A mass of bloody vapor surged into Wei Yuan's sea of consciousness, condensing into a gigantic ghostly beast. Opening its eyes, the beast was met with a boundless, endless expanse of earth and was momentarily at a loss.
Yet a blood curse cast by a Great Shaman possessed an innate sentience. Circling a few times, it locked onto the place where fortune gathered most thickly and lunged toward the full moon hanging in the sky!
Shadows churned within the full moon, revealing the head of a three-eyed bird. The bird opened a single eye and cast a frigid glance at the ghostly beast. The beast instantly wheeled about and fled Wei Yuan's sea of consciousness, following the unseen threads of karmic connection to plunge headlong into the cloth doll.
Wei Yuan was suddenly struck by bouts of dizziness and nausea, his whole body drained and weak, while two warm streams gushed from his nostrils. Wiping his face, his hand came away covered in dark green blood that reeked with a foul, fishy stench!
Guided by a sudden intuition, he immediately drew the cloth doll from his robes. Its once-cheerful face was now twisted in agony, and black blood steadily seeped from both of its eyes! When Wei Yuan gripped it slightly too hard, several wounds tore open across the doll's body, and black blood began to ooze from them as well!
The touch of that black blood brought piercing, bone-deep pain, prompting Wei Yuan to throw the doll to the ground at once.
This was the Great Shaman's blood curse!
Fortunately, the doll had absorbed part of the harm; otherwise, Wei Yuan was not sure he could have survived a death curse fueled by the lives of hundreds of sacrifices. Even with the Power of Rivers and Mountains shielding him, the blood curses of the Wu were notoriously potent, and the Great Shaman had offered up hundreds of victims to magnify its power. Without the doll bearing the brunt, Wei Yuan knew he would hardly have stood a chance.
What Wei Yuan did not know, however, was that he was currently the one absorbing the damage for the doll rather than the reverse—though the end result was the same.
Having taken the hit from the blood curse, Wei Yuan felt his mind reel. All around him, human cultivators were collapsing one after another. Behind the platform, the hundreds of human sacrifices had not even shown their faces before their heads were struck off. Wei Yuan turned to look for help, but saw not a single soul—only then remembering that the cavalrymen who had initially followed him into the fray were all dead.
A charge into an enemy phalanx had always been a one-way trip. They had known as much the moment they spurred their horses forward.
Wei Yuan was suddenly seized by an unspeakable fury. Wiping the filthy blood from his face, he vaulted down from his horse and strode forward toward the high platform!
Over a thousand elite Wu warriors still stood guard around the terrace. Their armor differed from the rest, draped in rust-pitted iron chains—the Great Shaman's personal guards. Farther back, a reserve of three thousand troops remained completely untouched, while Wei Yuan stood alone.
Over a hundred chain-clad elite guards advanced to meet him. Only their eyes were exposed, cold and devoid of human feeling, glowing with a dull light reminiscent of feral puppets.
Wei Yuan said nothing. Gathering the Power of Rivers and Mountains into his frame, he thrust his spear like a soaring dragon, piercing through the Great Shaman's personal guards one by one, turning everything within ten feet of him into a desolate realm of death.
Countless ironclad guards and surviving heavy armored infantry surged like an iron-gray tide, rolling in to encircle Wei Yuan. Amid the swell, Wei Yuan was like a lone skiff, slowly yet resolutely forcing its way upstream, leaving behind only a wake of corpses.
The Wu nobles and shamans on the high platform had initially been laughing, finding it sheer lunacy that a human cultivator of such modest attainments dared to challenge a Great Shaman. It was not that no one had tried before, but all had arrived leading vast armies—and even then, every one of them had failed.
Yet as their laughter dragged on, it slowly died away.
Without realizing it, the human had pressed forward several dozen yards under the siege. Just as at the start of the battle, he showed no fear, knew no fatigue, and mechanically, silently harvested Wu lives. As he drew nearer, the nobles and shamans could vaguely sense an endless subterranean fire brewing within that ordinary frame, ready at any moment to erupt into a volcano capable of shattering an entire realm!
***
Inside the Palace of Grand Beginning, Pei Tinghai sat alone watching a game of go. On the board before him, black and white stones moved and took positions of their own accord, locked in a brutal clash.
Just then, a premonition brushed his mind, telling him that the sliver of divine sense he had bestowed was now spent. Moments later, a faint haze of azure qi gathered above Immortal Monarch Tinghai's head, drifting down in fine threads like rain to merge into his immortal body.
Surprise touched Pei Tinghai's face. Gazing up at the azure qi, he murmured to himself, "Such a vast gift of heaven and earth—it must have come from a long-established dharma idol. Has the little fellow actually slain his opponent? I wonder which member of the Xu family he killed."
He knew very well the extent of the divine sense he had given away. At most, it was enough to severely wound a dharma idol, but far from sufficient to kill one. Given Wei Yuan's current strength, even a Perfected Person's dharma idol severed in two would not be something the lad could keep from escaping. Did the youngster have some hidden method of his own, or was it pure luck—or perhaps he had received powerful aid from an outside source?
Pei Tinghai pondered the question, yet had no intention of using immortal arts to investigate. The heaven and earth of the Shattered Lands were fragile; prying into them with immortal magic would trigger all manner of unpredictable consequences, not to mention the immense cost of invoking such arts.
"Since it's good news, knowing earlier or later makes no difference. What is there to rush?" Pei Tinghai gave a wry laugh and shook his head. The battle on the board was reaching its fiercest point, but he was no longer in the mood to watch. Picking up a fishing rod at his side, he prepared to fish the mortal realm.
He had sat by the cliff edge for only a short while when his brows suddenly knitted together. He felt a slight itch in his hands. Rising, he walked over to a basin to wash them, only for the water to turn a deep, murky green, while his hands became coated in black blood mixed with pus!
Pei Tinghai gave a cold sneer. "Casting a curse upon my head?"
Fine threads of blood sprouted from the pus and blood on his hands, extending into the void. Pei Tinghai reached into the void along those threads, caught hold of something in the unseen distance, and casually tore it apart!
Having done that, he drew his hands back, washed them clean without haste, and dried them on a snow-white square towel. Then understanding dawned, and a faint smile curved his lips as he cursed under his breath, "That little rascal—he certainly uses me to the very last drop!"
***
At Lanshen Palace.
A piercing shriek suddenly tore from the Great Shaman on the high platform. He collapsed to the ground, clutching his head and wailing in agony. Above him materialized the gigantic dharma idol of a dreaded serpent—except it was now torn into two halves. The upper and lower sections were desperately trying to reconnect, but no matter how they strained, the seam refused to mend!
Wei Yuan's eyes lit up. *Immortal backlash!*
The moment of opportunity had arrived. Wei Yuan instantly pulled himself out of the absolute chill that had followed his fury. He had known all along that the curse's backlash alone would not be enough to finish off a Great Shaman, so he had prepared another heavy blow.
Wei Yuan sank his mind into his sea of consciousness. Drawing on the curse lore he had studied in Theory of Arts, he located the traces left by the curse's intrusion and forced them into visibility. A mixed trail of dark red and murk-green appeared, one end vanishing into the void.
Wei Yuan extended his divine sense along the trail, reaching its source in an instant: the Great Shaman's sea of consciousness. Struck by the immortal's backlash, the shaman's dharma idol was torn asunder, and the defenses of his sea of consciousness were completely shattered, leaving it utterly exposed. Yet inside that mind realm, boiling pools of blood and endless dark miasma churned, with countless winged insects bobbing within them. The sight sent chills down Wei Yuan's spine; he dared not venture inside in the slightest.
With a thought, Wei Yuan lifted a gray orb of wind from his own sea of consciousness, hurled it into the Great Shaman's mind from a safe distance, and turned to flee!
With hope in sight, this was no time to trade life for life. Wei Yuan instantly dropped his rage, switched to survival mode, and fled with his divine sense at full speed, while also cloaking himself in a layer of fortune just to be safe.
He had barely turned when a scream of excruciating pain and madness erupted behind him. Countless fissures burst across the Great Shaman's sea of consciousness, spouting geysers of blood and dark miasma like a wineskin punctured in a hundred places. Inside, the realm boiled over completely, and countless winged insects were ground to powder in an instant!
Wei Yuan's vision went dark; he nearly lost consciousness on the spot. Fortunately, one strand of fortune dissipated, allowing him to keep his wits. Wei Yuan bolted back into his sea of consciousness as fast as he could. Just before diving in, he heard another shriek, and the second thick band of fortune he had applied was largely shredded away, degraded into ordinary fortune.
On the high platform, the Great Shaman twitched and thrashed, shrieking in utter torment. Swarms of insects flew out from beneath his robes, only to plummet to the ground dead the moment they emerged. In the air, the giant serpent dharma idol could no longer spare the effort to rejoin its halves; both segments writhed frantically, cracks spreading relentlessly across their scales.
The Great Shaman reached toward Wei Yuan, desperate to drag him into death alongside him. But down in the ranks, Wei Yuan suddenly manifested dozens of flaming immortal swords, hurling them wildly about as if they cost nothing, and with a few flickers of movement, he vanished a hundred yards away. His determination in running was not a whit inferior to his earlier resolve in charging to the death.
The Great Shaman had never expected Wei Yuan to flee so quickly. Loosing a final, unwilling roar, his giant serpent dharma idol dissolved, his head drooped, and he moved no more.
Falling beneath what amounted to the remote strikes of two immortal monarchs, this Great Shaman had met no unjust death. The moment he died, several hundred personal guards beside the platform collapsed in unison, dying without a sound. Their physical bodies and primordial spirits had been bound to the Great Shaman; if he perished, they could not live either.
Wei Yuan, who had just been fleeing, came to an abrupt halt. Flaming immortal swords materialized around him once more, arraying themselves in a ring about his person. From afar, it looked like the legendary Flaming Lotus Immortal Array, overflowing with imposing might.
Pointing his spear to the sky, Wei Yuan bellowed, "The Great Shaman is dead! Brothers, charge with me!"
Wei Yuan roared it three times. The first cry was in the official speech of the Great Tang, while the next two were in the Wu language he had only recently learned upon arriving in the Western Regions. To the latter two, he added Dao power to ensure every person across the several dozen li of the battlefield could hear.
The surviving human cultivators felt their morale soar, leaping out from the trenches one after another to strike back with all their might. The Wu, on the other hand, suffered a complete collapse of spirit. The high platform tilted precariously as the slaves pushing it turned and ran. But because they were chained fast to the carriage, their flight threw the platform completely off balance.
Wu generals, shamans, and nobles leaped down from the terrace, some fleeing on foot while others seized their subordinates' poisonous lizards to make their escape. The Wu reserve still had three thousand troops, their formation entirely intact. Yet with the Great Shaman dead and the commanding nobles and shamans scattering in panic, they too turned and fled.
The rear army of the Wuyu Clan was composed of the kinsmen of nobles and shamans, equipped with the finest gear; they were brought out only to harvest military merits and sacrifices when the battle was going well, which made them the readiest to run when it turned sour.
Spear in hand, Wei Yuan mounted his steed. Thirty-six immortal swords wheeled around him, forming a radiant fiery lotus as he charged toward the Wu reserve! Seeing this harbinger of death bearing down upon them, the rear guard lost their wits entirely, scattering into the marshes and dense forest.
Farther back, Xu Wenwu watched with blood boiling. Bursting from his hiding place, he grabbed a magical broadsword lying on the ground and hauled with all his might—it did not budge. He pulled again, and still it refused to move.
Xu Wenwu let out a long sigh. "My heart is filled with valor, yet the blade shrinks from battle!"
The Wu army broke into full rout. Wei Yuan pursued relentlessly; whenever a group dared to gather, a jade mountain crashed down upon them. The hunt lasted an entire night, sweeping across several hundred li until the dawn began to break.
Throughout the pursuit, Wei Yuan had kept a hundred immortal swords circling his body in a display of overwhelming might, but the lion's share of his kills had come from the jade mountain; the swords had actually accomplished very little.
Yet after this battle, high and low alike throughout the Wuyu Clan would surely know that Wei Yuan was a formidable warrior wielding a hundred immortal swords. They would inevitably seek ways to counter sword arts, most likely relying on curse arts to seal and suppress them. Only after they finished their research and prepared their defenses would they discover that Wei Yuan had already changed his immortal foundation.
Chapter 121