Volume 4, Chapter 195 – Invitation to Battle (Two-in-One)

Let time turn back ten minutes. In Zhennan, Maozhou, the streets were filled with an air of grim slaughter.

Bai Xiang had remained in secluded cultivation in Tongyun Circuit for ten days. That was enough time for Bai Shengju, Xiang Xian, and the others to make it back. As soon as they arrived, they immediately reassigned the batch of elite disciples who had been transferred out, along with Xu Shu and the others, into the ranks of the dojo forces and patrol units. Relying on these people, they established a strict and orderly rotation system, keeping constant watch on every movement around them and not daring to relax in the slightest.

This was not only to guard against possible pursuers or those demonic Dao Void People coming to make trouble. More than that, it was out of fear of the aftershocks of the Void Tribulation, in other words, all the chaos caused by its interference.

After all, things like “black rifts splitting open with giant hands emerging” and “heaven collapsing, earth splitting, shrieks from the bottom of a pit” were typical kinds of Void Demon disasters, and they had seen no shortage of them on the road back. The shock it dealt everyone had been immense.

In the first case, the giant hand had been at least a thousand meters long. It was pitch-black from end to end, like liquid ink, and from the tip of its wrist extended eight slender hooked claws with multiple joints. Without the slightest warning, it smashed downward, destroying buildings, sweeping ruins flat, and directly snatching living beings from where the refugees were packed together before retracting back into the black rift and disappearing.

In the second case, they had personally seen the edge of nearly half a Dao-city collapse. Some enormous monster was clearly hiding beneath that deep pit. Every time another district caved in, mournful wails and crunching chewing sounds echoed up from the bottom, and from time to time a foul evil wind would blow out. It had even tried to interfere with the route of the Silver-Shuttle Vessel.

With these sights from the journey still echoing in his mind, Bai Shengju stood alone atop the city wall, brows knotted tight, his eyes fixed on the clouds in the distance, filled with vigilance and exhaustion.

These past few days, he had barely had a single good night’s sleep.

Zhennan was not immune to disaster. It was only because it was surrounded and protected by two mountain ranges that those more mobile Void Demon disasters had not yet spread here.

But that was only a matter of time. Bai Shengju had been following the news as well. He knew attacks like those were erupting all over the world.

“Xiang’er’s match has begun.” Xiang Xian descended quietly onto the city wall and walked to his side to inform him. “Brother Bai, why don’t you go down and get some rest first? Leave this side to me.”

Bai Shengju hesitated slightly, but still shook his head. “I know. I’ll check on it every now and then.”

When a man grows old, he ought to see things more clearly. He ought not to be unable to bear life and death, parting and loss.

But this time the circumstances were different after all. Bai Shengju could not accept any bad ending. So he did not dare watch the live broadcast, nor even listen to it. He simply stood stiffly in the wind, and only every so often, when he could no longer help himself, would he take out his phone and read the text updates.

“Xiang’er once told me about some of what she saw in Shenwu Heaven,” Xiang Xian said to comfort him. “Compared with that kind of chaos, the order of the main world is still fairly stable. It can hold out until she makes it back.”

“Make it back… mm…”

Bai Shengju answered and could not help imagining that scene.

If Xiang’er could return safely, then she must have won, right?

But even if she does not win, I do not care. I was never so desperate to make the family rise to some great height. All I wanted was peace and harmony. I could even give up seeking revenge on Yaoyu for that.

Bai Shengju suddenly felt a trace of regret, because he had not yet said those words to anyone, least of all to Bai Xiang.

If something changes, if something happens to Xiang’er, how will I face Qing’er? How would I have the face to leave this world after the children?

Bai Shengju became more and more restless, though in this regard Xiang Xian was much calmer than he was.

Because before leaving, Bai Xiang had formally taken something from her.

Something capable of overturning the entire larger game.

At the same time, Bai Zhuqing was also out leading a patrol in the southern part of the city.

She would dare say she was the person in Zhennan Circuit most concerned about Bai Xiang’s condition, but with danger pressing down on them, she could not bring herself to lock herself in a room and watch television. She still insisted on leading the team in person, and every time they encountered a wandering demon pool, she personally went down to kill it, charging at the front and setting the example herself.

Only occasionally, when the team stopped to rest, would she take out her phone and stare at the screen, watching the news through an already unstable signal and following every report from the Yujing Division.

Such behavior did not stand out, because almost every disciple of Shenming was doing the same thing.

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Xu Shu, Ma Yue, Chen Shi… and even Liu Yong and the others who had only recently entered the Dao. While carrying out their tasks, all of them were also devoting part of their attention to the tournament.

“Get some proper rest.”

After collecting the day’s meal trays, one disciple raised his eyes toward Senior Sister Qin, looking as though he wanted to say something but hesitated.

“You are a guest, after all.”

“Cherish this stretch of time.”

Senior Sister Qin watched him leave with a cold gaze. As soon as he was gone, she hurriedly turned the live broadcast back on and fixed her eyes on the clamorous arena.

The streets were already nearly empty of people. All of Zhennan, and extending further, likely all of Maozhou and the whole land of the Nine Provinces, was more or less the same.

People had been warned to go out less and stay indoors to avoid disaster. At a time like this, they could only follow current events and the final outcome of the tournament through the network.

Yujing.

On a tower pavilion in the outer outskirts of Yong’an Prefecture, Little Princess Yao Ying stood at the edge, gazing from afar in the direction of the arena.

“You’re not going?”

She suddenly turned her head and looked at Ten-Extremes Daoist Zhou Yuan, who had arrived behind her at some unknown time. For the moment, she still could not make out what exactly he was plotting.

“The larger game is already decided. The merit need not belong to me.”

Zhou Yuan smiled.

“The larger game?” Yao Ying frowned, then asked, “Come to think of it, I’m curious… My father ought to be planning to abandon this place and flee into the void beyond, leaving behind this rotten mess. How does Blood Soul Heaven intend to clean it up?”

She too had realized that the Yaoyu imperial dynasty had reached the end of its road, and she also knew that these people had spent an enormous amount of time planning for the sake of establishing a new realm under heaven.

But the problem was that with the present chaos, demonic disasters were breaking out on every scale almost everywhere under heaven. Even if Demon Court and Blood Soul Heaven took over, would they really be able to contain it?

“There are many ways to govern an age,” Zhou Yuan said, shaking his head.

“A new dynasty has its new officials.”

“They may not need to save them at all.”

“You…”

Yao Ying stared at him, her heart filled with shock.

Did that mean that at least on Zhou Yuan’s side, on Blood Soul Heaven’s side, they had no intention of dealing with these disturbances at all?

Maybe they were even deliberately helping to drive the disasters forward?

They would not be planning to slaughter all living beings in the main world, would they?

At last, Yao Ying began to hesitate.

She began to suspect that her decision to support these people and allow herself to become the person they backed might have been the wrong one.

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The moment that thought arose, she suddenly felt someone close in rapidly, seize one of her arms, and grip it tightly.

She spun around in shock and fury.

It was Zhou Yuan.

“Little Princess needn’t trouble herself over such things,” Zhou Yuan said to her in a low voice.

“The sacrificial rite has already been arranged.”

“When that moment arrives, your dream will naturally be fulfilled.”

What arrangement?

What sacrificial rite?

Yao Ying froze. At once, scenes surfaced in her mind: these people telling her to build tower platforms, light bonfires on several hilltops, and hold rites there.

Was that not a ritual meant to soothe the dead and call wandering souls?

A sacrificial rite?

What exactly was he talking about?

“It is indeed for the dead, and indeed for wandering souls.”

Zhou Yuan smiled at Yao Ying.

At this moment, that smile looked incomparably sinister and terrifying to her.

“But perhaps it really is not quite what Little Princess imagined.”

Rumble, rumble!

Thunder boomed and wild winds rose.

The greater part of the sky surged with storm and flying sand and stone. Clouds from several kilometers around were all drawn together in the course of the tribulation’s change, forming an incomparably thick and enormous tornado, more than ten times as imposing as Chang Hongyuan’s Great Luo Heavenly Abyss.

The entire arena was completely enclosed within the tornado, sitting precisely at the eye of the storm.

But that was no storm at all.

The sword-bearing man who had been about to approach Bai Xiang narrowed his eyes and looked upward toward the inner layer of the tornado.

What moved there was not merely cloud-flow and air, but countless black rifts, countless fractures, and between every crack another layer of mirage-like illusion.

It was an enormous void vortex.

The Thirty-Three Heavens Sea, or at least part of it, had been forcefully transported here by immense power and supreme divine ability. A corner of it had been kneaded together, then driven into the main world by borrowing the interference of the Void Tribulation, and it was now about to merge in through this vortex.

It was being guided down in a spiral.

The process was extremely rapid. Very soon, as the whole earth began to tremble, the first section of the Heavens Sea had already rotated down through the vortex and crashed into the land, tearing through the soil and pouring into the earth-veins as the process of full integration began.

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From that single tremor alone, a full tenth of the audience projections inside the arena dimmed and went out.

Everyone stared in shock at the scene before them, unable to understand what had happened or what kind of consequences it would bring.

“Pang Tiandao, what a colossal move!”

At the Buddhist temple in the hills, the woman in monk’s robes was supervising members of the Yaoyu imperial clan as they loaded supplies onto a large flying vessel. When she saw the “wind pillar” in the distance, her face was filled with horror as well.

“He doesn’t just want to recreate the order of spirit and flesh. He wants to reverse the Void Tribulation too? He wants to drag back those largest fragments and forcibly fuse them with the main world again?”

At this moment, she finally understood why that earlier “aspect-body” of his had ignored her completely.

What he sought was entirely different.

The reason she had betrayed Demon Court back then, sealed shut every passage between the main world and the void, and supported Yaoyu in creating the Sword Dao was because she wanted to test whether such a course could prevent the invasion of the Void Tribulation.

In the woman’s view, the invasion that erupted once every so many centuries or millennia must contain some law no one had yet managed to uncover. If she could discover that law and lock down the conditions under which it operated, then she would have a chance to refine from the process an unprecedented Heavenly Dao Divine Pool, break through that barrier in one stroke, and truly step into the realm of a Great Saint.

Obviously, from the look of things now, she had failed.

Even if no one broke the severed link between Heaven and Earth, that kind of sealing was still imperfect. Tiny cracks had continued to allow things to slip through over the centuries and millennia, and she had long foreseen that Demon Court would return sooner or later.

And the reason she was not afraid of Demon Court taking revenge on her was because she understood Pang Tiandao far too well.

He was indeed vindictive to the point of never letting the slightest grudge go.

But he would also abandon revenge for the sake of a vague ideal.

And that ideal is a bit too grand…

The woman in monk’s robes bit down on her lips, her expression extremely complicated.

She and Pang Tiandao were figures from the same era, so naturally she knew quite a few secret histories of Demon Court and those ancient myths that had already been buried in the dust of time.

Well, actually, calling them myths was not quite right, because they were really stories of demons and humans. Every mythic image now passed down among the people, every mythic war behind it, had someone like her at its heart trying to stop the return of the Void Tribulation.

Emperors all want their realms to endure forever.

The strong all dream of eternal life.

Once one reaches that level, no one is willing to see order overturned and everything begin again. They fight for their lives over those seats in the tribulation struggle.

So throughout the ages, there have been quite a few people like her.

But there truly had been no one, not a single person, who had tried Pang Tiandao’s route.

To actually attempt to recreate the relation between spirit and flesh, and then piece back together the main world that had been stripped away in ages past… to stitch those fragments back together.

The woman in monk’s robes began trembling violently all over, because she knew that whether Pang Tiandao succeeded or not, the main world was about to enter an unprecedented super-upheaval.

That madman!

Who knew how many ancient demons were hidden in those Heavens Seas… and all sorts of chaotic Heavenly Dao laws that might have been stripped away from the main world tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago.

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How dared he just force them in like this?

Even if he succeeded, the destruction it would bring, at least to the heavens and earth as they currently existed, would still be catastrophic.

Boom!

At that very moment, the aftershock rolled up by the “sky-pillar” arrived as well.

The winds raged brutally, ripping up hillsides and forests by the roots. The outer walls of the temple were shredded like piles of sand. Many people and supplies were swept away in an instant, shrinking into mottled specks too small to make out.

Hmph!

The woman glared and flung out a sleeve. Instantly, a huge black rift was torn open before her.

Whoosh!

With another sweep of her sleeve, the black rift expanded, forming a hemispherical protective barrier. Every aftershock, whether storm or earthquake, was cut off by the spatial fissures and completely unable to invade.

I’m not going mad together with the lot of you…

The woman took one last look at the outer world and clenched her teeth.

The black rift immediately began to contract.

It shrank and shrank until it became a tiny point, vanishing together with everything wrapped inside it.

Meanwhile, above the arena, within the storm layer linking heaven and earth, black rifts were being opened at the same time in the gaps belonging to the Thirty-Three Heavens Sea.

Every one of these black rifts was a neat rectangle, standing in midair like doorframes, and there were thousands upon thousands of them.

Then, as if the same shot had been copied and played countless times, a single pale yet sinewy hand thrust out from every “doorframe” at once and directly grasped the outlines of the black rifts.

The figure of Pang Tiandao, that bearded middle-aged man, emerged from within the frames, like endless mirage-shadows standing in the sky and looking down from on high.

Feeling the scrutinizing meaning in that gaze, every contestant other than Bai Xiang tensed up and instinctively felt immense pressure descend on them.

“Not bad.”

“The candidates are basically all here.”

As he spoke in appraisal, those ten thousand aspect-bodies all took a step forward at the same time.

One single step.

As if crossing space, the countless figures converged in the air and formed the true Pang Tiandao, who stood with his hands behind his back and swept his gaze over the crowd.

“I have already set the problem.”

His eyes called the names one by one, passing over Chang Hongyuan, Meng Qiaosheng, and the others before finally settling on Bai Xiang’s face.

“If you want that result, then follow this heavenly ladder through the Thirty-Three Heavens Sea.”

“Keep walking until you reach me.”