Volume 5, Chapter 7 – Taking Stock (2-in-1)

Ever since waking up, the very first thing Bai Xiang had done was check her own general condition.

The Sky Sea was the residue left behind by the Void Tribulation, the aftershock produced by that tide colliding with her. More than half of the tidal force within it had been aimed directly at her. Even though she had only just broken through at the time to a realm above the Origin Realm, when faced with that super-catastrophe born of heaven and earth, all she had been able to do was resist it with difficulty.

She had fought that tide for ten full years before finally erasing it completely. Bai Xiang had originally thought the state of her body would be rather terrible, but to her surprise, she was almost entirely uninjured.

Her sinews and bones were intact, her qi and blood abundant. Though the three hundred and sixty-one orifices across her body had dimmed, they still functioned like stellar origin points under the unified coordination of the Heavenly Pillar Meridians, and under the drive of her three Origin Orifices they continuously provided the energy needed to maintain her bodily functions.

It seemed that upon reaching this stage, the interior of her body had already “become a school unto itself.” If she continued to advance, perhaps it really could form an independent world of its own, perhaps even give birth to Illusory Realms and laws.

With that realization, Bai Xiang decided to name this new realm the Divine Palace Realm.

Three hundred and sixty-one star-orifices formed twelve rivers of stars within her inner body-scape. They were like an inner divine palace, with large and small directorates and officials taking shape within it, while the three Origin Orifices controlling the Heavenly Pillar Meridians were like the three masters of that divine palace, coordinating everything.

And so, the Divine Palace was established. It became the seventh major realm after Entering the Dao, Refining Qi, False Core, Gathering the Medicine, Golden Core, and Origin Realm.

Bai Xiang felt refreshed and delighted inwardly, and then discovered that her clothes were gone.

The tidal surge of the Void Tribulation had not been able to do anything to Bai Xiang herself, but it had certainly been able to wreak havoc on her external belongings. Her dark Dao-lord robe, storage jade token, phone, ornaments… basically everything she had been carrying had been wrecked. Nothing was left.

Even when she had appeared afterward and slain the demon thing hatched from the meteor fragments, the dark robes people had seen on her body had only been made from qi methods, along with illusion cast through the Golden-Pupil Illusory God.

Standing where she was with a slight frown, Bai Xiang realized she could not sense Feixiang Heaven’s exact location.

That was the truly bad part.

Even before reaching the Divine Palace Realm, she had already been able to control Feixiang Heaven and send it through the void back when she was still in the Origin Realm. Now that she had reached the Divine Palace Realm, the difference was even more astonishing—at this stage, the Three Flowers above her head had fused into her beaded crown, no longer distinguishable from one another but perfectly unified, while the Qi-Origin stored in her qi sea had transformed accordingly into what Pang Tiandao had described as “Sword-Qi Divine Force.”

At such a level, Feixiang Heaven was practically equivalent to one of her incarnations. With a single thought she should have been able to summon her Dao-sword to her, yet after trying several times, Bai Xiang received no response at all.

There were only two possibilities: either Feixiang Heaven had fallen too far away from her, or it had been too badly damaged in the tidal surge of the Void Tribulation and no longer had the strength to answer her call.

If it was the former, then the distance was probably absurdly great—so great that it might not even have fallen within the main world at all, but been swept by the shockwave into some Illusory Realm plane.

The latter would be troublesome too. First, she did not know the specific location. Second, even if she did find it, she would probably need to get within a certain distance before she could sense it.

Bai Xiang was not in a very good mood.

From the familiarity and sense of kinship this world gave off, she knew she had already fulfilled her wish. Not only had she broken through herself, she had also reversed the devastation caused by the tidal surge of the Void Tribulation through her own strength alone.

But Feixiang Heaven…

We promised each other we would weather eighty thousand great tribulations together…

Boom!

At that moment, explosions and tremors suddenly sounded not far away, and several thick columns of black smoke rose from among the trees.

Bai Xiang paid no attention to what was happening over there. She still did not know how far civil order in the main world had developed, and she planned to go after the little girl who had just run away and ask her about the current situation.

But just because she could not be bothered with trouble did not mean trouble would avoid her.

The fierce wind howled. A silver-gray thing that looked somewhat like the “mecha warriors” from cartoons flew into view above the treetops, then quickly locked onto Bai Xiang’s location and dropped straight toward her.

“Look what I found.”

The silver-haired young man slowly brought the mecha down to the ground. His biological computer instinctively pulled up database records in sync and began comparing the scanned results of Bai Xiang’s features and bodily outline.

[Beep beep beep—comparison result: compatibility exceeds 95%. Further calculation in progress…]

“It’s actually 95%?”

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The young man froze, because in his view, a beautiful woman appearing for no reason in a zone where demonic aura was spreading had to be either a manifested voidfiend or a soul-eroding illusion produced by a demon pool.

It had never occurred to him that “match” was even a possible database result, much less that the match rate would be this high.

So what exactly did that result mean… who was she?

Instinctively, the silver-haired young man accepted the incoming data, then immediately shouted into the comm channel as if he had just been scared half to death. “What the hell? That’s impossible…!”

The biological computer was telling him that the person before him was Emperor Xiang of Eastern Xia!

[Bai Xiang, Dao name Zhixing, rose to prominence in Chilong of the Qi lands during the final years of Yao Yu. In less than two years, she advanced from an Entering-the-Dao sword student to a level comparable to a sword lord. She later participated in the Dao-Void martial exercises and, alone with a single sword, defeated numerous powerful foes. When the Great Chaos Catastrophe descended, she broke through the shackles, transmitted qi methods, widely proclaimed her decree, and locked heaven and earth in place…]

There was more after that, a whole string of information including all kinds of tagged entries. If he opened them, there were even more details about her life and so on, but the silver-haired young man could not be bothered to read any of it.

The truly important question was this: this person… the founding ruler whom Eastern Xia had posthumously honored as High Emperor Ancestor Xia—shouldn’t she have died long ago?

Every expert had asserted that no life could possibly survive in the depths of the Sky Sea. Only its outer fringe could form an “amber layer,” and only sapient beings fixed in place within those amber layers had any chance of returning to the main world!

The silver-haired young man was badly shaken.

He refused to believe that result… the biological computer had to be wrong!

“What happened?”

At that moment, the other Federation second lieutenant—the short-haired black-haired girl—also flew over in her mecha and likewise spotted Bai Xiang standing there.

“So that’s it…” The black-haired girl frowned.

“If she can be scanned, then she’s probably not a demon-pool illusion.”

“What’s the point of overthinking it? Just bring her back and hand her over to the institute.”

As soon as she finished speaking, the silver-gray mecha stepped toward Bai Xiang and casually extended an arm, intending to seize her.

Just then, a night breeze happened to sweep through, brushing aside the white-haired woman’s bangs and drawing one’s attention, involuntarily, to her perfect features and those faintly gleaming, uncanny golden eyes.

Th-this…

The instant the black-haired girl and the silver-haired young man met Bai Xiang’s gaze, both of them lost themselves, and the mecha froze in place as well, no longer moving.

“Hm?”

Bai Xiang was surprised, because these two strange “creatures” had such weak souls that they could not even withstand a single glance from her. Their wills were seized outright.

She had obtained half of Pang Tiandao’s remnant soul, which contained a fragmentary copy of the Xuandi Scripture, but she actually had not yet had time to read or cultivate it.

Under those circumstances, analyzed purely from a technical point of view, her Golden-Pupil Illusory God had not improved.

And yet she could directly suppress their spirits, even control and hypnotize them.

Was it that after entering the Divine Palace Realm, the strength of my soul had increased so dramatically that it raised the power of my eyes along with it, or are these two things simply too weak?

She examined the two mecha again. Seeing the ridges of tendon-like flesh swelling beneath the mechanical armor, and even the pulse of organs transmitting through the surface of the machines, Bai Xiang formed a guess.

“Meteor… blockade…”

“So they really brought things like this in to help with disaster relief?”

“What exactly was the person in charge here thinking?”

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At the same time, the outside world had already descended into chaos because the two mecha had gone out of control.

“The signal’s gone—cause unknown!”

“The demonic-aura index is still rising!… It’s broken through 100%! Past the red line!”

“No response to the second call! Forced takeover failed!”

“The demonic-aura index has broken through 180%… 200%!”

“How is it rising this fast!?”

Watching the disorder with a dark expression, Qiao Wen stood off to the side.

The heavy armored vehicle she had driven there earlier had already opened its side armor plates, revealing a row of detection instruments locked in place inside.

This team was the closest thing she had to a personal inner circle. It had been established from the start precisely to interface with mecha technology, and agreements had long since been signed with the two Federation second lieutenants.

That meant each of the two had been required to provide one sample of their biological tissue to Qiao Wen. If they lost control while in mecha state, then this team, together with those instruments, could at least serve to “remote-control” or “awaken” them to some extent.

“Send the whole unit in.” Qiao Wen turned toward her adjutant Zhang Heren. “The flying scouts too! Hurry!”

As the order was relayed, armored vehicles drove into the forest along the mountain road one after another, while more than a dozen silver-glinting aircraft advanced toward the depths of the valley overhead.

The earth’s tremors and the vibrations in the air carried countless streams of information. Through the Jade Spirit’s scene-modeling, Bai Xiang sensed this activity at once.

After a brief thought, she flicked her sleeve and drew a branch up from the ground, then wrapped it in Sword-Qi Divine Force, forming a translucent and distorted outline. If one looked carefully, it was extremely similar to Feixiang Heaven.

Holding that thing like a sword, Bai Xiang tapped it against the ground.

At once, the branch itself could not endure the force and shattered into powder, but the divine force around it spread outward in a ring, and in only about the time of a single breath, it had expanded more than ten kilometers with the point she had struck as its center.

Weng—

As the divine force swept through, all things where it passed fell silent.

The onboard systems of every armored vehicle were temporarily destroyed. The aircraft either crashed out of control or collided in midair. At the same time, the detection devices mounted on the heavy armored vehicle began spitting sparks and smoke, and every display screen went dark at once.

What was that?

What just happened?

Everyone there, Qiao Wen included, felt their minds crash.

They had simply never seen anything like it before.

It was impossible to understand.

Qiao Wen opened her mouth, trying to order her subordinates to inspect the instruments, but although she could clearly feel her vocal cords vibrating—which meant she should have been producing sound—her own ears could not hear the slightest trace of noise.

That bizarre dead silence lasted only about three breaths. It was not long, but to the people caught inside it, it felt like years.

After three breaths, the clamor of the normal world returned once more.

Wind. Shouts. The screech of tires. The sound of vehicles colliding… these noises, these bits of white noise that normally barely registered at all, merged into a tidal wall of sound, and the instant it hit, it was like a balloon exploding beside everyone’s ears.

Bang!

Zhang Heren jerked violently, then only just managed to recover.

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Qiao Wen was about the same, and inwardly she was just as horrified.

“Watchman?”

Zhang Heren immediately turned to Qiao Wen.

Qiao Wen grabbed the radio. “What did the advance unit find?”

Silence.

“Answer me! Advance unit! What did you find!?”

The scene shifted.

Inside the valley, the so-called advance unit stood at the edge of a narrow pass. One dojo military officer held a radio in his hand, Qiao Wen’s voice continuing to spill from it.

And before the stunned group, what they saw was a massive sunken hemispherical crater nearly a kilometer across.

…

“Put me down!”

“Hey!”

“You monster! Put me down right now!”

Meanwhile, at the edge of East City, Bai Xiang appeared in an alley carrying Shen He in one hand. She casually tore open a door, closed it behind them, and just like that commandeered an unoccupied private residence.

Shen He had already regained consciousness when they entered the alley. She twisted and struggled the whole way, but the effect was about the same as a maggot casually pinched up between someone’s fingers—no matter how much it wriggled, it was useless.

“You’re too noisy.”

Bai Xiang flicked Shen He on the forehead. At once, Shen He’s eyes rolled back and she toppled over stiffly.

First, find something to wear.

Bai Xiang ignored Shen He and went to the household wardrobe, pulling out some clothing.

But people living in a place like this were bound to be poor.

Bai Xiang did not mind rough fabric, but the styles of the clothes were simply not to her taste.

So she took two black garments, cut the cloth apart from a distance, condensed fine qi-force needles at the tips of her fingers, and stitched the pieces back together with thread drawn from the edge of the fabric, barely managing to make herself a black robe-gown.

It would do.

At least she no longer needed qi-force to preserve her modesty.

She then stitched together a pair of thick-soled long boots for herself as well, tidied up her white hair, and while doing so rapidly digested the two sets of memories.

The silver-haired young man, Bondi.

The short-haired black-haired girl, Heili.

The two of them belonged to the Starsea Federation and held the rank of second lieutenant within its system.

All kinds of information flowed through her heart like a stream.

After a long while, Bai Xiang’s brows finally eased slightly. At last, she had gained a rough understanding of the current world order in the main world.

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A bipolar confrontation.

The Federation and Eastern Xia.

The reason it was called Eastern Xia was that the forces of the old dynasty had never been completely eradicated. After the first chaotic year, the surviving remnants of Yao Yu had gotten mixed up with the Feathering Sect and cooked up a “Northern Yu” in the north.

That side had developed into a chaotic mess, with all sorts of claims like “Northern Xia” and “Xuan Xia” besides, so from the Federation’s perspective, the largest political body in the East came to be called “Eastern Xia.”

“The territory of this Federation is actually ten times the size of Eastern Xia?”

Bai Xiang found that astonishing.

One had to understand that present-day Eastern Xia did not consist merely of the former territory of Great Yu.

Pang Tiandao had failed, but part of his plan had succeeded—namely, his attempt to fuse the Thirty-Three Heavens Sea with the main world, using that as a foundation to gradually draw back all the fragments of Illusory Realms that the Void Tribulation had scraped away over hundreds of millions of years, and reassemble the main-world plane into a whole once more.

It had not succeeded completely, but it had succeeded in part. The main-world planet had already fused with a great number of Illusory Realm fragments, causing its surface area to expand enormously. Great Yu’s Nine Provinces had now become Eastern Xia’s Fourteen Provinces, and its total area had nearly doubled.

Even under those circumstances, the Federation was still another ten times larger? That basically meant it had swallowed up every region outside the eastern continent.

Had all the Federation nations been unified?

Frowning, Bai Xiang felt somewhat dissatisfied with the Eastern Xia Imperial Court.

The reason was obvious enough. If the Eastern Xia Imperial Court had any real capability, there was no way it would have allowed the gap in territory between the two sides to become so enormous.

Had the spread of qi methods been blocked?

But I clearly sent the Shenming Sword back.

The Divine Palace Realm might be one thing, but the cultivation methods for the Origin Realm were absolutely included in it…

There was something else that made Bai Xiang uneasy as well: the fact that the people of Eastern Xia referred to her as “High Emperor Ancestor Xia.”

It was a lofty title. An excellent title.

But the problem was that it was a posthumous title.

She did not care whether she had been made emperor or whether she had enjoyed imperial honors. What she cared about was that it was a posthumous title—which meant that across an extremely broad field of public recognition, she was regarded as already gone.

No living emperor takes a posthumous title. Only a dead emperor—or at the very least one firmly believed to be dead—would ever be given one.

If Grandfather or Master… or even Qing’er had been the ones in charge, none of them would ever have permitted anyone to bestow a posthumous title on me.

Posthumous titles are not handed out casually. To honor the ancient rites, one has to go through an extremely cumbersome process.

It was a statement of position.

They would only ever believe that I was still alive. They would never permit something like this.

Bai Xiang cared deeply about what state the Eastern Xia Imperial Court was in now, and what Bai Shengju, Xiang Xian, and the others had gone through over the past ten years.

But the two Federation second lieutenants whom she had casually reduced to dust… did not know any of that.

“Mnh…”

Beside her, Shen He moved a little.

Bai Xiang turned toward her at once, and a glint of light flashed through her eyes.