Volume 4, Chapter 121 – Ascension Transformation (Two-in-One)

With both Taishang Response and Jade Spirit Mingxin, distinguishing friend from foe was extremely easy for Bai Xiang. She deliberately avoided her own people. Every single tribulation lotus locked precisely onto the five Venerables on the enemy side, while also sweeping in the little fish and shrimp nearby who had come over to watch the show.

The terrifying lightning vajras pounded the mountaintop like rain for at least a full minute. When the smoke and dust finally dispersed, only the spot where Zhu Canghai and He Xian had been standing remained more or less intact. Every other area near this peak had basically been blasted to pieces, the earth mixed with the blood of who knew how many demonized cultivators.

That meant the field was basically cleared.

Bai Xiang was fairly satisfied when she saw the result.

Forbidden-Method Tribulation Lotus was a great divine ability sword formula. She estimated that this move could utterly crush ordinary Venerables, but if she wanted to use it to kill prodigies ranked on the various lists in a single stroke, it still was not enough. So she simply used it to clean up the battlefield.

After that wave of lightning vajras finished exploding, the peak was charred black and the mountain path had been leveled smooth. Whether they had wanted to come over and watch the spectacle or rush up to support Wang Xiu and the others, all of them had been blown clean to death. Lingyun Peak seemed to have returned to the quiet serenity she had seen when she passed this way before, and she truly felt wonderfully refreshed.

But while Bai Xiang felt refreshed, some people were feeling extremely unrefreshed.

“Bai Zhixing!!!”

Along with the furious roar, two shockwaves burst one after another from the dust, and two figures shot out from within. They were none other than “Young Master Yuling” Zhu Yunsheng and “Taixu Monastery’s chief disciple” Wang Xiu.

Zhu Yunsheng was charred black from head to toe. His once-handsome face was no longer recognizable, his hair had long since been burned off, and he had plainly turned into a bald man. Even the clothes on his body were tattered, reduced to ragged scraps stuck to his flesh.

Wang Xiu’s condition was somewhat better. Although a fair amount of his clothing had also been blown apart, he had at least barely managed to preserve his appearance. From that alone, one could see the gap in cultivation between the two men.

As for the three loose Venerables who had gathered around Wang Xiu, they had already been blasted into pulp along with the many lesser demons. Only a wisp of soul from each had barely escaped, fleeing off to seek the bodies they had hidden elsewhere.

Bai Xiang was not surprised by that scene. This was a sword move that Cui Yuanhao, even while wielding a lower sacred weapon, had only barely managed to contend with. It was perfectly normal for those loose Venerables to be killed instantly.

She sent Zhu Canghai and He Xian a transmitted order, telling the two of them to fly upward, rendezvous with Li Sheng aboard the flying vessel, and then have the three of them go straight to Wang Ran. No matter what, they had to settle the matter in Qiyun Circuit tonight.

As for Bai Xiang herself, she pressed a hand against empty air, rose out of her cross-legged seated posture, and stood there suspended in midair as Feixiang Heaven flew back into her grasp.

“Take advantage of the fact that there’s no Tianyuan nearby… strike!!!”

Wang Xiu’s face darkened with vicious resolve. He tore the ruined upper half of his Daoist robe right off, leaving himself almost completely naked save for a ring of purple-black demonic aura around his waist that conveniently served to preserve a shred of modesty.

His weapon was a purple-black spear, also summoned out of the demonic aura. Its shaft was thick and heavy, engraved with seven dragon patterns. The higher those engraved lines climbed, the more pronounced they became, until at last they gradually took shape as a spear blade curving inward in an arc, gleaming with cold light and radiating savage menace.

Spear Dao?

Bai Xiang arched a brow slightly. She did not even spare any attention to the flight path of Zhu Canghai and He Xian out of the corner of her eye. Most of her perception was fixed on Wang Xiu—or rather, on the spear tip stabbing rapidly toward her.

Meng Qiaosheng’s example had already shown just how flexible something like a Divine Pool could be.

If Sword Dao could become a Divine Pool, then Blade Dao, Spear Dao, Bow Dao, and the like could naturally be extracted into Divine Pools as well.

It was just that these weapon-based Divine Pools were harder to form than ordinary Divine Pools. There were not many tricks involved. The most important thing was still gaining true insight into wielding that kind of weapon.

In other words, one needed the talent for it.

Wang Xiu was exceptionally gifted in the way of the spear. Feints, deflections, thrusts, stabs—he used them all with effortless ease. The spear tip in his hands was like a living snake, and he first tested Bai Xiang with deceptive moves.

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He had long since obtained intelligence on Forbidden-Method Tribulation Lotus and knew that once this kind of great divine ability was unleashed, it would briefly drain the heaven-and-earth energy from the surrounding area. Right after using it was precisely when Bai Xiang would be at her weakest. For that reason, he became even fiercer and more cautious, like a venomous snake searching for the right opening, trying to pin Bai Xiang to death with a single thrust.

Bai Xiang flicked her wrist. The straight blade of Feixiang Heaven bent and flowed with the force running through it, twisting out like an elastic strip and winding up like a serpent around the oncoming spear. In the span of only a few breaths, it had already struck the spear tip more than fifty times. Every collision smashed a tiny crack into the air, and only afterward did the booming reports ring out.

It seemed the order of the main world really was much more stable.

Bai Xiang recalled the battle in Shenwu Heaven against Zhu Canghai’s group.

At the time, whenever two forces met and ground against each other during a clash, the resulting vibration waves would inevitably tear open the void and even punch fissures and holes through it, letting turbulent currents and chaotic winds rush in.

But now, whether in Qi-Origin or in the brute force of her blood and body, she had improved again. She could only be stronger than before, and yet in a head-on clash with a Heaven’s Pride List top-ten figure like Wang Xiu, the vibration waves generated were only capable of producing extremely tiny cracks.

It really was stable.

Then I don’t need to worry anymore.

Clang!

With another collision, Wang Xiu tried to yank his spearhead back with the momentum, only to discover in shock that he could not pull it free.

Looking closely, he saw that the Yu sword in Bai Xiang’s hand… its blade had actually softened like a sheet of paper, spiraling around and wrapping itself tightly around his Seven-Calamity Demon Dragon Spear.

Bai Xiang yanked hard on the spear shaft. Wang Xiu felt an irresistible force seize him, as if he were being dragged by an entire planet or by a fragment of an Illusory Realm. He could not muster any resistance at all.

Bang!

Before he could even react, a dark blur swept out from beneath her white dress, carving a sharp angle through the air as it slammed directly into the lower side of his chest and abdomen.

Wang Xiu reacted quickly enough to let go of the spear in advance, abandoning it as he crossed his bare hands to shield his lower abdomen. Even so, the kick still sent him reeling, half-dazed, his vision blurring for a moment.

How could her strength be this monstrous…

Seizing the opening Wang Xiu had exposed, Bai Xiang poured Qi-Origin into her sword. The edge of Feixiang Heaven snapped instantly taut once more, and with a mountain-splitting downward strike from the crown of his head, she cleaved him straight into two halves.

“Brother Wang!!!”

A howl rang out from behind. Zhu Yunsheng’s combined attack had finally arrived.

It was hard to say whether Wang Xiu had lost too quickly or Zhu Yunsheng had hesitated too long and thus delayed the coordinated strike, but either way, it was clearly far too late now to pose any threat to Bai Xiang.

…In theory, that was how it should have been.

Facing Zhu Yunsheng’s thrusting sword, Bai Xiang did not grow careless. She raised her sword to block and had already prepared her next move, intending to intercept him and kill him as well.

Venerables could not truly die, but making them lose a great deal more vitality was good too.

Yet the moment the two blades met, a force no weaker than Bai Xiang’s own poured through. Bai Xiang frowned as the vibration wave swept her body a full hundred meters away.

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What is this thing?

Looking again, Zhu Yunsheng was still in that same charred, half-human half-ghost state, but the aura around his body had completely changed.

It had not become heavier.

Nor had it become sharper.

Instead, no fewer than thirty-two different currents of aura rose from his body, and in Bai Xiang’s perception they formed something like a chaotic vortex.

When Bai Xiang looked again with her golden pupils, she unexpectedly saw thirty-two souls behind Zhu Yunsheng, their roots intertwined together. Every one of those souls had the appearance of a beautiful young man or woman. All of them had their eyes closed and faint smiles on their faces. The sight was indescribably eerie.

A sword array?

With only a single glance, Bai Xiang more or less guessed what kind of foundation her enemy possessed.

She had read the Venerable Net intelligence before. It had not stated it outright, but she had still caught sight of a saying: “Within Yuling Heaven stands Yuling Sect; Yuling’s Thirty-Two Constellation Dragons…”

Thirty-two constellations… Had he extracted the constellation layout of his own dojo and refined it into an array-type Divine Pool? And as long as he filled it with puppet souls, he could borrow power from it?

Among those phantom soul-images, Bai Xiang caught sight of two that were exactly the two beautiful puppet attendants she had suspected had been blown apart by the lightning vajras. That confirmed her guess, though it also made her feel that something was slightly off.

Zhu Yunsheng was pushing himself to the limit, drawing on thirty-two separate forces through the constellation sword array and fusing them into himself. Only then could he barely match Bai Xiang’s ordinary output. A threat of that level did not frighten her at all.

But if Zhu Yunsheng, who ranked only seventy-seventh on the Heaven’s Pride List, could possess a skill like this, then how could Wang Xiu, who was ranked in the top ten, have been so ridiculously easy to deal with?

The instant that thought took shape, Zhu Yunsheng let out another strange cry and charged at Bai Xiang again.

This time he made no effort to conceal anything. Thirty-two soul phantoms shot out from beneath his feet and took up positions in eight directions across the void, formally forming the Yuling Dragon-Gathering Constellation Grand Array. He intended to suppress Bai Xiang with the power of the sword array, or at the very least buy time for Wang Xiu to recover.

Wang Xiu did not waste the chance Zhu Yunsheng bought for him.

From the moment Bai Xiang cut Wang Xiu in half to the moment Zhu Yunsheng pinned her down, almost all of it had happened within just two breaths. One breath later, Wang Xiu’s body, split into two pieces and fallen away, suddenly began to writhe violently. Out of nowhere, it turned into two lumps of flesh along with shattered bones, smashed organs, and every kind of slurry, then pounced onto the falling spear in midair like a starving tiger.

The spear itself was strangely made. The seven demon dragons wrapped around it all the way to the spearhead, and just before they converged to form the point, there was an opening shaped like a mouth. Yet the inside of that mouth was hollow. Its cavity ran through the dragon bodies coiled around the spear shaft all the way to the rear end of the spearhead, forming seven small holes arranged in a circular pattern.

The two masses of mangled flesh that had been Wang Xiu entered through the small holes at the rear, raced once around the shaft along the seven dragons, then erupted back out from the mouths of the dragons.

The flesh that poured out condensed once more into Wang Xiu’s original form. His eyes snapped open, a harsh light flashing within them.

“You actually forced me to use Seven-Meridian Demon Ascension Transformation.”

“Fine, woman. I admit you have strength worthy of your ranking!”

After reconstructing his body through that demon spear, Wang Xiu’s presence was no longer anything like before. He grabbed the spear in hand and shot forward through the air, charging at Bai Xiang several times faster than he had before.

Bang!

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Bai Xiang knocked Zhu Yunsheng away with one sword strike, then slashed out again, forcing Wang Xiu to draw back his spear and defend.

But this time Wang Xiu did not abandon his spear to protect himself. His face was filled with crazed delight as he threw the spear forward with a wild laugh, plainly taking the posture of someone willing to trade his life for Bai Xiang’s.

Had he broken his own restraints, exposed the secret method that let him revive and grow stronger, and simply stopped bothering to disguise himself?

Bai Xiang changed moves to parry the spear tip and immediately felt that Wang Xiu’s strength had increased by at least a full factor of two.

This really was strange. She knew Immortal Venerables had methods of resurrection, but what sense did it make for someone to revive and come back twice as strong?

Cui Yuanhao had no low standing in Tianfu Mountain, and his ice and fire methods complemented and nourished each other. If Cui Yuanhao possessed a secret technique like this too, then after reviving eighty or a hundred times, would he not become invincible beneath heaven?

There had to be a catch.

Bai Xiang kicked Wang Xiu away again and lowered her gaze to the black spear in his hand.

A moment ago, his flesh had crawled out from inside that thing. Reconstructing his body through it was what had made him stronger.

So the problem lay in that object?

“Again!”

Wang Xiu had completely entered a frenzied state. Once more he clashed head-on with Bai Xiang, making no effort whatsoever to defend. The result was naturally that in only a few moves, Bai Xiang burst open his Heart Orifice with a thrusting kick, and he looked on the verge of dying violently once again.

This time, however, the speed of his “ascension transformation” was much faster. The rest of his body did not change. Only the organs that had been smashed into bloody rain and pulp flowed back into the holes of the spear and then back out, gathering together to restore his body to completeness.

As they continued to trade blows, Bai Xiang discovered that Wang Xiu’s output had risen again.

So it really is the spear.

He himself also has a problem… his aura is completely connected to that spear.

Is this… dual Divine Pools?

Aside from Spear Dao, he actually has another Divine Pool?

And so, under Wang Xiu’s suicidal assaults, he even ended up choosing to destroy part of his own body on purpose so it could gather itself again through the spear. Compared with before, his aura and strength had now risen to roughly seven times their prior level.

“Hidden meridians?”

After breaking apart another combined attack from the two men, Bai Xiang stared at the bulging blood vessels on Wang Xiu’s body.

“You reconstructed hidden meridians? On top of your original foundation, you can now connect seven great hidden-meridian dragons and light up every orifice along them, allowing yourself to gain a level of enhancement equivalent to a seven-meridian body cultivator?”

“Exactly!” Wang Xiu bared his teeth in a ferocious grin. “A great divine ability of my Divine Pool—Seven-Meridian Demon Ascension Transformation! Created by me!”

After that roar, he stopped wasting words on Bai Xiang and continued attacking her fiercely in tandem with Zhu Yunsheng.

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At first he had assumed that once he climbed to his peak state, he would be able to take this demon woman down swiftly and exact proper revenge for her failure to appreciate his mercy.

But gradually, Wang Xiu began to feel that something was wrong again.

How is it that no matter how much my strength increases, the force this demon woman uses to meet me is always about the same?

Earlier, it had not felt obvious. Wang Xiu had still been relying on the fact that he could continue transforming upward, so he had not cared and had fought without restraint.

But now he had already reconstructed seven dragons and seven meridians. There was no higher state left for his strength to rise to.

By all logic, with sheer physical force alone he should now be able to meet head-on and kill a world-shaking fiend like an Ancient Calamity Dragon.

Then why… why does the rebounding force transmitted back through this woman’s sword still send me flying back by the same distance?

Wang Xiu seemed to realize something, but he refused to believe it.

“Impossible… impossible… impossible… impossible!!!”

Clang!!!

With another collision, Feixiang Heaven again transformed into a soft, serpent-like sword, wrapping around the spear tip and dragging it over.

But this time, Bai Xiang had already drawn the Tianxuan Sword at her waist. Using the advantage of a sacred weapon, she knocked aside the troublesome Zhu Yunsheng, tore off one of his arms in a single slash, then reversed the blade and drove it clean through Wang Xiu from below the abdomen.

“Impossible…”

Wang Xiu’s body shuddered violently. Little by little, he raised his head and stared at Bai Xiang in utter disbelief.

“Why…”

“Why can you…”

“Because your seven great dragons are disconnected,” Bai Xiang said coldly.

“Without a Heavenly Pillar Meridian regulating them from the center, those seven forces only look ferocious. In truth, they cannot be fused into one. It’s far too easy for someone to find the gap and cut in.”

“A setup like that works well enough against livestock. That doesn’t mean it works against people.”

“Can a demon-barbarian ape like you understand something that simple?”

Splurt—

Before Wang Xiu could say anything more, violent Qi-Origin surged out through the Tianxuan Sword and shredded his body completely into a mass of pulp.

The pulp writhed toward the long spear, drilled into its holes, vibrated through empty air in flight, and fled off as a streak of black light, not daring to look at Bai Xiang even once more.