Volume 5, Chapter 122 – Condensing the Sword

Xiang Xian did not waste a word. She pressed her sword fingers together before her, shut her eyes tightly, and murmured an incantation under her breath.

Yuxiu had just been about to sneer when his expression changed abruptly. He no longer even cared that he was under a combined assault, and suddenly dropped his head to look at the ground beneath his feet.

That move amounted to completely abandoning his guard. In the next instant, Zhu Qingluo’s sweeping fox tails, Yu Daoyong’s smashing bronze mirror, and the qi-sha sword slash Li Huiran barely managed to launch one-handed after catching his breath, all twisted together into a single force and struck the man in the chest, blasting him out from inside the hall.

Yuxiu had done it on purpose.

He had sensed danger coming from the ground below and felt alarm in his heart, but he was not afraid of the itching attacks of these juniors, so he had deliberately used the opportunity to leave the danger zone.

But he was already too late… At the very instant he flew out of the hall, he saw in horror that from the high platform deep inside the hall, from the vacant seat above that platform, a white-blue radiance suddenly lit up. Centered on that position, the light spread rapidly in all directions. In the blink of an eye, it covered the entire dojo and mountain peak, and even enclosed a huge swath of land around the mountain gate, forming dense, mysterious, arcane patterns.

“Go!”

Less than a second had passed from activation to completion. As Xiang Xian suddenly opened her eyes, an incomparably vast sword force and sword intent surged up from her body. Her sword fingers stabbed sharply toward Yuxiu outside the hall, and all the power in the grand array was instantly constrained into a single point and imposed directly upon him out of thin air.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

Dazzling sword lights shot out from the array’s runic patterns, lancing toward Yuxiu like streaming meteors.

The emperor is clearly absent. Not one of the people left behind can truly tank or fight, yet they can unleash a method like this—one that even I find fatally threatening?

Yuxiu repeated his earlier move. A sinister red light emerged around him and wrapped him up, clearly intended as a defense.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

Boom boom boom boom!

Countless beams of sword qi and sword light converged upon him, bombarding him from all sides and every angle. In an instant, a blazing white sun lit up in midair, illuminating every last detail of the landscape.

It was unquestionably a magnificent sight. Whether they were disciples still training, disciples who had noticed something was wrong and happened to rush near the main hall, or commoners and townsfolk living in the regions around the mountain gate, everyone felt the sky around them suddenly darken. When they looked up, they saw endless sword lights converging toward a single central point, sweeping and surging like ten thousand swords returning to their source, grander than anything they had ever seen before.

What happened?

That’s the direction of Shenming Sacred Mountain… Is this some kind of demonstration, or is it under attack?

Zhang Xianzhi lived and worked right at the foot of the mountain so that he could go up the mountain and have an audience at any time, and so he too saw the abrupt heavenly upheaval. He immediately realized that the situation in Zhennan had gone wrong, sent out warning messages to a whole group of his friends at once, and had people notify Liu Haoran, the newly appointed chief minister of the court.

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“What? A celestial upheaval in Zhennan?”

Liu Haoran was deeply shocked when he received the news. He truly could not imagine what kind of nerve it would take to go cause trouble in Zhennan.

But he quickly calmed himself and immediately issued orders. Defenses everywhere were to contract and tighten. All road-building and expansion projects were to halt without exception. All restriction standards were to be raised to the highest level, and there was to be not the slightest bit of slackness.

“My Great Xia was born bearing the fortune of destiny, and His Majesty is an ‘Absolute Saint’ who appears only once in hundreds of millions of years.”

After doing all this, he narrowed his eyes halfway, stood in the courtyard gazing at the sky, then suddenly flicked his sleeve and let out a disdainful cold snort.

“If those barbarian Federation people think they can throw the greater situation into chaos with methods like this, then they are being far too naive!”

Meanwhile, in Zhennan, the terrifying tide of sword light was still continuing. At the focal point of the concentrated barrage, Yuxiu’s figure was no longer visible at all, completely swallowed by sheets of white light.

Yu Daoyong turned to look at Xiang Xian’s face and found her brows tightly furrowed and her expression grave. He, too, let out a low sigh.

He had to admit that this array was formidable. Driven by Xiang Xian’s Origin Realm cultivation, it could actually leap across an entire major realm and achieve the “sword-light transposition” that only Saint-level great powers could perform.

Even if it had limitations and could only be used within the array’s area of coverage, that was still extraordinary.

But they were facing a Saint, after all.

Against that kind of opponent, such a method was still too difficult.

“Hahahahaha!”

“Is this all?”

Sure enough, another breath later, Yuxiu’s mad laughter came from within the white light, and at the same time everyone could clearly feel that the proportion of red within that radiance was steadily increasing.

At that moment, Bai Zhuqing suddenly stepped forward, passed around Xiang Xian, and strode up to Zhu Qingluo, glaring at her. “Why aren’t you letting him out yet?”

“What are you waiting for?”

Who?

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Li Huiran had a huge hole through his chest, and his left arm was missing as well. Hearing this, he looked utterly bewildered.

But when he turned to look at the others’ expressions, he found that both Yu Daoyong and Xiang Xian wore the same look of “just as expected,” as though among everyone present, he was the only one who had no idea what was going on.

“…Go stop him!”

Gritting her teeth, Zhu Qingluo suddenly turned her head and looked toward a certain patch of empty space.

Before anyone could react, that area of space suddenly distorted. Without any warning, a rent opened there, and a burly black figure burst out of it, lunging at Yuxiu with both arms spread wide.

Him?

That beggar!

Li Huiran’s eyes widened. He suddenly recalled the complicated relationship between the “old beggar” and Zhu Qingluo, and at once felt as if the clouds had parted. At the same time, however, he still felt rather uneasy about it.

The old beggar was a split body Pang Tiandao had severed off after successfully seizing power, in order to firm up his Dao-heart. Although after everyone escaped from the Sky Sea, Zhu Qingluo had explained that Bai Xiang had used a technique to free the old beggar from Pang Tiandao’s control, and that like her, he could now be regarded as an independent sapient being, it was still not enough to hear only the testimony of the person involved. Even Li Huiran could not say for sure whether the old beggar still counted as Pang Tiandao’s split body.

But whether he did or not, Pang Tiandao himself had failed to break through that boundary before his death.

Even the main body had been, at most, only at the peak of demon saint. And this mere split body dared to charge a great power like this?

Even if his ability to tear open space was strange, something Li Huiran himself could not accomplish, this was still far too reckless, wasn’t it?

At this point, Li Huiran could not help at all. He could only watch helplessly and see whether things would somehow still take a turn.

Just then, he suddenly felt someone dart past in front of him at high speed.

Hm?

Was that Bai Zhuqing?

Bai Zhuqing forged straight ahead, following right behind the old beggar at top speed. The Qingwu Sword’s sword pellet floating at her side was now giving off a sharp cry, sounding like summer cicadas shrilling in alarm, the sound striking through the void and deafening the ears.

“Open a gate for me!”

At Bai Xiang’s request, the old beggar had once stayed in Zhennan for a while to help protect the Bai family, so Bai Zhuqing knew him and had even spoken with him before. At this moment, she only shouted her demand in urgent haste.

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The black figure charging ahead trembled slightly; there was no way to tell whether he had understood or not.

But there was no time to care about that now.

Bai Zhuqing gritted her teeth. The sword pellet spiraled around her side, trailing one illusory afterimage after another. It clearly went from one to two, from two to four, from four to eight… all the way until a full sixty-four sword pellets had split off!

After wavering for an instant, those sword-pellet phantoms stabilized. They were actually all solid, like sword-qi stars orbiting around her, causing her entire aura to surge violently upward!

…Still not enough!

Bai Zhuqing clenched her jaw and pushed herself to the limit, spraying out a mouthful of essence blood before her and making all the sword pellets pass through the blood mist.

At once, the sixty-four sword pellets began to vibrate violently, then split again under the horrified gaze of everyone present, becoming one hundred and twenty-eight!

“Die!”

Her sword fingers slashed out. The many sword pellets, like keen divine swords each wielded by a peerless swordsman, cut toward Yuxiu along different trajectories.

“That all?”

Yuxiu had just neutralized the last of the white light, and at the sight of this, he wanted only to sneer.

He had already tested the measure of these people. Now he could kill to his heart’s content.

As for when the Great Xia emperor might return… by then, he would already have eaten his fill and fled far away. Why would he need to care about the opinion of a Saint at the same cultivation level?

If they had the ability, let them come hunt him down.

But then his eyes sharpened. He saw the old beggar lunging in front reach out and rake across empty space, and with a ripping sound, several black rift fissures appeared.

What the hell is that…

Boom!!!

In the next instant, before Yuxiu could react, the one hundred and twenty-eight azure-glowing sword pellets whirled into the fissures and crossed space once again, appearing directly inside his flesh… inside his abdomen!

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And they landed at the same time!

At the same instant!

The one hundred and twenty-eight sword pellets merged back into one and condensed into a single body again, erupting with a power that filled him with profound dread!

That power?

Th-this-this…

What in the world is this???

In his horror, Yuxiu felt as though a white-haired empress wielding a long sword had appeared before his eyes. The moment he met those golden pupils, he felt as though his soul were being frozen in place. Not a single one of his divine abilities or spells could be brought forth!

Not good!

Yuxiu’s eyes split wide with fury. By the time he came to himself, it was already too late. His whole body exploded with a bang into shattered flesh and blood mist. That blood mist then gathered at incredible speed into a sinister red light, plunged into the clouds, and fled in a random direction.

Finally…

Seeing that the tactic had worked, Bai Zhuqing and the others all finally let out a breath of relief.

But if a mere Daoist Guangsha was already this hard to deal with, then there were still quite a few fallen meteor fragments left. Could there be other Saint-level great powers hidden among them?

If there were too many more, then this move would no longer work.

But they could not keep relying on Elder Sister forever.

Bai Zhuqing gritted her teeth and ordered everyone else back to their positions, especially telling Yu Daoyong to keep close watch over the observation towers.

As for herself, she was going into seclusion.

Her current cultivation was still far from enough.

She was going to begin her attempt to break into the Origin Realm.