Volume 3, Chapter 113 – Hidden Heart (Two-in-One)

“Was the one I sensed the young lady Xiang in person?”

The gloomy monk saw Bai Xiang, his brows easing as he stared at her with bright, intent eyes and asked.

Who is this one supposed to be now?

Bai Xiang sifted through the memories she had plundered since arriving in Luohou Kingdom and confirmed that none of them contained this man’s face.

But it did not matter—before, she might have set her doubts aside because of that. Now, however, she had comprehended the Taishang Induction.

She was still far from the ideal state of “feeling every blade of grass and tree,” but it was more than enough to observe and read this man’s micro-expressions.

Especially since Bai Xiang had just lured and slain Daokong’s true spirit and thereby seized partial control over the Ranyan Demon Kingdom. In her perception, this tree-hollow space had shifted from strange to familiar. The wandering heaven-and-earth energies here moved under her fingers like water, pushing and flowing around the gloomy monk’s body and, without his slightest awareness, delivering every minute change on his surface straight to her.

From this observation, it was obvious: he did not come with good intentions.

His facial expression had indeed relaxed somewhat when he saw her. That much was true. But under his robes, the outline of his muscles remained tightly tensed. From the moment he stepped in, that had never changed.

And his acting was not up to par either.

Bai Xiang had used this same method earlier to observe Daokong’s true spirit and had not found the slightest flaw in that performance. It had truly seemed as if he was sincerely thinking for her sake.

The true spirit had tripped and fallen only because what it schemed for was beyond its capacity.

Leaving aside the information gap between it and Bai Xiang—that she could, by way of the Soul-Refining Method and Blood-Transforming Method, infer its general background while it had no way of knowing she had refined not one but three sword embryos.

Just from the fact that its goal was to enter Bai Xiang’s inner body-scape and seize her, the end-game alone had doomed it to death.

Compared to Daokong’s true spirit, this gloomy monk had far more telltale micro-expressions.

As he spoke, his eyelids twitched three times in total. His lips trembled twice in an unnatural way. His face was stiff, and the veins on his neck bulged slightly without his control.

Such micro-expressions and physical state could mean only one thing: he had never come here to “meet” Bai Xiang at all. He had known exactly who she was from the start and had walked in already carrying the intent to kill.

In that case, there was no need to waste words on him.

Bai Xiang tried to draw on the heaven-and-earth energy. There were no storm clouds answering her call inside this tree-hollow space, but in that wide expanse of spatial rifts linked in the center—in those scenes of the Ranyan Demon Kingdom—clouds did gather, with purple-blue lightning flashing from time to time.

With her finger-gestures summoning, bolts of lightning were drawn out from the Ranyan Demon Kingdom’s Illusory Realm. Under the gloomy monk’s—in truth, Huali’s—stunned gaze, they slammed toward him.

I was only testing her a little. How did that turn into actual attacks?

He could not understand how he had been exposed.

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He had been cautious in all his past contacts with others, to the point of never showing anyone this face.

But there was no point fixating on that now. The reason he had come in intending to test Bai Xiang in the first place was that he feared her strength—he and that Shenwu Immortal Dynasty’s national preceptor Ji Chang had followed the rocky abyss down together. The series of fortress ruins they had passed on the way proved not only that Bai Xiang was powerful, but that her means and temperament were brutally domineering.

No time to worry about anything else now. Better to capture this woman first.

“Master Ji!” Huali growled, both hands catching the falling thunder. In an instant several figures flashed out from behind him.

One of them was Master Hua’an, and another was none other than “Golden-Halo Adept” Ji Chang. At this moment he was not only controlling Hua’an alone. As he flung his wide sleeves out, the many monks he had slain with the golden halo curse outside were thrown one by one from his sleeves, all at once snapping their eyes open.

They were long dead. Now they did not even count as living beings, but cursed corpses controlled by Ji Chang’s secret art.

Those cursed corpses had already been tempered once by the golden halo. Their skin was far tougher. Under Ji Chang’s command they gathered to help Huali withstand the thunder. Working together, they barely managed to keep from being shattered.

Are these things simply that thick-skinned, or is the Ranyan Demon Kingdom’s heaven-and-earth energy too thin, making this kind of drawing-out not very effective?

Seeing this, Bai Xiang could not help frowning.

The two men across from her were treating her as if she were some great calamity, while she, thanks to the Jade Spirit method, still had the mind to think about cultivation matters in the middle of combat.

She did not recognize the gloomy monk or Ji Chang, but she did recognize Master Hua’an, and with one glance she could tell something was wrong with him. He looked to have lost his self, turned into a puppet by some evil art.

With Hua’an as evidence and most of the newcomers being monks… there was no need to ask. These had to be the remnants of Golden Cicada Temple come knocking, aiming either at her personally or hoping to take the Ranyan Demon Kingdom.

Their methods and styles differed. The gloomy monk had already drawn the sword from his back, his aura clearly that of a Sword Dao practitioner. The thin-necked Daoist, however, did not rely on a sword. He used demonic power to manifest a variety of divine arts and methods instead.

This trait was very similar to the “envoys from the upper realms” that appeared in Daokong’s true spirit’s memories. Based on Bai Xiang’s experience and the collected information, this so-called upper realm also took “demonic power” as the main energy in its cultivation.

Demonic power came from the Void Tribulation.

There might not be any precise historical record, but many “upper realm envoys” firmly believed that the very first mighty one, the first great demon among the myriad worlds, had shed its skin and transformed only after comprehending something from the Void Tribulation.

The Void Tribulation had altered the original structure of heaven-and-earth energy, breeding pollution and demonic power. Creatures that discovered this had, in turn, founded various cultivation systems based on it.

But whatever the system, its initial driving force was demonic power.

First one converted and used demonic power, controlled it, and only after going further would one attempt to use demonic power as the medium to communicate with the drifting heaven-and-earth energy outside.

This was similar to Bai Xiang’s own research. Perhaps there truly was some unseen guidance in the dark. The difference lay in the fact that only she had refined that wisp of inner body-scape origin qi.

Even if the cultivators beyond the passageway were far ahead of her in other methods, that remained true.

Take the Sun-Chasing Scripture, for example. It was a pure body-forging method that spoke not of demonic power but only of training flesh, blood, muscles, and bones.

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The cultivators on that side called the system built on demonic power “Dao-Void methods” and kept it separate from body cultivation, artifact-forging, and other paths. It really did look like a fully-fledged cultivation world straight out of a fantasy tale.

But in all the memories she had gathered, there was indeed not one person who had cultivated an inner body-scape origin qi like Bai Xiang.

That meant that even counting the tens of thousands of Illusory Realms beyond the passageway, the path of qi that Bai Xiang had created was still one of a kind.

It might also possess some unique advantages.

All that thinking took less than a second in the real world. Bai Xiang’s gaze flicked to the golden collar on Ji Chang’s neck. Her figure blurred into afterimages. An instant later she appeared in front of Huali and brought her sword crashing down at his head.

Clang—

Though Huali had heard from many different sources that Bai Xiang was formidable, he had never experienced it for himself and still held onto a sliver of wishful thinking. He had not thought he would fail to withstand even one direct clash. When his blade met Feixiang Heaven, he felt a tremendous force surge into him in the form of “vibration”. His wrist went numb, and the Green Lantern Sword in his grip flew out of his hand. He had actually been disarmed on the very first move.

What kind of sword art is this?

Huali was horrified. Before he could think further, he saw Bai Xiang dip her head and slam forward. A blazing red sun exploded in his vision. With the rising of that glorious Great Sun, it was as if a sky-cleaving giant axe chopped down, slamming into his left shoulder and carving away his left arm along with a good chunk of his torso.

This imperial daughter—how can her skill be this terrifying!?

Not only Huali but even Ji Chang, still chanting incantations at the side, could not help the wild twitching of his eyelids.

With a woman this violent… no wonder His Highness gave me the Golden Wheel Talisman.

Bai Xiang’s gaze locked onto Huali. Her body swept through the air with a sideways kick. She had meant to drive a heel into his solar plexus and smash through what remained of his body to finish him off. In the next instant, however, a figure darted forward like a human shield and blocked the blow.

It was Master Hua’an.

Bai Xiang’s lashes lowered slightly. Master Hua’an had not only given her her name in this life. According to Xiang Xian, the only reason she had had a precious pill to eat back then was because Hua’an had gone out of his way to send her an eight-hundred-year-old treasure material. She could not simply ignore this karma.

She could only change her target.

Twisting her hips, her long legs wrapped in the battlesuit scythed sideways like a black wind-axe. The wind pressure alone made Huali’s heart pound with fear.

Seizing the hard-won chance to breathe, he grabbed his severed left arm and slapped it back into place, fitting it together like a toy. From the cross-section of his inner bone and marrow a stinking black mud suddenly surged out.

The mud turned into a hazy black glow and mist on contact with the air, wrapping around him like the Black-Heaven Dharma Aspect Xuan Yi had once summoned. Two giant hands of the Dharma Aspect reached from either side, clearly intending to squeeze Bai Xiang into its palms.

Bai Xiang kept her gaze locked on Huali. All her Qi-Origin roared and surged, turning into a giant Buddha of sword-Qi. She spread her hands and interlaced its fingers with the Black-Heaven Dharma Aspect’s.

The clash was like a wrestling match, a momentary deadlock. But soon enough the Buddha overwhelmed the Black-Heaven Dharma Aspect.

The link between this Illusory Realm and the outside world was weak to begin with—never mind that this was an Illusory Realm inside another Illusory Realm. This Dharma Aspect had no vitality at all. It looked more like Huali was actively driving it rather than it being controlled by Mo Buddha.

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“Ji Chang!” Huali’s furious roar came from within the Dharma Aspect.

He could not hold out much longer.

This move was supposed to have a second stage. He had originally planned to gather the monks and have them offer up their parasites, each of them summoning a Black-Heaven Dharma Aspect and merging them into his, so his power would surge for a short time.

But the monks had already been killed outside by Ji Chang. Refined into cursed corpses, they no longer answered Huali’s commands. He had nowhere to borrow strength from now, and could only rely on Ji Chang’s support.

“Coming, coming!” Ji Chang’s shrill voice rang out as his body blurred into an afterimage. He first drove a fist toward the middle of Bai Xiang’s back, chanting all the while. The massive golden collar on his neck suddenly exploded into a cloud of tiny fragments.

Bai Xiang naturally sensed the threat. She turned, sword raised, and hacked apart a golden-collar shard flying straight at her. In the next heartbeat she twisted half her body and swung up her right leg, smashing it directly into Ji Chang’s fist.

It was not that she had suddenly taken to fighting with her legs. It was that the Fleet-Movement chapter of the Sun-Chasing Scripture was in effect.

She could suppress the itching in her legs with her soul-ability, but the discomfort never went away. Just as normal people would scratch where they itched or even pound it to create pain, Bai Xiang also felt that urge and favored using her legs and feet to collide with others.

Ji Chang’s eyes bulged as he watched his jade-like fist twist, snap, and even be shoved back into his wrist under her kick. His whole body was booted away.

Bang.

Only then did the explosion ring out. Bai Xiang glanced sidelong into the air.

The Daoist himself was not much of a threat. What mattered were those scattered golden halos.

Dao-Void methods and Great Yu’s demonic human cultivation were similar in some ways. Both required passing body tribulations and completing Nine Turns.

If humans could imitate demons to pass tribulations, who said demons could not imitate other demons?

At heart, it was nothing more than the weak learning and copying from the strong. The principle was the same.

The difference was that Dao-Void methods, after the Nine Turns, still had to undergo a tempering by “Void Lightning Tribulation.” Only after surviving that could the cultivator freely shift between chosen physical forms, and from then gain the ability to draw on heaven-and-earth energy.

When the Daoist entered, Bai Xiang had clearly felt heaven-and-earth energy twist for a moment. That meant that even if he had not yet survived the Void Lightning Tribulation, he was at least a powerful Nine-Turn body-tribulation demon cultivator. At that level, he was comparable to the old idea of a human Sword Lord—definitely stronger than Xuan Yi or Qin Wuyang.

But he could not fully exert himself here.

Bai Xiang had already sensed, when she first drew down thunder from heaven-and-earth energy, that the energy here was quite scarce. What remained had largely shifted into her hands along with the change in control over the Illusory Realm.

In terms of their understanding of drawing on energy, the two sides were roughly even. That single point of control had become a crucial weight on the scales. Most of the energy had been locked in the Ranyan Demon Kingdom at her command, leaving the Daoist unable to move it.

The fact that he had taken so long chanting before coming in was likely because he had not expected his methods to form so much more slowly than usual.

The Daoist was relatively easy to deal with. It was his “magical artifact” that was troublesome.

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Most of the broken golden-collar fragments had been swept aside by Bai Xiang’s earlier sword-Qi. They remained undamaged, and now they began to orbit her like satellites.

In just a few breaths they spun faster and faster around Bai Xiang and Huali, who was still grappling with the sword-Qi Buddha. A misty golden radiance gathered on them and formed a brilliant sheet of yellow talisman paper in midair, its surface details impossible to make out.

The talisman drifted slowly toward Bai Xiang, melting many golden-collar fragments along the way. It formed a golden lock-ring in the air, clearly aiming to drop around her neck.

A surge of danger shot through Bai Xiang.

She could feel that if she were collared by it, she would not be able to break free easily.

With the sword-Qi Buddha tied up for the moment, Bai Xiang forcibly twisted her body halfway around, bracing herself. She wound up her arm and poured the force of the “Mountain-Smashing” chapter into this swing, then used the Splitting-Light Multiple-Images Sword Formula to shake out two ethereal shadow blades in succession, slamming them into the lock-ring.

It worked, to some extent. The lock-ring was knocked back and flung away, but its structure remained intact. Once it had recovered, it floated toward Bai Xiang again.

“Imperial Daughter, stop resisting!”

One-armed Ji Chang staggered up from below, his face dark as he glared at her.

“Come obediently with me to meet His Highness the Crown Prince… Wouldn’t enjoying wealth and glory be better?”

Bai Xiang shot him a cold glance and then sank into a seated posture in midair. Her left leg crossed and rested on the bend of her right knee. Her hands formed a strange seal, one finger pointing upward, the other downward.

At the same time, something immense was brewing in her inner body-scape.

It was the Hidden Heart Orifice.

Her soul-ability gave her absolute control over her body.

Before, she had not known the Hidden Heart Orifice existed. Now that she understood the concept of this orifice, Bai Xiang could immediately try to seek it out. Sure enough, she found a strange little point between her heart and liver where the flow of blood twisted strangely every time it passed.

She had never been able to make sense of such an anomaly before. Now, following the path laid out in the Meridian-Connecting Method, Bai Xiang sent her soul deeper to probe it. It was as if she replaced that tiny point and linked all the blood and heaven-and-earth energy in her body. When she opened her eyes again, her aura had exploded outward. Her surging, violent blood and qi rose like a column of wolf-smoke.

In truth, it had all happened in an instant.

Since the disappearing Feixiang Heaven was effectively Bai Xiang’s external incarnation, her skyrocketing blood and qi immediately affected her life-bound sword as well.

With a sharp hiss, Feixiang Heaven pierced countless layers of void and thrust out through the gap between her hands.

By the time it appeared again, it was already slicing through the seam in Ji Chang’s body.