Volume 4, Chapter 81 – Past Sorrows, Bitter and Vain; This Sword Ends All Causes (Two-in-One)

Rumble…

The instant Montian finished speaking, the underground pit beneath the imperial palace, no, the very earth of all Shenwu Heaven, began to tremble. Layer after layer of soil was thrust upward by some vast force, exposing the flesh membranes and nerve tissue hidden below. It looked as though the true form of some terrifying living creature had been revealed, and thick blood vessels could even be seen pulsing with every beat.

How could this happen!?

At the sight, both Alos and Tina were struck with shock. They had never imagined that this kind of monster was sealed beneath the imperial palace pit. This… this had already gone beyond the power a Venerable should possess, had it not?

“I think I told you before,” the giant face said, “that if you couldn’t kill me in one go, then you should never give me even the slightest chance.”

Amid earth-shaking sound waves, the layers of soil had already been split completely apart. Looking down from the sky, all one could see was grotesque crimson flesh, spreading from here in every direction until it vanished at the horizon.

And directly beneath the three of them, a giant human face rapidly surfaced, its features angular and unmistakably old. As the membranes of flesh tore open and revealed its appearance, it opened a pair of enormous eyeballs filled with violet-red mist and glared at them. With its even teeth and grim expression, it looked utterly sinister.

“Because as long as I get a chance,” the giant face said, “I won’t hesitate again.”

Bzz!

The moment he finished speaking, all three people in the sky felt an invisible pulse erupt from the depths of the earth-veins. Everything touched by that spreading wave began to twist and change in nature.

Flesh turned back into soil, rock, wood, and jade.

The palace corpse-demons that had originally been charging this way while tangled together were swept by the wave and instantly petrified. At least half their bodies were torn apart by gravity and inertia, crashing down in a clattering rain of architectural debris.

This interference was also all-range and all-domain. The entirety of Shenwu Heaven was affected by the wave at the same time. The Loss of Order phenomena taking place across the land, rivers, and floating sky-islands were all suppressed and rolled back in the same instant. Even the structure of the qi-heavens was restored, and the blood-red tint in the sky began to fade, slowly returning toward a clear blue.

The Loss of Order contamination released by the chaotic gale currents, spread across the entire Illusory Realm plane… had actually just been erased like that?

It was not only the three figures above the imperial palace who were shaken to the core. Even Bai Xiang, inside the flying vessel hurrying toward the scene, noticed the change at once.

“This is bad!” He Xian shouted. “The vessel’s out of control!”

The whole flying vessel shook violently. He Xian’s hands moved so quickly they left afterimages as he repeatedly tried to make fine adjustments through the talisman-array jade disk, but it had no effect at all. The vessel only hurtled forward on inertia for a short while before plunging headfirst toward the ground, entirely beyond control.

They were already not far from the capital of the Shenwu Immortal Dynasty. Bai Xiang simply leaped out of the vessel and accelerated, shooting ahead of He Xian and Zhu Canghai and reaching the air above the underground pit first. She too saw the gigantic face below.

That face…

The moment she saw it, ripples spread through her golden pupils, and countless shattered images flashed before her eyes.

“Father, you’re always cultivating and never resting. Mother sent me to persuade you. At the very least, don’t overwork yourself.”

“Father… I never understand, I truly don’t. The world is so vast, so boundless. That void has no end at all. So why is there not even room for a place as small as ours? Why do those people insist on wiping us out completely?”

“All right, old man. I think I finally understand why people are always so restless.”

“As you said, the whole world is a bitter sea. Demon or human, even Void Demons, as long as they soak in that bitter sea for one day, they remain unliberated for one day. They can only cling to their own positions and struggle desperately in the cracks between preserving order and breaking order.”

“It’s hateful that I, Qing’er, have no talent and can’t inherit your Dao lineage. And as for the divine soul arts you need most, I haven’t even managed to gather more than a few. I’m useless. I’m worthless!”

“Father! Look what I found out! There’s a Void Realm passage here that leads directly to the main world!”

“It’s connected to Blood Soul Heaven, but people have already explored it and returned alive. And ordinarily, order around this kind of major passage is extremely unstable. We don’t need to travel by that road itself. If we open a node nearby and follow that, we can still reach Maozhou!”

“When that time comes, I’ll subdue Bai Xiang, Bai Zhixing, and take from her the supreme soul art, the secret of the Xuandi Scripture. Then I’ll come back and help you!”

“Father! Wait for me! I will save you, and then save all of Shenwu Heaven!!!”

Why are these memories…

Hovering in the air and looking down at the ground, Bai Xiang’s hair whipped wildly in the gale, and her fine white brows drew tightly together, a trace of gravity in her eyes.

Because among all the shattered fragments flashing before her, some had never appeared in Wu Qing’s memories before.

Had they been hidden too deeply?

Or had some of Wu Qing’s memories been stripped away from the very moment he departed for Maozhou, left in the Wu Emperor’s keeping for reasons of secrecy, only to be returned when the condition of “father and son meeting again” was fulfilled?

Then what was happening now?

Because I absorbed most of Wu Qing’s memories, did that pulse just interfere with me in some special way, different from everyone else?

Did it judge me to be “Wu Qing,” and so return this portion of memory directly?

For a moment, Bai Xiang could not tell whether this was a side effect of absorbing divine souls, that is, whether devouring another person’s soul would affect what she herself emitted, something that could roughly be classified as spiritual sense, qi-sense, or mental waves, or whether this was the Golden-Pupil Illusory God manifesting its power again, a pure effect of those demonic eyes.

Below her, Alos, Tina, and Montian were much closer to the source of the pulse. Just a single wash of it left them dizzy and reeling. Not only did their heads ache as though they were about to split apart, their cultivation also seemed to have been struck by some demonic art. They could not use it at all. Even staying aloft took every ounce of strength they had.

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“What exactly is that?” Tina stared blankly at the giant face below, her throat still gripped by Alos.

“It is the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade, the Yang-Earth Essence, Wu.”

Montian spoke lightly from the side.

Perhaps because he had already decided everyone here was doomed beyond doubt, he no longer held back and simply laid bare the secret in his heart.

“All sentient beings wish to reach the Venerable ranks. Yet even after one has succeeded in the Dao and condensed a spirit pool, one’s grasp of rules and order can still only be called shallow. At most, one can spread a spirit pool over a small world with no self-awareness and no ability to resist. Even fighting others becomes awkward and constrained.”

“So here is the question.” With a flick of his sleeve, he resisted the impact of the pulses while continuing, “Since the strength of a Venerable after ascension is tied to the order established when the spirit pool is condensed, then what kind of wish must a sentient being make, and what kind of preparations must they complete, for the spirit pool they condense to surpass the very primary order birthed by heaven and earth?”

“Doesn’t that suggest another way of thinking? Instead of doing that, why not seek out the primary order itself and turn it into one’s own spirit pool, using that method to evade Void Tribulation and cheat one’s way into sharing the same lifespan as heaven and earth?”

Could such a principle really exist in this world?

Alos and Tina were even more stunned.

They had learned of the existence of Order-Preserving Treasures from the murals of the Augu Temple, but they had never known how such a thing was actually meant to be used.

Who would have thought it had this kind of effect?

Did that not mean that whoever obtained and consumed such an Order-Preserving Treasure could deceive heaven and earth themselves, deceive the order of the entire cosmos, and make it treat their spirit pool as part of the primary order, thereby casting off the shackles of lifespan altogether?

“Of course…” Montian said through clenched teeth, his voice so low only he could truly hear it.

“Otherwise the Sacred Court…”

“How do you think those ‘Exalted Saints’ came into being? Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered about that…”

They really had never wondered.

At the sneer, Alos and Tina both fell silent.

To put it bluntly, the Council they belonged to was just one among countless forces spread across the main world and the Void Realm. It was not even a strong one among them.

Even if, in the future, they had the chance to steal all kinds of secret treasures and somehow piece together the remains of their chief god and revive Him, whether He could truly lead them in restoring the glory of the ancient age was still a question mark the size of the sky.

For all the people who had voted in support of Tielmons back then, it was only because in recent years they had been beaten so badly by the Demon Court that everyone had a grievance pent up inside them, and they desperately needed some achievement to show for it. In eastern terms, it was called “stabilizing the Dao-heart.”

One could tell just from what they called the Demon Court. Most sentient beings of the Void Realm called it the Sacred Court. Only they called it the Demon Court, even the Eastern Demon Court. The bitterness in that alone was practically overflowing.

Normally, a single conquest-general, that is, a Heaven-Patrol, was enough to beat them into hiding all over the place. How would they ever dare speculate about “Exalted Saints”?

Who in their right mind would spend their time pondering that?

But if that was true… if that was true, then did it not mean that everyone in Shenwu Heaven was finished now?

Alos reacted quickly. He immediately understood why the demonic power and cultivation in his body had become so difficult to use.

An Order-Preserving Treasure. An Order-Preserving Treasure.

Since it bore the name of “preserving order,” then obviously its power lay in rectifying the rules of the universe. In Yu terms, that meant the heavenly order.

And their spirit pools were all formed by plundering order through illegitimate means…

In the eyes of an Order-Preserving Treasure, that amounted to fraud. A pure and unquestionable violation.

It did not need to do anything at all. As long as it kept emitting waves like this, and used them to set all order within range back to its proper state, then very soon their spirit pools would be washed apart and dispersed, returning to the state they had been in before condensation.

Under such circumstances, how could they possibly use demonic power or divine abilities?

The fact that they could still stay in the air at all was already something!

That damned old monster never even knew what he had fused with when he attained the Dao…

Montian turned his head to look over, and at last could not keep himself from grinding his teeth in hatred.

Back then, the Wu Emperor truly had advanced by leaps and bounds in cultivation after obtaining this treasure. But on the one hand, the treasure shackled him to Shenwu Heaven so that he could not leave his homeland by even an inch. On the other, it also continuously devoured and absorbed his divine soul.

That was why, in order to survive, he had kept trying to buy divine soul arts… and in doing so had eventually come to Cloud Tower, which was how they had discovered something was off…

Originally, it had been such a perfect opportunity. They had suppressed and sealed him precisely while he was still reeling from the pain of losing his son… After that, all they had needed to do was slowly draw out his essence blood and divine soul, wait for him to wither away and die, and then take over the treasure he left behind.

And then those two idiots had to ruin everything!

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Montian was so furious his nose practically twisted. How had he ended up in a disaster like this?

“An Order-Preserving Treasure…”

“‘The Heavenly Stem Precious Jade, the Yang-Earth Essence, Wu’?”

At that moment, a clear female voice suddenly rang out from above the three of them.

Under the rippling storm of the Order-Preserving Jade, Montian, Alos, and Tina all struggled with extreme difficulty to lift their heads. At last, they caught sight of a white-haired female cultivator standing in the sky, dressed in an exceedingly strange fashion.

It really was strange. The outer robe-skirt Bai Xiang had worn was mostly torn apart in battle. Now her two arms were bare, with only the lower skirt and a few ragged scraps of cloth hanging from her waist, while her full chest was wrapped in the remnants of the battle suit left on her upper body. Her clothing style was a complete mismatch.

Why does she look so relaxed?

Alos and Tina both stared in a daze, but Montian’s expression changed violently, like a man seeing a ghost in broad daylight.

“You… Immortal Venerable Shenming!”

“Impossible! How could you appear in a place like this?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know.”

Bai Xiang bared her teeth in a grim smile. Under Montian’s terrified gaze, she slowly drew the Tianxuan Sword and raised it high in both hands, reversed.

After listening from above for half the day, she more or less understood what was going on.

An Order-Preserving Treasure?

A Heavenly Stem Precious Jade?

A power like some cosmic order-police force, able to interfere with and affect every illegal spirit pool?

It sounded impressive, but what did that have to do with me.

It wasn’t as if I stole anything from the heavenly order to condense my spirit pool.

No matter how powerful this thing was,

it could do nothing to me.

“Wait!” Montian opened his mouth, pleading written all over his face.

He had to admit it. He was genuinely afraid now.

Immortal Venerables were hard to kill, yes.

Even if he died in Shenwu Heaven, he could still revive somewhere else. That part was true enough.

But the problem was this: if he could no longer maintain flight and fell straight into the mouth of the Wu Emperor below in his maddened state, then got refined by the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade, his spirit pool would most likely collapse on the spot.

And if his spirit pool was gone, then how the hell was he supposed to revive?

He would die so thoroughly there would be no dying more thoroughly. His soul would not even know release!

Originally there had been no way out…

No way out no matter what…

But then he had seen Bai Xiang!

Bai Xiang, Bai Zhixing. She could actually remain so calm under the influence of the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade?

Whether she had some secret art or possessed another precious jade of her own, none of that mattered to Montian anymore.

From what had been a situation of certain death, he had glimpsed a sliver of hope. At once, he was about to propose terms and try to persuade Bai Xiang to rescue him and take him away.

But he managed only those two words before the Tianxuan Sword’s point pierced through the back of his skull and punched straight out through his mouth.

“…”

Montian’s eyes bulged wide. His body shook, every nerve taut, while a hoarse hissing sound leaked from his throat. His bloodshot eyes strained desperately toward the rear, his face filled with confusion and disbelief.

“I’ve got nothing to discuss with you.”

With a wet rip, Bai Xiang dragged the sword down from his neck through his chest all the way to the bottom, nearly slicing him into two.

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“And if there’s anything I want to ask, I can ask the other you just as well.”

Bang!

As Qi-Origin sword qi tore through him in a frenzy, Montian’s corpse burst into a rain of blood. His soul had no time to use any secret art. Bai Xiang seized it by the throat in midair, crushed it in her palm, and snuffed it out in a single squeeze.

After devouring Montian’s soul, Bai Xiang was startled to discover that it was actually a complete divine soul.

Oh.

So it was because the pulses emitted by that old Wu Emperor had completely suppressed these people, producing an effect much like a tribulation lotus that sealed away all arts…

And because I cultivate the Path of Qi, I’m not too affected. It just feels as if the wind pressure has grown stronger and my movements have become more difficult… That’s actually rather interesting.

After killing Montian, this little leader from Blood Soul Heaven’s Intelligence Division, Bai Xiang turned her grim gaze toward Alos and Tina.

These two. The organization behind them was that western Council.

Sending a Yiin angel into the dream-world spread across Maozhou was one thing, but they had even tried to possess me.

And after I chased them all the way here, they were still trying to play dirty tricks.

If I had not cultivated new methods and new arts, would I not have been set up and killed by them as well?

Vicious and stupid.

They deserved death.

“Big sister… urgh!”

The red-haired girl was still trying to beg for mercy when Bai Xiang drove a kick into her soft lower abdomen. Tina spat out a mouthful of blood, and her beautiful face turned pale as frost.

She no longer had the strength to remain aloft, and her limp body was about to fall. But midway down, Bai Xiang caught her by the throat, leaving her hanging in midair like a doll whose joints had been pulled apart.

“When you ran rampant elsewhere, doing evil without restraint, other people begged you like this too, didn’t they?”

Bai Xiang looked down at her through golden pupils, her voice colder than ever.

“I want to know how you answered those pleas back then.”

“I…”

Tina’s face turned even paler. She had just opened her mouth to make some excuse when she suddenly felt the restraint at her throat loosen. Her eyes nearly split apart as she plunged downward, only to be bitten by the giant face as it lunged up. After a wet, grinding chew, it swallowed her with a single gulp.

“Good! Good! Good Qing’er!”

The giant face looked toward Bai Xiang with relief and approval. But the name on its lips was Wu Qing’s childhood name.

“As expected of my child… You really did keep your promise. Now all of us can be saved!!!”

Hm?

Bai Xiang frowned and met the giant face’s gaze instinctively. But the moment she saw the expectation in the Wu Emperor’s eyes, another pulse erupted, mixed with golden light. In an instant it enveloped heaven and earth, and Bai Xiang’s very field of vision changed color with it.

The real Shenwu Heaven vanished.

In its place appeared scene after scene of memory, memories that Wu Qing had specially stripped away before leaving and entrusted to the Wu Emperor for safekeeping.

From childhood to adulthood.

From boyhood to youth.

In every scene, the hazy figure of a white-haired elder stood by his side, teaching him and admonishing him in the truths of life.

“Qing’er… do you know that at the beginning, I never wanted to build such a vast immortal dynasty?”

“I wished only to return to mortal dust, but fate was cruel.”

“I never had much ambition or any grand wishes. But the cold Void Realm taught me one thing: if I am not strong enough, if I dare stop moving forward, then not only will I be devoured, so too will the people I care for, and everything I care for.”

…She also saw the night before his departure.

“Qing’er, because I cultivate a special spirit pool, I cannot travel far myself. The matter of finding the Xuandi Scripture will likely have to fall to you.”

“Remember this, Qing’er. According to what is written on that remnant page, a true Xuandi descendant whose signs have manifested should have white hair and golden eyes, and one look into those eyes should be enough to tell they possess the power of an Illusory God.”

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“These secrets are too important. You cannot possibly keep them safe as you are now. I must strip them all away and return them to you only when we meet again.”

As scene after scene of memory continued to flash, Bai Xiang was astonished to discover that her own body, the position in which she stood within these memories, was slowly overlapping with the Wu Qing of the past, as though they were becoming the same person.

What does that mean…

She was still thinking about the “remnant page record” the Wu Emperor had mentioned.

From the sound of it, they seemed to have something in hand that was connected to the Xuandi Scripture… So Wu Qing’s sudden attack on Maozhou had not been accidental? It had been decided before they ever set their plans in motion to return to the main world?

“Remember!”

Suddenly, the Wu Emperor’s aged face rushed close, as if he had seized the shoulders of the viewpoint itself in both hands and was shaking it hard.

“No matter what form you take when you stand before me then, as long as you think of me and call my name, I will know it is you!”

“I will recognize you at once and pass all I have on to you!”

“Remember this, Qing’er!”

“This is the failsafe I left behind just for you!”

Boom!

Another wave of dizziness hit.

When Bai Xiang came back to herself, she saw an utterly horrifying sight.

That giant face on the ground had already wrenched itself out of the sea of flesh, roughly forming shoulders and an upper torso. Full of hope, it stretched a hand out toward her and murmured in a low voice, “Qing’er… Qing’er…?”

The scene looked…

It was almost as if…

As if all she had to do was answer, and she would gain everything…

At such a moment, as if the light of destiny itself had fallen upon her, Bai Xiang only drew her brows together slightly and gave no response at all to the call.

Second by second, time passed.

Alos hung frozen in the air, his face drenched in cold sweat.

All he heard was a thunderous voice from above.

“Why?!”

“Why is it you, the greatest murderer of them all…!”

“Why can you resist a temptation like this?!”

The voice was thick with unwillingness and hatred, as though it had been shouted through shattered gums. The entire Shenwu Heaven rang with its echoes, and who knew how many surviving sentient beings had their heads burst apart by that roar.

“Because I respect you.”

Only then did a distant, drifting answer slowly sound.

“You said… what…?”

The Wu Emperor could not believe what he had heard. In his enormous eye, the pupil slowly, slowly contracted.

“I respect you, Wu Emperor. So I never intended to profit from this.”

Bai Xiang did not intend to explain herself.

At that moment, countless fragmented memories of the old man and the child echoed through her mind, only to dissipate like smoke in the end, leaving nothing behind.

She raised her sword toward the Wu Emperor, holding it before her chest in a sword salute.

“Past sorrows, bitter and vain. This sword ends all causes.”

“Fellow Daoist.”

“Please.”