Volume 4, Chapter 184 – Riding the Wind(Two-in-One)

This sword… not good!

When Bai Xiang’s move “Open Heaven” had only swung halfway—when her arm had just risen, when the sword-edge had reached its highest point and was hanging there, not yet fallen—many of the Void Venerables seated behind Chu Weiping, and thus directly facing the path of that slash, all changed expression at once.

In their eyes, it was far more than a simple vertical chop. What rose from the tip of that blade was not some illusory force, but a blazing sun. Before they could make any response at all, they were already swallowed and drowned by the dazzling sword-light.

Whaaa!

With a single “Open Heaven,” it was as if the air had truly been torn apart, as if the sky itself had been ripped open. From the point where Feixiang Heaven and the Qingping Sword met, an invisible sword-wave burst forth, dragging out behind Chu Weiping for a hundred meters, a thousand, growing longer… wider… until it formed a sword-scar more than five meters thick at its widest point, cutting straight through the coliseum-like spectator stands and reducing that entire section of seated onlookers to dust!

What kind of qi… was this?

Daoist Luoying, Yang Chen… and the accompanying disciples of Qianyuan Sect—all of their expressions slowly warped, eyes widening little by little as if time itself had slowed, their bodies trembling one after another as they stared in disbelief at the terrifying sword-scar dragging backward from the middle of the arena.

With that one strike, not only was most of the platform completely destroyed, not only were those self-important rogue Void Venerables—those who believed their cultivation gave them the right to watch on-site—caught in the disaster, but that entire side of the spectator stands was obliterated as well, leaving a gaping break in the ring-shaped structure of the arena itself.

What kind of joke was this?

Yang Chen found it impossible to accept.

One Bai Xiang had not been enough, and now there was Chu Weiping as well!

They were nothing more than natives abandoned in the old world. How could two people like that wield such might with casual sword-strokes?

If the two of them had flown up into the sky and unleashed field-path divine pools beneath the clouds, smashing together vast, large-scale divine-pool powers, then even if the spectacle had been ten times more exaggerated than this, Yang Chen would not have been so shocked.

But this was not divine pools at all.

These two had not used any divine-pool power whatsoever, had not used that so-called supreme divine ability of the Dao-Void Methods system!

Then how had they done it?

If this could be achieved with flesh alone… if pure force could reach this degree, then what were the sacred methods we had cultivated supposed to be?

In an instant, countless thoughts tore and collided like sparks inside Yang Chen’s mind. Countless voices rose to question the throne of Dao-Void Methods: Had all my years of persistence truly meant anything? Could it be that the sacred methods were not the Heaven-ordained path after all?

Yang Chen’s Dao-heart was actually considered fairly firm… He only faltered for a moment before recovering, quickly casting that doubt and hesitation out of his mind.

The ones truly affected were the disciples whose cultivation still fell short. Many of them lost control of their minds from nothing more than witnessing Bai Xiang’s single strike. They could no longer suppress the demonic power in their bodies. In an instant, from inside the arena to the countless groups watching around the world, no one knew how many lower-level disciples who practiced Dao-Void Methods lost control of their demonic power and transformed, one after another, into Yaosui monsters.

“This isn’t a battle you people can watch… move!”

Daoist Luoying immediately rose into the air above the steps, a silver-shuttle spear appearing in his hand. Cold light burst from both his eyes and the spear together, and with a bang he knocked a flying strand of sword qi off to one side.

But the sword qi had not been diminished by much. It merely shifted from a straight descending chop into an oblique rising slash, sank into the side passage with a crack, and then clods of earth began to rain down in a soft stream, revealing a smooth cut-face angled through the structure.

A mere earthen construction… outrageous!

Daoist Luoying was both shocked and furious. For the moment, he could no longer be bothered with watching the match. He hurriedly used his own body as a shield, blocking the air and sweeping away every sword-qi slash flying in this direction, ensuring that the disciples of Qianyuan Sect could withdraw safely.

But just because he possessed such cultivation and ability did not mean the other Dao lineages could do the same.

Chu Weiping held the Dao sword Qingping Sword aloft in both hands. First he met “Open Heaven” with a horizontal guard. Then, with his blade sliding forward along the edge of Feixiang Heaven, he crashed into Bai Xiang through the sparks, his follow-up taking the form of an oblique upward slash.

Bai Xiang swept a cold glance over the incoming green blade. Ignoring the fact that her own force had already run long, she forcibly drove her flesh with soul-abilities, shrinking bone, shifting joints, twisting tendons, both arms turning into locking bars as she snapped Feixiang Heaven upward!

Bang!

Another explosion rang out.

The blast of the Qingping Sword and Feixiang Heaven colliding spread outward with bursting sword-light. Several more sword-traces dragged away from the impact and tore through the arena, swallowing the Void People spectators who failed to dodge in time.

Those Void People probably could not understand even in death why… why a clash between two mere natives of the primary world could produce such a phenomenon.

No matter how radical they were, no matter how highly they had estimated Bai Xiang and Chu Weiping, they had never imagined they would not even qualify to watch from the sidelines!

A battle like this…!?

Whoosh!

A strand of sword qi shot past Bai Zhuqing’s side, whipping up all the hair over her forehead and exposing her round, wide eyes and smooth brow.

She had no time to react at all. She only saw a flash before her, then turned to look behind her and found, before her eyes, a deep sword-scar dragged out across that side of the grounds, along with broad splashes of fresh blood scattered all around it.

So this… is Elder Sister’s true strength…

The girl parted her lips slightly, then turned back toward the stage, staring at the two fierce sword-shadows that had already blurred into indistinction, her mind a complete blank.

“Where are you looking?”

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Chu Weiping suddenly roared. With a flick of his wrist, a vibration-force ran down the sword. The Qingping Sword instantly began to tremble at high speed, and its trajectory shifted at once from a right angle into a trembling broken angle, slipping around Feixiang Heaven before snapping straight again toward Bai Xiang’s face!

Old bastard…

Bai Xiang bared her teeth.

She could see it clearly: the line that thrust could burst into simultaneously encompassed both herself and Bai Zhuqing.

Facing such a vicious sword, Bai Xiang twisted her wrist and turned her blade. In an instant, Feixiang Heaven’s edge flipped from the thin line of a horizontal slash into a vertical plane, using the upper edge to knock the Qingping Sword aside.

Clang!

Chu Weiping’s move had been risky from the beginning. It lacked proper force, the blade flew too high, and his chest-center was left exposed.

Wha!

Bai Xiang released the hilt with her left hand, holding Feixiang Heaven up with her right arm alone to pin the Qingping Sword in place, then suddenly straightened the tendons of her left leg and drove a savage kick diagonally down toward Chu Weiping’s flank.

The white-browed elder’s brows jumped as well.

This junior…

The path of that kick also encompassed Yuchen…

He had only intended to test Bai Xiang’s basic swordsmanship. He had not expected to receive an answer like this. Chu Weiping pulled his dry lips into a grin, abruptly released the Dao sword with his right hand, and met Bai Xiang’s leg-slash head-on with a punch.

Bang!

Foot and fist collided. The two colossal forces smashed the void around them apart, splitting open one black rift after another.

From that single blow alone, the vibration-wave drove down what remained of the platform beneath their feet—that stretch of ground which had long since become an isolated island under the ravaging sword qi—by half a meter, blasting open great clouds of dust and smoke.

Chu Weiping’s body swayed slightly. Cracks spread through the ground under his feet with sharp snaps, and he was forced to skid half a step backward out of the pit.

Leg against fist.

A prepared strike against a hurried one.

In this exchange, he could only fall into the disadvantage.

Bai Xiang did not relent after seizing the advantage. Rather than withdrawing her raised leg, she borrowed the force of the contact and rebound to whirl it downward, sending a vicious toe-kick at Chu Weiping’s primary support leg in his current stance—his left leg.

Chu Weiping bared his teeth and sprang away.

Bai Xiang pressed in, shaking aside his left hand and sword with Feixiang Heaven. Her left foot slammed into the ground, and in one smooth motion she concentrated all the force of her entire body into her side, into her left shoulder, and smashed it brutally into the right side of his chest!

Puchi!

That one collision blew apart the entire right half of Chu Weiping’s body.

Blood rained through the air, mixed with the origin-qi shockwave erupted by the impact, dragging a trapezoidal mist of blood behind him as it tore far into the distance.

“Master!”

Just like Bai Zhuqing, Senior Sister Qin had refused to leave. She had not even considered dodging any of the stray qi-blades. She was merely clinging to the edge of what little remained of the platform. The moment she saw this, she cried out in alarm.

A close-quarters fight like this truly could be called a return to simplicity. It was also genuinely perilous…

Daoist Luoying had already sent off most of Qianyuan Sect’s disciples and was floating alone in the air to watch the battle. When he saw this, his eyes flickered.

These two… had the winner already been decided?

Suddenly, Chu Weiping jerked his head up. A bloody gleam flashed through his eyes.

At the very moment Bai Xiang’s sequence had run its course and her force had gone long, his intent condensed. The scattered blood and bits of flesh blasted into the air… began to gather themselves back together as if alive, forming a horrifying blood-arm that stretched thirty to forty meters long, its narrow hooked claw at the end seizing the Qingping Sword that had been knocked flying away!

Hm…?

Bai Xiang’s attention was drawn to the Qingping Sword, but in the next instant that narrow blood-arm smashed into the left side of her face.

The distance was too close; she could not dodge. The movement was roughly like an elbow strike, yet with the blood-arm’s grotesque elongated structure, it could change shape at will. Every section of it could bend.

In slow motion, her neck took the force of the hit and bent almost to its utmost limit. Her entire body was thrown away, rolling across the arena and carving out a long track before crashing into a huge crater in the seats behind her.

Chu Weiping’s body followed immediately after. The blood-arm shrank back little by little, reforming into a normal arm again. Then he accelerated violently into the smoke, his descending sword-light colliding exactly with the horizontally raised blade that blocked it.

Rumble…

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The broken seating structure had already been on the verge of collapse. It could not bear the force of that clash at all. Dust and debris exploded outward as it caved in, obscuring everything within.

Zheng!

Screee!

But immediately afterward, the qi-blades bursting from the two swords swept the dust-cloud away, exposing the two figures at once and allowing everyone—including all the viewers who could still barely follow through the live feed—to see Bai Xiang’s current condition clearly.

She was not dead!

Her neck had clearly been bent to its utmost limit, and even now it was still hanging off to one side, yet she still had the strength to command her body, to raise her hand, grip her sword, and block the slash!

“So this too is a use of demonic power…”

“Combined with the Path of Qi’s medicine-gathering arts, and with the demonic contamination of the Sword Dao system brought under control.”

“Do you think a technique like this can still bear the name of ‘Sword Dao’?”

As those words were spoken one syllable at a time, Bai Xiang’s neck contracted, straightened, and slowly returned her face upright again.

Her face remained enchanting and flawless. Even though a bruise had spread over her left cheek, a smear of blood had appeared at the corner of her lips, and her hair had gone slightly crooked and disordered, none of it damaged that beauty in the slightest. If anything, she looked like a blood-stained flower petal—more vivid than ever.

“Naturally, I am the principal.”

Chu Weiping met her gaze without the least surprise.

“Whose Dao is the Dao?”

“My Dao, of course.”

“If I can kill and defeat the source of the qi methods—that is, you—then naturally everything will be mine to define.”

“Good, Dao-friend.” Bai Xiang grinned. “Then we truly are thinking alike.”

Bang-clang!

Sword qi flew wildly. Chu Weiping felt an immense force—like a volcano erupting, like a tsunami surging, like a planet itself colliding—gushing up from below. He had no way to resist at all and was blasted away, leaping from the ground to a height of a thousand meters in only a few breaths.

With a whoosh, in the next instant a black-dressed afterimage appeared before him. First, one sword-strike smashed him out of midair. Then she extended her left hand and closed it loosely toward the void, like a true immortal or Buddha commanding wind and clouds. At once, the silver-white sky turned into a dense black darkness, and when one focused again, it was already rolling storm-clouds and flashing thunder.

“Good Dao-friend!”

Suspended in midair, Chu Weiping let out a long cry. He flipped over, formed a hand seal, and came dragging his sword in with his bare right arm.

“Then watch, Dao-friend!”

“This is the Second Sword!”

Boom!

High in the sky, as Bai Xiang pressed her sword-fingers downward, a blue-white bolt of lightning more than a hundred meters across drilled straight down, its edge as sharp as a sword-blade, crashing head-on into Chu Weiping’s Second Sword!

Slaaash!

A lifting slash with one sword!

The Qingping Sword sang out clear and bright, split open the Creation Qi Tribulation in one stroke, and cleaved the surging lightning clean in half!

“Take my sword, Dao-friend!”

The white-browed elder charged forward with wild momentum and a furious cry, pouring all his spirit into the blade, stabbing straight at Bai Xiang with a plain, direct thrust.

Bai Xiang opened her eyes. Blue-white plasma suddenly burst from her golden pupils, and as the arcs of lightning leapt, they wrapped around her entire body, transforming in an instant into a Great Buddha of Thunder-Light. Its hands parted in midair, crossing and separating, and the thousands of afterimages it brushed out were all filled in and made real by lightning.

The Great Buddha of Thunder-Light sat in the high sky. In its thousand arms it held sword, saber, spear, halberd, hammer, mace, lance… Behind it, the lightning stained the storm-clouds and gave rise to mountains and rivers, sun and moon, birds, beasts, fish, and insects… As for Bai Xiang herself, she stood revealed outside the Buddha, cradled in the center of its chest. Her eyes were closed, and her hands shifted from a prayer seal pressed together into a strange mudra, one hand pointing to heaven and one hand pointing to earth, with a hazy pocket of space formed between her palms.

The camera kept panning upward from below. Every onlooker stared, dumbstruck, at this scene.

The Great Buddha of Thunder-Light beneath the storm-clouds.

The white streak dragged across the darkened sky… the sword-point thrusting upward from below.

It was a scene like an apocalyptic painting, and in that instant it seared itself deep into the hearts of all who saw it.

Hummm!

As Bai Xiang and the Great Buddha opened their eyes at the same moment, a wave like an electromagnetic ripple spread out through the void. Under the impact of that wave, all the air within its range was shattered. The on-site spectators caught by it only felt as if something had been poured into their ears, and in an instant they could no longer hear the slightest sound from the outside world. As for those cultivators who had arrogantly believed they could hover in the sky and watch by relying on their cultivation, they dropped from the heavens like dumplings falling into boiling water, and no matter how they roused their demonic power, it was useless.

And within that absolute silence, the void shattered… and before the Qingping Sword, the snow-bright tip of Feixiang Heaven burst out through space itself.

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At the same time, all the power of the Great Buddha of Thunder-Light… all its light and shadow… along with all of Bai Xiang’s qi and blood… all of her gathered force, vanished into nothingness. In the same instant it passed through Bai Xiang’s palm—through that hazy opening she had formed there—and was translated directly onto the Feixiang Heaven that had shot forward.

Then they finally collided.

Feixiang Heaven.

Qingping Sword.

The two sharp points met and pressed together… and in the next instant they flashed downward at terrifying speed. In that silent world, a giant cloud of explosion rose from the ground below, and only several breaths later could one focus enough to see the thin oblique void-line left behind by that slash.

Rumble…

The mute stillness shattered. Only then did most people jump in fright. Only now did they finally hear the echo of that explosion-cloud, and only now did they truly realize what a horrifying, world-shaking battle they had just witnessed.

Then what was the result?

Pairs of eyes widened desperately, ignoring the torrential rain pouring down from the sky, straining to make out the two figures in the heavens.

Who had won?

Who had lost?

“Hah… hah… hah…”

Beneath the storm-clouds, both of Bai Xiang’s sleeves had been blasted away, revealing her two pale arms. Her high chest rose and fell continuously beneath the somewhat tattered black cloth of her dress, and two lines of blood trailed downward from her eerie golden pupils.

Her hair was still utterly disordered, with many edges cut away by qi-blades, leaving her in a somewhat bedraggled state.

But her gaze remained sharp.

Her breathing was heavy, but not chaotic.

Her bearing, her posture, and the force of her spirit all still held something in reserve. She could have borne another round of ultimate exchanges, perhaps several more.

And Chu Weiping…

The white-browed elder floated in the air a little over ten meters ahead, Qingping in hand, his face calm, his breathing not disordered in the slightest.

Whoosh—bang!

As Feixiang Heaven whirled back, Bai Xiang reached out and gripped it tightly. She looked once at the elder before her, then swung the blade behind her back.

“Actually… you didn’t have to do this.”

Her eyes remained fixed on Chu Weiping, her voice somewhat hoarse.

“A new era is about to arrive.”

“You understand qi methods. You could have continued on.”

Chu Weiping had been studying Bai Xiang the whole time. Hearing this, he suddenly grinned.

“I once thought that in many respects we were exactly alike, both the most extreme seekers of the Dao.”

“But now I see clearly. You are different from me.”

“The road you mean to walk is another one.”

Bai Xiang fell silent and said nothing.

“You are a fine sword.” Chu Weiping shifted his gaze from Bai Xiang’s face to the Feixiang Heaven she held, narrowing his eyes with a nod. “Rather than live in the shadow of this sword, I would rather become part of it and help push it to a higher realm.”

Hm?

At last, Bai Xiang showed real emotion.

Could it be… Chu Weiping meant…

“One hundred and sixty-four stars.”

Chu Weiping raised his head and spoke the number aloud.

“At your age, no matter how heaven-blessed your talent, you do not have time to trace every star in the sky.”

“Because the Dao-Void Martial Tournament will not wait for you.”

“Stronger opponents are already closing in.”

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“…But I am different!”

His tone changed as he looked up into the storm-clouds overhead.

“For long years, I was trapped in that realm, comprehending it for far too long.”

“Among those hazy sensations, some told me where those stars lay. But limited by thought, I could not see every single one of them clearly. Even now, many are still missing.”

“And you—do you not want to know where they are?”

Is that so…

So from the very beginning, you were seeking death…

Bai Xiang took a deep breath, suddenly raised the Dao sword across before her, and fixed her golden pupils on the streak of crimson wrapped around the blade.

That was blood-sha aura.

It was a phenomenon that could form only on a blade that had killed an enemy, that had swept up blood-sha.

Its very existence already said enough.

“Take care, Dao-friend.”

She lowered the sword, sending off her enemy for the first time without offering a sword salute.

Because it was no longer needed.

The meeting of spirit and intent surpassed all outward ceremony.

“Take care.”

Chu Weiping also cupped his hands toward Bai Xiang, then turned leisurely and began walking step by step toward the highest reaches of the sky, chanting as he went:

“My sword-heart cuts the mortal dust,

My feelings return to Taishang’s peak.

The Three Corpses witness a newer self,

My Dao-bones entrust a newer resolve.

Feathered ascension is not my wish,

To climb immortal still leaves an old man.

In the old dream of two bodies,

Awake through one life, all is emptiness.”

As his voice spread outward, the storm-clouds above slowly parted, and a radiant divine light fell slantwise from the heavens, enveloping him within it.

Whether because of the light or for some other reason, the elder’s features grew hazy and pale, fragile as a phantom.

Then, all at once, he halted in the light and turned to look down at Bai Xiang below. After that, his gaze passed through Bai Xiang and, across a thousand meters of empty sky, toward the center of the arena… toward Senior Sister Qin, Qin Yuchen, who was still staring up here in tense alarm.

“Ah!”

He let out a heavy sigh.

“Having seen the new scene today,

Better to become the spring wind.”

Then, for the first time, his whole face broke into a natural smile. Wild and unrestrained, he turned back again and threw his arms open toward the heavens.

“Hahaha—”

“Good wind, lend me your strength!”

“Carry me up into the blue sky!”

Then the light dispersed, and with it, that figure as well.

What remained behind was only a falling sword.

And, through Feixiang Heaven… the remnant thoughts of those stars, ceaselessly passing into the heart of the successor.