Volume 4, Chapter 197 – The Chan Sword Repels the Massed Enemies, a Green Shadow Reveals the True Body (Part 1)

The Heaven’s Pride List and the Venerables List did not carry the same weight on the Venerable Net.

The former recorded only young prodigies. Its standards were not limited to cultivation, but also included sufficiently young bone age and apparent age.

Once someone passed a certain age, they would be struck from the Heaven’s Pride List and kicked straight onto the Venerables List. And if they had only been near the tail end of that list to begin with, and had made no major breakthrough by this point, then they might not even be able to enter the tail end of the Venerables List, not even the ranks beyond the top thousand. They might simply vanish from every list altogether.

That point alone was enough to prove Yue Canglan’s worth.

Excluding Demon Court, excluding those Hall Masters who stood at the level of Venerable Saints, and excluding Demon Court Heaven-Patrols like Li Huiran, he could indeed say with perfect justification that he had been the strongest man in the world for a very long time.

Only, to Yue Canglan, that kind of first place meant nothing at all.

From just the few words they had exchanged upon meeting, one could already tell that this man was arrogant to the bone. There was no way he would take being beneath others, useful only as a tool for Demon Court to command, as any sort of honor.

Nor had Yue Canglan been lying.

He did not care what Pang Tiandao intended to do, nor did he care about everything happening in the outside world at this moment.

He had already made arrangements for the people of Canglan Sword Sect. The only thing he wanted was to have a proper match in this ready-made arena against an opponent who truly stirred his fighting spirit, to see whose swordsmanship stood higher, and to see whether he might gain some inspiration from it and break through to a new realm.

“Oh…” Bai Xiang let out a quiet sigh and understood his intentions.

In her view, Yue Canglan was probably the only one who, even while vaguely sensing that today would bring a tremendous upheaval, was still willing to follow the tournament format, follow the rules, and fight for the final championship.

A person like that did deserve to be called a seeker of the Dao. He was certainly inferior to Chu Weiping, but she was willing to give him her respect.

“Draw your sword.”

She still did not turn around. She had not even changed her posture. Her black sleeve covered her wrist, her right arm hanging loosely in midair as though it had lost all strength, letting the wind lift the long sleeve as it pleased. Her left arm rested rather lightly against her Dao sword. From her stance to her tone, her whole person was utterly relaxed.

“Let me see the fruit of your Dao.”

Such overbearing ease… and from a female cultivator who was, in theory, far younger than he was, a junior no less. Anyone else would likely have frozen, then flared into anger. But Yue Canglan remained expressionless, as though he did not find it insulting at all.

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He had seen that earth-shaking battle between Bai Xiang and Chu Weiping.

In his eyes, whether in the Void Realm or the main world, people could more or less be divided into several tiers.

At the very top were naturally Demon Court Venerable Saints like Pang Tiandao. Such people most likely held a fragmentary, or even complete, Heavenly Dao Divine Pool in their hands, possessing supreme magical power and divine abilities capable of moving space and shifting entire Heavens Seas.

The next tier was made up of Venerable Lords of various paths who, like himself, seemed invincible.

Below that came the Dojo Venerable Lords ranked near the front of the Venerables List.

And at the bottom were the unrated, unremarkable wandering Venerables and wild Venerables beyond the Venerables List.

Here, only the tier Yue Canglan himself occupied need be discussed. Venerables at this level were generally capable of cultivating one, or even multiple, Divine Pools to the limit, yet there still remained a gap of one line between their power and divine abilities and those of a Heavenly Dao Divine Pool.

A single line of difference in divine abilities was a difference beyond measure.

That was the gap in realm. At least for now, Yue Canglan had no desire to challenge Pang Tiandao directly. So he needed an excellent whetstone to sharpen himself against.

That whetstone could not be too poor. At the very least, it could not be any weaker than he was, or it would serve no purpose.

Nor could that whetstone be too good. At the very least, it could not be at the Venerable Saint level, or it would also serve no purpose.

Taking all that into account, Yue Canglan believed Bai Xiang was the only possible choice. That was why he had fixed his eyes on her from the beginning and followed after her like a shadow.

From her previous battle, her swordsmanship was astonishingly concise and refined. And her physical body was incomparably strong, to the point that she had likely manifested and refined more than a hundred orifices.

Yue Canglan slowly shifted the leaf-and-vine sword in his hand from a reverse drag to a proper forward grip, while Bai Xiang’s sword-techniques replayed ceaselessly in his mind.

He had already simulated this countless times in his head. Now that the real Bai Xiang stood before him, Yue Canglan felt even more strongly that those sword-moves had come alive, shifting through empty space onto the back of the woman facing away from him, as though in an instant they had split into countless incomplete phantoms, each using a different line of swordplay to attack him.

Ha!

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Planting his foot heavily, Yue Canglan sprang forward with his sword and met her head-on.

With a ringing clang, Bai Xiang drew her Dao sword, Feixiang Heaven, with her left hand and abruptly turned sideways, blocking his blade with a casual backhand motion.

Yue Canglan gripped and shook his sword. At once, a ripple of empty-space vibration burst from the point where the two blades met, blasting open a stretch of cloud-sea ahead.

Clang, clang, clang, clang!

He intended to use Bai Xiang to test what he had learned, so his opening moves were not especially swift. He simply began running through the “foundational swordsmanship” of Canglan Sword Sect, using all manner of cuts, lifts, and thrusts at will. Every single strike also carried layer upon layer of Canglan force. Once a sword swept out, that force did not vanish at once. It remained until the overlapping waves of Canglan force finally dissipated.

Canglan force came from the supreme art he had created, the Canglan Sword Scripture. He had long since fused it into his field, to the point that it had become instinct. Adding force to every motion came to him effortlessly.

Bai Xiang exchanged a few ringing clashes with him and immediately realized that the sword-shadows left behind did not disperse. Every single one still advanced through the void in rippling waves. Their speed was not especially fast, but as Yue Canglan continued to swing, the number of overlapping waves rose geometrically.

Each sword-strike released a thousand vibrating afterwaves. Was this the Dao he had comprehended from his own name?

Good.

It was likewise a path of vibrational force, but this path excelled in “technique” and stripped away “intent,” standing at the opposite extreme from the Shenming Sword Dao and the Void-Imagination Divine Sword, which “emphasized intent and downplayed technique.”

But for an individual, though these two roads seemed endless, in different stages of life they were both finite. At some point, one would always cultivate one path to the absolute limit, and from there achieve complete fusion, where things reversed into their opposite once taken to the extreme.

Just as with Yue Canglan. After little more than ten exchanges, he had already stacked up over ten thousand waves of sword-force. When that many sword-waves gathered together, it was enough to turn quantitative change into qualitative transformation.

Facing his sword was like facing an enormous sword formation made up of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of swordsmen. His blade rose like a tide of clouds and fell like a crashing sea, vast and majestic as it bore down from above.

At that point, could such technique still be called mere technique?

Of course not.

The boundary within it had long since connected itself naturally. Yue Canglan needed neither to think nor to act. The technique he had honed so deeply had already become a massive sword-intent, pressing downward like layered mountain-waves and slamming again and again into Feixiang Heaven.

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Boom, boom, boom!

Crash, crash, crash!

Every impact was like a real tsunami, as though a thousand layered waves were truly roaring in reply.

After more than ten such collisions, Yue Canglan’s expression finally began to change.

He realized Bai Xiang had not moved from where she stood.

In terms of the “foundational portion” alone, his display had already reached its limit. Yet no matter how the tides of sword-force stacked up, no matter how rapidly they hammered Bai Xiang’s blade in succession, that blade showed no change at all, rooted in place like a towering divine mountain standing upon the coast.

He could not shake it!

He could not even force a tremor from her wrist?

By now, Bai Xiang had already turned to face him. The tips of her snow-white hair swayed with her sword motions, and the pair of golden cicada earrings at her ears rocked gently as well.

She did not seem to be using any profound martial art. She simply stabilized her stance, planted herself firmly in place, raised her sword, received his sword, and took all of his Canglan force head-on. And by all appearances, it had not affected her in the slightest.

Her body cultivation realm is even deeper than I imagined!

Yue Canglan saw through the truth at a glance. At that point, he no longer bothered to conceal his divine abilities. With a sweeping motion, he dragged his sword into a blur of afterimages. The quantity and density of Canglan force surged explosively, until tens of millions of sword-waves gathered into a single colossal heavenly sword and slashed downward with a roar.

Faced with that strike, Bai Xiang finally showed the slightest movement of emotion.

For an instant, Yue Canglan’s determined figure charging toward her, and the resolute expression on his face, overlapped with Chu Weiping. Without meaning to, she thought back to the old man’s “Second Sword” when he had thrust it toward the thunder-light Buddha.

And from the memory fragments Chu Weiping had left her, the Second Sword had not been the limit of his seeking. It was only that he no longer had the strength to continue seeking further, and could do nothing but leave behind sorrow and regret.

No.

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There was no need for regret.

Turning her wrist, Bai Xiang took a single step toward Yue Canglan for the first time.

Around her figure there seemed to appear a layer of drifting cloud-mist, barely forming the phantom outline of a white-browed old man wielding a sword. Her sword-steps grew faster and faster… until without any warning, her whole body flashed across the open ground, and in the next instant, she was already behind her opponent.

Whoosh!

The mountain-toppling sword-force abruptly dissipated.

“…What sword was that?”

Yue Canglan’s whole body had gone rigid and frozen. Trembling, eyes wide, he spoke at last.

“The Third Sword Form.”

Bai Xiang turned her head slightly and raised her blade in a sword salute to him.

“My thanks.”

With a sharp clang, the Dao sword returned to its sheath.

She swept her sleeve and strode forward in great steps, passing the rigid figure in an instant and disappearing into the cloudbank ahead.

“The Third Sword Form… the Third Sword Form…!”

Yue Canglan kept staring at her back, baring his teeth as he murmured in wonder.

Then suddenly, great sprays of blood burst from all over his body, and as he fell, his final thought was this…

She had actually spared my life.