Volume 4, Chapter 72 – Unchanging

Bai Xiang flew east through the air in her physical body, but along the way she found that this was not a very pleasant way to travel.

Because Shenwu Heaven was no longer the Shenwu Heaven it had once been.

Wu Emperor had refined this world into a part of himself, binding its fortunes and lifespan to his own. Once he fell into misfortune, it also meant that the lifespan of heaven and earth was nearing its end. At a time like this, there was naturally no spare power left to shelter the lands in all directions, and phenomena of Loss of Order were appearing everywhere throughout this little world.

For instance, not long after she set out, the blood-red sky above her suddenly transformed into a deep violet one. It looked like an aurora ribbon formed from demonic aura and magnified many times over. At times, she could even see ominous green mist within it.

Whenever the heavenly signs shifted in that way, different disasters would also take shape overhead.

The blood-red sky was still manageable. Bai Xiang was quite certain that if someone stared at it too long, or lived beneath that blood-red canopy too long, some sort of mutation might occur. But that level of interference was not enough to trouble her.

When the sky turned deep violet, however, countless openings would suddenly split open overhead, and from them would strike bolt after bolt of incomparably deep, almost pitch-black lightning.

The first time Bai Xiang encountered it, she was even curious. She knew this was most likely the legendary void lightning tribulation, and she deliberately gripped the Tianxuan Sword and went after one of the bolts, wanting to test its power.

According to the Dao-Void records she had seen, using void lightning tribulation to temper the body was only a stage that began along with the ninth Body Tribulation. That still left one or two realms between it and Immortal Venerable. If so, the lightning should not have been all that fearsome.

As for the result of her test… she felt that this void lightning tribulation really was not particularly powerful, at least not to her. With her current level of body tempering, she would have been fine even if she had simply let those black bolts wash over her.

The real problem was that the black lightning contained an unspeakably vile contamination.

It was hard to say what it actually was. It belonged to the category of mysterious things that could neither be understood nor probed. The first time she raised her sword and split apart a black bolt, Bai Xiang herself felt little. Instead, the Tianxuan Sword trembled in her hand, as if it were extremely unwilling to continue touching that thing.

“Lightning is originally the most hard and most yang force in heaven and earth. Once the order of the world was altered, the void lightning tribulation, with Loss of Order as its source, actually turned into a thing of great evil? It can even contaminate a lower holy weapon?”

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Holding the Tianxuan Sword up for closer inspection, Bai Xiang found exactly what she expected. Along the edge of the blade, she saw fine black lines, like capillaries beneath skin. Some kind of contamination was trying to corrode the sword.

With that understanding, she stopped seeking out the black lightning to test it. Whenever she encountered it, she chose to detour or evade it, trying as much as possible to avoid contact.

For at least the next week, the Tianxuan Sword might be the only truly handy weapon she could count on. She had no wish to contaminate such a fine blade for no reason and end up fighting people barehanded.

She also had to consider her clothing.

Her fleshly body itself might not fear contamination, but there was no way for her to attach soul-abilities to the battle clothes and robes she wore.

If she lost the sword’s protection against the black lightning and that contamination fell onto her clothing, then having it blasted to shreds would actually be the better outcome. What she feared was the opposite: that the strike would leave the clothes outwardly intact, while fully contaminating them and turning them all at once into some living monster.

Bai Xiang was not afraid of such a thing actually happening, but she would find it utterly revolting.

So she tried to account for all those factors and flew even more carefully.

Apart from the blood sky and violet lightning, the appearance of green mist would bring mirages.

Especially when Bai Xiang flew a little higher and found that even the clouds had been stained a sickly green, she could catch glimpses of all sorts of chaotic mortal scenes there. They were like mirage-images, somehow imprinting scenes from unknown places into this world.

If the interference from Loss of Order grew too severe, those mirages could turn into illusions. One moment, a person might still be flying through the sky. The next, they could pass into those miserable green clouds, and in the time between one blink and the next, what appeared before them would be a bustling living city full of voices.

A cultivator whose mind was not firm enough, and who was too easily disturbed, might fall into it and then plunge from the sky, smashing themselves half to death.

After the mirages came wind disasters and earthfire.

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Enormous air currents would appear without any warning at all. One moment, heaven and earth would still be calm. The next, a gigantic tornado would condense into being, descend upon the earth, and sweep up soil and shattered rock. All kinds of demon beasts and monsters hiding in the wild would be driven out and forced to flee madly across open ground.

Quite a few of those demon beasts were things Bai Xiang had never seen before and could not identify. She had originally meant to record their appearances while she was at it, but in the very next instant the ground there suddenly collapsed, and the entire pack was engulfed by erupting magma. Flesh and bone alike were burned into drifting ash.

All these scenes, all this chaos… Bai Xiang finally understood in full why Illusory Realm planes and small worlds of the Illusory Realm absolutely required the protection of an Immortal Venerable.

These were all manifestations of Loss of Order. Its influence destroyed and ruined every stable order. At a more superficial level, it might look like lightning, wind, and fire disasters. At a deeper level, it could even involve physical laws and physical constants.

For example, the passage vortex she had experienced earlier, and that sensation of being pulled, was in truth the result of even spacetime gravity being interfered with.

There had to be an Immortal Venerable, a cultivator of that level, seated in command. That Immortal Venerable had to use the rules of their divine pool to cover the entire small world. Only then could the geomantic balance within the realm be stabilized and protected from outside disasters.

With tribulations this frequent and this dense, Shenwu Heaven had already entered the countdown to its death.

Back then, Bai Xiang and Xiang Xian had estimated that she would be able to return in about a week.

But looking at things now, it was uncertain whether Shenwu Heaven could even hold out that long.

Who knew how many common people at the bottom would die…

Bai Xiang traveled on, watching as she went, and felt a faint sigh in her heart.

When the cultivators of Shenwu Heaven had first come looking for her, they had spoken harshly, boasting that there were tens of millions upon tens of millions of people here. From that, it could be seen that at the height of the Shenwu Immortal Dynasty, at least in terms of population, it had not been much inferior to Great Yu.

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There were that many people, yet the territory was not even as large as the Nine Provinces.

That meant the population density was even higher.

Once calamity struck, the dying truly would not stop.

Especially now, the laws and order here had collapsed as well. In many places, so-called rule by men was in fact nothing more than outside forces carrying out a lawless exploitation of the locals.

And yet the locals had little way to resist, because they did not want to die either. They did not want to remain in this place, which at a glance was clearly on the verge of destruction. They wanted to leave. They wanted to follow those outsiders and “ascend” with them. That meant they could only accept the “methods of cultivation” laid out by those outsiders.

Lawless or not, at least there was still something to hope for, still some chance of escaping alive.

That was why forces like Jieving Heaven could suppress the lands under their control with only a very small amount of power. They were fully exploiting human nature.

“So demons can possess human nature too… Then what difference is there between them and humans?”

Bai Xiang could not help recalling what Xiang Xian had once told her about the difference between demons and humans.

Namely this: if the Demon Court tightened its control over these small worlds just a little more, and had all demons refer to themselves as “human,” then the surviving humans would instead become the demons. Once that happened, the very definition would be different.

And then she remembered what Aurora had told her about evolution theory. She suddenly began to wonder whether that kind of change had really happened before, whether the concepts and definitions of humans and demons had already been tampered with in the past, perhaps more than once.

“Doesn’t matter.”

Bai Xiang did not let herself get dragged into that line of thought. She quickly pulled her mind free and instead began studying those unfamiliar manifestations of Loss of Order with keen interest.

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Because her Dao-heart had been settled from the very beginning, during that ten-year interval.

No matter how this world of nature or the void cosmos might change, what she sought was only her true self. What she sought was only to verify the Dao and attain longevity amid this chaotic world.

And it had to be a kind of longevity that was actually interesting. As for sitting in seclusion for centuries at a time, she had truly had enough of that back when she was bedridden.

Thus:

Though the heavenly signs change endlessly, I do not change.

Though seas turn to mulberry fields, I remain.

Void Tribulation?

Why not come and see which of us is the true “tribulation” in this world.

The instant that thought spread through her mind, Bai Xiang suddenly felt her spiritual platform clear, her thoughts flow freely, and even her long-stagnant Path of Qi cultivation showed the slightest sign of loosening. Somewhere in the unseen, she seemed to sense that there was once again room to seek higher.

Hm…

Her lips pressed together, and her heart felt only freshness and exhilaration. She simply stopped holding back her speed and shot toward the blood sky like a streak of sword light.