyi’s thunderous voice boomed from within the giant of black light. “Imperial Daughter Xiang, will you convert?”

Bai Xiang said nothing. She simply drew Feixiang Heaven back and held it upright before her, letting her eyes gently close.

“Ignorance.” Xuanyi’s voice sounded even more furious now, as if he could not control his emotions and was gradually being led by the power he wielded.

Shenming Sword…

“Then I will borrow the World-Honored One’s strength to seize you first. When the heavenly path is open, I will hand you over to the Xuanhua Exalted One.”

…Empty-Imagination Thundercry.

Boom.

A sharp ring in her ears, then a sky-splitting roar.

The Hall of Five-Colored Glazed Treasures where they stood was shattered in an instant by terrifying force. All the brick walls were ground into dust by colliding waves of vibration and black light. In the grinding of white and black, everything crumbled apart bit by bit.

“Ah!”

“My ears… my ears!”

Not far from the rear hall many tourists were still visiting. They could not escape the impact of the battle. Without warning the tremendous sound shocked them into ringing deafness, and they fell as the ground heaved. When they looked up, all they could see was dust billowing from the explosion.

Bai Xiang’s figure came gradually into view through the smoke. Her peaked cap had been torn away by the first wave of impact. Her black windbreaker had been shredded into ragged strips by the violent membranes of air. Only her tight combat suit had held up; it still looked intact.

“Heh…” She let out a breath of turbid air and simply tore off the ruined windbreaker. Sword in her right hand, she looked toward the battlefield and, as expected, saw Xuanyi’s figure emerge as well.

But in the very next moment, her brow twitched as she sensed more strange presences from behind.

This was a completely different kind of danger. Air and Heaven-and-Earth primordial qi had become true water in that instant. Every informational trace her body could receive was sending her warnings, yet she still could not see exactly where the threat lay.

Under her gaze, Xuanyi pressed his palms together and began to chant.

“Yi ma mai a ru nuo ke…”

“Po jia fan ye na mo jia…”

One voice chanting scripture, a hundred voices in response.

Gradually, many monks walked out of the smoke. Like Xuanyi, their eyes were closed, their hands pressed together, their lips moving as they recited the scripture.

And it was not just them. All the victims in the surrounding area caught by the blast were included. As they heard the chanting, it was as if someone had hit a switch. One by one their expressions went dull and vacant. Black qi-sha rose on their brows, and they too began to chant in unison.

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“Yi ma mai a ru nuo ke! Po jia fan ye na mo jia!”

Thus have I heard: the World-Honored joins with the Dao, and all beings meet their destined calamity.

Thus have I heard: Dark Heaven turns in samsara, and all living things are reborn.

Thus have I heard: a hundred temperings in disaster, sinking into the sea of suffering.

Thus have I heard: transcend the mortal world and return to the other shore.

The surging recitation swept over her like a demonic chorus. It did not only try to force its way into the membrane Bai Xiang had sketched with the Vibration Art, like squeezing a bubble of water to force a way in. It also manifested outward as something almost tangible. In her eyes, the sound turned into characters of black qi, scripture sigils that wrapped around her like chains and ropes, trying to bind her and convert her.

The illusion she had seen when she crushed the black qi descended over her again. In a moment of daze, she once more saw a hazy cosmos unfolding in the darkness, Buddhist scripture and giant eyes flowing through space. It was as if a thousand, ten thousand voices were exhorting her to convert to the “truth” and give up the path she walked.

“Imperial Daughter Xiang…”

A thunderous voice reverberated through her consciousness.

“For Xuan Venerable’s sake, I will not pursue your earlier offenses.”

“As long as you are willing to convert, to enter my door and chant scripture and intone the Dharma, I will confer upon you the title of Black Lotus Saintess, give you mastery of Dark-Heaven’s creation, and let you ferry all beings’ suffering…”

Oh.

To be so belittled and insulted, yet Bai Xiang did not even get angry. Her first reaction was that this thing had guts. It had already suffered at her hands once, yet it still dared try to use phantom-spirit power to taint her.

Who gave you the courage to reach for my thoughts?

Her intent surged, and the absolute priority of her soul-abilities activated in an instant. The mysterious consciousness that had invaded and tried to pollute her mind and spirit was immediately reversed and refined by her, and her soul strengthened by one more step for free.

“Impudence!”

As if wronged beyond endurance, Xuanyi let out a shrill scream. His eyes flared with bloody light again as he charged toward her wrapped in a vast tide of black qi, slamming into the half-transparent great Buddha formed from Bai Xiang’s transforming qi.

Boom.

The two terrifying forces collided at the center. The membranes of air swept out and rebounded in opposite directions, hurling bricks and debris into the air and shaking the earth all over again.

“To dare offend the World-Honored One!” Xuanyi’s furious shout echoed from within the black-qi giant. “You must be suppressed!”

Boom, boom, boom, boom.

The qi-formed great Buddha waved its arms of sword-qi and hammered at the giant of black qi in a frenzy, and the giant answered in kind, growing the same number of black-qi arms, each returning blows just as fiercely. Not a single strike slipped through.

It was clearly demonic power, yet he could allocate and use it to this degree, enough to match her Core qi-origin in raw force.

Maintaining the flow of qi-origin into the giant Buddha, Bai Xiang still could not help a flicker of surprise.

Feeling more closely, the quality of the demonic power was still inferior to the refined qi-origin she had condensed. After the first clash it would be shredded and torn apart by her qi-origin.

But he was relying on an extremely advanced method of allocation that let the scattered demonic power and aura rapidly turn back, re-condense, and pour into each new blow of the black-qi giant. The two sides were fighting to a draw. For the moment, she could not break the giant.

She had meant to feel out that allocation method in detail and at least control the giant Buddha so it did not just punch, but used a few more techniques. At that moment, however, a sharp pain stabbed through her mind. A huge, chaotic stream of memory forced its way into her consciousness.

She froze for a second, and the black-qi giant seized the opening. Hundreds and thousands of its arms grabbed the Buddha’s extended arms all at once and, with a wrenching pull, tore them apart from the middle.

Her center lay completely exposed.

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The head of the black-qi giant roiled with dark smoke, then repeated the “laser” divine ability Xuanyi had used earlier. Fierce beams sprayed from all seven apertures at once, boring through the outer defenses of the giant Buddha and blasting Bai Xiang’s body out of it.

Zzzt.

Bang bang bang, crackle, crash…

A sweep of red light cut through city blocks and streets beyond counting. The impact sent Bai Xiang flying, smashing her through wall after wall of shops and leaving thick smoke rolling wherever she passed.

But her thoughts were no longer on the fight.

Even hit head-on by the red light, even with internal injuries and bleeding inside her body, her mind was fully immersed in the torrent of memory flooding in, drinking it down and comprehending it as if starved.

This was the memory of Dark-Heaven Shinu.

The memory was incomplete, which made sense. She had not destroyed its true body, after all. At most, through the Dark-Heaven Scripture of Saving the Suffering and Delivering the World, black-qi avatars had been formed in human hosts, and only by using temporary nodes like Xuanyi to gather the nearby black qi could it descend briefly into the main world.

There were intermittent images in it. Most were of watching stars turn in a boundless black cosmos, not so different from the hallucinatory visions Bai Xiang had seen while reciting the scripture.

But now there were many more “monks” in the scenes. Each had an indescribably strange outer form, so grotesque that you could hardly even call them human or demon. They were more like “aberrant growths that had drifted free of gravity in deep space and evolved without restraint.”

They all faced the viewpoint in adoration. Ten thousand voices blended into a Dark-Heaven sutra. In that tide of sound, Bai Xiang felt her awareness constantly leaping. She seemed able to control each of those monsters freely, to use ten thousand sets of eyes to peer, to piece together, to glimpse the Mahabuddha’s true form hidden in the depths of space.

Yet she still could not see it clearly.

Obviously, for these lower beings, its power was too great. Even looking with their naked eyes, all they could see was a mass of shadow hiding in the dark, and at best countless scarlet eyes set into that shadow, like red giant stars flowing in hazy birth and destruction, a shifting abstract painting that made one’s stomach turn.

“Since you have entered my door, from this day forward you will no longer have any connection with the Golden Light.”

The thunderous voice resounded through the cosmos, somehow spreading even where there should theoretically only be vacuum.

“Take on the form of Dark Heaven, and forget the way of the Golden Light…”

Her consciousness jolted and Bai Xiang snapped her eyes open.

All around was gloom, as if she were buried in rubble. A moment later a huge force crashed down from above. She raised her sword on instinct to block. The instant the blade met black qi, a membrane burst outward, tearing apart all the junk behind her, shattering a building down the street with the effect of “hitting a cow through a mountain.”

Boom.

The black qi smashed down. Bai Xiang turned her head aside and slipped past it, then lunged straight into the black mass, a transparent membrane of qi forming over her skin and slicing it open.

Slash.

White light flashed. With one rising cut she cleaved most of the black-qi giant apart, exposing Xuanyi’s stunned expression. How could she possibly do this?

The backward people of Yu, even with help from some ancient great power in secret and the transcendent methods that came with that, should only have a very shallow grasp of such forces.

What he was using was clearly the orthodox Dark-Heaven Dharma personally granted by the World-Honored One. How could it lose to her in a direct clash?

Before Xuanyi could work it out, Bai Xiang crashed into his open chest. The force from her shoulder and hips flowed through to her lower legs, and the ground split open. It felt as if the land for a thousand li around them shook with that single impact.

Not good.

Xuanyi’s eyes bulged. In a moment of daze he seemed to see a blazing Great Sun rise from the flat earth. Against that backdrop a gigantic silhouette turned sideways and hurled itself at him. The force of the impact first formed a mountain-cleaving axe, then shifted into a giant sword just like Feixiang Heaven. It was clearly going to split him in two.

A wet crack.

A roaring splash.

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By the time he realized what was happening, the blow had already landed.

As Bai Xiang struck, she swung her arm in a full arc, folding the sword’s sharp edge into the impact. A violent, half-transparent sword-qi punched through Xuanyi’s brow, dragging his bones and organs out through a gap in his back. At the same time it sliced the black-qi giant apart, blasting a cloud of blood and gore from its rear.

Even like this, Xuanyi still did not die. The eyes of the black-qi giant lit red once more, and the entire city seemed to fall under its control. Countless people froze in place, black qi-sha welled up on their brows, and they began chanting. Infinite black qi surged out of the void and poured into the giant, filling it with power again and again.

Xuanyi himself benefited from this strange change. His split body closed together at once. Joy and ferocity twisted his face as he threw out both arms, trying to lock Bai Xiang in an embrace, clearly mad enough to discard himself entirely to help the World-Honored One suppress her.

Bang.

His jaw jolted and Xuanyi felt himself fly.

Bai Xiang’s kick sent him up, and she did not stop there. She dropped into a squat and drove her full strength into the ground, stomping out a crater riddled with cracks. Like a shell fired from a cannon, she shot into the air and lashed out again, her leg smashing into the center of his chest and stomach.

Splat.

Xuanyi spewed blood and chunks of organ. In slow motion he lifted his head bit by bit. There was mocking laughter in his eyes as he looked at Bai Xiang.

“It is useless…”

He muttered.

“You have no idea what you are opposing…”

Then his eyes flew wide. His pupils shrank to pinpricks.

Because he saw Bai Xiang hanging high above, taking up a strange stance.

Her left leg folded up and rested under her right knee. Her whole body formed a half-lotus seated sword-meditation posture. Her hands each formed a peculiar mudra, the bases of her palms pressed together. Her right index finger pointed to the sky, her left index finger pointed down to the earth.

This was…

Heaven above, earth below, only I am supreme.

The supreme art of Golden Light Temple, precursor of Golden Cicada Temple, the legendary Great Golden-Light Seal and Sole-Supreme Seal, why would it…

And where was her sword.

In a haze, Xuanyi felt his consciousness begin to dissolve.

He glanced down and saw Feixiang Heaven nailed deep into the ruins. Below, a sword scar had appeared that nearly sliced half the city apart.

What an imperial daughter.

What a “only I am supreme.”

So there really was a sword that could surpass thought.

So the moment I saw it, I had already been struck.

With that last flicker of understanding, Xuanyi and the black-qi giant both dissolved into the air.

Only Bai Xiang remained, seated cross-legged in midair, looking down over the drifting smoke of the human world below.