Chapter 163 — Fierce Battle
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 4 of 5
As though in keeping with the eerie atmosphere all around, strange changes began to come over him as well. One moment his face bore a hideous, ferocious expression, transformed into Ming Li; the next he seemed wracked with unbearable pain, as though he had become once more that simple, honest Qingyun disciple, Zhang Qingyue. There beside Pu Zhao's corpse, he writhed in agony.
Above, beneath the vault of heaven, the wind and rain sighed on and on, a scene of utter desolation!
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The moment Xiao Yichen and the company of elite disciples joined the fray, the situation steadied at once. Moreover, these disciples clearly shared an unspoken understanding: in groups of three or five, they flew straight to the hardest-pressed, most critical points of the battlefield. The gaps the beast-demons had forced open were abruptly reinforced by these fresh troops, and in an instant the breach was driven back, the beast-demons that had poured in cut down almost to the last. The whole curtain of light turned firmer and more dazzling still—impregnable.
Amid the crowd, the most dazzling sight of all was at the very center of the light curtain: Lu Xueling, the Heaven's Axis Divine Sword in hand, standing proud upon the clouds like a fairy of the nine heavens. Within the myriad rays of sunset glow, the Heaven's Axis seemed to have become a blade of bloody slaughter—wherever it passed, blood rained down and shattered bones piled up, until a small mountain of them had gathered at her feet.
As time wore on, not only did those ferocious beast-demons begin to regard this cold, aloof woman—whose white robes had turned pink with blood—with a measure of dread, even the righteous cultivators behind Lu Xueling were stirred to alarm. On this battlefield where life and death were fought for, Lu Xueling seemed to regard life and death as nothing at all, charging back and forth, time and again plunging into the midst of the beast-demons in the narrowest of windows, raising gust after gust of bloody wind and rain.
Yet on her face there was not the slightest expression—no fear, no pain, no horror, no disgust. Even when the foul, stinking blood of the beasts splashed onto her, who had always loved cleanliness, Lu Xueling gave no reaction at all. She merely fought on, pouring out all her strength. In the bloody wind and rain, her cold yet exquisitely beautiful face seemed all the more striking, filling one with sudden dread, yet forbidding any approach.
An hour slipped quietly by. The black torrent pressed ever against that curtain of light, but in the end it did not break through. Across the Cloud Sea Plaza, once like a realm of immortals, lay lifeless bodies and rivers of blood and filth. In the dark sky, the low clouds hovered heavily, gazing down coldly upon it all.
Suddenly, from deep within the ranks of the beast-demons, from some unknown place, a strange sound arose—like a horn, and yet like a howl, mournful and desolate, as though on a night of the full moon a lone wolf bayed at the moon. At the sound, the torrent of beast-demons, which had been surging forward without regard for death, suddenly halted. Their attack ceased, and slowly they began to fall back, opening a distance between themselves and the righteous path.
On the righteous side, as the fighting paused, the curtain of light dimmed as well—and what rushed in to fill the Cloud Sea in its place was the sound of countless people gasping hoarsely for breath.
Every person seemed stained with blood. A bleak, eerie crimson had dyed the whole Cloud Sea. On the open ground at the center, where the two sides had drawn apart, corpses lay everywhere—beast-demons and human disciples alike.
Most of the righteous disciples who had been flying in midair came down to the ground, seizing the moment to catch their breath. No one knew when those mad beasts might come charging again. Only a few disciples of deep cultivation still hovered warily in the air, watching what lay ahead.