Volume 4, Chapter 186 – Pool Poison

At Bai Xiang’s current stage, her cultivation was no longer something that could noticeably advance through qi-sharing with anyone else.

She first took out her storage jade token and drew out a portion of the sacred weapons from the God-Slaying Sword Array. Then she summoned the yellow-jade short sword from her inner Body-scape space and sent it a single command:

Eat.

Perhaps it had realized that once it finished eating, it too would be eaten by Feixiang Heaven. After coming out, the little yellow sword hesitated and squirmed, turning back every few steps as it flew toward that pile of sacred weapons, as though hoping Bai Xiang would take the order back in the end.

“Just do it,” Bai Xiang said, half-lowering her eyes as she watched it. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

If she had only said that herself, it might have sounded somewhat believable.

The problem was that as she spoke, Feixiang Heaven, which still had not found a new scabbard for the time being, slowly floated up behind her shoulder. The way it wobbled there made it look very much as though it were nodding along with its master, and that was honestly rather terrifying.

Perhaps intimidated by some nameless threat, the little yellow sword immediately began obediently devouring that pile of sacred-weapon swords.

Watching the sacred weapons she had taken out visibly lose their essence to the little yellow sword, shrink in size, and finally crumble into a pile of iron dross, Bai Xiang propped up her chin and fell into thought.

Judging from Little Yellow’s reaction, there was nothing wrong with these sacred-weapon swords.

They were just ordinary sacred weapons, not the kind of demonic sacred weapons with astonishing activity of their own, nor was there any structural contamination inside them.

That was fine, then.

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She did not dwell on why Zhang Dai had escaped Blood Soul Heaven’s scheme and had not been part of that vile plan after all. Instead, she thought this was just as well. Most of the swords in the God-Slaying Sword Array could now be used to feed Little Yellow, and in turn become nourishment for Feixiang Heaven’s continued evolution.

“Go lean against it,” Bai Xiang instructed her floating natal Dao sword. Then she sank her mind into her inner Body-scape and began comprehending the precious legacy Chu Weiping had left behind.

There was one thing she saw very clearly: from the moment the battle began until his very death, Chu Weiping, that old Sword Lord, had refused to use even once the power that belonged to the Sword Dao.

By all indications, the existence of the Sword Dao had long since been integrated into Yao Yu’s dynasty itself. It was an indispensable part of the dynasty’s fortune, and was suspected to be a Heavenly Dao divine pool. In theory, cultivators who had trained to the summit within this system, meaning Sword Lords, ought to have the qualification to draw upon the divine pool’s power.

But Chu Weiping had truly never used it.

Bai Xiang had not understood at first, but after digesting part of his memories, she finally understood why.

All pool-methods are poisonous.

Those five words were how Chu Weiping had summed up everything.

“What are pool-methods?”

“In this world there are uncanny distortions called demon pools. Their root lies in gathered spirit that never dispersed, and in the end, under the interference of Loss of Order, they undergo distortion.”

“I once crossed hands with an emissary of the Demon Court. Inspired by that encounter, I gained a thorough understanding of the way of divine pools. To my shock, I realized their source was no different in essence from demon pools. One is ownerless, one has a master, but the latter suffers erosion without realizing it.”

To put it simply, Chu Weiping had once crossed hands with an emissary of the Demon Court. In the memory fragments Bai Xiang saw, she discovered that person had been Li Huiran.

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Li Huiran had perhaps found Chu Weiping interesting in his state of sudden enlightenment. After gaining the upper hand, he had not killed him. Instead, he said a few words to him by way of guidance, wanting to see what further breakthroughs he might make.

But what Li Huiran had offered guidance in was the Dao-Void Methods. At a glance he saw that Chu Weiping cultivated Yao Yu Sword Dao, and in his view, mere Sword Dao was nothing more than a lower-order substitute for Dao-Void Methods. For a genius like Chu Weiping, being trapped in that path was itself a shackle. He might as well cast Sword Dao aside entirely, let the vast demonic power in his body surge into motion, then go into the void and pass through a lightning tribulation once, stepping straight into the Venerable ranks of Dao-Void.

Yet Li Huiran had not expected that his words would land in Chu Weiping’s ears with an entirely different meaning. Instead, Chu Weiping used them to comprehend what it truly meant for every cultivator who relied on demonic power that demonic power itself was the embodiment of Loss of Order.

“The flesh is the candle, and the soul is the wick.”

“But those two alone are not enough. A candle and wick cannot ignite themselves. They cannot produce light on their own.”

“They require demonic aura and demonic power, acting as an external flame to light them.”

“And the unique candleflame produced when those two are lit and burned is what the demonic-power system calls a divine pool.”

This was the ultimate assessment Chu Weiping arrived at regarding the path of divine pools after gathering all of his insights together.

In his view, as long as one was a cultivator of the Sword Dao system or of the Dao-Void Methods system, as long as one was still using the energy called demonic power, then one was certainly being eroded by it.

There was no such thing as complete harmlessness. It was only that those with profound cultivation had stronger control, or that this erosion was buried too deeply to be seen before reaching a certain stage.

He even harbored a further suspicion: that the so-called Void Tribulations, the demon pools and Void Demons spilling out when the void was torn apart, were in fact transformed from the souls of all those who had been eroded by demonic power over the countless ages, and in essence were simply the dead spirits left behind by cultivators of earlier generations.

Once he had understood that, of course he was unwilling to use the power of the Sword Dao again.

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Even though he knew full well that this battle would be extraordinarily dangerous, and that refusing to use that power might very well lead to his death, he still chose that path.

Only because he did not want any external thing to come and stain the true sword in his heart.

No wonder he had sought death.

After reading through those insights, Bai Xiang silently shook her head.

The road ahead for the Sword Dao had already been blocked, yet he was unwilling to advance through the Dao-Void Methods either. It sounded lofty enough, saying he had comprehended qi methods and taken another step forward. But in essence, just as Bai Xiang had said during the fight, as long as he continued cultivating down that path, then before long all of his cultivation, and the very core of that cultivation, would be transformed into the methods of the Path of Qi, making Bai Xiang his ultimate source from the root.

But he had always been an arrogant, high-hearted man.

He had seen the dead end of the Sword Dao, and he knew that this road would have no future. Yet he refused to let someone like Wu Mengzi define the Sword Dao. In that regard, he wanted to do it himself.

And rather than survive by denying everything he had been in the past, he would rather, as the “lord of the Sword Dao,” fight Bai Xiang openly and die beneath the sword of qi methods.

That was the true reason he had sought death with all his heart.

“He remained in that sudden-enlightenment period for a very long time, and he really did excavate quite a few orifice-meridians throughout his body.”

“But all of those orifice-meridians were only in a partially revealed-and-refined state. The total amount was enormous, yet the rate at which he could use them was very low.”

“And even so, he still possessed power on that level. If he had cast aside his obsession and also used the Heavenly Dao divine pool, that battle would not have ended so easily.”

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Putting herself in Chu Weiping’s place, Bai Xiang estimated the power ratio between the two sides and felt that if he had truly fought without restraint, then even if she still won, she definitely would have been forced to expose her soul-abilities, which would have been extremely disadvantageous for the greater situation ahead.

She had often used the word gift to describe information she had refined and taken in. Only this time, that word was not meant sarcastically.

“Take a little extra care of Qin Yuchen.”

“I had Zhu Qingluo keep an eye on her. With her stamina, she could only hold out for one night. She should already be on the road by now.”

When a person dies, the lamp goes out. Before the great current of the age, Chu Weiping had made his choice.

What Bai Xiang could do was make use of the legacy he left behind, drawing from him the traits that she herself could use.

And after that…

heh, it was her turn to make a choice.

With a whoosh, a soul flew out from Bai Xiang’s body and seated itself in midair, facing her main body.

Within that translucent form, hazy “stars” began to light up, while Bai Xiang’s force remained in an extremely suppressed state.

Only by standing very close could one sense that aura steadily rising… steadily growing.