Chapter 100 — The Dark Serpent
劍問蒼天 · Page 3 of 7
"Hiss!" A sharp report—it was as though the all-piercing sword-light had been stopped dead by that Tai Chi diagram. Yet the blue light only blazed brighter, the pale radiance flickered, and brilliant halos sparkled between the two of them, a sight of rare beauty. But everyone knew that a single misstep, a brush against sword-light and pale radiance so freighted with the true power of the Daoist arts, meant death or injury.
Amid the radiance, Ming Li exhaled and cried out; with a muffled "boom," the Heaven-Cutting Divine Sword was sent flying back, and the Tai Chi diagram, after flickering several times, vanished in midair.
Ming Li gave a low chuckle, looking at Lu Xueling, a faint admiration in his eyes—but it was quickly overlaid with red light. "Truly formidable," he said. "In only ten years, you have actually broken through to the Supreme Clarity Realm. I daresay even the Patriarch Qingye in his day was no more than this?"
Lu Xueling stood in midair, garments fluttering. A gesture of the sword-seal in her hand checked the Heaven-Cutting Sword's momentum, and the blue light blazed brighter still than before. Inwardly, however, she was secretly startled. Her rapid progress over these ten years was due in part to her surpassing gifts, but chiefly to a ferocity of discipline that could almost be called excessive—so reckless had her cultivation been that even her master, the Venerable Master Shuijing, could not bear to watch and had remonstrated with her many times. The reason for it was not something outsiders could understand.
That bitter discipline, joined to her extraordinary endowment, had at last, half a year ago, made her the first among the younger generation of the Canglan Sect to break through to the Supreme Clarity Realm—the fastest anyone had reached that realm in a thousand years, save Patriarch Qingye himself. In cultivation she now stood, within the Canglan Sect, beneath only the various elders and heads; even Xiao Yichen, long hailed as the foremost of the sect's young disciples, must surely fall somewhat short of her.
And yet, for all that, Ming Li—this man who had once been the ordinary Qingyun disciple Zhang Qingyue—was in no way her inferior in cultivation. That conjured Tai Chi diagram, so practiced and masterful, had blocked a sword stroke imbued with the power of the Supreme Clarity Realm; and the hidden force within it had surged layer upon layer, deep and solid, seeming to belong to the Buddhist school—yet his casting was plainly the gestures and seals of the Tai Chi Mystic Clarity art.
Had this man, at last, also walked a road upon the path of cultivation that no one before him had trod?
The two regarded each other, their gazes gradually turning sharp and bright. But at that very moment, a roar of extraordinary loudness suddenly came crashing up from the mist!
So fierce and resounding was the sound that even Ming Li and Lu Xueling, for all their cultivation, felt faintly dizzy; and almost at the same instant, the tree trunk beneath their feet gave a violent shudder.
It was as though the solid earth itself had suddenly convulsed—something like the shock of an earthquake.
"Chee-chee! Chee-chee!" A shriek went up—it was the monkey Xiao Hui, sprawled beside the stone gate of the Heavenly Emperor's Treasure Vault, startled out of his wits by the sudden tremor. Clutching at the vines beside the gate, he cried out.
Before Ming Li and Lu Xueling could react, four figures suddenly appeared from the direction in which this immense trunk stretched away, flying swiftly toward them—one in front, three behind—and in the blink of an eye they were close at hand. Lu Xueling and Ming Li looked that way, and both were stunned.
The four, who had been pursuing them all this way, were likewise greatly startled to find that someone had reached the place ahead of them, and could not help halting.