The might of the Sword Slave swept right over, trapping in place the next life spiritual fish that could disappear as soon as it entered the water.

What was happening? Xi Ping froze at first, but he was well aware of the principle that “Those who enjoy watching the fun too much can easily end up unlucky.” What did he care what was going on? What was he doing watching other people fight? Run!

He quickly sent a warning to the Luwu and ordered everyone not to detour to the South Sea, to stay as far as possible from the Southern He Peninsula’s west coast—the South Sea coast, that was.

Just then, Chang Jun and Yao Qi spoke almost simultaneously.

Chang Jun said, “I think Lord Guang’an has woken up.”

Yao Qi said, “Strange, the spiritual energy around the Queen Mother of the West’s meditation chamber has suddenly gone wild.”

“Because the wicked ghost luring the Queen Mother of the West toward the spiritual mountains has caught his pants on fire,” Xi Ping quickly said. “You two, stop watching the tearjerker, get away from the ascended spirits at once. Take out the protective immortal tools I gave you before—use the ascended spirit grade ones, Wanshuang’s about to…”

No sooner had he spoken than Wanshuang was already there!

All the seawater in the area was locked in place by the Sword Slave’s sword energy, but perhaps she was too robust; she still didn’t see the next life spiritual fish, said in legend to be caught on the border between life and death.

Though the next life spiritual fish counted as large among fish, it still wasn’t large to the magnitude of a steamship. It was big at the head and small at the tail. Opening its mouth to the widest, it could in fact hold a few people at most. That the Miah cultivators and the Queen Mother of the West and her people could live as completely separate neighbors relied on mustard seed hidden realms that could collapse to be extremely small. The scope of an established foundation cultivator’s essence exploding was much larger than the fish.

But the sword energy locking the seawater in place had already permeated the fish’s body. The mustard seeds inside the fish’s mouth trembled, like one little world after another, on the point of collapse.

Everyone inside the mustard seed hidden realm was panicked and at a loss, yet they couldn’t find their backbone—Yang Wan was trapped, unable to move forward or back.

With a shed skin approaching, her spiritual sense was about to explode; there was no retreat. But having lost the grit projection, no matter what, it was almost impossible for her to take another step forward!

The matchlessly domineering ancient sword of Kunlun raised huge waves in the South Sea, bringing misfortune to the merchant teams that had turned to the South Sea route from fear of traffic on the canal. These huge steamships were like withered leaves, nearly thrown into the air by the sword thrust that hit like a flood dragon entering the water. The ships that had yet to leave port were pushed into a heap; fire broke out in places.

“Help—”

Xi Ping, who had remained on land, casually pulled a sword from the mustard seed he carried and soared up into the sky riding it with the Tai Sui Qin floating in front of him.

Where the sound of the qin passed, the ships on the South Sea, big and small, were enveloped in an invisible membrane. The sparks that had just shot out were pushed back and extinguished, and the ships that were about to collide were separated, gently bouncing apart.

Xi Ping had meant to fly a little higher to get a clearer view, but the sword at his feet wasn’t very attentive to his commands; it stopped at a certain height and wouldn’t move. But the Sword Slave, from dozens of li away, gave him a strange look.

Xi Ping looked down and only then discovered that the sword he had hastily summoned just now had been Zhaoting. He nearly split his sides laughing: It’s been nearly fifteen years, Master Zhaoting, thank you ever so much! He’d even become an ascended spirit, and he had been the one to go to Sanyue to steal the furnace that had reforged Zhaoting. How had the prohibition on flying too high once put down on the north slope not yet been lifted?

He was just about to switch to an ordinary sword that wouldn’t get in his way when Wei Chengxiang sent him a message: “I think this time it’s the Emperor of the East.”

The Emperor of the East’s subordinates were a bunch of evildoers with no bottom line; their loyalties lay with whoever benefited them. Wei Chengxiang had drifted through the Land of Turmoil year in and year out, so she had a number of not overly reliable informants at her disposal. She hurriedly said, “The Emperor of the East’s people are on the South Sea. Originally they were mixed in among the mortal merchant teams. I heard that one ke ago, word suddenly came down from above, ordering them to leave this area of the sea with all possible haste. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Emperor of the East must have done something.”

Xi Ping’s consciousness swept toward the South Sea again. He conjectured that the Emperor of the East must have used some means to discover the Queen Mother of the West’s hiding place. That old geezer’s “die of frustration if he wasn’t stirring shit up” problem had flared up again, and he had deliberately attracted Wanshuang’s notice, planning to use a borrowed sword to kill his target.

Soon, Xi Ping locked onto a small clutch of ships that stuck out—he had just disseminated talismans with his qin music, covering half the South Sea. Even the Dragon King’s shrimp soldiers and crab generals in the water must have gained extra shells; only on that team of ships fleeing at full speed was there no trace of protective talismans.

And at the speed they were going, the ships had even forgotten to belch steam.

These ships weren’t propelled by steam engines; they were propelled by spiritual stones!

“You’re right,” said Xi Ping, “I see them.”

Wei Chengxiang said, “Are you going after them?”

Of course not—he was shielding the alarmed mortals, keeping the battle of the immortals from mistakenly injuring the ants. Though the Sword Slave had made no move against him, that was after all the foremost sword in the world. He could hardly withstand even a glancing blow. Being in two places at once was impossible.

With a thought, Xi Ping threw out an immortal tool snatched from Lin Chi, which landed precisely in front of the Emperor of the East’s ships. The seawater immediately congealed into countless watery ropes, which tied themselves into a big net, catching the Emperor of the East and his people “in a single net”: “With all this excitement, don’t be in such haste to leave, sir!”

An ascended spirit immortal tool could of course be torn open by the Emperor of the East Halberd, which was of the same grade, but it was another question whether the Emperor of the East would be willing to show himself in front of the Sword Slave…and if he didn’t dare, what would his subordinate low-level cultivators, currently wishing they could sprout wings and fly away, be thinking?

In a flash, a number of great “evil cultivators” had gone a round of mutual trickery and even turned a corner.

Wei Chengxiang cried out an approving “well done” to him. “When enemies meet on a narrow path, the low-life wins.”

Xi Ping said, “Oh, why don’t you piss off already!”

While these great masters coming and going in the heights had wrestled themselves into a heap, under the all-enveloping spiritual energy screen of the Tai Sui Qin, Wei Chengxiang seized the opportunity to audaciously toss out a string of talismans and sweep the Turmoilers right onto the Luwu ships.

Xi Ping didn’t stop playing. At the same time, alarm bells were ringing in his mind.

In a single move, he had driven away Yu Chang, then pinned down the Emperor of the East. Ordinarily, his tail would have been sticking up by now, but instead, he had no leisure to feel complacent.

Something’s wrong, he thought. This can’t be an unexpected development.

The next life spiritual fish, which the Cauldron of Nine Dragons and Xuanwu back then and Kunlun’s Sword Slave now had been unable to grab—how could a measly Emperor of the East catch a trace of it? He supposed it couldn’t be because there was a dark pall upon his brow and he was an expert in courting death.

The only explanation was that someone had deliberately let that idiot find it.

Who? What were they playing at?

Didn’t Kunlun and the Li-Zhang remnants want to lure his shifu into a trap in Southern He? Wasn’t it a little too early to strike now?

Could it be that they had finally discovered that they couldn’t defeat Wu Lingxiao no matter what and had decided to simply kill themselves and take a bunch of mortals with them?

If he had been on his own, with Xi Ping’s impetuous temper, regardless of anything else, he would have activated the reincarnation wood seeds Yao Qi and Chang Jun carried and gone over in person to investigate.

But right now, he was “Tai Sui.”

Amid the murderous aura of Wanshuang that blotted out the sky and covered the earth, relying on the fact that Zhaoting could reliably catch him, Xi Ping laboriously used talismans to weave a hasty protection array over the Southern He Peninsula. The only lucky thing was that he had brought enough spiritual stones this time.

Wangge Luobao gently stroked the inner wall of the next life spiritual fish’s mouth. In his nose lingered the smell of age and decay coming from the fish’s belly. “Truly a pity. I was born too late. Your lifespan has nearly run out.”

Vibrant and unrestrained echoes came from the fish’s belly, rising and falling, a little like a whale’s song.

The next life spiritual fish’s answer to him was brimful of sorrow.

The gentle smile on Wangge Luobao’s face disappeared. His odd-colored eyes set into his ice-cold mixed-blood countenance made him look like a statue of an evil god. “It was the ancestor who chose this road. I am only his chosen successor.”

The Sword Slave didn’t have the patience to go fishing in the sea. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the evil cultivators Xi Ping had trapped. She reached out and scooped, simply snatching up an evil cultivator.

An established foundation evil cultivator on the Emperor of the East’s ship felt dizzy. Before he could work anything out, he was already dozens of li away. His essence was instantly pierced by sword energy, and he hadn’t even realized that he was dying, looking blankly around himself.

On the boundless South Sea, a strangely-shaped big fish finally attracted his line of sight. That fish had a pair of clouded, sorrowful eyes. Looking into them made a person want to cry, overwhelmed in the crush of all their life’s regrets.

The evil cultivator whose hands were stained with blood couldn’t help crying. He was cold and scared. He felt the sea wind blow through his body. His flesh was as flimsy as paper, blending with the sea wind.

His last thought was: Oh, so there’s a hole in me.

The dying could see the next life spiritual fish.

The Sword Slave tossed the useless corpse into the water and, following that good-for-nothing’s line of sight, she slashed at the next life spiritual fish with a beam of sword energy. “Mystifying trickery!”

A lament fit to break your heart reverberated throughout the South Sea. On land, in the sea, all the beasts both spiritual and mundane, so long as they could produce sound, began to wail in unison.

In the Heaven’s Design Pavilion branch on the Wan-He border, Pang Jian, tense because the border inscriptions had been aroused by a large quantity of spiritual energy, suddenly noticed something. He raised his head and found to his astonishment that the karma beast avatars on the mural were standing up one after another, facing south. The karma beasts were vigorous, always glaring, with faces that naturally looked like they were fuming with rage. Pang Jian had never before seen such obvious grief in those enormous eyes.

The instant Wanshuang fell, Wangge Luobao had already unfurled the protective immortal device in his hands. At the same time, he pried open a mustard seed with absolutely no hesitation.

Waking dragons, gold-armored zhengs, flood dragons, silk dragons… Innumerable spiritual beasts exploded from inside it, layer upon layer of them shielding him, against their own instincts willingly meeting Wanshuang’s blade, dying in his stead.

Wangge Luobao didn’t so much as blink. He swiftly rolled up another mustard seed containing Miah cultivators and instantly disappeared.

Only the Queen Mother of the West’s hidden realm remained, exposed and unprotected beneath the Sword Slave’s sword. Its inscriptions were destroyed by the sword energy, and layer after layer of the mustard seed’s edges were worn. The mustard seed hidden realm, which had only taken up a fist-sized space, was forced to expand to hundreds of mu, abruptly floating up on the South Sea.

Yao Qi and Chang Jun had made their preparations when Xi Ping had warned them. They had shifted to the inscription border. After the world turned upside down, they came right to the edge of the hidden realm. The two of them wrapped protective immortal tools around themselves and jumped into the water.

The instant they entered the water, both of them were stunned.

“Shiyong!” Chang Jun’s voice had changed pitch. “What the hell did Wanshuang just slash?”

Xi Ping said, “What?”

Yao Qi said, “The water’s changed into…”

There was nothing else.

When the mysterious next life spiritual fish crashed into Wanshuang, the fish’s body went to pieces and scattered in the sea. But there was no blood.

It turned all the surrounding seawater into semi-transparent mist, lifting the Queen Mother of the West’s hidden realm and swiftly rising. Before Yao Qi could finish his sentence, he was swallowed up by the mist. Instantly, all his senses cut off. He couldn’t even hear the voice through the reincarnation wood anymore. Unspeakable cold crept up his spine.

Around him was boundless darkness. A beam of weak light swept over him. The faces of all his family and friends flashed before his eyes, approaching then passing. He glimpsed his hometown of Jinping, and its bustle turned to ashes in the blink of an eye. Clamoring voices flooding his ears came and went. Yao Qi instinctively reached out to make a grab but came up empty. He could only watch as all activity left him behind.

No one instructed him, but Yao Qi knew—this was life and death.

Humans were transient, and the dust of the mundane world was transient for them.

Humans came from nothing, were awakened for an instant by illusion, then returned to endless nothingness.

Amid illusion, all things were inconstant.

In the corpse of the next life spiritual fish, all human thoughts turned to dust.

When her single blow fell, the Sword Slave already sensed that something was wrong. She quickly retreated, watching the mist rising over the South Sea in bewilderment.

The Queen Mother of the West, wrapped in mist, also seemed to enter a crevice between life and death. The voice of the “heavenly edict” in her ears abruptly increased tenfold. The marriage contract that bound her wavered on the point of collapse.

Just then, the door of the meditation chamber was broken open. Lord Guang’an charged in, staggering. His legs went weak, and he fell to his knees on the ground.

He panted for breath sharply, the veins on his head and face standing out. He crawled toward the Queen Mother of the West. “A-Wan…”

He came from Chu, the child of a spiritual stone miner. There was a tiny minority of people who devoted their attention more fully to anything they did and regularly drew spiritual energy into themselves unconsciously. Even with no one to guide them, living year in and year out in such surroundings, they could open their spiritual eyes through unexpected chance—compared to those in Western Chu who faked and flattered to force their way into the inner sect and remained mortal all their lives, it was hard to say who was more unfortunate…after all, not every miner who opened his spiritual eyes was like Pang Jian, with a conscience-stricken Liang Chen behind him, willing to busy himself to get him vouched for by the inner sect.

How his spiritual eyes had opened, the honest and timid family of miners couldn’t say. Despotic superiors and fawning subordinates were common practice in the Chu mines. They had immediately charged his family with the serious crime of “stealing spiritual stones,” with the punishment of execution for the whole family.

At the time, Yang Wan had been increasingly unable to bear the Emperor of the East. She had just begun to arrange her forces in secret; she was short on people. While she was at it, she had picked up this teenage boy who counted as a half-immortal and taken him to her newly-established hidden realm. At first, she hadn’t shown him her true face. She had disguised herself as a plain, ordinary woman, saying that she was a servant acting on behalf of her master. To save trouble, she had picked herself the ugly-sounding alias of “Wan-niang.”

She wasn’t the Queen Mother of the West, wasn’t the Emperor of the East’s wife, wasn’t a princess, wasn’t surnamed Yang.

“A-Wan…”

Guang’an was the only thing in this whole world that belonged to A-Wan.

Amid the whistling sea wind, he grabbed Yang Wan’s hand.

The sword cultivator’s palm was covered in calluses. In an instant, it nearly yanked the Queen Mother of the West’s consciousness out of meditation. The mist surrounding the two of them abruptly withdrew slightly.

Those clasped hands seemed to form a resonance with the Lancang Mountains—the founders of the Lancang Sword Sect had also been husband and wife, together called the Gold and Jade Sages. The “Gold Sage” was a sword cultivator, and the “Jade Sage” was one of the toolmaking cultivators that had been most numerous on the Southern He Peninsula.

Perfect harmony, walking hand-in-hand, immortal lovers… In a daze, Yang Wan couldn’t distinguish whether she was the Queen Mother of the West or the Jade Sage. A faint smile appeared on her lips.

Lord Guang’an’s expression relaxed slightly. He was about to continue waking her when he heard a roar. Aggressive spiritual energy came right at him. The heavily injured Lord Guang’an was thrown aside without making a sound.

This spiritual energy like a hurricane came from the southern mines. The Lancang Mountains were quivering violently. Countless plants grew from the immortal mountains; strange and splendid flowers bloomed. The wildfire vines that had despotically occupied the Southern He Peninsula fled like scared rats.

Dense clouds gathered over Lancang’s Principal Peak. An enormous thundercloud, like a vortex, hung in midair. Something flashed in and out of view.

The Sword Slave frowned. She forgot about the strange mist and hacked at the Queen Mother of the West’s hidden realm.

But the sword energy was knocked astray by brutal spiritual wind.

Right now, Xi Ping was simply trapped on the Southern He Peninsula. At his feet there were mortals everywhere. He didn’t dare to budge.

“Ziming, Hongzheng!”

There was no answer from the two of them.

Xi Ping felt his vertebrae and ribs pounded like a big drum by Wanshuang’s sword wind flying by, constantly split open and constantly repaired by the hidden bones, making teeth-aching creaks.

The ice-cold sword aura seemed to want to invade the cracks in his bones, but it was blocked by Zhi Xiu’s three beams of sword energy stored inside him. The swords of the north and south crossed through him. Xi Ping’s bones broke even faster.

The Sword Slave… What kind of monster was she?

How could the major boundary between shed skin and ascended spirit make such a big difference? In pain, Xi Ping came to a decision. If he made it through this and returned to Flying Jade Peak, he would definitely work hard!

When this thought quickly streaked by, a light suddenly went off in Xi Ping’s head. He captured a thought that had been hanging around in his mind.

Wait, he’d remembered!

Shed skin masters—except for the kind like Xiang Ning, only there to make up the numbers—might not be able to overwhelm an especially remarkable near-shed skin, but overwhelming an early stage ascended spirit…or even a middle stage ascended spirit certainly wouldn’t be a problem.

Xuanwu in his prime had been able to contend against a full moon master for half a night; even when his essence had been damaged and his boundary had fallen, he had still been able to send seven great ascended spirits scampering in the South Sea. It was hard to say whether Xuanwu’s cultivation surpassed that of Lin Zongyi, Wu Lingxiao, and others like them, but it was certainly stronger than Zhang Jue and Zhao Yin’s. When he had come down from the mountains in person to arrest Qiu Sha, why had he brought a murder weapon like the Silver Moon?

Couldn’t he have crushed Qiu Sha with one finger after she had lost the Law Breaker and the Riverward?

Wangge Luobao had already sunk to the bottom of the sea. He waved away the waking dragon corpse still wound around him and sent a message to Kunlun: There’s been an unexpected development.

From his expression, nothing seemed to have been “unexpected.”

Wangge Luobao paused, then wrote: We didn’t lure in Zhi Xiu. I’m afraid Wu Lingxiao has met the Lancang Mountains in battle ahead of schedule. Our plan has already been exposed. What should we do?

After sending this, he calmly restrained his aura and found a place to sit amid the spiritual beast corpses. He considered, took a piece of reincarnation wood from his clothes, and boldly spilled his blood on it.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you, Tai Sui.”