Chapter Ninety-Six: Cannibalism

Shiyue ultimately still followed Kong Hui to the inn where Xu Zhong was staying.

Along the way, she kept fiddling with the star disk in her hands, hoping to use it to find her companions.

When they reached the inn, Fang Yuan and the others were discussing what had happened that day. Seeing Xu Zhong arrive, they greeted him with cheerful waves.

“I heard you were just talking about those warships. Have you learned anything?” Xu Zhong asked as he took a seat across from Fang Yuan and the others.

“Nothing that could really be called news,” Fang Yuan said with a shake of her head. “Only a few rumors.”

“I’d be interested to hear them in detail.”

“They say something happened around here, and it seems to have something to do with the Sea of Chaos.”

Xu Zhong had heard that name before, from the mouth of the First and Supreme Holy Emperor.

After the Ancient Yue Heavenly Way opened the heavens, Bai Zhaoju had gone to the Sea of Chaos.

“The Sea of Chaos is no trifling matter,” Fang Yuan said.

She had once explained its origin to Xu Zhong.

It was the manifestation of a world shattered during the second divine war.

Because that world had been broken so badly, leaving the heavens and earth incomplete, the realm was called the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths.

“In the previous divine war, the First and Supreme Holy Emperor led a group of newly born gods among the innate divine race to overthrow the rule of the old gods, then banished them to the Sea of Chaos, ending the age-long strife that had consumed the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths for a million years.”

Yuanyi had once said that the total amount of spiritual energy in the world remained unchanged: it would not increase, only grow thinner.

To preserve the balance of heaven and earth, the old gods would periodically wage war, using slaughter to reduce the population and restore equilibrium.

But the newly arisen gods were unwilling to remain mere tools for the old gods’ maintenance of that balance, and so they joined hands to wage war against them.

Unfortunately, Wei Yan had died too soon. He never learned the ending.

That ending had now been filled in by Fang Yuan.

In the divine war, the new gods achieved a complete victory and drove the old gods into the Sea of Chaos.

He recalled the words spoken by the Golden Crow deity when leaving Heavenly Vault City: they should never have been banished in the first place.

Perhaps then, they had not yet possessed the means to kill the old gods.

But now, they did.

So were these armies that had suddenly appeared here meant to prevent the old gods of the Sea of Chaos from emerging?

Or, if one dared to think further, had they come to kill the old gods outright?

Xu Zhong and the monk Kong Hui listened with absorbed attention, never noticing the darkening expression on Shiyue’s face.

She looked down at the star disk in her hand.

Within it, three red dots had overlapped with Li Feiyu.

“Do cultivators of the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths also eat people?” Shiyue suddenly asked, cutting through their heated discussion.

She looked at Li Feiyu as if waiting for his answer.

“What does the young lady mean by that?” Li Feiyu was baffled.

“What is wrong?” Xu Zhong asked beside her in a low voice.

Shiyue lifted the star disk and activated it. A layer of space shimmered into view, and within that space, at the place where Li Feiyu stood, three red dots merged over a single blue one.

Xu Zhong’s expression changed.

He knew what this thing meant.

A cultivator marked by the star disk could be located even after death, so long as their undying spiritual light had not dispersed.

And now the red and blue dots had overlapped.

The person corresponding to the blue dot was Li Feiyu.

A thought surged through Xu Zhong’s mind.

He has an innate elixir.

Only a cultivator who possessed an innate elixir would need to devour native cultivators of the Kingdom of Yu to balance yin and yang.

A chill went through him, and Li Feiyu suddenly seemed terribly unfamiliar.

Shiyue’s expression remained calm as still water, but a wave of spiritual power had already begun to rise around her. She seemed ready to strike at any moment.

“Brother Li, did you truly eat people?” Xu Zhong’s heart thudded violently.

He, too, was a native cultivator of the Kingdom of Yu, and one of the possible sacrificial ingredients for an innate elixir.

Whoever Li Feiyu had devoured might have been one of Shiyue’s companions, and naturally could just as easily have been Xu Zhong himself.

Suddenly, he remembered that the first person to make a move the day the trouble began had been Li Feiyu.

Perhaps that was when he had seized the innate elixir.

“Isn’t cultivation just a matter of eating people?” Li Feiyu said with a shake of his head and a sigh.

Fang Yuan and Tang Yuan, standing nearby, were so stunned by his words that they could not speak.

“Yes, cultivation is indeed a matter of eating people,” Shiyue said more calmly than before, though the fury beneath that calm had only grown fiercer, like a silent volcano.

“But you should never have devoured them while they were still alive.”

She turned the star disk, and countless formation flags flew out. The scene shifted in a thousand ways, space itself twisting and changing without pause.

A moment later, they were no longer in Sky Abyss City, but in a minor world hidden within the star disk.

All around them was empty gale and void; only above their heads did layer upon layer of stellar rivers flow, as though several great dragons were coiling through the vacuum.

“You devoured them alive, flesh and blood, soul and even their undying spiritual light.”

Undying spiritual light was intimately linked to a person’s soul. Upon death, it departed the body together with the soul.

At that moment, it returned to heaven and earth.

In the cultivation world, most qi cultivators who required undying spiritual light as an alchemical ingredient would take it either from the dead, or from spirit medicines and spiritual plants that had not yet awakened intelligence.

The extracted undying spiritual light would lose all its former spirit and leave behind no trace of what it had once been.

The fact that Shiyue could now locate her companions’ undying spiritual light through the star disk meant that they had been eaten alive, flesh, soul, and all.

The time had been too short. Li Feiyu had not yet fully digested their souls, which was why their traces still remained within the undying spiritual light.

“Does it matter whether the one you eat is alive or dead?” Li Feiyu said, drawing his sword.

At that moment, the sword no longer shone with light. It had turned a sinister, dusky black.

The heart of a sword is a reflection of the heart of the user, an outward declaration of one’s deepest nature.

The corruption on Li Feiyu’s sword meant that he himself had been tainted by demonic nature.

He has fallen to corruption, Shiyue thought.

And in the next instant, she struck.

Her hands flew through seals at high speed, and starlight rapidly condensed into azure phoenixes soaring through the air. Each phoenix darted toward a different point, drawing down starlight into strands of silver that wove into a vast net spanning heaven and earth, surging to kill Li Feiyu.

“So what if a living person can’t be eaten? What sort of rubbish reasoning is that? You’ve lived this long, and that’s all the insight you have?” Li Feiyu laughed aloud.

With a twist of his wrist, sword qi spread in all directions; sword light cold as frost and sword qi bright as moonlight crisscrossed the air, stabbing toward the phoenixes in flight.

Each phoenix pierced through burst into starlight, then re-formed once more.

A great formation had been completed.

Clouds rose, thunder rolled, and radiance fell like dragons, roaring through the high sky.

Within that stellar river overhead, countless bolts of lightning surged and, in the next instant, transformed into ten thousand thunderclaps. Together they descended, becoming ten thousand long dragons that pierced Li Feiyu’s flesh.

In the next instant, blood splashed across the sky.

He suffered grave injuries and crashed to the ground.

Blood seeped into the earth and, in an instant, transformed into millions of scarlet fire lotuses. Those countless red lotuses fused together and became a boundless sea of flames.

Li Feiyu stood bathed in that sea of fire, the scarlet lotuses instantly devouring his blood and vitality. Just as he attempted to circulate his power and cast a spell, a halberd flew toward him. He casually swept out a sword strike and knocked it aside.

Shiyue then burst forward from behind the halberd.

She opened her mouth and exhaled a surge of White Tiger baleforce.

That baleforce roared like a vast flood, bearing the might of the White Tiger. Within it, countless silver glimmers held the essence of metal, transforming in the void into all manner of illusory magical treasures.

It was less a baleforce than an ocean of divine weapons.

Li Feiyu’s eyes were nearly splitting with rage as he forced his sword art to its limit.

His longsword opened and closed in broad, sweeping motions, sword light surging in torrents as he struggled to sever Shiyue’s technique.

But how could he possibly be her match?

Li Feiyu had consumed an innate elixir and then eaten human flesh. His cultivation had indeed risen, but he was still only a cultivator of the One-Guarding Realm.

The gulf between realms was not something talent and technique alone could bridge.

He managed to cut apart part of the White Tiger baleforce, but a great deal of it still pierced his body.

In an instant, it was as if he had been seized by a white tiger and ground into the earth.

Li Feiyu now suffered severe injuries. Dense wounds covered his flesh, each one as wide as a finger, blood gushing out in streams only to be swallowed by the flames outside him, the blood feeding the fire and making it burn ever fiercer.

Seizing the opening, Shiyue struck again, aiming for the flaw and slamming a palm into Li Feiyu’s heart. The tremendous force washed through his body, shattering several ribs at once. Fragments of broken bone stabbed into his flesh, bringing sharp, searing pain.

Li Feiyu coughed blood and stumbled backward again and again, his sword flashing in repeated strokes. Sword light fell in cascades, yet almost none of it landed on Shiyue.

He kept coughing blood, and the flames on his body grew even fiercer. Some of the fire fused into his blood and flowed with it; flames seemed to burn inside his veins.

He tried to use his Fire Luminary Secret Vault to extinguish the flames on his body and swallow the fire in his blood.

But it was all in vain.

Thunder and fire crashed through his body.

His insides shattered and collapsed in an instant.

Without the Fire Luminary Secret Vault, he could not digest the power invading his flesh from outside.

Without the Water Luminary Secret Vault, he could not seal off that external invasion.

Without the Metal Luminary Secret Vault, he could not live without grain.

Without the Wood Luminary Secret Vault, the lifespan he had gained was nothing but a reflection on water, a flower in the mirror.

Without the Earth Luminary Secret Vault, the power that had once been unified within him lost control and began colliding wildly through his flesh.

His body slowly, bit by bit, vanished within the flames.

Shiyue withdrew the formation flags, and the azure phoenixes flew back into her hands.

Looking at Li Feiyu, now reduced to charcoal, she cast a spell to gather up the remains, turning them into ashes.

She placed the ashes into a porcelain vial and left the star disk.

Outside it, Xu Zhong and the others were watching anxiously.

Only when Shiyue emerged did he finally let out a slight breath.

“He is dead,” Shiyue said, tossing the vial to the grief-stricken Fang Yuan.

Fang Yuan caught it and could not stop herself from bursting into loud, heartbroken sobs.

She had never intended to avenge Li Feiyu, and even if she had, she would not have thought herself Shiyue’s equal.

So weeping and silence were the best choices.

“Where is the innate elixir?” Xu Zhong asked, looking at the porcelain vial with some curiosity.

“What?” Shiyue did not understand, bewildered.

At that very moment, a crisp cracking sound rang out.

“Not good!” Xu Zhong’s eyes widened.

He suddenly remembered something: Li Feiyu had once bid successfully on a drop of Prime Mystical Flow Essence.

A flying sword burst forth and shot toward Shiyue’s heart.