Chapter 693: Cut Off Your Own Left Arm and Throw Him Down! |
The spear carried the weight of Heavenly Dao, accumulated over ten thousand years of life force. It drove the terrifying faceless divine manifestation hard into the middle of a viscous cliff built from its own death tide.
The death tide reversed, and the laws retreated.
“AAAH!”
Three agonized screams rang out simultaneously from three entirely different shadowy root passages.
They came from the three Dark Current Sect Manifestation Realm cultivators who had tried to ambush the twenty-four old cocoons from the outer ring. Su Ming’s formation core had just blocked one of their strikes, and they had not yet fully withdrawn their attacks or retreated.
With the Lord of the Nether Abyss’s manifestation pinned down, the laws within him collapsed in direct backlash, a chain of monstrous waves surging down along the bonds of their souls.
These three elders had been so arrogant moments ago, nearly shattering Qingluo’s Dao foundation. Now the thick, black-iron-like armor protecting them, or their garments of baleful death energy, was torn to shreds on the spot. The decay laws they had painstakingly cultivated surged backward into their organs, and each spat out mouthfuls of blood infused with their origin.
“Suppress!”
How could Qingheng let slip this heaven-sent opportunity Woodheart had won with their life?
He pointed his broken staff down. The incomplete royal seal, still giving off the wooden chime of a bell as it hovered above the ancient hall, immediately sank. It did not press down, but instead settled like a boulder whose position had already been calculated. The lingering power of the seal divided into twelve tough strands of green light.
Those twelve green strands landed precisely around the body of the Manifestation Realm cultivator in the middle of the passage, who had been stunned for an instant by the surging retreat of the death energy. He was the Root Armor Elder, whose bone armor bristled with poisonous spikes.
As Qingheng turned his hand, the green flame contracted. The hundred-zhang-thick ancient roots of ten thousand trees seemed to answer the direct command of some ancient will. All around the Root Armor Elder, thousands upon thousands of old iron-green roots grew of their own accord, like chains, binding him fast in a root prison less than a zhang across.
The Root Armor Elder was wrapped so tightly that his divine sense had no room to move.
In that cramped space, where he could only crane his neck, the only thing left in his eyes was the utter madness of despair.
The deathly-white gleam in his eyes had already fallen into disarray. Instead of spewing outward, his deathly true blood surged frantically toward the middle of his chest, where his core of life lay.
“You old dogs! You want me to be a stepping stone for a bunch of walking corpses? Dream on!”
A terrifying gray-white ring, capable of turning every stone and tree within a hundred li into black, ashen sludge, began expanding without limit from the center of his chest, from the black life pearl that had withered to no more than the size of a fist.
A Manifestation Realm mighty being, driven into a dead end, was about to detonate himself to drag others down with him!
If the core within that body, saturated with death energy, ignited and triggered a backlash here, it would be far more than a simple explosion. Pure, high-level decay laws would fall like poisonous rain. They would not only blast apart the twelve strands of Qingheng’s royal seal, but also travel along the tightly packed old root chambers on either side, burning the already-ruined earth veins beneath the ancient sleeping hall into a deathly abyss that could never be restored.
Su Ming still had an unfinished formation of Water-like Art lines in hand.
The Observation of the Minute technique flashed frantically in the depths of his eyes. He did not dare blink even once. In his extreme observation, stripped of color, he could see that the Manifestation Realm cultivator was swelling like a high-pressure iron cauldron filled with boiling water, already beginning to crack at the edges.
If the blast traveled along the root veins and spread into the Grand Hall, the underground would not hold for even a quarter of an hour. The remaining soul cocoons would be reduced to ashes on the spot!
“Do not let him connect with the root veins!” Su Ming barked a sharp, unquestionable order to the two elders at the front, who were still gritting their teeth as they held up the broken wall.
“Elder Qingluo! Cut down every main wood-spirit vine on your right, and slash them all back toward the root core!”
“Elder Panshi, shatter the three stone-beam channels beneath your feet that you just used for support! Smash out the ground beneath them and leave the thirty-zhang area below completely suspended, with nothing left to bear weight!”
A command from a Golden Core cultivator was like telling someone to take a knife, cut off his own left arm, and throw it out the door. If word of it got out, it would have left countless people’s jaws on the floor. Yet this was exactly what was happening.
If they obeyed, Qingluo’s true essence would be severely depleted. And Panshi, by smashing apart the support beneath his feet, would have to face the shockwaves of a Manifestation Realm self-detonation alone within seconds, losing the advantage of being able to maneuver.
But Qingluo did not spend even half a second thinking after Su Ming finished speaking.
The cool, beautiful elder’s face was already more than half smeared with wood chips and poisonous blood. A faint, pained glimmer flickered in her eyes, and she brought the long bones in her palm down hard against the several dark-green main vines that had been protecting the main artery at the front.
“Crack!”
All three emerald roots, infused with Qingluo’s own wood-core essence, were severed at the base. The cut-off section of the main vine, now unsupported by any laws, had not even hit the ground before it scattered into broken leaves.
Panshi, on the other side, was just as decisive.
He brought his massive wrists together and slammed both fists down with all his strength, right onto the layers of broken basalt walls that remained on the ground.
“Boom!”
With nothing left to guide any force upward, the three old rock beams, each a zhang thick and just moments ago serving as a foundation buffer, shattered with a sharp crack, like bricks smashed in the middle by a heavy hammer. Fragments of stone scattered into the void below.
Beneath this space, the area where the Root Armor Elder was bound had been densely connected to the surrounding main roots. Yet the two elders’ swift, resolute act of cutting off their own support had abruptly made it an isolated death pit, connected to nothing and unable to draw in even the earth’s energy or heat!
When the Manifestation Realm cultivator’s thoroughly ignited body exploded at the center of this pit, cut off from the earth veins, a blindingly white light burst forth. It was so bright that even the blood on Qingluo’s face took on a pale, bluish cast.
But without any soil or waterway through which its vast laws could spread, this merciless gale of death was like a whirlwind trapped at the bottom of a tiny wooden bowl, spinning in place. Although it blasted a terrifying pit hundreds of zhang deep into the rock, and even shattered the ring of green royal-seal chains Qingheng had wrapped around it into dust, the shockwaves struck the air-filled pit and its dead ends, completely cut off from one another, and dared go no farther.
The Dark Current Sect Manifestation Realm cultivator who had tried to drag others into death with him was left in that utterly isolated space, his remaining bone armor blasted apart along with him. Nothing remained but a wisp of deathly smoke, without even a trace of its dark green-black stench.
Hot ash fell through gaps where fragments of rock had crumbled, but not a single speck even brushed the edge of the leaf-shaped soul cocoon nearest the impact, which Su Ming had carefully shielded with his Water-like Art spirit veins.
Standing at the rear, Su Ming tightened his grip and gathered his breath. His calm gaze swept across the battered underground ruins, riddled with holes and pits.
He studied every small crack in the wood left by falling stones and every structural shift caused when Panshi smashed apart the rock pit. Deep in his Consciousness Sea, he meticulously marked every true hidden injury and surviving old artery after the upheaval, turning them into a brand-new map of the terrain and formations.
After this battle, if chaos broke out again and they had to flee, he would know exactly which crack connected to the underground current below and which boulder was hollow underneath.
At the very moment the Manifestation Realm cultivator died amid the scattered debris, the aerial battle above, where the sky had nearly been pierced through, entered an even more brutal and desperate deadlock.