"This old man is Xu—"
Before the Dharma Idol elder could finish giving his name, a sudden spike of alarm flashed through him. His silhouette flickered to the side in an instant, just as a massive broadsword cleaved through where he had been standing.
Startled and furious, the elder glanced back at the two towering, silent Dharma Idol warriors. For some reason, even though he knew full well they were puppets, seeing them always sent a faint chill down his spine. He couldn't shake the eerie feeling that whenever his back was turned, they were quietly sizing him up.
It was as if these two might spring to life at any moment and turn into genuine Dharma Idol cultivators.
The two Dharma Idol puppets Wei Yuan had summoned had only just entered the Dharma Idol realm. Their movements and reactions were rather sluggish, nowhere near comparable to a real Dharma Idol cultivator. If the elder were facing the two puppets on his own, he ought to have had every confidence in victory. Yet for reasons he couldn't name, he had an intuitive suspicion that their sluggishness was entirely an act.
Were it not for both warriors standing a zhang and a half tall, the elder would have suspected they might actually be flesh-and-blood people.
Thus, the Dharma Idol elder fought with extreme caution. He cast a flurry of defensive and reactive life-saving Dao arts to secure an invincible footing first, and only then did he probe Wei Yuan with two spells, both of which Wei Yuan neutralized with Dao arts of his own.
He edged closer toward Wei Yuan, hoping to break through on this side, only for a speck of dusky yellow light to gleam at the tip of Wei Yuan's spear, which scared him right back.
For a time, Wei Yuan and the two puppets harried him from all sides, but the elder flew with incredible agility, dodging about like a buzzing fly and leaving Wei Yuan with no clean angle of attack.
Fortunately, the two Dharma Idol puppets kept the elder firmly locked down. The moment he dared to flee heedless of the cost, he would instantly face two thunderous strikes. And so, the two sides settled into a stalemate.
On the other flank, Perfected Chuhe battled two elders alone to a standstill. The cat and the snake weren't human, so it was still him fighting alone.
However, the cat was wounded and diminished in strength, so Perfected Chuhe could only ensure he didn't collapse into a swift defeat, without any ability to hit back.
Though Feng Tingyu was on the back foot, Jia Wood Life-Mystic was a tremendous tonic for a body cultivator like her who relied on physical combat. Where others took tonics in the form of pills, Feng Tingyu was practically being infused directly. Bolstered further by the otherworldly fortune Wei Yuan had bestowed, her blood and vital energy boiled while her Dao power surged without cease; she felt as though she could fight on until the end of time.
Xu Zhongxing, faced with the dozen or so mysterious figures shielding Zhang Sheng on all sides, could only seethe with fury, rage, and madness. Fortunately, his state of mind was exceptionally refined, allowing him to vent his wrath while simultaneously fighting with cold reason and keeping an eye on the battlefield as a whole.
Far to the rear, Fan Donghe had already directed his troops to scatter and evade the endless artillery bombardment. Suddenly, he barked an order directing ten thousand archers in the rear army to discard their bows, draw their sabers, and charge Xuanwei Three alongside ten thousand infantry.
Fan Donghe had realized that the thirty thousand troops in his assault force had completely vanished underground, their auras disappearing at alarming speed while the enemy's military qi declined only at a crawl. In the blink of an eye, his side had lost over ten thousand men, whereas the defenders had suffered fewer than two thousand casualties!
Both sides were fighting underground. Fan Donghe knew all too well that in their panic, his soldiers would never find the exits. If their morale collapsed, they would be slaughtered like cattle. Thus, making a decisive call, he immediately dispatched twenty thousand reinforcements—not primarily to kill enemies, but to extract the trapped forces underground.
After that, Fan Donghe planned to station troops at the surface exits to seal the underground forces in. Once they crushed Wei Yuan's main army, they could return and wipe out this pocket at their leisure.
Fan Donghe knew Wei Yuan was not a fool and had surely prepared alternate escape routes underground, so he harbored no illusions of wiping out this host completely.
Though the cultivators on both sides were clashing with world-shaking fury, none of the high-level figures had truly fallen yet. The casualties among the regular troops, however, were soaring by the minute, with hundreds or thousands dying with every passing breath.
As Wei Yuan played hide-and-seek with the Dharma Idol elder, he continued bestowing Ephemeral Multitude upon the soldiers on the main defensive line before sending them back into the fray.
A Qingming Dao Foundation cultivator speared a Xu army junior officer at Body Casting completion to death. With quick hands and sharp eyes, he scooped up two loose rounds of ammunition from the loose dirt of the trench, swiftly loaded them, and fired, killing two Dao Foundation captains back-to-back. The morale of the surrounding Xu family soldiers took an immediate hit, their will to fight dropping sharply.
By now, the bulk of the Xu family army had pushed into the defensive positions, and both sides were locked in desperate, bloody melees in every trench and dugout. Yet Qingming possessed far more Dao Foundation cultivators than their opponents. Each Dao Foundation expert served as a cornerstone; with a dozen or several dozen soldiers rallied around them, they formed a formidable combat unit.
As Wei Yuan continued his game of hide-and-seek with the Dharma Idol elder, Perfected Chuhe's voice transmission sounded in his ear: "Can you wrap things up faster on your end? My cat can barely hold out—it's thinking of bolting!"
Wei Yuan replied, "It's not the crucial moment yet. Hold on a little longer, Daoist."
"How long?"
"Two quarters of an hour?"
"Then you'll owe me at least two jin of Nether Soil to treat its injuries!"
After Wei Yuan agreed, Perfected Chuhe fished out a strip of jerky made from who-knew-what and tossed it to the cat with a pained expression.
Upon devouring it, the cat's aura surged wildly and its temperament turned ferocious; reflected in its pupils, the Dharma Idol elder no longer looked like an elder, but rather a frail white mouse.
Wei Yuan continued playing hide-and-seek, the strange sensation in his heart growing ever more pronounced. Right then, the Dragon Blood Tree suddenly shook off another fruit, which sprouted the moment it hit the ground, while the shadow within the moon dropped ten strands of otherworldly fortune all at once!
Deep within Wei Yuan's eyes, black and white faintly emerged. The entire world transformed into massive, interwoven swathes of black and white—the visible forms of various fortunes. In some spots the colors soared upward; in others, they plummeted. But along one unmistakable trajectory, black and white were violently collapsing into nothingness.
And across a wider expanse, karmic luck was converging furiously toward a high place above!
Without hesitation, Wei Yuan instinctively manifested Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, activated Outlaw of Heaven and Earth, and bestowed every scrap of the newly gained otherworldly fortune onto Zhang Sheng!
The clouds in the sky parted to reveal a massive finger. Then, a clear, resonant voice rang out: "A pearl as tiny as a grain of rice, yet it dares to flaunt its brilliance?"
The finger pressed down toward the center of the defensive position. In an instant, as if the Heavenly River had burst its banks, a vast, surging torrent of flowing light converged into a river, crashing down in a roaring cascade!
In a split second, the entirety of Qingming shuddered. Every person, plant, and living creature, friend or foe alike, trembled by pure instinct. Wherever the river of light washed, all life was extinguished, while beyond the river of light, karmic luck surged desperately upward.
This was a strike from a True Monarch!
The core at which this finger was aimed was Zhang Sheng.
Zhang Sheng showed not the slightest trace of panic. Calm and unruffled, every movement of his was as swift as lightning yet distinctly rhythmic. He flicked a wisp of faint crimson sword qi from his fingertip onto the Crimson Night Immortal-Slaying Sword; the entire immortal sword lit up in an instant, its power skyrocketing!
Zhang Sheng slashed upward against the river of light. That slender wisp of pale-red sword qi leaped from the blade and surged upstream through the flowing light, wherever it passed causing the torrents of brilliance to vanish mysteriously. This sword qi defied the heavens, traveling thousands of feet before slowly fading away.
Beyond the celestial vault, a surprised exclamation sounded: "An immortal sword?"
True immortal artifacts in this world were exceedingly rare. For an immortal treasure like the Crimson Night Immortal-Slaying Sword, many True Monarchs would cast aside all pride to join the fray and claim it.
As the pale-red sword qi dissipated, the stream within the river of light directed at Zhang Sheng grew dim and translucent. Zhang Sheng followed with four successive strikes of his sword, each blow causing the stream to fade a few degrees further.
The river of light crashed into the mortal realm, washing across the center of the battlefield. Everyone within its radius, friend and foe alike, collapsed and died without a sound.
From the corpses of many Qingming warriors, wisps of black qi invisible to the naked eye rose and drifted toward a certain point beyond the firmament.
Zhang Sheng dropped to one knee, coughing up a violent spray of blood shimmering with radiant light, as though spewing out a river of stars.
His aura plummeted, nearly scraping rock bottom—yet it did not run dry. He had taken the full brunt of a True Monarch's strike head-on and survived!
Beyond the celestial vault, the True Monarch who had struck was consumed with fury. He let out a heavy snort, which instantly summoned dense, dark clouds across the heavens, unleashing a torrential downpour.
The dark clouds then parted, and that finger appeared once more, pointing down at Zhang Sheng again. Noticeable fissures could be seen on the fingertip now—undoubtedly a backlash from the Shattered Lands. But having failed to kill Zhang Sheng in one blow, the True Monarch had suffered a humiliating loss of face. Truly enraged, he was determined to strike again, even at the cost of injury from the backlash.
Suddenly, a crimson line appeared between heaven and earth, one end on the ground, the other reaching beyond the celestial vault. Though numerous Dharma Idols were present, almost none could discern how that red line had come to be.
In Wei Yuan's vision, he could only catch a blurry silhouette clad in red ascending into the sky, leaving behind a few afterimages before disappearing beyond the heavens.
A tempest suddenly rippled across the firmament, violently shoving the dark clouds aside and revealing a vast swath of open sky!
A voice rang out, both shocked and furious: "Zhu Yuanjin! Striking only when I am weighed down by karmic debt—how underhanded!"
A soft, pleasant female voice drifted from the heavens: "I'm flattered, but I still fall slightly short of you."
"Were the lives of those mortals below not lives at all? If you had struck a moment earlier, you could have saved them! Or do they count for nothing in your eyes?"
The woman replied, "Qiuniu, you were the one who killed them. If you sever both your hands on the spot, I wouldn't mind offering them an apology."
Storm after storm swept across the sky, punctuated by flashes of red light—an intense battle was clearly raging.
Qiuniu's aura was boundless and vast, permeating heaven and earth, while the red light was like sparks of fire—infinitesimally faint, yet refusing to be snuffed out under any circumstances.
"Zhu Yuanjin! Fighting me here, have you abandoned your northern mountain gate? How can you show such complete disregard for the bigger picture?"
"Heh heh, I was the one advocating to abandon the northern mountain gate in the first place. That impoverished backwater isn't worth defending. Why not simply toss it away and sit back to watch the alien races destroy your Xu family and dig up your ancestral grounds? My Palace of Grand Beginning still has two other mountain gates, but your Xu family's roots would be severed entirely. Once both sides tear each other to pieces, we can just come back, seize your Xu family's ancestral lands, and rebuild our mountain gate there. Wouldn't that be splendid? Alas, those old fogies wouldn't listen to me. No matter. Once they've all died in battle, I'll be the one calling the shots in the Palace of Grand Beginning."
Qiuniu's aura was fluctuating noticeably now. The woman chuckled. "You've only taken two slashes from me—what are you dodging for? Huh, your pants are rather sturdy, aren't they? They didn't even split open. Hold on, let me find where the seam is... Or perhaps you'd prefer to take them off yourself?"
Qiuniu shouted, "Hold! If we keep fighting, a heavenly tribulation will descend!"
The woman said leisurely, "You're the one burdened with karmic debt, not me. If a tribulation strikes, it'll strike you first. As for whatever lingering aftershocks remain, how many do you think I can withstand?"
Qiuniu spat through gritted teeth, "You vicious woman!"
"Thank you for the compliment! Actually, the Sage wrote a book specifically praising me back in the day."
Qiuniu asked instinctively, "How could the Sage have praised you? You weren't even from the same era!"
"Of course he did. The Sage said: 'Only petty men and I are difficult to deal with.' And the Sage also said: 'Only I and women are difficult to deal with.'"
Chapter 344