Volume 5, Chapter 85 – Self-Destruct Blast (2-in-1)

The moment the words fell, the light in the eyes of the nine giant demon heads in the sky went out.

As though that single sword strike had slain the soul within them, as though it had struck some fatal vital point, that enormous body, “specially shrunk down to target Bai Xiang, yet still two thousand meters in length and width,” also began to fall, crashing heavily toward the desert wilderness.

At least these things had picked a good place.

Bai Xiang remained standing alone in midair, watching the thing slam into the ground and throw up a skyful of sand. She thought that it was fortunate this was a vast, uninhabited desert. Had this happened over any city, a battle on this scale would have caused countless casualties.

Not to mention anything else, just the flesh and blood that had splashed down after she wounded the giant demon on the way here. The instant those things touched the ground, they burrowed into the sand like living creatures, took root, sprouted, and then produced grotesque umbrella-shaped fungi from the pits.

This was undoubtedly the Loss of Order contamination contained in its body. Especially considering that its power was “fusion,” there was no need to think too hard about what would happen if this stuff landed in a base city, or on ordinary civilians.

“Still, this isn’t completely over yet.”

Lifting her head, Bai Xiang once more gazed far to the west, her line of sight seeming to pierce through the void itself. At that moment, the Blood Lord and Qingjiang, who were standing at the borderland observing the battle, suddenly felt as though something were watching them.

Not good!

The Blood Lord reacted instantly. That madwoman was still not satisfied after killing the Demon Lord. She actually had no intention of letting even him go after he had run this far!

Without another word, he grabbed Qingjiang and turned to flee. And in the very next instant after he shot away, a bright sword light came chasing after him, tearing a deep sword scar a thousand meters long through the earth.

That sword scar…

The Blood Lord spared a moment to glance back and found that, from the outside, the scar was not imposing at all. In fact, it was practically inconspicuous.

Of course it was inconspicuous. Imagine that, across a wilderness blanketed in yellow sand, there suddenly appeared a slit less than a millimeter wide. No matter how far it stretched, it would still look inconspicuous.

But beneath that inconspicuous appearance, he noticed that along the edges of that slit, the portions visible to the naked eye, a layer of black-rift cross-sections was spreading outward to both sides. It looked as though some kind of microorganism had attached itself to the cut surfaces and was frantically devouring the land on either side.

How terrifying… it was something attached to that “strange sword qi.”

The Blood Lord’s heart sank at once.

That meant the madwoman’s control over power was still as exquisitely precise as ever.

Damn it. She fought the three of us by herself, then went on to face a real demon god’s body, and they had tangled for quite some time in the middle. How could she still have this much strength left?

Before he could think it through, he was forced to stop, frowning as he stared at the white-haired empress standing proudly ahead of him. He muttered, “After we escaped, we showed no further intention of taking part in the battle… Does the Xia Emperor truly mean to exterminate us to the last?”

Bai Xiang said nothing.

The real reason was simple: voices from too far away were beyond her hearing. As for words spoken about her, she could only sense them vaguely through her Qi-path divine pool.

But the distance between these two and her just now had not been that extreme. This was the same as discussing how to seek revenge on her right under her nose. How could she possibly let them go that easily?

She did look forward to people rising up to challenge her, but she would not create unnecessary complications.

And as for matters concerning the “Demon Lord,” even Fang Yang’s memories contained very little about them.

She was certain that the sword strike just now had destroyed the soul-fire in the demon god’s body, but Feixiang Heaven had not managed to bite down on even a trace of a remnant soul. She wanted to pry more information out through the Blood Lord.

If she could kill him, all the better.

With that thought fixed in mind, Bai Xiang shifted from absolute stillness to absolute motion. In a single step she appeared before the Blood Lord and swept a fist toward his face.

What a lunatic of a woman!

Seeing that Bai Xiang’s killing intent was already set, the Blood Lord also hurriedly raised a hand, preparing to meet her in battle.

But at this moment he not only had to protect himself, he also had Qingjiang in his arms as dead weight. It was doubtful whether he could bring out even half his strength. He did not even dare wrap too much microcosmic voidburst around himself anymore, only encasing his raised right arm with it before whipping it toward Bai Xiang.

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“Where is your ‘Imperial Mecha’?”

The two fists collided. The Blood Lord’s arm bones were smashed into a backward bend, and all ten of his fingers twisted out of shape. Even while retreating rapidly, he still had to endure the pressure of Bai Xiang’s words.

“The things you transformed earlier, the shield, the propulsion device, the giant cannon, they should all be components from some large mecha.”

“Is its name ‘Imperial Mecha’?”

“Why not show it to me?”

“Do you really want to see it?” While retreating, the Blood Lord’s voice suddenly lowered.

“Fine. Then I’ll show it to you!”

The moment the words fell, his back swelled up and a huge blood blister more than a hundred meters across bulged out from it.

The thing looked utterly revolting. The outer layer was basically a balloon-like membrane made of flesh and blood. It expanded rapidly, then stopped when it reached two hundred meters. At the same time, Bai Xiang discovered with some surprise that the Blood Lord’s original body, the human body that had generated this bloody sphere, was actually starting to shrivel, as though the matter inside it had been sucked into the blister in an instant, leaving behind only a discarded layer of skin.

“Ah!”

Qingjiang noticed the same thing at once. After all, he had been flying along in the Blood Lord’s embrace. At that moment, what he felt was his body pressed against a thin membrane of human skin, and that slightly sticky, nauseating sensation, coupled with the terror of being the only one left to face Emperor Xiang directly, made him scream involuntarily, using it to vent his fear.

“What are you yelling for?” The Blood Lord’s voice came by his ear. “Such a rare chance, and you’re still shouting… Hurry over!”

The moment he finished speaking, Qingjiang felt the Blood Lord’s human skin around him turn into a bundle of elastic fascia, wrapping around him and flinging him backward.

At the same time, the blood sphere was also changing. It rapidly deflated and shrank, quickly revealing the huge mecha within, or at least stamping out its outline.

The thing carried a vague sort of beauty.

Its appearance was quite similar to a “giant robot.” Usually, the head and torso would be covered in a layer of metal armor made to resemble actual armor. To the Sacred Weapon Clan, however, that was not merely metal. It could be counted as an exoskeleton.

And this thing was no exception. Its true outline was not nearly as exaggerated as two hundred meters. After the blood blister condensed, the final outline that emerged was about ninety meters tall. One could make out raised edges such as shoulder armor and arm guards across its frame, and its faceplate was a V-shaped cut surface that spread outward on both sides.

This thing…

Bai Xiang had no intention of letting it fully hatch. She stepped forward, crossed the barrier of the void in pursuit, and the blade of Feixiang Heaven slid out of her right palm with a hiss, landing perfectly in her grip. She raised her hand and cut out a fused sword aura toward the flesh-and-blood mecha.

Her condition truly was not as good as it had been at the start, but her greatest strength was never her body or her technique. It was her mind.

With her thoughts coordinating everything from the center, no matter how tired or exhausted her body became, so long as she had not collapsed completely, she could forcibly remote-control it and make it display a state close to her peak.

Puchi!

Without the slightest suspense, the fused sword aura struck the flesh-and-blood mecha. In an instant, a straight cutting line appeared from the top of its head to its chest and abdomen, marked out by the blood spraying from the wound.

Splash! Splash!

Great torrents of red blood plasma burst wildly from the opening, so dense that Bai Xiang was forced to halt and fly upward to avoid it.

What trick is this now?

She checked herself. Taishang Response and the Jade Spirit were both still active, and her condition was still fairly good. Flipping over the curtain of blood, she looked at the flesh-and-blood mecha again and was startled to find that the blood had not fallen at all. Instead, it was being drawn back in, forming a pair of wings entirely made of blood on its back.

They were not bionic wings of the normal sort, but rather formed from clusters of icy crystal spikes, with a frame that still carried a mechanical aesthetic.

This should have been an image of striking beauty, but because the main body of the wings had been cut open from head to toe, the result looked absurd.

And at exactly that moment, Taishang Response sent out a warning.

At that instant, Bai Xiang suddenly had a wondrous “illusion.” The path of calculation and divination she had once learned from Xiang Xian seemed to fuse at this moment with the art of calculation and divination in Fang Yang’s memories. It was as though, in a single instant, she had stepped into and walked through everything the two of them had ever achieved in “void extrapolation.”

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Almost instinctively, she began sensing the heavenly essence around her.

Whether it was heavenly essence, the air, or even the tiniest molecules and elements drifting within the air, every arrangement and combination of matter, every trajectory of motion, was simulated by “void extrapolation.” In the end, based upon all of that, it pushed open an incomparably mysterious door, one that even Saints would find difficult to glimpse.

Within Bai Xiang’s pair of golden pupils, the scene she saw was this: a phantom broke free from the flesh-and-blood mecha. It looked like a slow-motion afterimage, opening both its arms and its wings as it embraced her.

At the same time, many afterimages were dragged out from Bai Xiang’s own body. One of those afterimages moved forward along a trajectory that landed perfectly in the flesh-and-blood mecha’s embrace. Then, in the next moment, she saw endless heat and endless waves of light erupt from inside that mecha, instantly swallowing that afterimage of Bai Xiang whole.

And after that scene unfolded, the sky was immediately covered once more by the signature dim tribulation clouds of the Primordial Chaos Heavenly Punishment Divine Thunder. This time, they formed with unprecedented speed and on an unprecedented scale.

In the very next moment, all the scenes formed by those afterimages vanished.

Like the collapse of the universe, all of the afterimages contracted back into the flesh-and-blood mecha, and she herself followed inertia and drew close to it, exactly along the trajectory just displayed in that vision.

Bai Xiang suddenly understood something.

The scene she had glimpsed after pushing open that door, all those afterimages and contours, should have been the “future that would happen” ultimately derived through “void extrapolation.”

Though it was very brief, just a little over one second if counted carefully, that instant of imagery was already enough for her to understand and realize many things.

She immediately halted her forward rush, leaned her upper body backward, bent her knees slightly, and planted her right foot behind her. In an instant, she shifted away from where she had been standing.

Whoosh!

The moment she moved, the flesh-and-blood mecha’s embrace arrived.

Not only did it arrive, the Blood Lord’s crazed howl also came from within it.

“You truly are a terribly difficult enemy to deal with, Xia Emperor! But if you underestimate the pursuit I’ve devoted my whole life to, then you can only… hm?”

He had only kept speaking that long out of sheer habit, but he immediately realized he had failed to catch his target.

The Xia Emperor had actually retreated!

I was already prepared to use ‘Imperial Self-Destruct Blast,’ my final trump card! And she actually retreated?

Why—

Before his thoughts could finish, the predetermined sequence locked its final gear into place. The enormous explosion that Bai Xiang had just seen in her extrapolation suddenly came into being, turning into a vast wave of light that spread in all directions.

If converted into equal terms, that power already exceeded a nuclear bomb by hundreds, even thousands, of times…

One hundred kilometers away, Bai Xiang had only just shifted out when her vision was swallowed by endless white light.

Through the haze, she vaguely caught sight of a blazing white fireball rising ahead, something comparable to the sun itself.

It kept climbing, kept swelling larger, and around its outer surface was wrapped a ring of incandescent light like Saturn’s rings.

This is not that man’s own power.

It has mixed with the Primordial Chaos Heavenly Punishment Divine Thunder.

If I were at the center of that explosion, in my current state it would be troublesome…

Bai Xiang’s hair was blown streaming backward. She did not dodge. Instead, she faced the impact head-on, flinging fused sword aura in front of her to form a “voidburst layer.” At that moment, one after another, those temporarily sustained sword auras became like invisible shields, blocking for her.

Weng—

That incandescent light-ring suddenly expanded outward, colliding with the sword aura like a slash launched by heaven and earth themselves.

The two merely gave off a single hiss before shattering and canceling each other out. In the next instant, Bai Xiang was forced back several dozen meters through the air. When she looked up again, she saw the great fireball emit even more incandescent light-rings.

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Like vibration waves, one after another.

She continuously slashed out fused sword aura, continuously neutralizing the impact of those light-rings. At first she could not block them completely and was forced backward again and again.

But gradually, she was able to hold her ground, and even advance toward the front against the oncoming rings.

The direct force of the explosion lasted for nearly a full minute, yet to Bai Xiang it felt as though several days had passed.

When the light finally faded and she looked again, she saw that not only had the origin point of the explosion become an incomparably smooth hemispherical crater sunken into the earth, but every stretch of terrain outside that crater had been flattened and transformed into a kind of melted crystalline substance.

And the heavenly phenomena as well.

The dark clouds had completely dispersed. Within a radius of a hundred li, there was not even a wisp of white cloud, let alone black smoke. What lay before her was a vast, boundless expanse of deep blue sky, and directly above the center of the explosion, a gigantic gradient-colored black rift had appeared in the heavens, slowly shrinking and closing with time.

“To use a method like this without hesitation… where did he get so many Heavenly Stem Precious Jades?”

Feeling the threat, Bai Xiang was in no great mood.

There should have been no way the other party could survive such an explosion. Most likely both his flesh and soul had been blown into fragments, then completely consumed by the impact mixed with heavenly tribulation power.

“That makes sense. After the New Era, he took control of the Starsea Federation, and the Federation’s territory is ten times the size of Great Xia. If I could find fragments, there’s no reason the Blood Lord couldn’t find others.”

“Feixiang Heaven devoured Precious Jade fragments without drawing heavenly tribulation. It seems that was because of Xiao Huang’s interference.”

After considering it, Bai Xiang more or less understood the cause and effect.

Her mood brightened again, because she really had turned calamity into safety just now. That sensation of extrapolating the future was still not very familiar to her, but if she studied it more deeply later, it would certainly become a stable method.

That way, if she encountered this sort of self-destruction attack again in the future, she would still receive a warning of danger.

A method like this could no longer pose any major threat to her.

She searched through the explosion crater again and confirmed that not even a single fragment of the flesh-and-blood mecha remained. Only then did Bai Xiang rise once more, step into the void, and shift away.

When she appeared again, she was back at the place where she had first been summoned.

Bai Xiang swept her gaze over the wilderness and found that the battle was already close to its end.

When she had come out earlier, she had casually swept out several sword auras. The aftershocks of those sword auras, combined with the cannon the Blood Lord had fired, had nearly wiped out eighty percent of the strength of the two voidfiend armies.

That enormous tree demon, the Qingyun Demon Saint, had taken her fused sword aura head-on. At this point, more than half of its remaining body had already been eroded away by voidburst.

The demon god Jiuli had had its soul extinguished, and after its body was usurped, it had been cut down by her sword.

Pilgrimage Mountain’s Saint, Fang Yang, had been killed by her.

The Blood Lord had been forced by her into self-destruction.

Only that sinister “Demon Lord” remained of uncertain fate. Bai Xiang had a persistent feeling that the thing was still alive.

But in any case, the leading figures of these voidfiends had all been swept away in this battle. The surviving small fry could not withstand the army under Bai Tingyun’s command, and were already being hunted down in scattered groups. From the look of it, only a few small groups of demon birds had escaped into the deeper wilderness.

At this moment, Tingyun’s army was cleaning up and securing the battlefield. A large stretch of military tents had been set up in the distance, and one could vaguely see cooking smoke rising.

“Master!”

Liu Yong was the first to spot Bai Xiang’s appearance. He immediately rose from the camp, ran below her, looked up, and dropped to his knees in a deeply respectful bow.

“Thank you, Master, for standing up for your disciple!”

Standing up for him… that was really only incidental.

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Bai Xiang first looked at Liu Yong, then at Xu Shu and the other disciples following behind him, all of them properly bowing to her. Shifting her gaze, she saw behind the crowd a huge wolf demon bound in iron chains.

The wolf demon had still been struggling, letting out hoarse growls from its throat, and even the many soldiers gathered around it had found it difficult to fully suppress it. But the instant it saw Bai Xiang, it flattened itself to the ground and curled up there like a big white dog, trembling all over.

“This is your own grievance. I do not intend to resolve it completely for you.”

Bai Xiang withdrew her gaze and said to Liu Yong.

“Yes!” Liu Yong nodded and spoke the words he had already prepared.

“This disciple begs that this demon be spared for the time being!”

“This disciple wants to wait until I have grown stronger… I want to defeat it myself and settle the karma between us!”

“That’s for you to decide.” Bai Xiang waved a hand. Then, seeming to sense something, she looked up just in time to see Bai Tingyun flying swiftly toward them.

He was clearly coming to report the situation.

Bai Xiang’s brow creased almost imperceptibly, and she suddenly felt somewhat irritated.

With the emotional intelligence and social smoothness she could simulate through her ability, handling such matters would naturally be child’s play.

But she had long since grown used to leaving all this miscellaneous business to Bai Zhuqing. Now, being forced to deal with everything herself, unable to simply turn around and go back to cultivation, gave her a distinctly awkward feeling.

Compared to all these trivialities, cultivation and insight seemed more important after all.

Then I just won’t bother with it.

I’m already the Emperor, so it should be fine if I act willfully once in a while… right?

Bai Tingyun is capable enough. He’ll definitely handle it well. I trust him.

Thinking that, Bai Xiang took another step and vanished before Bai Tingyun could descend.

???

What Bai Tingyun saw when he arrived with a group of people and landed was precisely this scene. He could hardly believe his own eyes!

This… did Her Majesty have some urgent matter?

It couldn’t be that I made some mistake and drew Her Majesty’s displeasure, could it?

At the same time, elsewhere, within the air currents blasted outward by the explosion, the Blood Lord’s face appeared within a streak of blood-light fleeing westward.

“That was dangerous…”

“If I hadn’t also once been trapped by void-time, I’d already be finished this time…”

He checked the state of his body and found that the losses were truly catastrophic.

He wasn’t dead, true, but without some fortuitous opportunity in the next few decades, it would be almost no different from death.

“Looks like I’ll have to lie low and build up in secret again.”

he muttered.

“There are ambitious men in the Federation too.”

“I absolutely can’t let them know the truth…”