Volume 5, Chapter 46 – The End (Two-in-One)

The crafty old thing.

Seeing this, Bai Xiang frowned slightly.

But in the end, without her natal Dao sword, and with the Shenming Sword and her fleshly body pushed to this extent, her condition had declined somewhat as well. So she did not try any more futile moves. Instead, still gripping Yao Sheng by the throat, she withdrew, just in time to avoid one collision of the vortices.

The vortices here were nothing like ordinary whirlpools formed from seawater.

They were condensed from countless airbursts, from countless shattered fragments of the void. The sound of tidal surging actually came from the microscopic-scale bursting and exploding of innumerable black rifts. When enough of those explosions gathered densely together, they formed airburst vortices. And when two such terrifying currents collided head-on, they instantly produced explosions and collapses even more outrageous than when the ruins-space had shattered before.

What in the world is this—

Yao Sheng was completely dumbstruck. In his field of vision, everything was being destroyed. After the vortices collided ahead of him, they formed a supermassive “black hole” hundreds of meters across. Every trace of light and image that fell into it was swallowed whole. And around that “black hole” were densely packed at least several hundred “small black holes,” colliding and merging with one another, tearing at and devouring all things!

“Blegh!”

As Bai Xiang hauled him through the chaotic currents, the warped, wrenching force left Yao Sheng dizzy and disoriented. Before he even understood what was happening, another brittle crash sounded from ahead. His whole body felt as though he had been flung a thousand meters into the air. When he opened his eyes again, he immediately saw a vast stretch of black seawater below.

This is… the North Sea?

The ruins in the North Sea—are we above those ruins now?

Relying on his cultivation to barely stay aloft, Yao Sheng hovered there and looked down over the sea surface, only to see something even more astonishing—the entire sea level seemed to have collapsed downward by a noticeable margin. All the seawater visible in the scene seemed to have been swallowed up, one-third of it sucked away in an instant by something. Then, with another boom, a monstrous wave surged up from directly below, plucking him out of the air like a chick and smashing him headfirst into the surf.

Yao Sheng could swim, but some indescribably bizarre force seemed to cling to the seawater. Swept along by it, he felt all of his cultivation being suppressed and sealed, leaving him to flail like an ordinary mortal. Caught unprepared, he swallowed several mouthfuls of seawater.

Did… the ruins below get destroyed…?

In the battle between Sir and Di Xiang… Sir actually lost? And to save his own life, he had to throw me out as bait to distract Di Xiang?

After a brief daze, immense shock flooded his heart, followed by boundless fear.

At that very moment, Yao Sheng suddenly felt the sky darken.

He struggled to hover above the sea, looked up, and slowly opened his lips and eyes as wide as they would go, staring at the towering wave that blotted out heaven and sun, rising who knew how many thousands of meters high.

That’s… right…

That collapse just now… the void swallowed an enormous volume of seawater…

Once the force of those shockwaves traveled outward, the seawater over there was bound to come surging back, and so a wave like this was formed…

This is a natural disaster born after fusion and return!

The newly formed primary world-space is more stable. The earth and matter are harder to damage. And likewise, all derived natural disasters are vastly more destructive than before! They can even surpass the grand divine-ability techniques of Venerables and Venerable Saints!

How am I supposed to resist a force like this on my own?

In the depths of his despair, Yao Sheng suddenly saw that beneath that vast shadow—beneath that disaster of heaven-toppling seawater pouring down—there stood another figure with its back to him, treading the air, snow-white hair whipping wildly in the wind.

Di Xiang?

With power like this… can she really withstand it?

“Tianyuan…”

But unlike Yao Sheng’s tense state of mind, Bai Xiang looked utterly calm.

The skin on the front of her body writhed and tore open, and from within it burst out blood-stained iron fragments one after another. Bai Xiang controlled them in midair, reassembling them into the Shenming Sword before gripping its hilt in one hand.

Closing her eyes to feel it for a moment, she found that the intent coming from Little Yellow had already grown very faint, which meant the Shenming Sword had suffered severe damage this time. Simple repair would probably not be enough; it would have to be reforged using something like sword fusion.

Still, it was enough to suppress this thing.

She raised her hand and swept out with the sword, tearing a visible gash through the heaven-surging wall of water.

At the point of rupture, innumerable violent currents of qi force guided and layered together microscopic airbursts. A maneuver that in the past might have been extremely laborious now came with effortless ease, like slicing thin paper with a paper knife.

And then—

Boom!!!

The airbursts exploded, and the blast wave and shockwave they produced shoved the giant wave outward, suppressing it with ease.

“First transporting and shifting space, then opening up space, and even guiding the space one opens to explode and shatter—using that to produce explosive, destructive force.”

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Watching as the wave lost its support and began rapidly collapsing and breaking apart, Bai Xiang nodded faintly to herself.

It can store external objects.

It can cover the surface of the body.

It can be actively released.

It combines utility, defense, and destructive power in one.

For saints who had mastered this method, every divine ability and every move below the saint level was, in truth, no more than a breeze brushing the cheek. They no longer had any lethality at all.

That was why Fang Yang’s battle form had looked the way it did.

That ruins-space was actually far more stable than Shenwu Heaven had once been, yet our battle—mere aftershocks alone—could still damage and tear it apart. Even when the Wu Emperor and I fought desperately to the death back then, we couldn’t have done that.

“However, he has at most manifestly refined only two of the Three-Origin Orifices. He is missing one—the Hidden Spirit Orifice was never lit.”

“The Hidden Spirit Orifice may not help increase raw strength, but without it, the Heavenly Pillar Vein cannot connect through. The power of all the meridians and orifices in his body can’t be twisted together into a single force, so his strength is far inferior to mine.”

“And whether in releasing airbursts for destruction or generating airbursts across the surface of the body for defense, his control is also worse than mine.”

“Worse, but not by that much, because I only learned this layer of technique today.”

In front of her, the heaven-high tsunami was collapsing and raining down.

Behind her lay the North Sea shore she had casually protected.

Bai Xiang raised her left hand and turned it over, looking at the palm and back with a trace of delight at the improvement in her skill.

Strictly speaking, only now could she truly be called a “saint.”

When she had just broken through into the Divine Palace Realm, the methods she used did not, in the strictest sense, belong to the saint realm. They still fell within the category of divine abilities and moves.

On the road to Yujing, she comprehended Shrinking the Earth to an Inch—her first true mastery of spatial translocation, a flexible application of this technique.

Then, in her clash with Fang Yang, she comprehended airbursts, finally making up the greatest deficiency in her understanding of what a saint truly was.

Now, she not only possessed the cultivation of the Divine Palace Realm, equivalent to a saint, but also held real saintly methods in her grasp.

Even without Feixiang Heaven, people like Fang Yang had only one possible end against her if they refused to flee—defeat and death.

“Still, if several more rotten players like him showed up, maybe three, I’d have a very hard fight.”

Bai Xiang estimated her own limit.

“In the end, I’m still missing Feixiang Heaven.”

Of course, that was just a thought.

Feixiang Heaven was a living thing, not an ordinary natal Dao sword. In ten years without Bai Xiang’s blood essence to nourish it, it had surely withered into a sorry state. Even if she found it again, its short-term power would still be inferior to the Shenming Sword. It would take time and feeding to recover.

“Something that can block my senses… the sword’s whereabouts… Qing’er…?”

Bai Xiang frowned—she had suddenly thought of something. When Bai Zhuqing Entered the Dao, a soul-ability had entered her body. Like Bai Xiang’s Dao sword, it could be counted as a same-origin split body.

If that were the case—if the sword were hidden inside Qing’er, and its aura had been concealed along with hers…

Boom!

A tremendous sound rolled up from below. Bai Xiang turned around and saw the seawater crashing down. It would not cause catastrophic destruction, but it still drove up layer after layer of surging waves, carrying Yao Sheng, Zhao Feng, and the other survivors onto the shore before smashing them hard against the rocks.

Dou Feiyun felt as though she had just had a terrible nightmare.

In the dream, a monstrous woman had stormed in, white-haired and hideous… She had first killed the junior brother she admired and loved most, Wu Yuan, and then destroyed the Qingli Immortal Estate, its palaces, and its ruins. Right before Dou Feiyun’s eyes, she had driven a monster to eat Master one bite at a time, slaughtering the Suzhen Dao to the last.

At the end of the nightmare, Dou Feiyun herself jolted awake, instinctively thinking it had all been a false alarm. But when she turned and got out of bed, she discovered that from her dormitory to the doorway, and along every road stretching outward beyond it, the ground was piled with the bodies of her senior and junior brothers from the sect… and the mangled corpses of various elders and masters as well.

Every one of them was staring at her, all with expressions of absolute terror and panic on their faces.

As though the thing that had killed them was standing right behind her…

Th-this is…

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Filled with fear, Dou Feiyun turned her head little by little, and once again saw the black-mud monster from the nightmare—the thing that had eaten Master.

Compared to the dream, it had shrunk by quite a lot, down to roughly the size of a normal person.

But its body was still made from fifty-four Buddhas twisted, fused, and congealed together! And almost every corner of its body was still covered in golden eyeballs, all of which were staring at her in unison!

“Aah—!”

With a scream, Dou Feiyun was wrapped up and devoured by the black mud.

All the dreamlike scenes shattered and collapsed, revealing sand, rocks, and crashing waves. A human-sized mass of black mud was wrapped around something, and from inside came an endless crunching, gnawing sound.

“…Should I praise Your Majesty’s mercy?”

Watching his junior sister be slaughtered so cruelly, Zhao Feng forced himself to raise his head and look at the white-haired empress leaning half against a reef.

“Of course.”

“I consider myself a woman of principle.”

Bai Xiang answered him in perfect seriousness.

For those directly involved, the methods she used were slow torture and execution.

For those not directly involved, but too close to the matter and thus accomplices who abetted evil, she could at least let them die a bit more cleanly.

Wu Yuan’s memories contained some information on Dou Feiyun. Bai Xiang knew the woman had a rigid personality and had only ever held feelings for Wu Yuan himself, so she had not intended to humiliate her too much. She let the Buddha corpse give her a quick death.

Mm. The Buddha corpse.

Worth noting was that the thing had actually survived.

Even though most of its black-mud flesh had been blown apart by Fang Yang, and even though it had gone through spatial collapse and a great explosion, a tiny portion of it had still managed to remain. It even still maintained its connection to Bai Xiang.

“How will Your Majesty deal with me?”

Zhao Feng asked.

Hm?

Bai Xiang paused, then looked down at the rest of him… meaning the part below his neck.

There was a huge irregular gash across Zhao Feng’s chest and pectoral area. Most of the organs inside had already been hollowed out. His entire body amounted to little more than that piece plus a right arm severed at the elbow. To be honest, there was no saving such an injury.

“I’ll take Yao Xing and Yao Sheng with me.”

Bai Xiang first glanced at the two generations of Yu Emperor lying unconscious nearby, then looked back at Zhao Feng.

“As for you.”

“Live or die on your own.”

“Cough, cough… then I should… cough cough cough… thank Your Majesty…”

Zhao Feng coughed weakly.

His body had already been exhausted to the limit, but at this moment he still forced himself to rouse his spirits. Divine light rose in his eyes, and even that corpse-pale face surged with a brilliant flush of blood and qi.

This was the final flare before death.

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes.

“Is there something you want to say?”

“Yes…” Zhao Feng nodded. “I want to ask Your Majesty… you said before that this place was only a minor disturbance… What do you intend to do after you return?”

“Return?”

For a fleeting instant, the image of Bai Zhuqing in crimson bridal attire surfaced again in Bai Xiang’s heart. She frowned sharply and forced the image away, then looked out at the shoreline and said softly, “I will designate every power outside Great Xia as demonkind.”

Wh… at…?

Even in a dying state, Zhao Feng’s eyes widened in disbelief at what he had just heard.

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“I will declare that the Sacred Weapon Clan are demons, and that the Dao-Void Methods are demonic arts.”

Bai Xiang continued, pronouncing every word distinctly.

“I will push forward those techniques and methods for ‘cleansing contamination.'”

“Those unwilling to be human—I will kill them all.”

“Th-that… Your… Majesty…”

“Haven’t you noticed what you’ve become, practicing demon arts all this time?” Bai Xiang cut him off.

With a wave of her hand, she condensed two water mirrors. One faced Zhao Feng and reflected his current face. The other showed what Zhao Feng’s features had looked like ten years ago.

Zhao Feng stared blankly at the mirror image of himself.

It… does seem a little different from before.

The handsome young man of ten years ago—now that he looked again, there was clearly more savagery between the brows and around the eyes.

His sideburns had unknowingly stretched farther forward, making him look more like some kind of simian demon-creature. His nose had bent forward by a few degrees, the bridge narrower, the wings knife-sharp. Even when he parted his lips, one could see the fangs inside…

I… is this me…?

So without even realizing it… I’ve changed this much already…

“Killing, brutality, blood-drinking, cannibalism.” Bai Xiang summed it up.

“The side effects of the Dao-Void Methods can’t be eradicated, not even at the saint realm.”

“With faces like monster-men, doing the same things monsters do.”

“If that isn’t demonhood, then what is it?”

“…”

Zhao Feng was struck dumb. He had nothing to say.

A surge rose in his heart, a sudden impulse of doubt toward everything he had been taught.

Master and Sir had always said that Di Xiang was the real monster, so why was it that she looked more human?

Not just in appearance—even in the way she acted. Why was his faith wavering?

Perhaps… Master had truly seen wrong.

Suddenly,

Zhao Feng saw himself as a child.

A small boy with a solemn face, speaking seriously to his parents at the dinner table.

“I’m not a little kid! I’m going to become a sword immortal in the future! Can you stop patting my head already?”

…Then he saw the final sigh of the village teacher when the demonic disaster came.

“Children, remember this well. If any of you are lucky enough to enter an immortal sect one day, you must hold fast to your original heart.”

“Remember: be human first, then become immortal.”

“Helping the weak against the strong—that is true chivalry.”

…Then he saw blue tiles, white walls, and an immortal estate towering into the clouds.

“Master above, this disciple pays his respects!”

“Mm. Now that you have entered my Suzhen line, remember well the principles I usually teach you.”

…Then he saw campfires burning, blood and severed arms flying beneath sword edges.

“Little Feng, get up there! Leave these people to you!”

“But Senior Sister… they’re obviously good people, aren’t they? They only killed officials because they couldn’t survive anymore! There are even children among them!?”

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“People like that stirring up trouble are shaking stability itself. What kind of good people are they?”

“Hurry! Kill them!”

“Kill them, and you will be preserving the Heavenly Dao! Preserving destiny! All sapient beings under heaven will benefit from it! Aren’t we the righteous ones?”

One scene after another from the past replayed before his eyes, until at last they came together into a bloodstained sword.

Suddenly, Zhao Feng felt heat in his eye sockets, and two lines of bloody tears ran down.

“East… Prefecture… Zhao clan.”

The life in his face was fading fast. He could only force the words out from the depths of his throat.

“If, Your Majesty…”

“Tell… them…”

“that their son… was… un…filial…”

The final word came out short and abrupt. He did not even finish pronouncing it before all life left Zhao Feng completely, his head drooping motionless.

Bai Xiang fell silent and turned to look at the setting sun and the shoreline.

Her journey to the North Sea had yielded much.

Not only in terms of technique and battle experience, and not only because she had finally taken revenge with her own hands. Now she also had the chance to bring two generations of Yu Emperor back to the bai family ancestral ground and use their heart’s blood to make an offering to her little aunt.

But most important of all, her true self was awakening.

At the beginning, after crossing over, she had trodden on thin ice, striving in all dealings with others to be flawless in every possible way.

After the chaos of the Southern King, she protected her family and opened a new foundation in Maozhou.

After that came the invasion of the Void People, the calamity of the martial performance, until finally the tide of the Void Tribulation fell. At last she broke through to supreme strength, reigning over the world, and no longer needing to practice any forbearance at all.

From here on, debts of vengeance would be paid in vengeance, debts of hatred in hatred.

Only thus would she not fail this one rebirth, and with her true self walk the Great Dao of longevity through to the end.

“The Tathagata sees me… I see the Tathagata…”

Straightening herself, Bai Xiang shook her head and used the Shenming Sword as a cane to support her body.

Whoosh—

Whoosh—

A wild wind blew around her, sending her hair and skirts streaming and revealing the curves of her figure and her white-jade legs.

“What You Clan… what dangers could force even the You Clan into hiding from the world…”

“Come.”

“Come, all of you.”

“Come and see whether you can shake my dynasty.”

As the sun sank in the west, the slender figure gradually receded into the distance.

Among the shadows left behind, one black-mud-like thing quietly burrowed into the body beside it, controlled that body into crawling upright, then dragged another person up and slung them across its back before hurrying after the departing figure.

Crash…

Time passed.

The tides rose and fell.

Look upon the shore.

Nothing remained but endless white bones.