Chapter 125 — Heartbreak
劍問蒼天 · Page 5 of 6
Then she charged forward with her sword, white robes like snow, like a lily in the flames—haggard, and yet still so beautiful.
Zheng!
In that keen ringing, the Divine Sword Tianxuan blazed with ten thousand rays of light, blotting out the sky and veiling the sun, yet the red glow of the Blood-devouring Bead was like a phantom, flickering faintly within the blue radiance—and however fiercely the blue light blazed, it could not wholly suppress it.
With a thunderous roar, a vast flame descended from the heavens. The two figures parted and then joined once more. In this hellish place, the two of them had at last come to a final decisive battle.
Even if those two figures were, amid the firelight, so very desolate.
Ahetai could scarcely collect himself. Everything had been going extremely smoothly, but then sudden upheaval had struck: on the ground of Qili Tong, strange events came one after another, and unfamiliar figures appeared one after another—moreover, all of them cultivators, among whom were masters even he regarded with misgiving.
It was only that those figures below were baffling as well. Before a few words had passed, they had fallen to fighting among themselves, leaving him standing to one side. And the Li clan, which had held the upper hand, had been thrown into such disarray by these newcomers that they too turned pale with alarm, just like the Miao, and both sides had withdrawn to the sidelines.
Ahetai cursed inwardly. At that moment he could not spare thought for so much, and besides, before he had come down from the mountain, that Demon Lord's cold words were still echoing in his ears—"So long as you bring back the Li clan's sacred artifact, the Bone Jade, and seize the Miao's sacred artifact, the Black Staff, then the Li clan's rise to replace the Miao will be irreversible..."
He drew a deep breath and once more focused his spirit upon the Great Shaman, who was still putting up a desperate resistance. With a great shout, he who stood among the clouds abruptly flung wide his arms, and in an instant blood burst from the fourteen joints of his hands. Almost at the same moment, the black fire within countless enormous fireballs surged at once, drilling out from the cloud layer one after another and smashing down upon the Great Shaman.
The fragile red curtain could hold no longer. Beneath the ceaseless battering of the fireballs burning with black flame, after a moment it vanished with a thunderous crash.
In an instant, all of Qili Tong was engulfed in a sea of fire, and the Great Shaman, after letting out a howl, collapsed to the ground.
Ahetai was overjoyed. He hurtled down from midair and in the blink of an eye reached the platform where the Great Shaman lay.
The Great Shaman struggled to rise, propping himself on the Black Staff, and said in a hoarse voice, "You—you are mad. You actually went to beg the beast-demons..."
Ahetai did not wait for him to finish. He kicked the utterly enfeebled old man to the ground and snatched the Black Staff, examining its tip closely—and sure enough, there it was: the Bone Jade sacred artifact for which the whole Li clan had yearned for a full two hundred years.
"Hahahaha..."
He was beside himself with triumph. Without another word, he was about to step forward and strike the finishing blow, to put to death this enemy who had been the Li clan's bane for centuries—but a flicker at the edge of his vision showed him that some of those outsiders down the mountain had already noticed what was happening here, and were rising into the air and flying toward him.
Ahetai's heart lurched. In an instant he decided not to complicate matters. In any case, after that battle just now, the Great Shaman, under the Demon Lord's demonic power, was as good as a cripple, and no longer posed the slightest threat to the Li clan.