Volume 4, Chapter 49 – Sword Slash

Not enough.

As she watched Immortal Venerable Jiuli get struck down again and again by the thunder tribulation, and even occasionally blasted into the earth by linked strings of thunder-tribulation bolts, Bai Xiang sat in the void and observed with cold eyes.

It could wound him, but not kill him. In terms of body-cultivation alone, this man was indeed far more formidable than Cui Yuanhao.

Her interest gradually began to stir.

Following that train of thought, could a body cultivator like this really have uncovered only a single major body-refinement orifice, the Hidden Heart Orifice?

Might there be other hidden orifices related to body cultivation that this body had also traced back to their roots?

Or perhaps he had already excavated more than one hidden meridian?

Thinking this, Bai Xiang drew in her seated posture and turned into a blur, sweeping straight down into the forest below, where she saw an enormous crater formed from many small pits overlapping one another. The bottom of the crater was charred black, and no trace of flesh or bone could be made out.

This was where the female Immortal Venerable she had just blasted to death with the thunder pestles had fallen. She had abandoned Liu Yong and tried to flee after running out of strength, so Bai Xiang had shown her no further mercy.

Unfortunately, as expected, it really had only been a clone.

After searching for a moment with Taishang Resonance, Bai Xiang felt faintly disappointed.

She could not sense the slightest trace of soul aura. Not to mention anything belonging to that Venerable herself—even the remnant soul of the body she had parasitized was gone as well.

Had it been consumed by her as some sort of price, some sort of expendable item?

These people clearly had not excavated the Hidden Spirit Orifice, and yet they could still master all kinds of soul-related techniques through a process like “having knowledge poured into them by the void.” What exactly was the basis and principle behind that? Could it be connected to my descent into this world, and to soul-abilities…?

Boom!!!

A tremendous crash erupted from the mountainside to one side. Bai Xiang instinctively looked up and saw Immortal Venerable Jiuli, covered in blood, shaking off broken stone as he glared straight at her with crimson eyes.

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“Bai Zhixing! Is this all you’ve got?” He hunched his lean back and drew in a great breath. His body abruptly swelled to twice its original size, turning into a burly giant of a man, while only his head remained the same size as before, making him look somewhat ridiculous.

“Come on, then!” With a furious roar, another thunderous blast erupted where Immortal Venerable Jiuli stood. His afterimage had already caught up to the sound as he flashed right in front of Bai Xiang and threw a punch at her face.

Bai Xiang cut her eyes sideways, saw the disciple Liu Yong lying on the grass not far away, and shifted her body slightly in the opposite direction, narrowly dodging the fist at the last possible moment.

Boom!!!

Crash—

The punch did not land on her, but the inertia behind it smashed open a stretch of intact ground. A great number of shattered rocks were cracked apart and blasted loose in the same instant, and a huge plume of dust shot up at once, with two figures darting out from within it.

“Don’t think you can run!” Real fury had been beaten out of Jiuli now. He kept pursuing Bai Xiang’s figure, and from the savage look on his face, nothing short of pounding her into mincemeat would satisfy him.

How many years had it been since he had suffered such humiliation?

To be suppressed for several straight minutes by someone else’s art—if word of that got out, he would lose every shred of face!

If he could not suppress this Bai Zhixing in turn today and seize that legendary great power’s cultivation method for himself, what face would he have left to return to Yinsha Heaven?

Die!

So this was a secret art of the divine pool?

Yet Bai Xiang did not confront him head-on at first. Instead, she observed the course of his bodily momentum with cold eyes and discovered that this man not only had a horizontally tempered body that could resist the cutting of swords, like a Buddhist vajra immune to blades and spears, but could even gradually keep improving his bodily functions as the battle went on.

In other words, the longer the battle dragged on, not only did his momentum not weaken, it actually kept growing stronger. It was truly difficult to understand.

There had to be some form of replenishment.

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The reason he had not shown this capability at first… was it because the Forbidden-Method Tribulation Lotus had drained all the heaven-and-earth energy from this region?

At that thought, Bai Xiang gained a flash of understanding. She guessed that he likely had some secret technique that let him continuously absorb heaven-and-earth energy through the movement of his limbs, then transform it into an unending stream of essence-blood sha-force to unleash.

Was this the law of his divine pool?

Frowning slightly, Bai Xiang felt that his divine pool could not be so simple.

Suddenly—her pupils tightened. She abruptly tilted her head aside and felt a sharp gale sweep past her cheek.

At the same time, a blurred figure slammed toward her from the front. She had no time to dodge, so she raised her sword diagonally to block the massive fist, while her right knee came up to stop a knee strike as well. With a thunderous boom of compressed air, her body was driven backward through the sky before flipping once and stabilizing itself.

“Hmph!” Immortal Venerable Jiuli’s figure appeared where he had been, staring at Bai Xiang. At last, a smug expression surfaced on his face.

“…”

As though noticing something, Bai Xiang lifted her left hand and wiped at the right side of her cheek, then saw a faint smear of crimson blood on her fingers.

This is not the reaction speed I should have.

Jade Spirit Mingxin had been running at high speed since the battle began. Its combat records even included the efficiency with which each of Bai Xiang’s movements broke through air resistance. She swiftly compared the data and calculated that her movements—or more precisely, her reaction ability—had been abnormally weakened in some way.

Was it “momentum”?

Going by that secret art that made him stronger and stronger as the fight continued, was his divine pool something like “Condensing Momentum into Divinity,” perhaps even allowing him to devour his opponent’s soul and force of momentum during battle, constantly swelling his own qi and blood?

There might be some discrepancies, but the underlying principle should be more or less the same…

“Running out of steam?” Jiuli asked with a savage grin beneath that undersized head of his. “The world’s energy has been drained dry. You won’t be able to bring out those tribulation lotuses again any time soon, so now your true limits are exposed!”

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“Don’t rush. We’ve got plenty of time next. I’ll slowly tear all your limbs off, one by—”

Bzzz—

She shook the sword and sent ripples through the air, and a transparent wave spread outward.

The wave directly silenced all of Immortal Venerable Jiuli’s following words. His lips could still be seen moving, and a trace of astonishment appeared on his face.

In the next instant, before he could react in the slightest, a leg wrapped in a brocade-cloth long boot smashed viciously into the right side of his face, twisting and deforming his expression little by little. In the slow-motion instant, even teeth could be seen flying loose.

Bang!

The enormous force made Immortal Venerable Jiuli rip open the ground, carving a deep trench across the surface.

What the hell…?

How—???

Still stunned, he looked up and saw only a black shadow. In the next instant, a Mountain-Cleaving sword blade hacked into his chest. Refined skin, flesh, and fascia were all cut open, and the edge crashed all the way into his spinal column, where it jammed and only then paused slightly.

“You didn’t actually think I was weaker than you, did you?”

The voice came down as Bai Xiang’s figure covered him from above, neatly blocking the sunlight from that side.

You—

Immortal Venerable Jiuli was both shocked and enraged. Instinctively, he tried to use his spinal column to clamp Bai Xiang’s sword in place, then spread his arms to twist her to death. But in the next moment, an extreme wave of numbing, agonizing pain suddenly erupted from his spine and spread all the way into his brain.

Slash!

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Without any wind-up or inertia, the sword blade swept hard along his body and spinal column.

One sword strike.

It cut him diagonally into two pieces.

Crash!

Only after a brief delay following that sword strike did the ground behind him split open along the angle of the blade, carving out a deep sword-mark. The gap in the middle passed through earth and stone alike, shaking everything apart to left and right, as though a thin strip of empty space had formed between all things—so absolute that not even air was permitted to exist within it.

How could this…?

Immortal Venerable Jiuli could not understand what had happened. Looking down, he discovered that the sword in Bai Xiang’s hand was no longer the Great Yu-forged longsword from before.

Instead, it was another treasured sword, its hilt wound with gold thread and its guard inlaid with gold and jade, engraved with the characters “Tianxuan.”

Smack!

Bai Xiang gave Immortal Venerable Jiuli no time to react. With her left hand, she seized his head and held up his upper body so he would not fall, digging her middle and index fingers into his eye sockets. At the same time, she cast aside the Tianxuan Sword, then used Feixiang Heaven to stab upward along the cross-section of his severed chest and abdomen—that is, along the line of his spinal column—driving a single sword straight through the crown of his head.

Her left hand and the blade vibrated in unison. The vibration-force running through the spinal column ought to be suppressing the nerves of the brain at the same time.

Bai Xiang controlled the force with extreme care, afraid that if she was not careful, she might kill him by accident.

All of her observation and calculation had really been for the sake of this very moment.

Now she knew just how cunning these Immortal Venerables truly were. In order to dig secrets out of this man’s head, she did not mind waiting a little longer.