Black‑Stockings Sword Immortal – Chapter 86 – Divine Transmission

The remnant page was small and had seemed completely ordinary. But once Bai Xiang used the Golden-Pupil Illusory God on it, the image in her eyes changed.

Starting from the remnant page, the scenery spread outward as though washed through with ink. In an instant, her position shifted beneath a vast, dimly lit sky, and on the earth below she could vaguely make out a man in black robes standing there.

He wore a beard, and his features carried the weight of age and indifference. Yet what drew Bai Xiang’s attention most were his white hair and golden eyes. She guessed his identity at once—this man was Emperor Feng himself.

What exactly is this?

If the remnant page had been copied from the Xuandi Scripture, or had simply been torn directly out of it, then did that mean only someone possessing the Golden-Pupil Illusory God could see this hidden information? Was this a secret he had deliberately left behind for later generations?

Her thoughts shaken, Bai Xiang then saw Emperor Feng turn around. His dazzling golden eyes seemed to look straight through her as he cast a gaze filled with coldness and disappointment into the distance.

She turned with him and caught sight of a figure slowly walking over from a dim horizon.

It was a black-haired woman, also wearing dark robes in a style somewhat similar to a modern trench coat. Beneath her shorts, two white jade-like legs were bare. Her face was elegant and beautiful, but when she met Emperor Feng’s gaze, she seemed unable to bear it, not even daring to look him in the eye.

Then Emperor Feng spoke, and Bai Xiang heard his voice travel across the distance in a quiet question.

“I want to know why.”

“Your path… cannot be walked through to the end.” The woman spoke with obvious difficulty. “It isn’t as though I never tried to do things the way you said… But nearly everything in this world, almost everything at all, is opposing me. I’m already sick of being treated this way…”

“All roads are like this before they succeed.” Emperor Feng did not sound angry at all. His voice was gentle and calm, as though he were sincerely speaking to a friend. “If the people of the world only ever walk the roads laid out for them, wouldn’t that make them slaves to those roads?”

That way of putting it—

Though nothing had been said directly, the instant she heard those words, Bai Xiang could not help thinking of Dao-Void Methods and Sword Dao.

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According to Monk Zhuye’s account, Dao-Void Methods had been “gradually refined by many gifted demons,” so perhaps they did not carry the sort of hidden danger she had imagined. But Sword Dao, firmly held in the hands of the Great Yu Court, was another matter. To put it bluntly, every cultivator in the world who practiced the Sword Dao system was, in a very real sense, a slave to the Court.

Bai Xiang could not help being surprised. If this was an insight Emperor Feng had reached back then, then Sword Dao and the like had not yet even been created. So where had such a thought come from?

“Emperor Feng!” A furious roar suddenly sounded from the horizon. The next moment, the entire sky was cast into shadow. Looking more closely, the shadow was actually a mass of giant serpent heads packed together and writhing without end. Then the darkness rapidly contracted, turning into a man in azure robes who landed on a hill.

“Stop standing there spewing your lies and deceiving people!” The instant he landed, the man pointed at Emperor Feng, his face full of grievance and rage. “For the sake of your monstrous ambition, look at what this world has become! How can you possibly still have the nerve to use that same line of reasoning to bewitch people!?”

“I have bewitched no one.” Emperor Feng lifted his eyes and glanced at him, the white lock at his forehead stirred apart by the wild wind. “Your realm simply isn’t high enough.”

“You!”

“That’s enough, Mang Dao.” Several more figures descended nearby, and the one leading them spoke in an aged voice. “At this point, there is no use in speaking of grand principles.”

“But—”

“You spent all these years lurking in hiding. Was it really just so you could wait for a moment like this to argue with him?”

“Hmph!” The man in azure robes seemed to have been persuaded. Though he still looked deeply unwilling, he obediently shut his mouth.

“Emperor Feng, don’t say we’re bullying you.” After a pause, the leading elder finally turned his gaze downward and narrowed his eyes at the solitary figure below. “The truth is, no one wants to become a stepping stone for you, and the order of heaven and earth cannot be destroyed in your hands.”

After another pause, he seemed to be waiting for Emperor Feng to defend himself.

But Emperor Feng said nothing. He only smiled and watched the old man perform.

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That attitude clearly enraged the elder even more. He exhaled heavily and snorted, then said in a low voice, “So it seems you have no intention of speaking in your own defense? Very well… then we may proceed directly—”

“How pitiful.” Emperor Feng interrupted him with those words. The expression in his eyes had shifted from coldness to pity. “To this day, you still do not even know what it is I actually want to do. In that case, yes—there truly is nothing left for us to say…”

“Enough of your nonsense, Emperor Feng!” The man in azure robes roared as he charged forward. “Back then you suppressed my Yunhe Qingmang! You slaughtered who knows how many of my kin! Today, I, Mang Dao, will make you pay the price for it!!!”

“Die—!!!”

With that roar, his body at once swept up a colossal shadow. That shadow stretched longer and longer and longer still, expanding in an instant from its ordinary height of around two meters to a thousand meters, then ten thousand… until even the outline of that shadow covered the dark clouds overhead, making the cloud layer itself look even more dim and oppressive. Then from the rolling sea of clouds burst forth nine savage serpent heads!

Boom!!!

A nine-headed giant python!

As its massive body crashed downward, the whole earth shattered apart. It had not even yet launched a proper attack, yet the afterimages of its serpent heads and tail alone, sweeping through the air, were enough to tear open the surrounding void and release countless chaotic gale currents.

Woo—woo—

The shrill wind sounded like the wailing of innumerable resentful spirits, and in truth it really was just that. Watching the details of the battlefield closely, Bai Xiang noticed that a layer of black watery mist always shrouded the nine-headed giant python’s body. The moment the chaotic gale currents touched that mist, all the countless remnant souls hidden within became visible. The scene looked strangely similar to the chaos she had seen earlier when she tore open Shenwu Heaven.

But there was one key difference: these remnant souls had not gone out of control. The black mist swept around them and absorbed them into itself. Some even reshaped themselves with the substance of mist, taking form as thousands upon thousands of demon shadows around the python as they charged together at the enemy.

What about Emperor Feng?

When others looked back toward where Emperor Feng had been, they found that his figure was fading, vanishing.

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“He escaped?”

“No, he didn’t! Look over there—”

But Bai Xiang was even faster than they were.

As though guided by some innate instinct, before anyone at the scene reacted, her golden pupils had already shifted toward a certain point.

Right there, directly in the path of the nine-headed giant python’s charge, Emperor Feng had somehow already appeared.

In the face of an overwhelming assault capable of changing the color of heaven and earth, all he did was extend a hand as fine and pale as white jade and strike the python’s body with his palm.

Thud!

In reality, that scene should have been silent.

But for Bai Xiang—she could not be sure whether the others there had heard it, but she certainly had—the sound effect of that palm strike was exactly like a heartbeat.

The python’s body was so enormous, and Emperor Feng’s figure so small. Using a palm strike against it ought to have looked like a mantis trying to stop a chariot. Yet what Bai Xiang saw was a gray-white soul-shadow, identical in appearance and features to the man in azure robes from before, being struck clean out of the python’s fleshly body!

“Mang Dao?”

“What happened to him?”

“That strange technique again!”

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“All of you, attack together! Don’t give him another chance to deal a killing blow!!”

They didn’t see the soul-shadow?

She heard the uproar around the battlefield, and in her awareness, more than ten, perhaps dozens, of terrifying presences were erupting across the plain. Watching those heaven-covering hazy forms, Bai Xiang suddenly arrived at a bold guess.

That palm strike had knocked the nine-headed python’s soul out directly, leaving its enormous body limp and motionless like a statue. Did that mean that, in the eyes of everyone else, there had been no image at all of a soul being forced out? Was that something only I could see?

But she had no chance to think further. Those vast shadowy forms surrounded Emperor Feng, and the whole battlefield froze at that very instant. Then the scene from every direction rapidly blurred and collapsed inward toward the center, once again revealing the mysterious remnant page.

The characters on the remnant page then turned into flowing gold, finally gathering into a single line:

[Void-Imagination and Non-Thought, formation, abiding, decay, emptiness!]

The instant the words appeared, those golden characters exploded into a sand-like spray of light and, without exception, plunged directly into Bai Xiang’s eyes!

In that moment, countless mysteries and insights appeared in her heart all at once.

She sat there with her eyes open and her gaze vacant. Only after a long while did her eyes flicker and regain clarity.

“Emperor Feng…”

A faint sigh drifted through the training room.

“It’s a pity you didn’t live to see today.”