Everyone saw the Clear Water sword talisman transform into a rainbow streak, lopping off the heads of Gong Kun and his two companions. Its momentum undiminished, it circled once through the air before flying back.
Atop the building, the young man's robes billowed in the wind as he wielded the sword art.
With a beckoning wave of his hand, the sword gleam danced like a living creature, swirling ceaselessly around his body and casting an emerald-green glow across half his face.
The onlookers wore varied expressions, and quite a few elder cultivators looked thoroughly shocked.
A Five Elements sword talisman might be bestowed by an elder, but sword arts had to be cultivated by oneself.
If one had already established a Dao foundation, wielding a sword talisman would be ordinary enough. The difficulty lay in the fact that he was merely at Qi Refining. The magic power within him could never sustain such a treasure; unleashing it once ought to have been his absolute limit.
Yet looking at him now, he seemed to have energy to spare.
In other words, his sheer talent in the sword arts had made up for his lack of magic power.
From the shadows, an elder remarked, "In the past thousand years, Pingyuan Commandery has never produced a proper master of the sword. Tracing further back, there was only a sword-wielding monk who joined the Western Religion to cultivate at Thousand Buddha Mountain in Shuzhou. This time, an interesting junior has indeed emerged."
Just then, an even louder voice rang out from the darkness: "Mount Tong's Xieling Sect truly lives up to its reputation! One of the sect's five core disciples is actually adept at catching someone's sword gleam with his own head! Hahaha, what an absolute joke!"
Qin Xuan glanced coldly in the direction of the voice, unsure who was fanning the flames.
"Haah—!"
With a chilling shout, the four guardian elders of the Xieling Sect struck together. Violent magic power surged from beneath the ground, throwing up massive earthen walls. Qin Xuan's sword gleam flashed once more, cleaving the earthen walls into flying fragments in midair.
"Brat, accept your death!"
All four elders were at Foundation Building, utterly overpowering Qin Xuan in magic power. Yet even with the ability to counter sword gleams, they remained exceedingly cautious.
One of them shook a bell, and the corpse puppets detonated at the sound, bursting into a sky full of bloody mist.
In the next moment, the four elders swelled their bellies and spewed forth thick black vapor, gathering the bloody mist into a single mass.
At once, the black mist violently contracted and abruptly expanded, birthing four gigantic figures that lunged out from within.
All possessed blue faces and protruding fangs, covered in black hair, standing over a zhang tall and wrapped in foul corpse qi.
"Xieling corpse generals!"
Someone shouted, "Those old bastards actually managed to refine such vile things!"
The four corpse generals burst from the black fog and opened their gaping maws, spewing a foul wind that surged toward Qin Xuan as black miasma.
With a sword-finger gesture, Qin Xuan pointed, and the Clear Water sword talisman transformed into an azure rainbow that cleaved through the black miasma, aiming straight for a corpse general's throat. When the sword gleam made contact, it only sliced through a clump of black fog; the corpse general merely paused for an instant before swinging its claws down toward Qin Xuan.
Qin Xuan leaped into the air just as the building collapsed in a thunderous roar, bricks and tiles flying everywhere.
One claw missed, but another immediately followed. Furthermore, with all four corpse generals attacking at once, a flurry of claw shadows engulfed the space around him.
Twisting and turning midair, Qin Xuan relied on his superior speed to continually dodge, skirting peril at every step. He struck out only three times; each strike cut into a corpse general's body, yet it was like slicing through clouds and mist, leaving them entirely unscathed.
It seemed this spell could only be broken by exhausting the four elders' magic power, but that was utterly impossible.
Knowing this was merely a probing move on their part, Qin Xuan was unwilling to take further risks, so he crushed the talisman seal in his hand.
In an instant, a sharp, clear cry echoed from the twilight clouds above.
All eyes looked up to see a white crane breaking through the clouds. Beneath the moonlight, its plumage was like frost and snow, its long beak vermilion, and its wingspan stretched over a zhang wide.
It exuded an immortal aura so pure that had Qin Xuan not known the crane's true nature, he would have been thoroughly fooled by the sight.
He Wushuang looked down contemptuously at the four elders. "Monstrous freaks of the demonic path, how dare you act so rampant here!"
Everyone saw that there was no rider upon the crane's back, yet the white crane swooped straight down, holding an object between its talons.
The object was shaped like a lampshade, made entirely of colored glaze, with cyan light swirling inside.
Flying before Qin Xuan, the lampshade suddenly expanded, turning into a light curtain that kept the corpse general's massive claws at bay.
With a dull thud, the corpse general's claw struck the light curtain as if hitting solid metal or stone; the barrier did not budge in the slightest.
Immediately after, the four elders attacked together, hurling streams of corrosive poison gas from different directions, all of which were blocked by the lampshade's light curtain with loud hissing sounds.
The four elders were startled. "What kind of magical treasure is this?!"
He Wushuang taunted, "With those pitiful tricks of yours, did you really expect to shatter a true treasure?"
Swooping past with blinding speed, it lunged with its talons toward two of them. The four corpse generals rushed back to defend; with two loud explosions, two of the corpse generals were torn apart by the white crane, bursting into mist that required time to reform.
The other two corpse generals pressed the attack, but the white crane swept aside and dodged effortlessly.
Seeing that it was an exotic beast of extraordinary speed, the four elders hurriedly produced Mount Tong talismans of the Xieling Sect, summoning and commanding ghosts and spirits with incantations to call forth four black-haired zombies.
These dead creatures possessed immense power.
Unfortunately, their movements were stiff, whereas the white crane was exceptionally nimble, flitting effortlessly among the Xieling corpse generals and black-haired zombies. It even chanted leisurely, "Cultivating a body light as a crane; four old fools who comprehend in vain!"
"Outrageous!"
Infuriated, the four elders' minds grew erratic.
In that fleeting lapse in their concentration, the lampshade treasure around Qin Xuan contracted slightly to infuse him with magic power. Seizing the opening, he gulped down a large mouthful of tiger ginger spirit dew, causing spiritual qi to surge anew within him.
The light barrier then retracted. While the four elders were being toyed with by the white crane, the two blasted corpse generals reformed once more.
Reconstituting corpse generals naturally came at great expense.
One of the guardian elders suddenly felt a jolt of alarm and hastily summoned a corpse general before him. But the emerald sword gleam was far too nimble; slipping through the gaps between the corpse general's long claws and nails, it flashed past the elder's neck.
A head soared into the air, the elder's face rife with indignant unwillingness.
His flying head glared at the white crane, cursing with its dying breath: "You damned feathered beast! You made me die at the hands of a Qi Refining junior—what utter humiliation!"
He Wushuang was infuriated as well. "You old mongrel, it wasn't even this crane that killed you! If you're so ashamed, feel free to come back to life!"
"You—!"
The elder died with his eyes wide open.
Having struck a decisive blow, Qin Xuan had no magic power left to unleash the flying sword again. Retrieving the talisman sword, he said to He Wushuang, "Brother Crane, don't waste your breath on them. Let us coordinate again and slaughter the rest of these old fiends."
The remaining three elders did not believe Qin Xuan still had enough magic power to wield the sword, but seeing their sect brother slaughtered before their eyes, they no longer dared to attack with reckless abandon.
Right then—
Spectators in the darkness were clearer-headed than the elders and saw through Qin Xuan's true condition.
A magical artifact enveloped in black light and two flying needles wrapped in demonic qi shot toward Qin Xuan from east and west. An immense sense of danger instantly stretched his nerves taut!
Boom, boom, boom!
Three explosions resounded in the air. A grand Buddhist light, a soundless white beam, and an aura that Qin Xuan found exceedingly familiar all lent a helping hand, emerging from two other directions to knock back the flying needles and the magical artifact.
"Which elder of Xiniuhezhou is that?!"
A shrill voice shouted into the darkness toward where the Buddhist light shone, sounding thoroughly baffled. How could someone of the Western Religion lend a helping hand to a Dao Sect cultivator?
Yet no one replied.
Qin Xuan sensed that matters were far from simple.
Suddenly, the earth trembled. The streets rippled like water as something swiftly moved underground.
At the same time, a massive beam of golden light lit up from the Geng family's back courtyard, causing rows of buildings within the manor to collapse. Only then did people clearly see dense, bizarre runes crawling across the ground like tentacles, continuously spreading outwards.
This was a wondrous array diagram, radiating a sensation of heaven and earth shifting and twisting...
Chapter 26