Volume 1, Chapter 54 – Breaking the Method

She’s ‘Lü Ran’?

That Protector from the Demon-Immortal Dao?

Bai Xiang frowned, feeling the situation turn bizarre.

The Demon-Immortal Dao did have a grudge against her. Yang Xing was this Lü Ran’s younger brother—the two were close. On hearing the bad news, Lü Ran had rushed from Zezhou back to the Demon-Immortal Dao… that part she could understand.

But why had the Demon-Immortal Dao shown up less than twelve hours after she arrived at the field camp?

Her tent was way in the rear!

Even if they were sneaking in to cut off reinforcements, they shouldn’t open with someone on Lü Ran’s level!

But now wasn’t the time to think about all that.

She let thoughts like these flick through her mind once, then her breathing steadied again.

The gunfire, explosions, and screams at her ears… all the noise faded. The world grew quiet; she could even hear her own breathing, and the sound of heart flow coursing and surging through her body.

The opponent was ‘Stain-the-Body stage’.

According to the dossier from the Chilong Circuit’s Chief Inspector, ‘Zhang Daoming’, Lü Ran had already been a major Stain-the-Body demon more than a decade ago.

A demon’s ‘Stain-the-Body stage’ corresponds to a swordsman’s cultivation above ‘Forge the Sword’. The difference is that the Stain-the-Body phase lasts a very long time: from first entry to completion you undergo nine ‘body-tribulations’, each one you survive bringing a major boost in strength.

That’s because demons are all humans who defected; their bodies are innately different. To defy nature and remake flesh and method, they can only molt again and again—like going from larva to adult—until, upon completing Stain-the-Body, they fully become demon.

The Demon-Immortal Dao’s Left Protector… even with a regional prefix attached, she should have at least passed three body-tribulations.

From the first body-tribulation on, a demon can wield Outward Aspect power. In this, the demon path is more convenient than the sword dao: demons generate their own demonic power, while the sword dao has to borrow from a Demon Pool; naturally the former is more efficient.

You can’t map the tiers exactly, but three body-tribulations, in Bai Xiang’s impression, was roughly equivalent to the Spirit-Unity through Condensed-Aspect range.

About the level of Grandpa’s youthful peak?

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Bai Xiang bent her knees and lowered her center of gravity. With her left hand she quietly opened the chest pocket at the upper left of her vest, took out a [Nurture-the-Spirit Stabilizing Tablet], and tucked it under her tongue, eyes locked only on Lü Ran.

Lü Ran, by contrast, was visibly at ease. She had hidden in the red-mist observing Bai Xiang for a while, convinced she had seen through her. Having finished her threat, she didn’t plan to keep posturing; she simply swung a sleeve, and from within it loosed trails of red thread.

Look closely—the front of each red thread gleamed faintly violet-red. Once released, they shot straight at Bai Xiang, in a blink pressing into every angle around her, sealing all avenues of evasion.

Bai Xiang poured heart flow into her brain and eyes. The scene before her seemed to decompose into slow motion.

She also saw what that violet-red gleam was—slender spikes of varying length, like embroidery needles, threaded with red at the tail.

Some kind of puppet technique?

She’d seen what happened when the sentry skeletons were tugged by those red threads. Focusing hard, she gripped the wooden sword with both hands. In that instant her body looked weightless, like willow fluff—one gust could have toppled her.

“Clang, clang!”

“Clang!”

Having calculated the paths, she flicked the blade and caught three of the spike-needles on the edge. Her light body rolled and vaulted in midair; her white ponytail spun once around as she actually slipped past that volley.

Lü Ran’s expression didn’t change. Her raised left hand suddenly pressed downward as her fingers caught all the threads and yanked hard.

Whoosh!

Even in midair, Bai Xiang had watched her hands. She knew exactly what Lü Ran was trying to do, and as she half-turned she also saw several violet needles ricochet back.

Heart flow poured into the cloud-pattern wooden sword. A layer of ‘invisible distortion’ rippled across the blade’s surface. She lifted the sword to guard her whole body and saw with her own eyes—the violet needles that struck the blade were thrown off hard by that ‘invisible distortion’. Not a single one could bite into the wood.

“Hm?”

Twice thwarted, Lü Ran’s pitch rose. At last her brows knit tight.

She adapted quickly too… As the needles rebounded, she looped the threads around her fingers. Her left-hand digits flitted like butterflies in the air, and the bounced-back needles seemed to be infused with life—one became two, two became four—multiplying out of nothing by more than a dozenfold, then scattering down into all the corpses littering the battlefield.

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“Rise!”

She clenched and yanked the red threads. With a whoosh, a hundred-odd corpses—Chilong Army and shattered bone beasts alike—were all hauled upright at once!

In an instant, the attention of everyone still alive on this field swung their way. On seeing Lü Ran, someone cried out, “It’s the Demon-Immortal Dao!”

No hesitation—the outer-ring soldiers raised rifles and opened fire at Lü Ran.

Lü Ran plucked the red threads like suspended harp strings. On one side she drove a portion of the corpses to block bullets; on the other, she reanimated the bone beasts, urging those skeletal hulks to move again.

With this kind of control—so many targets, and bone beasts so heavy—the efficiency naturally couldn’t match the beasts moving under their own power.

But don’t forget: those bone-beast skeletons had all been tainted by the red-mist Demon Pool! Riddled with tiny pores, once they moved they emitted that eerie demonic tone again!

“Ah…!!”

“Pffft pffft!!”

Plenty of Chilong soldiers close to the bone beasts had no time to react. One by one their eyeballs burst under the demonic sound, and they dropped, out of the fight.

“Hmph…”

The corner of Lü Ran’s mouth pulled into a wicked smile. She looked back to Bai Xiang—and found the spot empty.

Where did she go?

Her gaze snapped right. In the corpse-meat shields ahead to the right, a dark shape was circling fast.

Threads moved at her whim; the corpses under Lü Ran’s control closed in.

The dark shape was Bai Xiang. Seeing the ambush spotted, she simply chose to meet the enemy head-on—she slipped past a corpse’s bear-hug, flowed behind it, and cut the thread attached to its back.

She repeated it twice, three times. A gap opened in the line of corpse-soldiers.

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Bai Xiang was about to break out that way when she suddenly saw the corpse-soldiers lunging from left and right, the scarlet demonic fire in their eye sockets flickering violently.

A sudden premonition—her thoughts couldn’t even catch up. She followed instinct, hooked a foot under a corpse whose thread had been cut, flipped it up, and shoved it in front of her as a shield.

The next instant, the surrounding corpses detonated. Bone shrapnel swept down like rain, turning the shield-corpse into a sieve; a few stray fragments peppered Bai Xiang’s body too.

Dead, right?

Watching the blood-mist of the corpse blast bloom, excitement lit Lü Ran’s face.

Not even the most perfect Nurture the Spirit could withstand a point-blank ‘violet-red toxic blast’.

Did I blow her to bits…?

Whoosh—

A dark shape streaked out, chopping a blocking corpse in half at the waist, sprinting the last stretch, and now face-to-face with Lü Ran.

Lü Ran’s pupils contracted; horror flashed across her face.

Bai Xiang locked onto her eyes. A few meters out she twisted her shoulders; her feet bit into the forest floor; force chained from calves to thighs, to waist and abdomen, to shoulders—finally coalescing in her right arm as she whipped it forward with abandon, the sword edge she carried cleaving down like a giant axe!

In that instant, she saw Lü Ran’s lips curl.

Feather-light, several red threads settled onto Bai Xiang; the needles at their tips drove deep through the combat suit into more than a dozen acupoints, releasing something into her body.

Threads rebounded from the earlier corpse-blast.

Think I’d overlook that suit?

Flooded with my demonic qi—you’re mine now…

Lü Ran’s grin grew more feral.

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But as the time ticked by in ‘seconds’, she suddenly sensed something wrong.

Why is that sword…

Bai Xiang wasn’t going to give her another chance.

The moment she kicked into her charge, the [Nurture-the-Spirit Stabilizing Tablet] had dissolved and slid down her throat, unleashing a surge of medicine into the heart-flow cycle, transmuting endlessly into heart-flow energy—which she poured, heedless of cost, into the wooden sword.

The demonic qi that entered her body was supposed to seize control of it. In truth, it couldn’t budge the sovereignty of her spirit at all.

Bai Xiang remained unaffected.

“Srrring—!!!”

Figures crossed. In a blink she was a meter behind Lü Ran.

Body leaning forward, left hand by her side, Bai Xiang’s right hand gripped the hilt, the blade hanging at a steep angle behind her left flank. Her right knee bent to brace her weight. Her chest heaved under the vest; the blood-wet edge didn’t move a hair.

Hoo…

Night wind slipped past. She straightened, snapped the clotted crimson from the sword, and slid it back into the clasp at the rear of her form-fitting combat suit.

Without a sound, a slanted red line opened on Lü Ran’s face.

From upper right to lower left, it crossed her entire face and ran on to her chest and belly—splitting her whole body into two parts.

Under gravity, one half slowly slid away.

Red-and-white gore splashed down with it, soaking the grass—and soaking this forest battlefield that had witnessed the kill.