Volume 5, Chapter 47 – Voidfiends (Two-in-One)

She had come swiftly, but on the journey back to Great Xia, Bai Xiang traveled somewhat more slowly.

On the one hand, the goal of this trip had already been more or less achieved. She had measured out her current place in the “food chain.”

On the other hand, she had not forgotten what it was that had allowed her to gain so much in the North Sea. So on the way back, she chose routes that mostly passed near the monster lairs she had managed to learn about, all so she could slaughter them and give the common people at the bottom of Northern Yu a little breathing room.

Northern Yu had entered civil war three days ago.

New Yujing City had gained the support of Pilgrimage Mountain, enthroned Yao Sheng’s daughter, Yao Yun, as emperor, and together with several northern military garrison towns had gathered a total of two hundred thousand dao troops to suppress the refugee uprising that had erupted from south to north.

“Northern Yu’s fate is exhausted.”

Standing on a cliff and gazing into the distance, Bai Xiang wore her sword at her waist and let the breeze stir her hair slightly.

It was called suppression of the uprising, but for the vast majority of the refugees, anyone with a functioning brain knew exactly which option to choose between “taking revenge on Northern Yu’s government troops” and “using the chance to flee south like mad.”

Bai Xiang’s northern campaign had smashed the entire military and administrative structure of Northern Yu to pieces. With the central line as the dividing mark, the farther south one went, the greater the chaos became. That meant that for at least three weeks, no matter what happened here, it was impossible for large-scale government forces to march over and clean up the mess.

The refugees burned official residences, tore down banners, and seized weapons.

For three weeks, they could do anything they wanted.

This wave would likely absorb quite a bit of the population. The manpower problem Bai Zhuqing had been complaining about all along would probably ease somewhat because of this.

After thinking about state affairs for a while, Bai Xiang gently raised her left foot.

Her snow-white thigh, wrapped in black gauze, lifted first. From knee to calf to ankle, it traced a perfect curve.

As her bare foot fell naturally, she did not step into empty air off the cliff. Instead, her figure instantly shifted a hundred meters away, and her sole and toes planted solidly into the soft grass.

And so Bai Xiang traveled onward using the art of Shrinking the Earth. Her bare feet alternately stepped into soil, mud, and mountain streams, yet not a trace of grime ever clung to her soles.

She could not be bothered to borrow anyone else’s clothes or shoes again. Since condensed qi force was already wrapped around her body to preserve her modesty, she simply intended to return like this all the way home.

She, however, traveled ahead in ease and delight, while the Buddha corpse possessing Yao Sheng had it much harder.

Yao Sheng himself was one thing. Because he was being possessed by it, his bodily functions had been fixed in place.

But Yao Xing, like Zhao Feng before him, had been gravely injured by the aftershocks. Even both of his legs had been twisted to pieces. The Buddha corpse not only had to tend to his injuries, it also had to find him food and water, and sometimes even threw little fits.

Bai Xiang paid no attention to any of that.

Along the way, she heard shouting and killing cries. Curious, she shifted over to take a look, only to find that both sides fighting were refugees.

The equipment and gear these people wore was remarkably “luxurious.” Though the models of firearms in their hands varied wildly, every one of them wore military- or police-style protective clothing, and each had daggers, short blades, and ammunition pouches at the waist. At a glance, they hardly looked like refugees at all.

“There are no signs of government troops intervening.”

“Are they fighting in order to swallow up the other side?”

Bai Xiang had not seen this kind of “mortal struggle” in a very long time. She found a hidden vantage point up high, sat down, and watched with great interest.

Northern Yu had received aid from the Federation. The upper-tier technology was indeed all in the hands of the nobility, but things like firearms and protective gear had become very easy for refugees to get hold of now that the military and police had almost all been slaughtered by Bai Xiang.

Their fighting was basically like a modern skirmish: finding cover, laying down suppressive fire, relying on protective gear to absorb the force of bullets. They had even evolved elite roles such as mortar teams and snipers.

This could hardly be blamed on them, because they had no cultivation to rely on. Otherwise, they would not have fallen so low as to become refugees in the first place.

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Bai Xiang roughly calculated that if these people had even a tiny bit of cultivation, the brutality of the fighting would immediately rise by several orders of magnitude.

Whether it was the Dao-Void Methods, qi methods, or even Yao Yu Sword Dao, once one entered the gate, the improvement to the body’s coordination with awareness, what was known as the harmonizing of heart, skill, and body, was immense. Bai Xiang herself had experienced this when she first Entered the Dao.

With cultivation in the body and the soul awakened, one could gain a certain degree of danger sense, and could predict the direction of bullets based on the battlefield situation, thereby choosing the best possible evasive movement.

And if one truly could not avoid them, the body’s resistance to bullets would also far exceed that of a mortal. With protective gear, as long as the head or another vital point was not hit, it would not be difficult for such a person to break through moderately dense gunfire.

Then it would become… like the fight I had with Lu Ran back then.

Relying on protective gear to move at high speed across a complex and shifting battlefield, looking for opportunities to close to melee range. Once battle developed to that stage, blades would actually be deadlier than bullets that could not hit their mark, so of course the fighting would become even more savage.

Their combat quality is decent, but their combat strength is truly not worth mentioning.

After watching for a while, Bai Xiang found that after all that exchange of fire, these two groups had barely killed anyone. She concluded that with only these firearms and protective gear, they could do no more than barely keep themselves alive.

Not to mention the government troops sent from the north to clean them up. Even a random person with some training, so long as they wore bulletproof gear, could sneak up and slaughter them all.

And as for demon beasts, there was no need to say more.

Their situation was actually extremely dangerous.

Suddenly, Bai Xiang seemed to sense something and turned to look northwest.

The dense forest there showed no visible change, but she had already smelled it: mixed into the wind was a faint demonic aura drifting over from that direction.

The two groups fighting below had no reaction at all. They seemed to have old grievances between them, and after fighting for so long neither was willing to stop. One side had even split off more than ten men to circle around the flank and launch a surprise attack on the opposing force.

One of the young men, his field helmet askew on his head and his gun in hand, was walking along the side when he suddenly smelled an extremely heavy stench of blood.

Instinctively, he looked to the side, only to see the “green” in the environment, that patch of color, come alive. It transformed into a savage demon beast shaped like a lizard, with reverse-jointed beast legs and serrated spikes running from elbows, legs, back, all the way to its tail.

“A mo… monster!”

He shouted, making the others look over this way. At the same moment, the lizard demon pounced at him, its scythe-like hooked claw sweeping horizontally toward his waist.

If that blow landed, he would be cut in half at the waist.

Just when the young man thought he was about to die, he suddenly felt that… something, some invisible and intangible thing, had wrapped itself around him.

His companions’ shouts and cries.

The crack of firearms, the roars of monsters, and the rustling in the grass and woods all vanished, as if someone had pressed a mute switch. Even his sense of time seemed to slow slightly.

The feeling came quickly and went just as quickly. When the muting effect faded, the lizard demon broke apart midair, exploding into thousands upon thousands of tiny flecks of flesh, together with a great spray of demon blood that shot wildly in all directions.

Pfft! Pfft!

Shhk! Shhk!

W… what happened?

The others were startled and retreated one after another, sweeping their guns around in every direction. After a long while, nothing else appeared.

Only then did the young man, forcing his courage up, shakily circle around the demon beast’s corpse and peer out from behind the large tree in front of him. From there he discovered a huge slope below.

From the slope all the way to the official road beneath, the ground was piled densely with the shattered flesh and corpses of monsters. The bodies had even vaguely formed the character for “south,” while not a single branch or blade of grass around them had suffered any extra damage.

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“This is the last stretch before entering Great Xia’s borders. Hopefully they’ll have the sense to understand.”

Elsewhere, Bai Xiang had already set out on the road again.

She had offered help like this countless times on the way back.

If she came across it, she helped. If not, then it was up to fate.

It was not pure goodwill on her part. There was still a little self-interest mixed into it.

Mainly because after killing Yao Yu Demon Ancestor and using the methods of the Xuandi Scripture to absorb a portion of her scattered remnant soul, Bai Xiang had learned quite a lot of information from the other woman’s memories, including the threat posed by the voidfiends.

Voidfiends were actually the collective term for Demon Pools, Void Demons, and demon beasts.

In common understanding, Demon Pools were generally judged to be “phenomena without fixed form,” while Void Demons mostly acted in the material world with tangible bodies.

As for demon beasts, they were simply animals that had been demonized. They were also the kind of life Bai Xiang had slaughtered the most.

“Void Demons are actually the evolved form of Demon Pools.”

Bai Xiang recalled that information.

“In essence, both of them are strange manifestations formed when, after a sapient being dies, the power of its soul fails to dissipate directly because of some factor.”

“Demon Pools root themselves in the primary world and are farther from the Void Tribulation, so the interference they suffer is smaller. Most of them remain ‘formless and shapeless.'”

“But Void Demons are closer to the void and are more heavily interfered with, so many of them have begun to ‘turn from void into substance,’ regaining the ability to condense bodies in reality, in the material world.”

“The only exception is the soul-eroding Void Demons. They have no bodies, their varieties are limited, and their means of attack are not as changeable as Demon Pools, yet they are far more terrifying than most Demon Pools.”

Ordinary demon tides did not deserve to be called “voidfiend armies,” because for the most part they were incited from within by certain Demon Pools, Void Demons, and even soul-eroding Void Demons. It was they who controlled great numbers of demon beasts and made them wander the land “without conscious purpose.”

Which was to say, demon tides possessed no strategic awareness. They had only instinct. Their wandering was simply to find something to eat.

A “voidfiend army,” on the other hand, was different. It was usually composed of multiple demon-beast kings and Void Demon commanders. Its upper ranks possessed intelligence, could communicate, and could control many different kinds of demon beasts, divine pools, and Void Demons, even arranging tactics like frontal assault, sneak attack, and decapitation strikes according to each species’ traits.

The civilized world was already overwhelmed dealing with demon tides. Great voidfiend armies were even harder to oppose.

There were simply too many of them.

And behind them, something was probably organizing and linking them together.

According to the intelligence provided by Yao Yu Demon Ancestor, this was mainly the result of the remnant forces of Blood Soul Heaven courting disaster.

At the very beginning, in the first year of Zhengyuan according to the Great Xia calendar, there had been no mature and fully formed voidfiend armies. The “great voidfiend armies” recorded in the histories were nothing compared to those of today. Most of them were merely led by demon kings driven blood-crazed by interference from the Void Tribulation, and their tactics were exceedingly primitive.

But as time passed, the influence of what Bai Xiang had once slaughtered high in the sky, one division of Blood Soul Heaven and the monster called “Blood Heaven” that they had expended enormous effort to summon back, gradually began to spread.

Blood Soul Heaven had a total of eight divisions. Bai Xiang had annihilated one, but many of those remaining were still alive. Because Blood Heaven had failed to descend, disagreements arose among them.

One faction, under the leadership of the “Blood Lord,” chose to remain within the Star Sea Federation and intended to settle down there from then on.

The other faction was even more fanatical. Even within Blood Soul Heaven, they were fanatics among fanatics. They believed that those who remained in the Federation had betrayed the “doctrine.” True disciples of Blood Soul Heaven had to take “returning body and soul to Blood Heaven” as their final goal. Compared to that goal, all prosperity, civilization, and peaceful livelihood were worthless things that had to be abandoned and destroyed.

This was, without question, a conflict of ideology.

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Bai Xiang still remembered that her first awakening to that ideology had come from Li Huiran, that Demon Court Heaven-Patrol officer.

Li Huiran had once said that Blood Soul Heaven believed the form of life, whether human or demon, did not really matter. What mattered was whether one could survive better through cycle after cycle of Void Tribulations.

[“If humans can’t do it, then become demons. If demons can’t do it, then find a way to research a new form.”]

That was roughly their creed.

Once one understood that, one could understand why the Sacred Weapon Clan had come into being. This new race perfectly suited those ideological demands. Clearly, Blood Soul Heaven’s leader, the Blood Lord, believed that reaching that stage was already enough, and that further transformation was no longer necessary.

But compared to truly deranged fanatics, he still was not extreme enough. Those madmen did not believe the Sacred Weapon Clan fulfilled the doctrine’s ideal. They believed the Sacred Weapon Clan was still defective, still incomplete, not the perfect form they envisioned, and so they still had to fight, still had to seek more.

Even if they had to draw inspiration from monsters whose nature was that of the dead, such as Demon Pools and Void Demons, they would still create a true “Blood Heaven.”

And so… they split.

Blood Soul Heaven, once the greatest evil organization of all, fractured. One faction remained in the Federation. The other, after its defeat, fled into the wilderness.

Yao Yu Demon Ancestor truly deserved her title as an ancient demon. The parasitic arts of the You Clan could parasitize any organic lifeform. Using that ability, she personally infiltrated the team of those rebel forces to see what direction they would take afterward.

It was not that she truly cared about any of it. It was simply habit.

She had long been accustomed to gathering intelligence in this way, then weaving a web out of that information to control everything. This time was no different. She did not think she could truly gain anything from it.

They were only rebels, after all.

Even someone like the Blood Lord had remained in the Federation and chosen the Sacred Weapon Clan. There was no possibility of these scraps accomplishing anything.

And yet what happened next left Yao Yu Demon Ancestor, an ancient demon who had weathered countless storms, shocked… even afraid.

For a pack of madmen.

For a group of madmen driven to the point of no return, what could they do?

The answer was: anything.

If they could think of a possibility, they tried it.

During that time, Yao Yu Demon Ancestor watched with her own eyes as these madmen, using extremely primitive conditions, began a series of frenzied experiments.

Could sapient beings, who were living creatures, merge with Demon Pools and Void Demons, whose essence was that of the dead?

The “Blood Heaven” summoned from the depths of the void had ultimately been slain by High Emperor Ancestor Xia. That was indeed a failure, but it did not necessarily prove that the path itself was wrong. It might simply have been that Blood Heaven had not yet grown to perfection.

After all, it had remained in the void for too long, devouring only dull-witted dead spirits and remnant souls that could not even think on their own. What would happen if, instead, it were made to devour things with greater sapience…? They were determined to find out.

Yao Yu Demon Ancestor lay hidden among them and witnessed them controlling monster hordes, assaulting villages and towns, using living humans as sacrifices, and repeatedly exploring those Illusory Realm planes hidden deep in the wastelands.

The primary world was indeed fusing with the fragments of the Illusory Realms, but that fusion took time.

If the primary world were compared to a giant beast, then its process of fusing those fragments was like that beast eating.

Only after swallowing them and fully digesting them would the primary world’s territory expand, increasing by the amount corresponding to the Illusory Realms it had digested.

If it had merely swallowed them but had not yet digested them, then those fragments of the Illusory Realms would form crack-like secret realms on the surface of the primary world, like tumors hanging from the giant beast. Those parasites, humans for example, could crawl through the cracks in the tumors to explore, seeking opportunities and ancient ruins.

That rebel force gradually began to make progress, because Yao Yu Demon Ancestor discovered that one by one, they no longer wanted to live.

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Not out of despair. She could feel the excitement and elation in them.

The moment she witnessed a pack of lunatics starting to use themselves as living sacrifices, she realized: they really might have produced something.

But she had no chance to glimpse exactly what it was.

The body she had possessed was chosen as a sacrificial offering. The last piece of intelligence she managed to provide Bai Xiang before that body died was that she had been taken to a “secret realm” wrapped everywhere in bloody flesh and rotting mud.

And there… in the middle of a blood pool, she had sensed a terrifying aura comparable to that of an ancient demon.

“So that’s where ‘wisdom’ comes from.”

After recalling that information, Bai Xiang also thought of the cicada demon patriarch.

The old demon of the bai family ancestral ground, that is, the Demon-Breeding Ground, was said to have reached the ultimate boundary of Demon Pool cultivation, the “extreme limit of wisdom,” and thus awakened true intelligence.

Probably a mutation of that sort?

But the cicada demon was nothing more than a thing with empty cleverness. It was said to have a thousand years of cultivation, yet what it actually displayed was pitiful. Even I, fresh to the Dao at the time, could contend against it.

For the time being, Bai Xiang still could not make sense of what those Blood Soul Heaven heretics, sacrificing themselves in the wilderness, had ultimately created.

That thing was a threat, so along the way she was not just saving people. She was also studying the various types of evil beings through killing them, making preparations for what was to come.

Before she knew it, she had crossed the border.

The Shenming Sword immediately began vibrating and humming.

It was cheering, because returning to Great Xia’s territory meant entering the domain of qi methods.

The power of its divine pool could be reactivated.

“Bzzz, bzzz—”

A vibration came from Bai Xiang’s waist.

It was her phone.

Before the great battle, she had hidden it away, which was why it had not been damaged.

Once across the border, the signal could more or less be used again.

“This is Bai Xiang.”

After pausing briefly over the caller ID, Bai Xiang chose to answer.

“Big Sister~”

That sweet voice alone was enough to identify the caller.

“Big Sister, you need to come back quickly~”

“I’m in Zhennan right now.”

“We’re all waiting for you~”