Volume 4, Chapter 82 – Bathed in Blood, the Soul Returns; First Glimpse of Feelings from a Former Life (Two-in-One)

Staring blankly up at Bai Xiang, the Wu Emperor’s facial features trembled, and a towering rage rose in him beyond his control.

But this time, his anger was not directed purely at the outside world. More of it was aimed at himself. He simply could not accept that, for one brief instant just now, an overwhelming surge of emotion had spread up from the bottom of his heart.

From beginning to end, no one has ever understood what I wanted to do…

In all of Shenwu Heaven, among these countless sentient beings, some feared me, some revered me, some doubted me, some loved me. But I knew that was only because I was the Wu Emperor, because I held power in my hands!

Not a single person could understand my thoughts or my pursuits. Not even Qing’er. I told him of my life, of everything I had experienced, and he still only half understood. The force behind all his actions was nothing more than emotion, and also his unwillingness to lose his status as Crown Prince…

How many years has it been since anyone called me “Fellow Daoist”?

Why did it have to be you…

Why… why did it have to be you?!

His vast grievance and hatred twisted the expression on that giant face. Strange syllables burst from his mouth in a roar, sounds whose meaning even he himself could not understand. The whole world shuddered with a humming tremor as he swung a gigantic fist through the air, dragging layer after layer of pressure waves behind it.

The attack looked incomparably slow, but it was as though time itself had slowed with it. Because Alos was close to Bai Xiang, he too was enveloped within the range of the move. He desperately tried to force his body to dodge, but no matter how hard he struggled, he could not move in the slightest.

He truly was like a mosquito, pinned to the canvas of midair by a single nail. The giant fist swept down with its pressure waves without even touching him directly. The tail end of one of those waves merely brushed him, and his entire body exploded into a mist of blood. Even his divine soul and true spirit were shredded apart.

Only Bai Xiang remained unaffected.

She watched the Wu Emperor’s attack coldly. Her wrist turned, both hands tightened around the hilt of the Tianxuan Sword, and she leaped down from the air. Her legs relaxed, her waist straightened, and her graceful body arced like a crescent moon as she brought her sword down onto the giant fist head-on.

Bzz!

At the point where blade met fist, an earthen-yellow brilliance erupted, faintly streaked with gold before turning completely white. Massive force spread outward in wave after wave of vibration. The very first shock tore apart the countless masses of flesh clinging to the surface below, then continued outward like ripples, one wave after another, spreading farther and farther until even ordinary soil was shaken into dust.

Mountains, rivers, and the ruins of cities alike were doomed to destruction. Even though they had only just been restored to normal by the power of the Order-Preserving Treasure, they were still obliterated beyond question by the impact of the waves. If any among them had time, before being destroyed, to turn their gaze toward the source of the shock, then perhaps they would have seen that within that central mass of white light, within that roar shaking heaven and earth, there stood a gigantic hazy figure.

“Invading thief!”

The hazy figure let out a booming roar. It was the Wu Emperor, wrenching his body free from the fleshy earth and landing on the ground as a naked giant. The giant had no skin anywhere on his body, and below the waist he lacked even sexual characteristics, but his entire body was packed with thick, bulging muscle. A faint golden glow covered his surface as he clenched his fist and smashed toward Bai Xiang again.

Whoosh!

The dust was swept aside by that punch, revealing Bai Xiang flipping backward through the air. She steadied herself midair and fixed her gaze on the incoming fist. Using the force of her spin, she rotated several times, raised her left shoulder crosswise just before the giant fist reached her, then snapped her body back and twisted, swinging her right arm in a full arc and slashing out a streak of golden sword-light with the Tianxuan Sword.

Slash!

The sword-shadow struck the fist head-on, and another tremendous shock erupted. Amid the tearing white light came the giant’s angry roar and, mixed within it, the cry of a bird. Fist-shadows and sword-shadows collided again and again in midair, while the bird-shaped sword qi released by the Tianxuan Sword canceled out the golden radiance on the giant’s fists in empty space.

After who knew how long of such direct clashes, the Wu Emperor seemed to realize that Bai Xiang’s foundation in body tempering was excessively solid. With the assistance of a sacred weapon, she actually could withstand this kind of frontal collision and attrition with him. At last, he chose to change tactics. Once more he swept his fist across, but midway through, he turned the blow into an open-handed palm strike.

Bai Xiang lifted her head and dodged the edge of one giant finger, then raised her sword and sliced off half his palm. Her brows furrowed immediately afterward. From the severed wound, countless tiny flesh-men suddenly sprouted, baring their fangs and claws as they lunged at her.

At first glance, those little flesh-men looked like infants only just learning to walk. But in the space of a single breath, their bones hardened, their weak and shriveled bodies rapidly swelled and grew, and soon they were covered in hard bone armor and jagged bone spikes. Bone swords, bone fist-spikes, bone sabers, and bone spears appeared in their hands as their speed surged severalfold while they charged Bai Xiang.

And that was not all. With both Taishang Perception and Jade Spirit fully active, Bai Xiang did not even need to turn around. Through qi-sense alone, she could clearly tell that the fingers she had cut off earlier had undergone the same kind of mutation as they fell. They too had of mutation as they fell. They too had become a wave of blood-bone armored soldiers, treading on the air and rushing at her menacingly.

Faced with the encirclement, Bai Xiang instead withdrew her sword momentum.

She arranged herself into a half-lotus posture in midair. Her left hand formed a sword seal, her right gripped the sword upright before her chest, her eyes were shut, and her lips were lightly pressed together. Her expression seemed both sorrowful and compassionate. Then an invisible vibration wave spread outward from the treasured sword in her hand, and even from her body itself.

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Crash…

Swept by that vibration wave, the blood-bone armored soldiers dropped from the sky as though the strings holding up puppets had been severed at the root. Some of them simply disintegrated in midair.

But that was not enough.

Bai Xiang opened her eyes. Even after the wave had swept across, she could still see large numbers of new presences rapidly condensing and forming all around. She knew then that the Wu Emperor had set his heart on changing his battle style.

She had not brought Feixiang Heaven with her, which made certain divine sword arts genuinely inconvenient to perform.

Even with the Tianxuan Sword’s support, the vibration wave could not be maintained for long. Bai Xiang released the stance and tightened her fingers around the sword hilt.

Then I’ll simply make the most of your strengths.

Bzz!

With a single vibrating hum, her figure actually moved ahead first, leaving the shadow of the Tianxuan Sword dragging behind her.

Only now did the layers of white light scattered by their earlier collisions finally begin to fade. The sky suddenly cleared, revealing countless droplets of blood floating all around.

Those had all been flung out by the giant on the ground, the Wu Emperor, when he swept his fists. Given the sheer mass of his current body, every single drop of blood he hurled was the equivalent of an artillery shell. And when those blood-drops burst apart in midair, they could generate blood-bone armored soldiers out of thin air. After only a few sweeps, thousands upon thousands of armored soldiers had gathered in the sky, like an army advancing to meet Bai Xiang.

Bai Xiang moved so fast that both her face and figure blurred, as if overlaid with lines of speed. That astonishing sight was reflected in her eyes, and the corners of her lips lifted slightly. In the next instant, like the front of a train, she crashed straight into the ranks of armored soldiers in the most brutal, primitive, and violent way possible, slaughtering anew.

Slash!

Void-Imagination Divine Sword: Mountain-Cleaving Form!

Her arm swept out, drawing the blade upward from below in a rising slash. Accompanied by the sacred bird cry unique to the Tianxuan Sword, a streak of golden sword qi cut forward like a paper slicer. Every armored soldier in its path was cleaved apart like tofu, then blasted to pieces by the bird-shaped sword qi.

After that slash, Bai Xiang shifted her posture. Her right leg stepped through the air and bent at the knee. Her long, rounded leg drew tight like a bowstring, driving her upper body forward like an arrow. Midair, she switched to her left shoulder and slammed sideways—

Void-Imagination Divine Sword: Mountain-Crashing Form!

At first, there was no sound at all. Only a plume of white mist spread over Bai Xiang’s body like a membrane. Then, in the next instant, she burst out through it. A hazy layer of sword qi cloaked her shoulder as she smashed violently into the mass of armored soldiers on that side.

Boom!

Another shockwave exploded.

The first armored soldier was naturally ground into dust on contact with the sword momentum. That dust was then driven backward by the force behind it, smashing into the second soldier, then the third… Every armored soldier struck along the way shattered apart under the additional force of the sword qi vibration wave. With that one shoulder-charge alone, hundreds upon hundreds of armored soldiers were sent tumbling and exploding as a rain of blood poured from the sky.

Bang! Bang!

Slash!

The more Bai Xiang killed, the more exhilarated she became. She cared nothing for whether it looked elegant or not. Each move seemed to return to a primal state, reduced to the simplest possible cuts, crashes, thrusts, stabs, lifts, carvings, and smashes. She tore downward through the ranks at high speed, all the way accompanied by shrill sword-cries and drifting blood-rain. In the blink of an eye she had dropped several hundred meters in altitude and was about to appear directly before the Wu Emperor!

Such a powerful enemy. No wonder Qing’er and the others had all been wiped out!

The Wu Emperor’s eyes were filled with gravity. Facing Bai Xiang now that she had reversed the momentum and become the fierce aggressor, he clenched both fists again. The exposed wounds on his body rapidly healed, and a yellow-brown radiance mixed with gold burst out from within him as he charged straight at her once more.

Was that an illusion…

Bai Xiang suddenly frowned.

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A moment ago, both Taishang Perception and Jade Spirit had conveyed the same message to her: as that radiance rose from the Wu Emperor’s body, the whole world seemed to shrink by a tiny, almost imperceptible amount.

Like a sheet of paper laid flat and then held over fire. It would curl and contract, no longer seeming to possess the same substance it had before.

The thought flashed by in an instant. Bai Xiang tightened her grip on the Tianxuan Sword and collided once again with the fist wreathed in golden light.

Crash!

This time, the vibration wave was ten times stronger than before.

The tremendous impact blasted Bai Xiang backward. Even the Wu Emperor himself was not spared. Wherever the golden radiance covering his body was thinner, flesh was torn away and shredded. Half his face and half his body were left as nothing but ruined bone.

It wasn’t an illusion!

Bai Xiang quickly stabilized herself and looked around.

She was certain now that it was not her imagination. As the Wu Emperor had just collided with her, the whole world, all of Shenwu Heaven, had shrunk inward by another full tenth!

He had truly abandoned any regard for his life.

Bai Xiang watched coldly, but offered no mockery or judgment.

Without saying a word, she raised her sword again, dove down, and collided head-on with the Wu Emperor once more.

Then both of them were blasted backward.

Then they collided again.

Then separated again.

By the end of it, the Wu Emperor had almost been reduced to a skeleton, while Bai Xiang had burned nearly fifty years of lifespan in order to drive her soul-abilities and forcibly repair and control her body.

When she looked up again at this point, Shenwu Heaven, which had once been an Illusory Realm minor world vast enough to contain countless sentient beings and larger overall than Maozhou, had shrunk into a sphere only a hundred li across.

Everything that had disappeared had been burned away by the Wu Emperor himself.

He too remained fixed in place. His giant body was ruined like the remains of a skeletal corpse. Most of his blood and flesh had been vaporized by the vibration waves, and he panted in great gasps, none of his former arrogance left.

Bai Xiang was not in much better shape. She had still spent extra Qi-Origin to protect the clothing covering the surface of her body. Her legs and feet had received no such treatment, and even her face had been broken and cut apart many times in the spreading collisions and edge-waves.

The reason she looked mostly unharmed now was that she too was burning lifespan, relying on her soul-abilities to force her body back into a complete state.

She raised her hand and held her sword vertically before herself. With that action alone, Bai Xiang made her stance clear.

She intended to see this fight through with the Wu Emperor to the very end.

“Heh…” Seeing her posture, the skeletal giant grinned.

“I possess the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade. The power of Yang-Earth is immeasurably heavy, and even that cannot stop the edge of your sword…”

“So the only way I can think of to defeat you now would be to burn this entire skeleton to nothing, to keep burning until Shenwu Heaven compresses further and further, shrinking into an egg and then collapsing, and see whether I can drag you down with it…”

That really would be troublesome.

Bai Xiang frowned.

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With the outside world having shrunk so much, Guo Rongzhi’s little flying vessel was probably already finished. And if Shenwu Heaven’s destruction triggered a collapsing explosion, who knew how much lifespan it would burn off of her? Even though her life level was at the Immortal Venerable tier and she could physically cross the disordered void cosmos, the efficiency of that…

In any case, there was no way she would be able to keep her agreement and return to Maozhou within a week.

“But it cannot be done.” It was the Wu Emperor himself who shook his head instead.

“This thing is an Order-Preserving Treasure… It will not permit me to commit such an act of disorder-breaking…”

“At this point, I no longer have the strength to draw on or use it.”

“Immortal Venerable Shenming.”

“You have won.”

The admission came cleanly. The Wu Emperor lifted his eyes and looked straight at Bai Xiang, and the force of his presence rapidly faded. He no longer resembled a towering Venerable or supreme expert. Even though his body remained huge and imposing, a heavy aura of dusk now wound itself around him.

He was about to die.

Even if Bai Xiang had not come, even if Wang Li of Purple Soul Monastery had not betrayed him and sold his information, drawing in the power of Blood Soul Heaven’s Intelligence Division, that is, Cloud Tower, he would only have had a few months of lifespan left. No amount of refinement could have made it enough.

After forcibly burning himself out to this extent, every one of his hidden cards was gone. He had nothing left to rely on.

And yet, having reached this point, it seemed that the outburst just now had actually allowed him to vent some knot buried in his heart. Within that aura of decline was even a trace of calm. When he looked at Bai Xiang now, there was no longer much hatred left in his gaze.

“I truly never expected that, out of the several hundred years of my life, the person who understands me best, who comprehends me best, would be you.”

“Everyone relied on me and pinned their hopes on me, yet none of them knew that I too am only a coward.”

“The reason I was able to walk this road all the way to where I stand now is not because I liked it, nor because I upheld my convictions. It was only because I did not want to die. I did not have the courage to face the end.”

“But who can escape it…”

With a faint sigh, the giant body gradually dispersed into smoke.

Only his final words remained.

“Immortal Venerable Shenming.”

“I will wait for you in that world.”

“…” Bai Xiang silently watched the scene. Once more, she raised her sword in a sword salute, but she could not agree with what the Wu Emperor had said.

She was someone who had died once already.

Not only had she died, she had also seen through the mystery of the womb and understood that stretch of chaotic consciousness that had existed before she awakened in this reborn life.

To be honest, she truly was not sure whether that place even existed.

But she did not think she had any chance of going back.

This too was a road of no return.

And beyond those thoughts, she also felt a small measure of emotion at the Wu Emperor’s ending.

She respected the Wu Emperor not because of his power, but because everything he had done contradicted the “cowardice” he described in himself.

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By now, Bai Xiang was no longer some outsider ignorant of the Void Realm. She knew that there were many Immortal Venerables who, after occupying an Illusory Realm minor world, maintained their rule through exceptionally brutal means. To them, every sentient being within their territory was undignified livestock, nothing more than cold numbers to be treated as cultivation resources.

But in Shenwu Heaven, the countless sentient beings here had at least developed a civilization of their own.

There had been one person leading them.

He had tried to save them.

Even after giving up everything, even after his family was destroyed and he himself dissipated into smoke, nothing he had protected was able to remain. Before long, even the land that had raised him, this world itself, would meet its end.

But it was enough.

More than enough.

“You were not a coward,” Bai Xiang murmured.

“I acknowledge you.”

Suddenly, golden light flickered across her field of vision. A bright yellow jade-essence shone as it rose into the air, carrying with it a yellowed, tattered page that had clearly weathered long years. Together, they flew straight toward Bai Xiang.

Bai Xiang did not move rashly. She let the yellow jade circle around her once, then extended her free left hand and plucked the page out of the air.

Shed the Flesh and Restore the Bones, Spirit Condenses the Mysterious Embryo

The title certainly sounded intimidating.

So this was the “remnant page” recorded in their memories, the one said to contain the secret of the Xuandi Scripture?

Bai Xiang glanced in a certain direction, then reached out and caught the yellow jade too as it flew around her in excited circles. She wrapped it in the page, crumpled the whole bundle together, and slipped it through a side opening in her battle suit into her cleavage.

In the next instant, a somewhat battered Silver-Shuttle Vessel cut through the sky and rushed before her. When the hatch opened, the faces of He Xian and Zhu Canghai appeared inside, both wearing expressions of complete incomprehension mixed with awe as they stared wide-eyed at Bai Xiang.

Those two really were lucky.

Aside from me, they should be the only two survivors left in this world.

Just then, a strange pulse suddenly came from Bai Xiang’s waist sash. She instinctively took out one of the storage jade plaques that He Xian and Zhu Canghai had given her earlier, then pulled out a wood plaque inlaid with jade from inside it.

This is… the thing that dark-skinned monk gave me?

And now it’s vibrating?

Woo…

The wooden plaque let out a low, mournful hum. Bai Xiang watched as it floated free of her palm, seemingly guided by some unseen pull. From the devastated land below, it drew up another wooden plaque. The two came together, fused amid a burst of black light, and grew into the form of the dark-skinned monk she had seen before.

“Amitabha.”

The monk bowed slightly to Bai Xiang.

“At the time, I did not know that it was Your Highness herself standing before me.”

“Please forgive any offense I may have given.”