Volume 4, Chapter 48 – Mutual Restraint

Faced with this move, the Forbidden-Method Tribulation Lotus, Immortal Venerable Jiuli in his boyish form and the one-armed Immortal Venerable Mingche were not actually all that surprised at first.

One of them was a wanted fugitive who had long been hunted and bounty-posted by the Sacred Court; the other was an itinerant cultivator who ran rampant in the Yinsha Sea of the Upper Realm—that is, the Cosmic Void lying somewhere between one Illusory Realm and another. If they had been unable to do proper intelligence work before stirring up trouble, they would have died countless times over by now.

So they knew about it: they had already formed an expectation of the rough scene from the reports that Bai Xiang had once used this move to crush the Dao troops of Shenwu Heaven and then go on to defeat Cui Yuanhao, the Dao Enforcer of Tianfu Mountain.

But no one had ever said she could condense this many tribulation lotuses!!!

Wasn’t the order of the main world supposed to be more stable? Weren’t even many Dao-Void Methods that could be used casually in the Upper Realm supposed to be restricted here?

Mingche, especially, found it hard to accept reality. Her escape methods were all sealed off, and as she faced more and more azure tribulation lotuses—nearly reaching the number of one hundred thousand—her heart cried out that this was impossible.

The tribulation lotuses exploded, their main focus locked onto Jiuli.

It was not that Bai Xiang had no intention of killing Mingche. It was just that Liu Yong was still in her grasp.

Rather than waste too much strength locking onto her with attacks, only to have their direction forcibly diverted when Mingche used the hostage as a shield, it was better from the start to aim only at temporarily pinning her in that stretch of airspace, and then gather all the remaining force together to see first whether one of them could be killed.

Looking down on me?

Jiuli clearly saw through Bai Xiang’s intent. His arrogant face twisted, as though he had been amused to anger by her choice.

Even those few in the Yinsha Sea backed by Venerables didn’t dare open a fight by trying to kill me. This woman truly doesn’t know the immensity of heaven and earth!

Bang!

The first thunder pestle had already descended. At first glance, it seemed to strike the youth squarely, but the lightning soon shifted aside, revealing a jade-white palm gripping the thunderlight tightly in its grasp.

Though he stood within the forbidden-method domain of Void-Imagination Shenming, he seemed utterly unaffected by it. Laughing loudly, he swung both hands, sometimes punching, sometimes striking with his palms, batting every thunder pestle away. Not a single one managed to truly affect him.

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Boom boom boom boom boom!

Bai Xiang was in no hurry. The moment he had withstood the Mountain-Cleaving Form head-on, she had already understood that she had finally encountered a genuine body cultivator.

She now knew that, in the Illusory Realms, the saying that one became an Immortal Venerable through “five qi and three flowers” was exaggerated to a flattering degree. This much could be seen from Mingche over there, who was already in miserable retreat and dropping lower as she dodged the thunder pestles.

For someone with the cultivation of an Immortal Venerable to be wounded by Qing’er’s Qingwu Sword—even if one counted the one from before as merely her clone—her body-cultivation progress was simply too poor.

Bai Xiang was not calculating too finely here. In truth, she could also have factored in that Bai Zhuqing had struck by surprise, and that after repeated dual cultivation between the two of them, her younger sister’s qi had also been tinged with the violent qualities of Bai Xiang’s own Qi-Origin.

But none of that could serve as an excuse before the cultivation of an Immortal Venerable.

The only conclusion she could draw was that in the phrase “five qi and three flowers, Immortal Venerable,” that first half about “five qi and three flowers” contained no small amount of sheer nonsense.

This was obviously a Daoist term. The “five qi” should refer to the Daoist Five Dragons, while the “three flowers” referred to essence, qi, and spirit, pursuing the great Dao of “the five qi returning to the origin, the three flowers gathering at the crown.”

If understood in that sense, then the demonic-power cultivation of Dao-Void Methods should also be condensed by blending the five qi of the viscera. At the very least, that element ought to be part of it.

The three flowers were even more direct. Taking Bai Xiang herself as an example, her three flowers had been condensed in exact accordance with Daoist concepts. The flowers of essence and qi respectively represented that she had reached the Innate Realm in both body refinement and qi refinement.

As for the final innate completion of spirit, that was even easier to understand—she had already awakened all her past-life wisdom, truly pierced through the mystery of the womb. Whether in Daoist terms or Buddhist ones, this meant she had achieved a genuine innate perfection of the soul.

Once Innateness was attained, the three flowers naturally began to manifest.

That meant that whether in “body,” “cultivation,” or “soul,” she had cultivated all three to the utmost limit and extremity possible under the concepts of that era.

She had once thought that even if other Immortal Venerables were inferior to her, the gap could not be all that large.

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For example, perhaps regarding the concept of the flower of spirit, they were unable to find the Hidden Spirit Orifice, and thus unable to interpret it through the “soul,” so all along, in the Upper Realm, the understanding of the word “spirit” had become the condensation of a divine pool.

But the flowers of essence and qi were not the same either. It was not as Bai Xiang had once imagined, where all Immortal Venerables merely differed in their divine pools while their foundations in the two flowers of essence and qi were equally solid. Rather, within those two flowers, they usually only managed to bring one of the paths to the Innate Realm.

Either they excavated the Hidden Field Orifice and used Dao-Void cultivation together with a divine pool to become a Venerable.

Or they excavated the Hidden Heart Orifice and used body-cultivation together with a divine pool to become a Venerable.

Even Venerables who advanced both of those side by side were rare, much less someone like Bai Xiang whose three flowers were all correct.

That seemed much more like the proper state of things.

Bai Xiang moved from surprise to sudden understanding.

Only this kind of reality matched the earlier thing she had learned about “the difficulty of advancing two orifices in tandem”—that was referring precisely to how difficult it was to possess both the Hidden Field Orifice and the Hidden Heart Orifice at the same time. Cultivators across the world exhausted all their efforts and usually could obtain only one.

So that was it. I had set the standard for Venerables too high.

Though the chain of thought sounded complicated, it was in fact no more than a flash of divine thought… Her gaze flickered, then cleared, and Bai Xiang saw that the youth calling himself “Immortal Venerable Jiuli” was already beginning to falter.

He no longer laughed wildly and effortlessly batted away every thunder pestle as before.

Instead, his face had grown gloomy and taciturn. From time to time, thunder pestles struck him directly, and his movements had slowed somewhat.

Did you never consider that each of those hundred thousand tribulation lotuses would be of identical quality?

Jiuli had no way to voice his bitterness. The constraints on him did not stop there. More importantly, he was unable to unleash his full strength.

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As a body cultivator whose bloodline was chiefly human, what he revered and yearned for was in fact the ancient human race—crossing the void through flesh alone.

If Bai Xiang had known a little more about the history of the human clans of the Illusory Realms, she would have been able to tell his background at a glance just from the title “Jiuli.”

Because “Jiuli” originally referred to one branch of the ancient human tribes. From that alone, one could see his ambition.

But unfortunately, he was not an ancient human.

He could not truly rely on nothing except bodily cultivation. He still had to depend on his simultaneously cultivated Dao-Void Methods.

Because he was a wandering cultivator, his channels of information were no match for those of the Venerables from major dojos. But fortunately for him, his luck had been good. In the outer-sea region, he had once found the cave estate of an ancient clan, and inside it discovered a body-cultivation root art called a “body-refinement transformation method.” It could use the circulation of essence-blood to drive qi-refining cultivation, then convert it at the same time into the force of essence-blood and unleash it.

In simple terms, it allowed a cultivator to fuse the quality of body-cultivation and Dao-Void cultivation into a single attack and release it in an explosive burst.

At higher levels, it was not only Dao-Void cultivation that could be poured into it. Even the “heaven-and-earth Origin Qi” could be absorbed by the body and transformed.

As long as he managed to get started and was not defeated right away, then Immortal Venerable Jiuli would only grow stronger and stronger as the fight continued. Taking on multiple opponents of the same realm would be no problem for him.

This was one of the foundations of his arrogance.

But the principle behind it happened to be perfectly countered by Bai Xiang.

Once the Forbidden-Method Tribulation Lotus was deployed, all the Dao-Void cultivation within his body was locked down. It could no longer be fused in as “additional damage.”

At the same time, the Forbidden-Method Tribulation Lotus also drew away the energy of heaven and earth within a radius of a hundred li. As a result, that energy too could no longer be absorbed and transformed by him.

The situation that should have let him grow stronger as he fought had instead become one where he grew weaker and weaker.

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Of course he was in no mood to be happy. Inwardly, he cursed the Blood Soul Heaven Intelligence Division—the main planners of this entire operation—up and down.

What kind of garbage intelligence had they provided? It didn’t match reality at all!

“But this really isn’t my fault…”

On the silver shuttle overhead, a handsome young man with bright silver hair and rimmed glasses sat in the seat of honor, smiling as he stroked the cat in his arms.

“After all, even if I had asked you in advance, you would never have told me that your root art also needs to borrow outside force before it can become overwhelmingly strong.”

Even as the operation was clearly on the verge of failure, he was not anxious in the least.

This Immortal Venerable Shenming really was too bizarre. To say that the preparations made so far were enough to scheme against her would be almost disrespectfully inadequate.

Then he would simply change the target of the plan and use Jiuli to gather a little more relevant information.

On the one hand, he could probe Jiuli’s root art. On the other, he could probe hers. Either way, he would not lose out.

Just in time to prepare for the real grand curtain to rise.

The Nine-Prefecture Sword Meet of the Yu Emperor Sacred Dynasty…

No.

Now it ought to be called—

the Dao-Void Martial Demonstration.