Volume 1, Chapter 470 – Heaven’s Might

“I saw that you still hadn’t come out, so I thought I’d wait.”

Even as he spoke, Tian Xuanjing’s hands did not slow in the slightest. He pried off another two massive gold bricks, each a foot square, and carefully put them away.

Shi Lan had no mind to waste time here. After pausing for only an instant, she continued racing toward the edge of the tribulation clouds.

The Divine Phoenix Wings expanded several times over. With a single beat, she was already hundreds or even thousands of miles away. After a few flashes, she vanished without a trace.

After putting away several more chunks of Crimson Nether Gold, Tian Xuanjing quit while he was ahead. A blood mark surfaced between his brows, and a layer of clear light spread across his body, faintly etched with divine patterns of the Imperial Dao. In the blink of an eye, he turned into a dazzling rainbow and shot away.

In that instant, he burned the imperial blood within his body. Within a single breath, he had fled tens of thousands of miles, slightly faster even than Shi Lan.

The world was dark and heavy. The heavenly punishment was far from over. Lightning-serpents danced wildly, violent to the extreme.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

More than ten bolts of lightning crashed down almost without any interval between them. The world-destroying lightning illuminated the heavens and earth, displaying the supreme divine might of the Heavenly Dao of the Lingyang Realm.

Kreee!

The floating island suddenly exploded. The golden palace shattered into pieces, and fragments scattered in all directions, instantly punching the void within hundreds of thousands of miles full of holes.

At the very center of the floating island, a divine phoenix corpse that seemed to be cast from gold was infused with life. Like a blazing sun, it rose into the sky and drove away the darkness of the world.

Divine phoenix true fire blazed across the heavens. The terrifying heat, impossible to describe in words, melted through the void for nearly a million miles in every direction in an instant.

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Any Heaven-Men or Heaven Demons whose escape was even slightly slower were swallowed by the true fire at once. Together with their own small worlds, they were refined into nothingness.

Crack!

The barrier of true fire surrounding the divine phoenix shattered on contact before the tribulation lightning. It turned into countless sparks that fell to the earth like a resplendent meteor shower, crashing into mountain ranges and igniting vast wildfires that looked capable of swallowing the sky.

The divine phoenix spread its wings once more. Its eyes blazed like molten gold and fire, its feathers flaring upward. A dazzling pillar of fire that seemed to connect heaven and earth shot into the sky, plunged into the tribulation clouds, and devoured a vast swath of thunderclouds.

Boom!

As though enraged by the divine phoenix’s defiance, a heavy shackle came crashing down from between heaven and earth.

The divine phoenix’s wings were bound by an invisible force. A giant hand of lightning reached out from within the tribulation clouds, struck it down from the highest heavens, and pinned it firmly to the ground.

A gigantic halberd formed from lightning appeared immediately after, and without the slightest pause, pierced through its body.

The divine phoenix’s body split apart. Phoenix blood splashed through the air, then was instantly eroded by the world-destroying power of the lightning, turning dull and lusterless.

Heaven and earth sank into chaos once again.

…

“Is it dead?”

Shi Lan watched from far away. She could only vaguely make out a blazing sun rising into the sky, only to be swept away by lightning moments later. The distance was too great, so she could see only the rough outline of what had happened.

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“Most likely not. The blood rain of a Supreme hasn’t appeared. Even if she abandoned that body, she could still undergo nirvana and be reborn. She is of the phoenix race, after all.”

Samsara was not surprised by this outcome. A Supreme was never so easy to kill. The Lingyang Realm had even once produced beings above the Supreme realm, so a few strange methods were nothing out of the ordinary.

So many Supremes had fallen in the battle of the Qiongluo Realm entirely because, for one reason or another, they had fought to the death without retreating.

“From the Middle Antiquity until now, several million years have already passed. Even if the Demon Race is long-lived, how could she possibly have survived for so long?!”

Shi Lan found it hard to accept. Even for the immortal path cultivated by Qinglan, after crossing the heavenly tribulation and stepping into the Mahayana realm, one’s lifespan was only around three million years. One still could not escape the cycle of life and death.

“A Supreme has already come into contact with origin power. Using origin power to extend one’s lifespan is perfectly normal.”

Samsara was unsurprised. If seniority were ranked by the length of one’s lifespan, then with the years it had lived through, it would count as ancient enough itself.

“Immortality…”

Shi Lan’s gaze flickered slightly. To countless cultivators, those two words carried an astonishing temptation, but to her, they did not mean all that much.

A mortal’s brief hundred years is likewise a lifetime. What she sought was only freedom, so that when she turned back at the end of her road, there would be no regrets left behind and no remorse in her heart. That would be enough.

Death was the inevitable ending. From another perspective, it was precisely because death existed that life had meaning. It was the distance between life and death that made the process in between worthy of being called a life.

“Never mind immortality. You’ve stirred up trouble again.”

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Samsara let out a sigh. The ups and downs of the past few years had come far too frequently. Even it felt somewhat mentally exhausted.

It had only just escaped from the quagmire of war among a host of Supremes, and now it had gone and provoked a Demon Emperor.

Who could have imagined that just a few years ago, Shi Lan had been nothing more than an ordinary mortal without the strength to truss a chicken, yet now the people moving in her orbit were already figures on the level of the universe’s Supremes?

“I’ll think about it when trouble comes knocking.”

Pulling her thoughts back together, Shi Lan clenched her fist, her expression shifting uncertainly.

“Maybe by then, I’ll already be strong enough to beat her to death with my own hands.”

The injuries inside her body were not light. Unwilling to invite any further complications, Shi Lan directly found a spiritual vein, slipped deep underground, and began mending her wounds.

…

The tribulation clouds lingered without dispersing, but the lightning had stopped falling. Across the entire great world, only the raging mountain fires cast a little light.

There were not many Heaven-Men and Heaven Demons left. Altogether, there were barely more than twenty. More than half had already been lost after entering this realm.

Both of the human race’s two Pseudo-Emperors had fallen. The Heavenlords had suffered grievous casualties. The Demon Race had lost four Great Venerables, and counting the newly advanced Demon Emperor of the Divine Phoenix clan, their losses were even greater.

The few remaining Heaven Demons of the Divine Phoenix clan paid a certain price to enlist the rest of the Heaven Demons to act together. They began purging the native lifeforms of this great world, doing everything they could to recover the Divine Phoenix Undying Scripture.

The human Heavenlords also deliberately avoided those Heaven Demons. Unwilling to fight again, they instead went deep into the mountains, rivers, and marshlands to search for spirit materials and immortal herbs.

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Sometimes the two sides encountered each other, but they only exchanged a few glances across the distance before going their separate ways. If they kept fighting, the only outcome would be mutual destruction.

Because of the earlier slaughter carried out by the Divine Phoenix clan, the native lifeforms of this world had already suffered catastrophic losses, leaving only a few survivors. Within a matter of days, they were wiped out completely.

The almost complete Divine Phoenix Undying Scripture was a crimson iron stele nearly as tall as a man. It recorded the cultivation methods of the Divine Phoenix clan, as well as all sorts of secret arts unknown to the outside world.

“Why is there still a piece missing…?”

“And it just had to be this part.”

Several Heaven Demons of the Divine Phoenix clan stood around the iron stele, their expressions ugly.

In one corner of the iron stele, there was a gap the size of a palm. A few lines of the circulation formulas from one supreme secret art were missing.

Without Divine Phoenix bloodline, it was simply impossible to cultivate the Divine Phoenix Undying Scripture. The Divine Phoenix clan had no intention of hiding this iron stele at all, allowing any interested Heaven Demons to observe it freely.

Standing in a corner, Qinglan silently swept her gaze over the iron stele, memorizing every line of scripture and engraving it deep into her mind.

“There have to be survivors.”

“There’s still a little time left. Go look again.”

Several divine phoenixes were extremely anxious and scattered once more. The one-month deadline was almost upon them, and they no longer had any time to spare.