Volume 4, Chapter 68 – Buying and Selling

Roaming beneath the “Blood Sky” of Shenwu Heaven, Bai Xiang piloted her flying vessel onward as she observed her surroundings. She found that, just as in the memories of Wu Qing and the others, the scenery and environment here were not all that different from the main world.

There was land, there was air, and on the ground she could see winding rivers and dense forests. Not far away, mountains rose in tiers. From the white peaks and the dark green-black mountain faces, it was clear that the basic climate and temperature had not changed much either. The interference from the Void Tribulation was not yet too deep.

But there were also obvious differences.

Most notably, she could see many rocks and mountains floating in midair. Some of those masses were so enormous and so vast that there was no explaining what sort of force was holding them aloft.

Then there was the blood-colored sky.

When she looked up, the “Blood Sky” overhead happened to split open. From within emerged a giant amber eye. This unknown monster locked onto Bai Xiang’s flying vessel at a glance, and its massive body lunged down from the clouds.

Bai Xiang studied its shape and saw that it had a whale-like body, but its fins on both sides were far too broad, spread like wings that blotted out the sky. Somehow, they allowed that body to fly through the air.

This thing was obviously no harmless creature. Its gaping maw was packed with hooked fangs like blades, and scraps of flesh still hung from quite a few of them. It was clearly trying to swallow Bai Xiang’s vessel in one bite.

Now that she was already inside, there was no need to stay hidden in the cabin.

Bai Xiang flipped open the hatch and stood up. First, she took a deep breath of Shenwu Heaven’s air, then immediately drew her brows together slightly. She could smell a rotting stench in it.

The overwhelming shadow came crashing down over her head. She did not dodge. She merely rested her right hand on the hilt of the Tianxuan Sword for an instant. The next moment, a slash sharp enough to tear the air itself burst forth around her body, and with one sword strike she split the giant whale monster in two.

Rumble…

The thing was simply too huge. Even though Bai Xiang had cut its giant corpse apart in midair, its momentum remained ferocious. Driven by inertia, it smashed brutally into the floating island behind it, triggering the collapse of entire stretches of cliff. Dust exploded through the air.

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Caw, caw, caw—

The tremor also startled a flock of strange birds nesting on the floating island. There were at least a thousand of them. When they all beat their wings and rose at once, the scene looked like a swarm of bees. Bai Xiang noticed that each one had three wings and three legs, while three feathers sprouted separately from the tops of their heads, standing upright like a phoenix crown.

The influence of Loss of Order…

She watched those creatures with some curiosity, uncertain whether they existed because Shenwu Heaven was nearing the end of its lifespan and had come under deeper interference from the Void Tribulation, or whether a stable ecology like this had formed long ago.

The giant whale and the strange birds had not appeared in Wu Qing’s memories. Perhaps that suggested they were later developments. Of course, it was also possible that those creatures were outsiders.

She recalled intelligence once passed on by Sun Yaoming: from the moment a Void Realm plane or a small world of the Void Realm separated from the main world, it began to die. Only a Hui Spirit at the Immortal Venerable level, blanketing the place with the rules of their own divine pool, could slow the efficiency with which it was eroded by the Void Tribulation.

Bai Xiang actually wanted very much to test whether Shenwu Heaven currently had any other Immortal Venerables by using this method. But she did not walk the path of Dao-Void Methods. She had no divine pool, much less any divine pool rules.

Would a test like this even work?

She decided to try. Drawing her sword, she unfolded Void-Imagination Shenming, driving her Qi-Origin to connect with the energy of heaven and earth and spread outward without cease, wanting to see what kind of effect such an action would have on the matter of this world.

Hum—

The vibration rang only once at the beginning. After that, it suppressed every surrounding noise, expanding outward like a spherical ripple.

A wondrous phenomenon occurred. As that ripple continued to spread, the foul, rotten air was purified, the blood-red vault of heaven turned blue again, and some of the three-legged strange birds that tried to approach suddenly tore apart in midair, directly splitting into two birds that chirped noisily as they tumbled downward.

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As for the rocks and floating islands suspended in the sky, it was as if they had lost the force holding them up. One after another, they came crashing down, throwing up vast clouds of dust from the ground.

It could actually have such an effect?

Bai Xiang watched scene after scene with cold eyes, continuously making guesses and analyses in her mind.

She felt that this change was caused by a difference in the essential nature of the powers involved.

Whether these phenomena had happened long ago or only recently, the conditions displayed by Shenwu Heaven were clearly all related to Loss of Order.

The power of the Path of Qi, on the other hand, was “preserving the proper order.” It did not forcibly interfere with the external Body-scape. Rather, it excelled at excavating the Inner Body-scape. That happened to stand in direct opposition to Loss of Order. The two were absolutely incompatible.

Perhaps pure qi-force alone could not produce such a large-scale abnormal transformation, but when driven by Bai Xiang’s Origin Realm cultivation, that power of “preserving the proper order” became far too vast.

Once the interference and contamination of Loss of Order were struck by that immense force, they immediately began to scatter. Many of those influences could no longer continue, and things had to revert at once to the way they originally ought to be.

Bai Xiang made several more attempts and confirmed that she really could interfere with the internal rules of Shenwu Heaven in this way. Only then did she withdraw her Qi-Origin and Void-Imagination Shenming, pilot the flying vessel down onto a floating island, and find a hidden spot to stash the craft away. After that, she flew out alone.

After descending for some distance, she picked up speed and searched along the winding river, planning to find an inhabited place first and learn what had been happening locally in recent times.

She quickly found a town built along the riverbank, but she did not descend directly into it. Instead, she first found a place in the nearby forest, made sure her feet were on solid ground, and then stepped onto the “official road.”

Shrubs grew thick all around here, and towering giant trees could be seen everywhere. The plants had grown wildly, looking exactly like the jungle of Maozhou that had also been affected by Loss of Order. In such conditions, the only place that could still have an opened, intact roadway, with heaps of peddlers setting up stalls along the roadside, could naturally only be the local “official road.”

As Bai Xiang walked along the road, she sized up the passersby around her and found that they truly did not look like pure humans.

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Their skin colors were all over the spectrum, but that was only the beginning. Quite a few of these “people” had all sorts of bizarre organs growing from their faces and bodies.

They were not simply “organs with demonic-race characteristics.” It was not like that.

Not things like “a bull’s horns” or “a pig’s ears.”

Instead, there were writhing tentacles, densely packed eyeballs bubbling outward like foam, wet openings that kept shrinking and swelling… all of them things that instinctively made one uncomfortable to look at.

Walking among these crowds of “people,” it was actually someone like Bai Xiang, who had no strange organs at all, who stood out more.

She noticed that quite a few people were indeed casting frequent glances her way. Some even directly pulled their companions to a stop and pointed at her from afar.

“This lady patron… I see that your Yintang is dark, and tribulation-aura coils around you. I fear that in the coming days, great disaster awaits you…”

An aged voice drifted over from the side. Bai Xiang turned her head and caught sight of a “bald monk” with pitch-black skin sitting at a stall, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan.

The monk was likewise one of these demonized people. The long beard on his chin consisted of tentacles and fleshy buds, and even his facial features were growing upside down. On his stall were laid out some Eight Trigrams diagrams and fortune sticks. One look was enough to tell that he made his living telling fortunes.

“So you can calculate anything?” Bai Xiang asked, switching into the Yu tongue with the accent of Shenwu Heaven and trying to speak with him.

“Indeed.” The monk nodded proudly.

“Then over there—”

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Bai Xiang raised a hand and pointed toward a group of people lined up ahead.

“What are they doing?”

She had only asked casually, but the moment the words left her mouth, the dark-skinned monk was suddenly alarmed. He hurriedly gestured for her to lower her hand.

Hm?

Bai Xiang arched a brow. Was there some special taboo here?

“You’re from out of town, aren’t you, patron?” Only after seeing her lower her arm did the monk relax. Then he dropped his voice and spoke casually.

“Thinking about it, it makes sense. Only outsiders like you would have that kind of nerve and courage… As for us, we wouldn’t dare. Whoever crosses the line dies.”

“So what are they doing over there?” Bai Xiang pressed.

“What else could they be doing?” The dark-skinned monk lifted his eyes to her, a somewhat bleak expression on his face.

“They’re selling themselves.”

“Selling the organs on their bodies, so they can get money and continue cultivating and advancing.”