Chapter 169 — The Demonic Beast
劍問蒼天 · Page 2 of 6
The wind and clouds howled; a fierce gale screamed.
In that soundless place, a thunderclap suddenly burst with a mighty roar, as though shaking the hearts of ten thousand people. Across the horizon sword-glints streamed and colored lights blazed; countless colored qi-swords streaked across the sky and shrieked downward.
Like the angry tide of heaven, they came surging on, purple qi at the fore, stretching beyond sight—mightier by far than before, no one could say how much. And behind the purple, every ten zhang apart, a sword qi of another color gathered and flew, rushing and roaring, surging and swelling, beyond anything human power could imagine.
At that almost world-destroying spectacle, not a face did not change; palms broke out in sweat.
The archaic song mingled amid the great thunder and the sky-filling shrieks gradually faded, and even those strange drumbeats had long since vanished. Yet the giant demonic spirit, facing this terrible tide of sword-rain, stood defiant and did not retreat; amid the rising black qi it shrieked all the more shrilly, as though taunting the heavens, utterly wild and unyielding.
In an instant the sword-glints struck home; dozens of black qi tentacles surged up at once. Though this sword qi was now beyond compare with the last, the ancient sorcery of the southern wilds possessed uncanny powers beyond the reach of gods and ghosts; the black qi tentacles fought more fiercely the longer they fought. Though in a flash they were pierced with a thousand holes by the countless qi-swords, the seemingly endless black qi filled them in the same instant, and their greatest reach actually expanded, stretching out to tens of zhang.
Yet this first wave of purple qi-swords, charging into the black qi, forced it down flat; but in but a moment the black qi struck back, rising up and swallowing the qi-swords one by one. Even so, before the black qi could recover its former shape, the second wave, a square of qi-swords, had already arrived.
Ten thousand phenomena, boundless keen radiance; in the vault of heaven the sword-glints came like rain, like locusts, thick and dense, while under Dao Yan Zhenren's urging of the true dharma, the ancient sword Slaying Immortals flashed with ever stranger light, and the seven-colored master sword in midair split off ever more single-colored qi-swords, faster and faster, wave upon wave forming heart-stopping giant sword formations that crashed down into the billowing black qi.
Beneath the Slaying Immortals formation's furious tide of assault, the black qi lost all its former arrogance, its range gradually pressed down from its first tens of zhang; and against wave after wave, ever stronger, of that almost endless, despair-making surge of sword radiance, the black qi too began to fail. The giant demonic creature roared without cease, yet the black qi around it grew ever thinner; each wave of sword-rain came closer to its very body than the last, the black qi thinned, the strange tentacles it formed grew weaker, and holding back that sky-filling sword-rain grew harder and harder.
At some point, after that long silence, the crowd below burst forth in cheering like a tide.
The last six black qi tentacles, after barely holding off a wave of azure sword qi, finally scattered and dissolved into nothing; in midair there remained only that giant demonic spirit.
Heaven and earth stood solemn; sword qi crisscrossed the air!
A faint ancient song; a vast wild desolation!
Like thunder, like lightning, boundless sword radiance descended from the sky, swooping in from all four directions, piercing through the giant demonic spirit in midair.
The enormous white bones burst apart in an instant; countless streams of black blood splashed outward. The demonic creature flung up its head and loosed at the vault of heaven a long shriek that tore the heart and lungs.
The wind died; the clouds scattered.
The sword-rain gradually ceased.