Volume 5, Chapter 100 – Pursuit and Extermination (2-in-1)

Not long after Bai Xiang left, Bai Zhuqing appeared on a rooftop at a street corner several dozen meters away from the courtyard.

She was still dressed in a great crimson phoenix robe, with golden rings on her wrists and ankles. Only those pairs of bells were missing, and accordingly, her expression was extremely serious.

She still knew the difference between inside and outside, primary and secondary.

The bells were her little secret with her elder sister, a means of pleasing her and a private delight. She would only take them out and hang them on herself after returning to Listening-to-Rain Tower. She never wore them while moving about normally.

“…That’s the situation in full.”

The view shifted, revealing the person standing behind Bai Zhuqing. It was the very officer who had previously led the Xuanxia delegation. He had just come here in person and recounted everything he had seen and heard along the way to Bai Zhuqing.

“Is that so?” Bai Zhuqing said flatly. “From the sound of it, those people are being fairly obedient. That really does make things somewhat troublesome.”

Troublesome in what sense…?

The officer broke out in a sweat, lowering his head deeply, not even daring to look at her back.

Bai Zhuqing did not hide anything from him. The fact that he could serve as rotating guard duty in Zhennan already meant he was one of her trusted confidants, so she continued in a comparatively casual tone, “Then for the next few days, I want you to keep your eyes on that courtyard.”

“I don’t need you to do anything else. Just find a way to pick faults. Find any breach of etiquette on their part, preferably the kind that can be blown up into something bigger. Once you’ve secured evidence, come notify me. I’ll handle the rest myself.”

“My lady,” the officer said through gritted teeth, voicing a doubt, “but that is, after all…”

“Of course I know what she is,” Bai Zhuqing cut him off with a wave of her hand. “But before she is ‘what she is,’ she has a specific identity. That identity is called the Xuantian Holy Mother, called Ninth Lady Xuan. That means that whether she knew it or not, whether she was willing or not, she helped further the massacres committed by a band of fanatical cultists.”

“After Xuanxia was founded, nearly four hundred thousand people were slaughtered in the northwestern sands.” She fixed her eyes on the officer. “Are you suggesting that we should prepare to receive the spiritual symbol of such a nation, to prepare to accept her as Grand Empress Dowager? Do you think Her Majesty is the sort of person who would do such a thing?”

“This subordinate would never dare!” The officer dropped straight to his knees.

That accusation was far too heavy. He could not shoulder it.

“I’m not blaming you.” Bai Zhuqing shook her head. “But you must first understand what the meaning of your existence is.”

“If, and I do mean if.”

“If Her Majesty’s talks with her fall through, in other words, if the possibility I just described ceases to exist, then are we supposed to do nothing but stand by and watch?”

“Do we want to witness the most enlightened and greatest sovereign in history personally harming her own birth mother? Do we truly want that? And then let the Court of Ceremonies record every bit of it, list it in the official histories, pass it down to later ages, and stain her reputation?”

“Of course not!” At last, the officer fully understood. A sudden sense of mission rose in his heart. With his face flushed red, he lowered his head and said, “That is clearly… clearly the moment when subordinates like us are meant to play our part!”

Yes… yes…

No matter how one dressed it up, whether one called it carrying out Heaven’s justice or placing righteousness above family, the charge of kin-slaying absolutely could not be allowed to fall upon Her Majesty.

Some things had to be done, but the right people had to be found to do them.

The Commissioner was right. This was exactly the meaning of their existence.

After dismissing the officer, Bai Zhuqing remained alone, standing at the edge of the rooftop and gazing toward the courtyard.

“If she finds that decision hard to make, then let me bear the sin.”

“Elder Sister.”

“This time, it’s my turn to protect you.”

…

Elsewhere, Bai Xiang appeared directly ten thousand meters above Zhennan Circuit, standing upon the astral winds, her eyes taking in sun and moon alike as she lifted that peculiar soul gu before her.

“Demon Lord?” she asked probingly.

“Are you coming out yourself, or should I come find you?”

The soul gu clearly possessed a will of its own; that much could be felt the instant it was yanked out. It kept producing an urge toward self-destruction, like a captured spy attempting suicide.

Yet Bai Xiang had locked down its movements with the Golden-Pupil Illusory God, so at this moment it could do nothing at all. It could only writhe and struggle in her hand like a truly fat worm. No matter how hard it squirmed, though, it refused to send out any thought. In other words, it refused to speak with Bai Xiang.

“Refusing to communicate?”

“You can’t possibly think your little scheme would fool anyone.”

With a soft snort, Bai Xiang exerted force in an instant and directly crushed the soul gu in her hand.

Bang!

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In a single moment, the soul gu burst apart. The special semi-transparent slime composing its body, faintly suffused with a white-gold sheen, splattered in every direction, only to be drawn back together by an invisible force of qi and compressed into a sphere under her control for refinement.

As she refined that remnant soul, all the information making up the soul gu flowed into Bai Xiang’s heart as well.

The first thing she saw was countless white bones.

White bones, rotting flesh… The first-person view was like standing in a slaughterhouse or a corpse pit. The image shook and swayed, and then its owner was restrained and taken away by keepers.

After a brief stretch of blackness, what appeared next was a sealed metal-walled space. It looked somewhat like the laboratory Hannah and Xiang Xian had built on the back mountain, but far cruder. The owner of the viewpoint should have been lying flat on a bed, while numerous people in white coats waved medical instruments overhead.

An experimental subject?

Bai Xiang was taken aback at first, then understood. It seemed this sort of soul gu was not directly created, but produced through a cruel Feathering ritual that forcibly awakened ordinary mortals, selecting layer by layer those with sufficiently strong souls, then using various methods to catalyze them into a form close to a Demon Pool, and finally having the Demon Lord’s side infuse spirit into them and possess them.

How bloody… There had been at least twenty thousand human skeletons in that pit just now. Rumor said that, since the founding of Xuanxia, it had devoured four hundred thousand sapient beings of different kinds. The real number was probably even higher.

Once that stretch of memory belonging to the soul gu’s original owner passed, the remaining memories were far more chaotic, mostly appearing in fragmented form.

So it knows I have soul-reading methods, and deliberately scrambled and encrypted them?

Meaningless.

With a thought, the powerful soul of the Divine Palace Realm was handed over to the Jade Spirit model for processing. All the fragments were separately numbered and arranged, then forcibly pieced back into the proper order through brute-force enumeration.

Whoosh!

One scene after another was completed and restored.

Bai Xiang continuously examined these scenes, watching them while processing the flow of information. Then she suddenly turned westward, and with one step of her black silk-clad foot, shod in a high-strapped sandal, she crossed through the void. When she landed, she had abruptly arrived in the side courtyard of a temple.

The courtyard was not large. The bluestone-paved path was covered with a thick layer of dust. A locust tree grew in each of the yards flanking the road. Bai Xiang happened to land in the middle of the path, with the front hall behind her and an empty Mahavira Hall before her.

The Mahavira Hall was the core building of every Buddhist temple, the place that housed the images venerated by the monks. Under normal circumstances, it would always have people tending and maintaining it. It should never have been so empty and dilapidated.

One of the scenes Bai Xiang had seen belonged precisely to this place. She steadied herself, her left hand resting on the sword scabbard at her waist, and the golden pupils beneath her hair focused with mental force as she cast another slanting glance around her.

This time, what she saw changed completely.

The place was still the same place.

The temple had not changed.

The courtyard had not changed.

Yet in her golden eyes, it was no longer empty. Along the roads on both sides, kneeling skeletons sat row after row, all facing the main hall, hands pressed together as though chanting sutras to the Buddha.

Shhk!

She eased Feixiang Heaven half an inch from its sheath.

At once, a razor-sharp sword aura sliced across the scene, locking onto the locust tree to the left.

Aaaah!

The locust tree had time for only a single scream before it was swept into the sword aura and shredded to dust. The deep sword scar cut by that strike tore through the illusion like a crack in painted scenery. Within the left half of the peeled-away image, a blood-red sunset appeared, revealing the densely arranged rows of seated bones, along with the countless hanging skeletons suspended from the locust tree on the right by thick hemp ropes.

The bones possessed no life. They were dead objects and did not move. But once the true scene was exposed, Bai Xiang could directly see the wronged souls circling above the temple.

There were not many, but still around thirty of them. If left unchecked, those wronged souls would definitely form a Demon Pool in the future. They might even become the temple’s monks and deceive and harm passing travelers.

“Return of Souls.”

Bai Xiang kept her left hand on the sword at her waist, formed a hand seal with her right, and spoke the decree aloud. The wronged souls circling beneath the blood-red sky flew toward her like young swallows returning to the nest, zipping into the gap between the guard and the scabbard, where they were devoured, digested, and absorbed by the blade.

Such tiny remnant souls were not even enough to get between Feixiang Heaven’s teeth, but by absorbing them, Bai Xiang obtained a great deal of related memory.

This place had originally been called White Crane Temple.

White Crane Temple did not belong to any base city. Strictly speaking, five days ago, this temple, together with the mountain upon which it sat, had not belonged to Great Xia at all, nor to any corner of this planet.

It was a fragment, an Illusory Realm fragment that had reintegrated into the main world through primal return.

Those wronged souls were not native inhabitants of the fragment. They had been mixed-blood descendants of two races living and farming nearby, rejected because they counted neither as human nor as demon, and so could only cling together in settlements out in the wilderness.

It was through their viewpoint that Bai Xiang clearly saw the process by which White Crane Temple descended.

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Five days earlier, the process had begun at the road entrance to the village, where the void split open, drawing many people to stop and stare.

The opening grew bigger and longer, gradually stretching from ground level to a height of one hundred meters. Then, with a sudden ripping tear, it “spat out” an entire mountain.

Once the mountain emerged, it naturally fused with the earth. There was no resistance in the process at all, as though it had always belonged there.

What appeared afterward was White Crane Temple atop the mountain, along with the blood-sun backdrop that came with it.

The village itself was not crushed beneath the mountain either. Instead, it merged with the surroundings and became a settlement built halfway up the slope. Many villagers were startled out of their homes. They saw a golden lotus fly out from White Crane Temple. When it rose overhead, the central lotus bud slowly bloomed, revealing a figure wrapped in light, its outline impossible to make out.

“The Blood-Sun Bodhisattva Who Saves the Suffering and Redeems the World.”

Even so, everyone seemed to know that figure’s title spontaneously in their hearts. One by one, they began reciting it and kneeling in worship, as if their minds and souls had been stripped from them in an instant, turning them into puppets on its strings.

“So I’ve finally returned…”

The figure in the light let out a soft sigh.

“Ten thousand millennia in the span of a finger snap, mulberry fields in the seas… Ah, but the foundation I built before has been ruined. That fragment must have been completely destroyed.”

“Still, now that I’ve returned to the main world, there must surely be even more sapient beings here.”

“So… let’s begin with all of you.”

“Come, recite with me: the Blood-Sun Reincarnation Bodhi Scripture.”

And so, the figure in the light began teaching the villagers to chant the Buddhist scripture. Every time they repeated a line after it, a piece of flesh would fall away from their bodies, turning into a wisp of blood-qi that flew to the temple and sank into the blood-sun hanging above its head.

Before long, all the people here had been reduced to skeletons alone, yet they still knelt piously with palms pressed together, following the figure up the mountain into White Crane Temple and worshipping in proper order before the main hall.

So that was how the scene inside had come to be.

Bai Xiang’s eyes were shut, but her fine pale brows had already drawn together slightly.

“There should not yet be many great powers awakened in the main world. I ought to seize the opportunity and not remain stuck in this godforsaken corner.”

“There are still quite a few settlements within a hundred li of here. I may as well harvest them all and replenish the Blood Sun.”

In the memory, the figure of light turned into a rainbow and flew away. When it returned on the third day seated on a lotus dais, it was clear that the lotus was far more vivid than before.

This time, the figure of light was surprised, because there was now a person sitting in meditation before the hall inside White Crane Temple, as though specifically waiting for him.

“Who are you?”

He sensed the aura of a great power from the other party. Though it was not strong, only somewhat faint, he himself had not recovered to his peak state either, and so did not dare attack at once.

“Bodhisattva may call me Demon Lord.”

The figure stood up, revealing a handsome young man with a tall, slender frame and a smiling face.

“I have come to discuss a great plan with the Bodhisattva.”

“The Bodhisattva may not yet know that this place actually lies within Great Xia’s territory…”

The missing section of the scene was filled in there, but everything after that cut off, impossible to see clearly.

In reality, Bai Xiang’s body did not move.

Only the breeze passing through the side doors of the hall stirred fallen leaves into a slow spiral and teased at her skirt hem and hair tips.

Crk… crk-crk-crk…

In the corner, the only remaining locust-tree demon was trembling.

In its eyes, as time passed, this unexpected intruder who had suddenly descended was radiating increasingly dazzling, blinding sword-light, so sharp it seemed about to stab into its face.

At just that moment, a dark shadow drifted in from the horizon. On closer inspection, it was precisely the lotus dais glimpsed in the memory. The petals on the dais had now completely transformed into a brilliant crimson, and the veining upon them no longer looked botanical at all, but more like the blood vessels and nerves of some living thing, making it all the more eerie and lurid.

A blurry figure sat cross-legged atop the dais. When it saw Bai Xiang, it froze again and demanded, “And who are you?”

What answered him was a sword-light.

That sword could be described as heaven-drenching. The moment Bai Xiang drew her Dao sword from its sheath, the blade itself turned insubstantial, becoming a plume of white light whiter than moonlight, spilling forth like radiance, like snow. In an instant it swept through the figure and the lotus dais, carrying White Crane Temple, the entire mountain, and even the blood-sun backdrop in the sky into its wash, where all of it melted apart and disintegrated within the light.

Zheng—

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Crash!

Only when every last thing had been broken down, when Bai Xiang stood high in the air and her golden eyes looked down upon nothing but a terrifying sword scar that had ripped the earth apart, with no mountain and no temple left at all, did the raging sword aura subside somewhat and slither back to her side.

Death and destruction were not enough to calm her emotions at this moment.

Bai Xiang took another step. Using the memory image to fix the coordinates, she appeared instantly in a dark mountain ravine.

Boom!

The aura of the Divine Palace Realm spread outward without restraint. The moment she arrived, she aroused the vigilance and dread of every living thing in the ravine and cliffs.

A gigantic silver flood-dragon leapt from the river. A mottled spider-demon crawled out of a cave. Vines and tentacles emerged from cracks in the rock.

One strange lifeform after another stared at Bai Xiang, sizing her up from top to bottom in extreme tension.

“Human, who are you?”

The silver flood-dragon was clearly the lord of this place, while the other demons were merely its followers. It brought its head, fully three times the size of a locomotive, close to Bai Xiang. Its huge blood-red eyes fixed on her as it said, “I am Ao Xian, son of Ao Gong, Dragon King of the Lihai Sea.”

“We have only just returned to the main world. If you can help me find the Dragon Palace, I will surely—”

Shhk!

Exorcising Blade. Sheathe sword.

Bai Xiang paid it no further attention. Lifting a section of her skirt, she stepped past it.

Pff…!

Shhk!

Slash slash slash!

As the silver flood-dragon’s head slid from its neck along the cut and crashed down, countless brilliant sword-lights blossomed from the wound like ever-burning lamps ravaging the gorge.

Not a single demon could withstand that sword-light. Their resistance shattered on contact. The moment the light found them, they were already dead. Their corpses were then wrapped, twisted, and reduced to blood mist that gathered back together. Part of it was absorbed by the Dao sword in Bai Xiang’s hand, while part of it was condensed before her, gradually forming a gigantic tombstone pieced together from the flesh and bones of countless demonkind.

The main body of the monument was the silver flood-dragon’s ruined corpse. Its severed head hung from the top of the stele, and beneath it were piled the remains of the other demonic beasts.

But that was not the most horrifying part.

The most horrifying part lay elsewhere—in the thick carpet of snow-white human bones spread across the ground on both sides of the gorge, covering the entire valley.

“If there truly is reincarnation, then in your next life, be reborn in Great Xia.”

After clearing every demon and fiend from the gorge, not even sparing the soul-eroding Void Demons, Bai Xiang bowed once toward the “corpse-cairn” monument. In the next instant, she rose straight into the air and flew out through the slit of sky high above the ravine.

Rumble…

After she left, the earth shook, and the rocky cliff faces on both sides of the ravine collapsed and shattered, burying all the bones beneath them.

Flash!

With another step, Bai Xiang vanished from midair.

The third location was a dense forest. Here too lingered the aura of the Demon Lord, but after arriving, Bai Xiang still failed to find him, so she simply drew her sword and split the entire forest open.

Screee!

The earth let out a shrill scream. Clumps of blue blood sprayed out from the cut, and in that instant, Bai Xiang, high in the sky, saw the forest “turn over,” revealing itself to be a giant rock-scaled turtle over a thousand meters long and wide.

“Where is the Demon Lord?” She was not surprised by the giant turtle’s existence at all. She merely fixed her golden pupils on it and questioned it coldly.

“How would I know anything about a Demon Lord?!” Realizing Bai Xiang was not someone to trifle with, the giant turtle’s enormous eyeballs rolled wildly. “I… I only got back not long ago either… I haven’t even dug myself a few feet into the soil yet!”

“If I have to say something, then it’s just that a strange fellow came to see me yesterday and told me to move north as soon as possible. He even said… said that if I stayed in this place, it would be very dangerous!”

Bai Xiang asked again, “And what else?”

“That’s all!” The giant turtle glared. “Nothing else!”

“Oh.” Bai Xiang nodded. “Then do you know why he said that?”

“No!”

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“Because if you stay here, you really will die.”

“What—”

Shhk!

Once again, sword-light poured forth, and a vast stretch of forest vanished from the earth.

“The third.”

Bai Xiang stared at the rising blue blood mist and murmured to herself.

“I’ve already traced it back to ‘yesterday.’”

“Did you really think you could escape?”

Her black silk-clad toes curled inside her sandals. With even firmer resolve, Bai Xiang stepped onward, her figure continuously tearing through the void, crossing from one place to another, slaying demons and purging monstrosities, incessantly wiping out the aberrant things that the Demon Lord had personally contacted during this period… those outlanders that had just so happened to “return” within Great Xia’s borders.

One “corpse-cairn” after another was raised by her hand, and sheets of demon blood were flung beneath her sword.

Mountain peaks. Seashores.

She hunted and exterminated them all the way.

At last, on the wasteland near the northern frontier, she saw that familiar figure.

“There is no meaning in this.”

Ahead on the wasteland, the Demon Lord shook his head and turned around.

“I too have cultivated the Xuandi Scripture.”

“That means the information you can actually see is extremely limited. Even if you destroy this body, it will not change anything.”

“The harm done by cockroaches is indeed limited,” Bai Xiang replied. “But cockroaches are disgusting. I’ve always had the habit of crushing them whenever I see them.”

“It’s not good to be so extreme…”

The Demon Lord smiled.

“It just so happens that the merging is still ongoing, and the will of Heaven is still focusing most of its attention beyond the star ring… otherwise, enormous forces of rejection would already be gathering around you.”

“Whatever it is you mean to do, I’d advise you to hurry…”

Zheng—

Before he could finish, Bai Xiang cut off his head with a single sword stroke. His headless body spouted dark-red blood in pulsing bursts as it fell, and within three seconds it was devoured clean by the fusion sword aura.

The merging truly was intensifying…

For the time being, she had dealt with the source of the soul gu. Judging from the residual memory, every one of these split bodies lost would be a massive weakening to him as well. Bai Xiang finally paused and began surveying the surroundings.

She was a little curious why the Demon Lord had come to a place like this.

The places he had gone before had either housed returned pseudo-saints or great numbers of voidfiends. He had presumably approached them in order to network and cooperate with such things.

But what could there possibly be in this wasteland…?

What was his purpose in coming here?

At first glance, there was nothing to see. But very soon, Taishang Response sent her a warning. Bai Xiang flew straight up into the air and looked down upon the wasteland from above, discovering that the entire stretch of land was trembling ever so slightly.

Rumble…

Very soon, the trembling intensified, and a bizarre statue sculpted entirely from packed earth was pushed up from underground.

This statue…?

Once she saw it clearly, Bai Xiang could not help knitting her brows slightly.

Because she recognized it.

It was a gigantic male figure wearing animal hides, bare-chested above the waist.

Its facial features were exactly the same as the figure she had visualized while cultivating the Sun-Chasing Scripture.