Chapter 15 – Red Robe Skims the Fire for Ten Thousand Meters
Kacha.
The golden Kui Dragons on Chou Bodeng’s left wrist came to life, transforming from an ancient bracelet back into two intertwined small dragons. The interlocking fangs receded, the front dragon’s tail spike retracted, and the scales suddenly flared. The ancient bracelet split in two, flying apart in two different directions like streams of fire.
The handcuffs were open!
Wind.
A long, sharp wind like a knife.
The powerful airflow from his fall pulled his sleeves into a taut red line. A streak of crimson swept past the long corners of his eyes. Black qi spread from his increasingly pale fingertips, coiling around the hilt of the Taiyi sword… All the colors on him suddenly reached an extreme, as if a wolf-hair brush were recklessly splashing ink and cinnabar on plain paper, letting the three colors collide and erupt with a startling, strange beauty that seemed to belong only to evil spirits.
“Oh, great Fu, protect my city!”
A hundred thousand people sang out, a hundred thousand people cried out, a hundred thousand people called out.
Seven Wood Vines shot out from the Divine Fu Tree, coiling toward the descending Chou Bodeng from all directions.
Chou Bodeng’s beautiful pupils clearly reflected the shadows of the Wood Vines.
When they were clinging to the Divine Fu Tree earlier in the night, the ancient tree’s trunk, which covered several miles, had made them look as slender and harmless as dodder flowers. Now, in the city-wide firelight, they emerged from the crown, the thin ones like ancient pythons, the thick ones like cartwheels. The edges of the vine leaves were shaped like rows of saw teeth, glinting with a savage, bloodthirsty ferocity. If a living person were caught, their tendons would snap and bones would break in an instant.
Below, to the left, and to the right were all Wood Vines shooting through the air. Chou Bodeng was in mid-air, with no way to dodge.
The Wood Vines to his left and right touched the hem of his robe. Chou Bodeng didn’t dodge or evade. He tapped his foot on the Wood Vine directly below him and slid down at an angle. He suddenly became as light as a feather. The Wood Vine, having lost its sense of weight, froze in mid-air, its leaves swaying slightly as they tried to locate their prey. The leaves grew in staggered pairs, with a gap of less than a foot between each pair. Chou Bodeng clung to the vine, his entire body suddenly becoming like flowing water, a gentle breeze, silently passing through the narrow gaps between the leaves.
The edges of the leaves cast sawtooth-like shadows on his face.
The thick ink at his fingertips crept past the guard of the Taiyi sword and began to seep into the bright, snowy blade.
The Wood Vines on the left and right collided in mid-air, tangling into a mess. The remaining four Wood Vines were manipulated to spin back, smashing toward Chou Bodeng, who was clinging to the vine.
“Take my blood as sacrifice, protect my city!”
Chou Bodeng stepped on the broad surface of a vine leaf and lunged forward. A horizontally sweeping Wood Vine smashed into the spot where he had just been, sending sparks flying. He twisted his wrist, the tip of his sword touching the iron-hard surface of the fifth Wood Vine. He sank his wrist! And pressed down! The most flexible front half of the long sword suddenly bent.
The wind howled.
The remaining two Wood Vines whipped around in an arc, like a tightening vortex on a flat plane, with Chou Bodeng at its very center. The sword blade snapped back straight. The spine of the sword became a line of ink that quickly spread to both edges. The cold glint of the twin blades flashed and was gone. He used the force to leap up, brushing past the remaining two Wood Vines.
He descended, enveloped by an overwhelming shadow.
“The wind is mournful, oh the bitterness!”
The seven vines that had attacked Chou Bodeng in mid-air were merely a distraction. In the time it took for him to slide, rise, and dodge, all the Wood Vines on the branches of the Divine Fu Tree had coiled upwards—tens of thousands of them! They wove a huge, circular cage in mid-air, sealing off all space, strangling everything.
Not a single gap remained.
Chou Bodeng stood on the seven gnarled and knotted vines, looking up and listening to the mournful songs and bitter winds of the entire city outside the cage. The Wood Vines slithered like a swarm of snakes, contracting, compressing, until even the last bit of firelight leaking through the gaps between the vines and leaves disappeared. In the darkness, only the snow-like gleam at the tip of the Taiyi sword remained.
The cage knotted together.
The Taiyi sword was completely swallowed by black.
“I know not if the god will protect or not!”
Boom!
Thick ink smashed into clear water, exploding into a carbon-black flower in mid-air. Vines snapped and leaves shattered.
Chou Bodeng broke out of the cage, dressed in red with black hair, emanating a hostile aura, and carrying the Taiyi, which had transformed from a famous sect’s chillingly sharp mountain-suppressing sword into a sinister, evil one.
A sharp, clear cry.
A dark cloud rose from the thick smoke on the ground, arriving with the wind to catch Chou Bodeng.
It was the gray bird!
It wasn’t dead!
The gray bird spread its wings, carrying Chou Bodeng over the raging fire, over the collapsing eaves and jagged walls in the thick smoke, over the hundred thousand people singing blessing songs and kowtowing, over the constantly scattering silver light of the Fu tree, and swooped toward the place in the city where the heavenly fire had been drawn.
East Third Street, Iron Life Gully!
The furnace was as bright as day.
Will the god protect or not!
***
The Oracle Master held his Scarlet Saber in a reverse grip, its tip pointing diagonally at the ground. Blood dripped from the tip into the black soil.
He was injured.
He had made a mistake that was simply unbelievable for someone like him.
He had been distracted in battle.
When Chou Bodeng leaped from the ten-thousand-meter-high sky, his pupils contracted sharply, as if he had suddenly seen his most terrifying nightmare. He subconsciously turned back, desperate to catch that crimson figure falling from the sky. He forgot he was in a life-or-death battle, and the bronze halberd’s spear tip pierced his right shoulder, leaving a gruesome wound.
The Red-Faced Six-Eyed Martial God failed to seize the opportunity to rip open his throat with a counter-thrust of his halberd.
Because the red-faced Martial God had made the same mistake.
The moment the Kui Dragon Bracelet disintegrated, the Martial God immediately turned his head toward Fu City, a look of extreme shock and a very subtle… fear appearing on his crimson-as-a-jujube face. The next moment, he directly abandoned his fight with the Oracle Master, withdrew his bronze halberd, and was about to hurl it with all his might at the figure falling from the sky.
The bronze halberd was struck down by a long saber, smashing into the ground and creating a fissure hundreds of meters deep.
“Impossible.”
The red-faced Martial God took a step back, his foot leaving a deep pit in the ground.
When he was first summoned by Daoist Priest Xuanqing, the Martial God’s divine image, which had been a hundred meters tall in the sky, had now solidified and shrunk to about six meters. He was still tall and burly, wearing tiger armor and a leopard crown. His bronze halberd was over five meters long, its tip adorned with a red tassel. On the tiger armor of his shoulders were ancient characters in bronze script: “Pi.”
Even for disciples of the Immortal Sects, the “Heaven Beyond Heavens” was a mysterious place; otherwise, Lou Jiang and the others would have noticed something was amiss. Cultivators referred to all gods descending from the Heaven Beyond Heavens as “High Gods.” This “High God” was only in relation to city-protecting gods like the ancient Fu.
In fact, the “Heaven Beyond Heavens” itself was divided into upper, middle, and lower heavens. Normally, only gods from the lower heaven would answer the summons of mortal cultivators. Gods from the middle heaven did so occasionally, and gods from the upper heaven basically ignored requests from the mortal realm.
The Red-Faced Six-Eyed Martial God was named “Pi Mu.”
He was a genuine High-Heaven God.
“You saw?” the Oracle Master asked faintly.
Pi Mu didn’t answer. A great golden light erupted from his body as he prepared to disperse this avatar.
“Freeze.”
The Oracle Master ordered in a low voice.
The miasma suddenly froze.
Countless Dead Souls and Wild Ghosts in the fog were crushed by an invisible force. The space within a ten-mile radius was abruptly sealed off by an invisible power, cut off and separated from the rest of the world.
The golden light scattered and then reconverged. Pi Mu stood in place, his face ugly.
“So it was you!”
Pi Mu’s six eyes stared at the person opposite him, with both disgust and extreme wariness. He squeezed the words out from between his teeth.
“Shi… Wu… Luo.”
A dim fire started at the hem of the snow-cyan ritual robe and quickly burned upwards. Where the fire passed, the color of the robe deepened, like the ash left after a fire dies. The “Oracle Master” held his Scarlet Saber in a reverse grip, standing there coldly. His figure stretched and grew taller, and the lines of his face shed all pretense of gentleness, becoming cold and sharp.
The last spark of fire flew from his shoulder, and in its flickering light, it illuminated those silver-gray eyes.
“Does the Southern Border Witch Clan wish to make an enemy of the Heaven Beyond Heavens?”
Pi Mu stepped back with his left foot, slightly hunching his chest, sinking his shoulders and dropping his elbows. The brilliant light on the tip of his bronze halberd completely vanished. On his burly frame, the tiger armor and leopard crown all opened their azure eyes, as if a tiger and a leopard resided within him. His aura suddenly became savage and wild. When he breathed, he seemed less like a man and more like a fierce beast.
“I made a vow.”
The spear wound on Shi Wuluo’s shoulder bled through his black clothes.
That single word, “Freeze,” had forcibly severed the connection between a High God and the Heaven Beyond Heavens, which was also a great burden for him. Under his sleeve, blood snaked across the back of his pale hand, but his grip on the saber was so tight that the veins stood out, and his knuckles were like high mountain ridges, as if the wound on his shoulder didn’t exist.
Killing intent was hidden in his stillness.
Both sides knew this was a fight to the death, but Pi Mu’s determination was tinged with regret. If someone had told him he would encounter Shi Wuluo, he would never have come to Fu City to join the fun, even if the true spirit of the ten-thousand-year-old silver Fu tree could likely be refined into a rare treasure.
A treasure is good, but is it worth more than one’s life?
Shi Wuluo…
He was a madman!
A madman who had appeared out of nowhere a thousand years ago, whose origins even the most ancient gods of the Heaven Beyond Heavens didn’t know!
But now, Pi Mu vaguely had a blurry, terrifying guess.
…He thought he knew why this madman had been on a thousand-year killing spree, making countless enemies.
“One day, I will tread the Ninety Thousand Heavenly Steps of the Heaven Beyond Heavens, shatter all the bronze bells and heavy cauldrons, burn all the rotten steles and decaying statues,” Shi Wuluo’s voice was very soft, as if he were talking about something very small, but in the air, a deep hatred and killing intent were about to reach a critical point. “I will make everyone pay for what they owe him…”
Pi Mu suddenly had a terrifying intuition.
The one who had descended to Fu City was only his avatar, but if he were killed by the madman before him, he would fall completely!
The thought flashed through his mind, and Pi Mu could no longer maintain his composure. He roared, and his bronze halberd drew a semicircle in the air. A fierce tiger and a savage leopard roared out from the halberd’s shadow, shaking the solidified space until it trembled invisibly.
“…one by one!”
Shi Wuluo shook his sleeve.
The long saber cut a scarlet path.
***
Dark red sparks were swept up into the sky.
East Third Street was already submerged in a sea of fire. The great fire that swept through the entire city had started here.
The houses on the entire street had been reduced to ashes, with only a towering furnace left standing in the great fire. Thunder rolled and roared within the iron furnace, and the heavenly fire drawn by the Spirit Cleansing Stone boiled in its belly. The entire furnace had become a ferocious monster, spewing fire and flames. Thick smoke danced like demons in the sky, dozens of meters above the ground.
The skeletal “old blacksmith” had changed into the dark blue, wide-sleeved ritual robe of a City Diviner. While singing an ancient blessing song in a voice like a great bell, he shoveled Quci charcoal into the furnace. His body was entangled in countless dense silver threads, like a spider lurking in the deepest part of its web.
The web was layered upon layered, and with his song, it vibrated back and forth at a strange frequency.
He sang, “My heart is bitter, and bitter again,” his voice filled with the impatience of a spider about to devour a moth caught in its web.
The Liu family’s Oracle Maiden, A Ren, and the previously captured Ye Cang were bound in a cocoon of silver Soul Threads, suspended above the mouth of the furnace, their chests rising and falling faintly. They were still alive, waiting to be thrown into the furnace as the most suitable sacrifices for this evil weapon.
Bang!
Two heavy Profound Iron puppets fell to the ground in pieces, breaking many of the silver threads.
The old City Diviner’s voice stopped abruptly, and the blessing song throughout the city followed suit.
He turned, flipped his sleeves, and drew two curved sabers.
Chou Bodeng walked out of the firelight, his sword tip lowered and pointing diagonally at the ground, drawing a straight, long line. Ink-like black qi gathered and dispersed from the hem of his robe and his sword, like an evil demon or a devil.
“How rare,” the old City Diviner said, hunching over, his eyes glinting as he stared at him. “We are both evil spirits, why must we kill each other? The evil weapon this old one is refining is a pair of sabers. Why don’t you wait? After this old one finishes refining them, I will give you one. Wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds?”
“What nonsense.”
Chou Bodeng bent his elbow, and the tip of his sword flicked upwards, as fast as lightning, cutting through all the silver threads that had silently spread to his feet. Then, with a twist of his forearm, he thrust the long sword forward, its tip like a splash of ink, stabbing straight at the old City Diviner’s glabella.
“Did I say you could kill the Divine Fu Tree?”