Chapter Seventy-Six: Joining Forces

Golden Scales’ robes fluttered like drifting clouds, his swordplay light and ethereal. In the next instant, his form transformed into a streak of sword-light, traversing a thousand miles in a single breath to arrive before Wei Yan.

Wei Yan cast him a brief glance, then brought his palm down with casual force.

“Arrogant!” Golden Scales snorted coldly. He merged body and blade, sweeping up banks of cumulus clouds. The air around him rippled and folded under his sword aura, transforming into frothing waves—each crest, a surging tide, together forming a towering maelstrom.

Cloaked in this tempest of waves, Golden Scales charged ahead. Wei Yan pressed his hand downward, and an immense, invisible weight seemed to bear down, suppressing the oncoming surge. Then, Wei Yan exhaled a stream of breath with a piercing whistle—brilliant as a white rainbow splitting the sky. It descended from beyond the heavens, swelling larger and larger until it struck the sword where man and blade had become one.

Crack!

A clear, brittle sound rang out as fine cracks spidered across the sword’s surface, rapidly spreading down its length. From within these fissures, blood burst forth in torrents, staining the distant horizon in crimson.

Within the bloodied clouds, Golden Scales was forced apart from his blade by that single breath. The sword in his grip was riddled with fractures, and those same wounds seemed to etch themselves upon his body—like vivid, blood-red tattoos.

“Get out of my sight!” Wei Yan sneered.

Golden Scales felt a heaviness in his chest, blood rising and clogging his throat. Even now, that breath of energy was still rampaging through his Five Internal Stars. He clung to his golden core, using his sword path to bridge the forces of heaven and earth, borrowing their strength to deflect and suppress the invading energy. Only then could he barely contain the turmoil within.

At Wei Yan’s scornful words, he finally coughed up the mouthful of blood he had been holding back. A crackling sound rippled through his body—his cultivation shattered as that wild energy ran amok inside him.

“I too am an Inner Vision cultivator—why can’t I withstand even a casual blow from him?” Golden Scales’ body was battered and torn, breaths of that destructive energy seeping from every wound, eroding his very life force.

Yet, from the hidden reserves of his Wood Star, vitality surged forth, flushing the wounds clean and knitting his flesh anew.

“For him, the Inner Vision is a limitation. For you, it is your limit,” Xuan Jiuyuan hefted her great black blade onto her shoulder. Behind her loomed the shell of the dragon-turtle; the spoils of victory were clear.

“In other words, you’re just useless.”

Xuan Jiuyuan had no time to care about Golden Scales’ contorted expression.

“I’ve long heard the tales of Wei Yan,” she said. The black blade in her hands seemed to seethe with dark currents, harmonizing with her spirit and will. She was gathering strength, drawing half the spiritual energy of the secret realm into her weapon.

“In his time, he was Thunder Ancestor’s chief strategist, famed for three schemes that could settle the world. Yet even after deploying all three, chaos persisted, and so the Thunder Ancestor had him boiled alive in the Five Cauldrons!”

Her words drew the attention of both the cauldron spirit and Wei Yan.

No sooner had she spoken than a bolt of lightning split the sky above her, causing her aura to falter. Clearly, she had not expected mere mention of the Thunder Ancestor to bring down such retribution.

It was a tale from ancient times, yet even within this secret realm, they could sense the slow passage and change of the world outside.

“You are well-informed.” By now, Wei Yan was fighting with only one arm and one leg; his soul-flesh body insubstantial, save for his head and those two limbs which remained corporeal.

“It was not my strategies that failed, but the Thunder Ancestor himself,” Wei Yan laughed. “Had he heeded my advice, he might have subdued the ancestral races and established the Celestial Court a million years ago, rather than meeting death and oblivion as he did.”

A divine thunderbolt crashed down upon his head as well.

The thunder dragon beside him opened its maw, devouring the strike to bolster its own might.

“That woman—now that Wei Yan has not fully restored his cultivation, if he summons his other bodies, you will all die here, sacrificed as his offering and sustenance,” the cauldron spirit called out.

Wei Yan possessed both soul and flesh; he would never resort to something as crude as possessing a corpse. He aimed for true resurrection.

To restore life to dead flesh required an immense flood of blood and energy, reviving the body’s vitality; it demanded vast immortal radiance, to fill and integrate soul and body into a single undying whole.

Wei Yan’s cultivation was so profound that the vitality demanded by his body was all the more immense. The energy and immortal radiance required for his resurrection, if measured by ordinary standards, could fill the entire secret realm and still fall short. Even if every cultivator within this secret land were sacrificed, it might only be enough to restore half his body.

The thunder dragon’s warning was not wrong. In fact, Xuan Jiuyuan had rushed here precisely because she foresaw this.

“Here I come!” Divine light flared between Xuan Jiuyuan’s brows as she leapt into the fray.

Her blade technique was grand and imposing, as if she wielded mountains in her grasp. The sheer force reflected from her blade shook the stars of the secret realm. From the sky, studded with night pearls, the stars began to fall.

They crashed to earth, stirring up dust that blotted out the heavens. The cold radiance of the night pearls condensed the air into ice crystals, reflecting the light of the moon.

“Where did that moon come from?” The sky was already obscured by dust, so the moonlight reflected from the ice crystals appeared uncanny.

Just then, Xu Zhong saw Feng Xun approaching the battlefield, crowned with a wheel of moonlight. The moon above his head was strange indeed, surging with yin energy, its chill so intense that even from afar, one felt frozen to the marrow.

It did not seem a true moon.

“That moon—isn’t it the one that fell from the sky before?” Fang Yuan remarked beside him.

Before this secret realm had opened, a moon had fallen from the heavens.

It was, it seemed, this very moon.

“It appears he has refined it into a magical treasure.”

Though it was but a jade disc, bathed in moonlight for a million years, it shone with the radiance and yin essence of the true moon—indistinguishable except in origin. The jade disc was false, the moon real.

Feng Xun refined the moon and joined the battle.

The moon became a wheel, and with it, countless spheres of lunar radiance formed in the sky, crashing down upon Wei Yan.

The thunder dragon released a storm of thunderclouds, raining down an endless deluge of lightning.

Xuan Jiuyuan’s great blade cleaved through the air, conjuring phantom mountains stretching for thousands of miles, a thousand peaks spinning and falling to earth.

Golden Scales wove through the chaos, searching for an opening.

With the combined might of the three and the dragon, Wei Yan was thoroughly pressed—at times, mere moments from death as spells clashed.

He looked up at the moon above Feng Xun’s head and sneered, “Have you come to deliver your immortal radiance to me?”

Feng Xun’s expression changed. The moon disk in his hands twisted and writhed, and from its yin aura, a wisp of immortal radiance emerged—transforming into a spectral image of Wei Yan. It struck at Feng Xun with a single punch.

That punch unleashed a cascade of cloudfalls, their force splitting distant mountains with rending cracks.

Feng Xun was at the heart of the storm. He borrowed the shifting terrain and the power of heaven and earth to deflect the force—his movements light and elusive.

Only those within the cloudfall could appreciate his desperation—every step was upon a razor’s edge. Should even a trace of that force touch him, his body would be shattered.

He barely escaped the onslaught, flung a hundred miles away. In that hundred-mile swath, countless cultivators and forests were ravaged by the cloudfall—left in utter ruin.

As Wei Yan called forth the immortal radiance hidden in the jade disc, Xuan Jiuyuan seized her chance and struck.

Her blade’s power was peerless—each swing conjured mountains from its steel, as if dragons themselves were unleashed, shattering the world.

Wei Yan took the blow, staggering back step after step, coughing blood with each retreat. He was left drained, his face pale and defeated.

The thunder dragon redoubled its efforts, summoning a sea of thunderclouds. From them, countless bolts rained down in a dense, roaring deluge, each crackling with an annihilating force.

Wei Yan could bear it no longer. A mouthful of blood welled up and spattered the earth, flowing outward in a crimson river.

At that moment, Xu Zhong felt space itself ripple.

Moonlight fractured, shattering the countless ice crystals in the air. From within the shards, phantom banners unfurled.

In an instant, the banners shimmered with ghostly light, threads of spiritual energy weaving between them, unleashing a titanic force. It was as if the sky and earth had been severed from one another.

Xu Zhong looked up to see an even larger moon appear overhead.

Within that great moon stood Xuan Jiuyuan, the cauldron spirit, and Wei Yan—only Feng Xun, controlling the banners, remained outside.

Feng Xun waved the master flag, causing the moon to shrink steadily. Those within looked up and finally realized what was happening.

Using the master flag, Feng Xun forced the moon to collapse inward.

“He wants to lock them in this space, just as the Thunder Ancestor once sealed Wei Yan,” Xu Zhong’s gaze burned with understanding. “He must have arrived even earlier than Xuan Jiuyuan and Golden Scales.”

Xu Zhong carefully watched the shifting banners, comparing them to the patterns engraved upon the dragon-turtle’s shell.

“Perhaps he saw from the start that the moon disk was a trap—he sent it in on purpose. But why?” Xu Zhong couldn’t be sure, but he did see one thing: “His array changes according to the patterns carved on the shell.”

Xu Zhong saw it; so did Yun Yong and Li Feiyu.

But they did not know that the nine-grid diagram was the River Map itself.

They simply forced themselves to remember some of its changes, distilling those variations into their own foundations, blending them into their techniques.

“He’s ruthless,” Tang Yuan muttered. “It’s as if he wants to seal everyone else inside that moon.”

At this moment, the moon seemed not illusion, but substance.

“It’s so Wei Yan will touch the jade disc himself—he’s laid a trap within it,” Xu Zhong’s heart skipped a beat.

...

“Enough gawking, let’s get out of here!” Fang Yuan urged her reckless companions.

Danger loomed on every side, yet they still harvested dao resonance and honed their techniques.

She could not fathom how they still had the heart for it.

With a spell, Fang Yuan summoned a wild wind from her lips, lifting the three and carrying them away, with Tang Yuan close behind.

Only after they had fled a safe distance did they find themselves cut off from the resonance, awakening from their cultivation with a sense of loss.