Volume 5, Chapter 34 – Exploration

Night.

In the northeast, Northern Yu’s capital, New Yujing.

Viewed from high above, the entire city was completely undamaged.

Its high-rises and neon lights remained as they were. Everything that ought to be brightly lit was still brightly lit; only those parts given over to drunken excess had been forcibly brought to a halt.

Yes, the one who caused it all had already left.

But her lingering might remained, and there were many things the survivors no longer dared to do.

“Cai Jichang! Fuck your mother!”

In a sky garden built atop one of the high-rise towers, a young man in imitation-ancient robes was raging into a phone.

“You, you, you… why the hell did you have to provoke her?”

“Now look what happened! My father is dead, my grandfather is dead, my grand-uncle and my grandmother are dead too! This huge clan is down to just me alone! What am I supposed to do? You tell me! What the hell am I supposed to do!?”

“They’re all dead?” On the other end, Cai Jichang and Guo Mao exchanged stunned looks, clearly not having expected that kind of answer.

No, what do you mean, they’re all dead?

What?

“Di Xiang tore Yujing apart?” Cai Jichang asked blankly.

That made no sense.

If Yujing had been reduced to ruins like Plateau City, how could an idle little wastrel like you have survived?

“Yujing is fine.” The young man took a deep breath, then enunciated each word into the phone. “The towers are fine, the factories are fine, the city walls… the fortresses… all of them are fine!”

“But the people are dead!”

“All we saw was one streak of sword-light fly in, and my father and grandfather’s heads exploded!”

“I’m telling you, Cai Jichang, this didn’t just happen to our family!”

“It was all of them!”

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“In Yujing City, every single family whose name you people can call out was practically wiped out to the last person yesterday evening! Only a scattered dozen or so survived because they happened to be outside the city!!”

“And the Qianyu Palace?” Guo Mao hurriedly snatched the phone, eyes bulging as he demanded into it. “Quick! Tell me! What happened to Qianyu Palace?”

“Dead…” The young man let out a cold, unhinged laugh. “Heh heh… dead… they’re all dead!!!”

Clack.

The phone slipped from Guo Mao’s hand and hit the floor, shattering its screen.

Guo Mao stared ahead blankly, then slowly turned to look at Cai Jichang. The two of them remained silent for a long time.

Hadn’t Sir gone after her?

Sir actually hadn’t even managed to hinder Di Xiang in the slightest? To the point that after she finished killing people, the whole of Yujing City was still intact, which meant there had never been any real confrontation at all?

Could the gap really be that great, even between people of the same Saint realm?

“Don’t think nonsense…” Cai Jichang’s voice shook as he warned Guo Mao. “We mustn’t speculate rashly about Sir… Perhaps Sir deliberately… deliberately sacrificed them in order to preserve Yujing…”

“Perhaps…” Guo Mao’s voice shook as well. He began searching for reasons to explain everything. “You’re right. If he had truly fought that madwoman head-on, Yujing City would definitely have been reduced to rubble. At that point, it wouldn’t just have been that many people dying…”

And he was not speaking utter nonsense. There truly was some logic in it.

Including the Thirty-Three Heavens Sea, all the fragments that had been scraped away over countless cycles of Void Tribulation through the billions of years before were now returning to the main world, merging into it once again.

Naturally, that caused the area of the main world to expand at a terrifying rate.

Sky, land, ocean.

Everything was expanding, and that growth was still continuing. It had not yet stopped.

In the past, Great Yu together with the Federation states had already occupied essentially all the land on the main world’s planet.

Now, because of the fragment-merging, even with the Federation already unified and countless minor states in the gray zones having perished in the tide, if one counted the Federation, Northern Yu, and Eastern Xia together, the land they occupied still amounted to less than a fifth of the total land area of the current main world.

Huge numbers of islands were appearing out of nowhere.

Some of those islands had joined together into great masses, already showing signs of evolving into continents.

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As for the remaining four-fifths, it was not that the Federation and the others did not want to occupy it or explore it. They simply could not push outward into it.

Vast numbers of voidfiends surrounded the entire civilized world like a tidal sea. Beyond those tides of voidfiends, in those unexplored empty expanses, there most likely lived ancient great demons as well, all of them returned together with the phenomenon of fusion.

Now that the Void Tribulation had receded, the apocalypse aimed at the main world itself was over.

But the apocalypse aimed at civilization, aimed at humankind, seemed only to have just begun.

Eastern Xia had occupied what used to be Great Yu’s lands, taking the richest and most fertile territory. Left with no better option, Northern Yu had been forced to open up the northern frontier, and that northern frontier was even more dangerous than Eastern Xia’s territory.

There were more voidfiends here, and more ancient demons.

As the gateway by which Northern Yu established itself on the northern frontier, Yujing City blocked the northeastern demon tide from advancing south.

If the city were to fall, then it would no longer be merely a question of how many people died. It would be a question of whether Northern Yu could continue to exist at all.

So seen from that perspective, their attempt to rationalize things could not really be called wrong.

“Didn’t Sir say that His Majesty is cultivating inside his sleeve?” Cai Jichang continued to comfort Guo Mao.

“As long as His Majesty and the ancestor are still alive, Great Yu’s orthodoxy has not perished.”

“Just wait…”

“That madwoman first humiliated our Great Yu, and then on the White Scar Plateau she killed a federal Executive Governor.”

“One day she will offend everyone. I refuse to believe the whole world will remain helpless against her forever!”

Easy to say, but will we live to see that day?

Inwardly, Guo Mao shook his head.

The only good news was that the Emperor was not dead.

Back then, Northern King Yao Sheng, under circumstances where no one thought well of him, received help from a superior expert and in one stroke seized the Northern Yu imperial throne. Even his talent was valued by Sir, who declared that he had hope of one day reaching the Saint realm.

Di Xiang had not insisted on finding Yao Sheng and killing him too. Perhaps that was because Yao Sheng had long been at odds with the Yao Yu imperial house and had no particular grudge against her back then.

In Sir’s words, he had “not been touched by karma.”

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That meant Guo Mao could continue serving as Imperial Preceptor.

But what path was this nation’s fate supposed to take from here on out?

Most likely, that would have to wait until the old Sword Lord and the others returned before it could be discussed.

As time passed, hidden currents stirred, and what had happened in Yujing City began to leak out, spreading unstoppably.

“Six Hundred of the Northern Yu Imperial House Wiped Out in a Single Day; Even Former Emperor Yao Xing Could Not Escape After Becoming a Monk!”

“The Yujing Massacre! Northern Yu in Peril!”

“The Returned Executioner! Who Is Di Xiang?”

“The Dead Beneath Her Sword Have Already Exceeded Ten Million: The Future of Old Humanity, or Its Final Madness?”

All kinds of headlines.

All kinds of reports.

They began spreading madly, both in reality and across the net.

Some said Di Xiang was a devil, an unreasonable madwoman, and that the entire civilized world should unite to wage war on Eastern Xia.

Some said Di Xiang had built her fame on the blood of Northern Yu, and that even Pilgrimage Mountain could not stop her. Count the Federation in as well, and the world had now become a three-way balance.

Almost the entire civilized world was talking about Bai Xiang. Everyone wanted to know where she was now.

Meanwhile—

Past Yujing City and straight on to the northeast, a lone figure stood quietly atop a mountain spur.

Beyond it stretched an endless beach, and beyond that beach lay the Northern Sea, a place already recognized by the civilized world as a forbidden zone.

“So it still won’t work.”

After fiddling with the Shenming Sword a few times, Bai Xiang finally gave up on trying to send a message.

It was not that she did not want to inform the people back home of her objective on this trip. It was just that the times were different. With the network cut off, there was no way to transmit anything back from this far away.

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As for using the Shenming Sword…

This was not Great Xia territory. The qi-path Divine Pool did not reach here.

And even inside Great Xia, she could not send a voice transmission from Yujing City all the way to Zhennan.

The Shenming Sword let her monitor Xia Capital and transmit sound freely within the bounds of Xia Capital, but that authority had a range limit.

Once one went beyond Xia Capital, it stopped being so useful.

So there was no helping it.

For now, she could only swallow it.

“Qing’er is sensible now. She has governed for many years; she should be able to anticipate what I intend.”

“In that case, whether I send word or not doesn’t really matter. Exploring the Northern Sea is more urgent.”

Lowering her head slightly, Bai Xiang looked down at the beach ahead.

The beach was vast. Just within sight alone it stretched for dozens of li. The shore was littered with all kinds of amphibious demon beasts, and even in the sky above there were large flocks of bird-type demon beasts circling densely.

Spring had arrived. It was breeding season for demon beasts once again.

If this place were left alone, then in no more than three months, a voidfiend frenzy launched from the Northern Sea would be able to sweep all the way to Yujing City.

She had slaughtered nearly all of Yujing’s upper ranks. The people left behind absolutely would not be able to stop it.

Bai Xiang was not someone who created slaughter recklessly. Naturally, she had to take responsibility for the consequences.

“I’ll kill my way through the Northern Sea first and see what happens.”

Weighing the sword hilt in her hand, Bai Xiang tentatively set her plan.

“I’ll take the measure of what the demon race amounts to now.

“And while I’m at it, I’ll see whether there are any traces left behind of Feixiang Heaven.”