Volume 5, Chapter 27 – The Bigger Picture

No joke, Bai Xiang truly meant it.

Part of it was to avenge the Eastern Xia people for the humiliation they had suffered over the years and to vent their fury. Part of it was also to test where her own strength truly stood in the world of today.

In her previous life, she had seen a movie where a dragon-beast was released and rampaged through slaughter after slaughter, not because it wanted meat, but to determine its exact place in the food chain.

Same principle, wasn’t it?

If no one could stop her, then of course she had no reason to let her enemies keep living.

“Di Xiang!!!”

Ahead of her, a white-bearded old man let out a furious roar through gritted teeth and charged forward with a three-meter spear in hand. With a flick of the spear, a swift black shadow shot out from the spray of spear-blossoms.

“A Spear Dao Divine Pool? Or the level of someone who has grasped spear intent?”

Bai Xiang saw through the old man’s cultivation at a glance. The Shenming Sword left its sheath with a piercing explosive cry, and with a single swing she cast out a dazzling flood of sword light, like sunlight being poured down, swallowing both the black shadow in the spear-blossoms and the old man himself.

What kind of sword art was this?

The old man’s pupils contracted violently. From the incoming tide of sword light, he felt an irresistible momentum. The spear-blossoms he had shaken out could not offer even the slightest resistance before they were destroyed inch by inch beneath the onrushing radiance. He was about to be killed on the spot.

Zheng!

Shrrk!

At the critical moment, more than a dozen streams of divine power converged and slammed into the sword light at the same time, finally knocking it off course and narrowly saving the spear-wielding old man.

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But the sword light did not dissipate. It skimmed past the old man and slashed downward, cleaving through half the plateau city with a single stroke. Wherever the sword light passed, all people, all beasts, and every obstacle turned to dust. Nothing was left behind.

That one strike alone caused at least ten thousand casualties.

This only intensified the conflict on the spot. The dozen or so figures all shouted in rage and attacked Bai Xiang together. Their various powers stacked and crushed against one another as they tried to force her back into the high sky, if only to keep the city below from suffering further collateral damage.

But it was useless.

Every one of them was at the field-dao realm. In most places, they would have been considered top experts, and even in the present main world they would have been enough to hold an entire region in check. Yet under Bai Xiang’s sword they were as frail as children. Not only did they need to join forces just to withstand the sword qi and divine force she swept out with casual strikes, they could not even force her to change position.

Whoosh, whoosh—

Boom!!!!

As these people fought Bai Xiang, the aftershocks alone caused massive destruction throughout the city. One building after another collapsed, the ground split open, smoke and dust billowed everywhere, and almost every second someone was struck by the aftermath and lost their life. The dead and wounded were beyond counting.

“Di Xiang! If you want to fight, we’ll fight you! But at least not here!”

One of them, a refined middle-aged man with a bluish beard, spoke urgently.

“I can understand that you have a grudge against the Yao clan! But the common people below are innocent!”

“Anyone who can live under Yao Yu’s rule cannot possibly be purely human,” Bai Xiang retorted without mercy. “They received its favors, so they have no right to separate themselves from it.”

“If they die, they deserve it!”

“Bai Zhixing! You’re vicious beyond measure!” someone else shouted in anger. “Who do you think you are? What right do you have to define humanity?”

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“At least I don’t eat human flesh or drink human blood.” Bai Xiang shot that man a sidelong glance and hacked down with ruthless force. Instantly, another hundred-meter arc of sword light surged out. This time, even the combined strength of the others could not block it, and the man was killed directly beneath her sword.

“Trash that didn’t even dare join the Dao-Void Tournament.”

Facing the crowd’s shocked and furious stares, Bai Xiang merely looked back with disdain.

“You have no right to question me.”

She could see clearly that every one of these people was over thirty or forty years old, and some were probably several hundred years old. Ten years ago, they naturally could have gone to the Dao-Void Tournament and tried to fight for supremacy, yet she had no memory of a single one of them.

What did that mean? Naturally, it meant that most of these people were opportunists.

There might well have been a few lucky ones who had gained insight and advanced over the past ten years, but most of them had probably given up on participating in the previous round of tribulation struggle and only dared return to the main world to scramble for resources after the dust had settled.

People like that were not worthy of her respect. She could not even be bothered to say more. She planned to kill them all outright and refine their souls.

“Your Majesty the Xia Emperor, your blows are a little too heavy!”

At that moment, a handsome man and woman around thirty years old descended from the sky together, dressed in precious robes and holding jade swords. They landed in front of Bai Xiang and addressed her.

“Who are you?” Bai Xiang asked.

“Heaven-Patrols of the Sacred Court, Yu Wenyue and Zhang Shuping, pay our respects to Your Majesty the Xia Emperor!” The two first bowed respectfully to Bai Xiang, giving her full face in their attitude.

“What is going on with the Sacred Court?” Bai Xiang frowned. “Didn’t Pang Tiandao die?”

The Shenming Sword was not Feixiang Heaven, after all. It could not itself help Bai Xiang collect and refine remnant souls. To do that, she could only rely on the half of the Xuandi Scripture she had already cultivated.

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But she had been moving in far too much haste this whole way. Every time she arrived somewhere, she would often just wave a hand, wipe out the defending troops, and then leave in a streak of rainbow light. That was how she had managed such efficiency in breaking cities, but it also meant she had no time along the way to interrogate upper-level figures for intelligence.

Or rather, in her eyes, those people did not even qualify as upper-level figures.

“Although the false lord Pang Tiandao is dead, the Sacred Court’s orthodoxy still endures,” said the young Heaven-Patrol called Yu Wenyue respectfully. “There is much Your Majesty does not know. A great many things have happened in these past ten years. Not only has the Sacred Court set chaos right and reestablished its orthodoxy, it has also welcomed back its former Holy Lord… It is precisely because the Holy Lord is seated on Pilgrimage Mountain that the many great demons descending from the void have been held back. Your Majesty’s own kin have benefited from this as well!”

Holy Lord?

The missing founder Zhu Qingluo had mentioned before? The one truly qualified to be called a Saint, the one who had established himself in the world under the title of Great Sage?

That person had actually returned… and from the sound of it, there were even external enemies that made him wary?

What was going on?

Was it the Demon God Temple?

But for the moment, Bai Xiang had no intention of dwelling on any of that. She continued, “So by your reasoning, not only can I not hold you accountable for allowing the remnants of Northern Yu to go on living, I should even thank you for this contribution?”

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes, and anyone could hear the killing intent in her words.

“Because of the chain of events Pang Tiandao set in motion, the fragmented Illusory Realms that were swept away by Void Tribulation over billions of years are returning, and many primordial lineages and primordial horrors are reviving!” The female cultivator beside him, Zhang Shuping, frowned when she heard this and could not help trying to enlighten Bai Xiang. “With a great enemy before us, humanity should naturally unite and face these new threats together…”

“Every year Northern Yu’s southward campaigns cause more than a million deaths right at the gates of Xia Capital,” Bai Xiang cut her off coldly. “Count the other places as well, and humanity suffers more than ten million casualties every year. Is that how you define ‘unity’?”

“That…” Zhang Shuping fell silent.

The truth was, of course, that however many weak humans of the lower strata died had nothing to do with her. The Sacred Court only recruited and accepted people who had at least reached the field-dao realm. Only at that realm did one have any hope of reaching Venerable Saint, and only the faintest sliver of hope of reaching the Saint realm.

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What was there to bother counting in the lives and deaths of those mortals?

She could not understand why Bai Xiang was bringing this up at all.

“You have already slaughtered ten million soldiers!” Zhang Shuping still tried to continue her admonition. “No matter what, you should have vented your anger by now!”

“Your Majesty the Xia Emperor!” Yu Wenyue also wore an earnest expression. “With a great enemy before us, the bigger picture must come first!”

“The bigger picture?”

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes.

“When Northern Yu invaded Great Xia, you did not come out.

“Now I have killed my way into Northern Yu’s heartland, and you come out to talk to me about the bigger picture.”

With a slight curl of her lips, Bai Xiang mocked them.

“Then let me tell you this.

“As long as this sword can still cry out,

“I, Di Xiang,

“am the bigger picture!”