While the Southern He Peninsula was large, apart from the Lancang Mountains, there was no other high ground. Therefore, the Heaven’s Design Pavilion branch on the Wan-He border had a full view of the clash between the upgraded immortal tools and the Lovebird Sword Array.

But they only knew that their own upgraded immortal tools had “sent up fireworks”; they didn’t know concretely what had happened. The eyesight of an established foundation cultivator couldn’t reach that far, and it couldn’t see the divine tool of the mountains wrapped in fierce light and raging wind. Right now, Pang Jian, guarding the border, was completely in the dark. He only felt wave after wave of violent spiritual energy slamming against the border inscriptions—from north to south, the southern peninsula spanned nearly ten thousand li; even after passing through the better part of the Land of Turmoil, the spiritual energy waves were still so strong when they hit the border—how big must the mess be?!

Pang Jian pinched the piece of reincarnation wood that had dropped the ball at the crucial moment. It had recently been sent to him by the Kaiming Department’s head office; they had said it was secure and efficient. The upshot was that it seemed to be dead now. Pang Jian spilled blood on it, drew talismans, poured in spiritual energy; none of it was of any use… After reaching the end of his endurance, he even spat on it.

Ptui. He had actually believed that Xi Shiyong could be reliable!

And beside him there was a foolish blue-clothed half-immortal with his head tipped back, standing there marveling, “It’s…a miracle…”

Pang Jian slapped his subordinate on the back of the head. “Some damn miracle!”

Who—or what—could cause so many ascended spirit grade upgraded immortal tools to fire simultaneously?

If it wasn’t Wanshuang, then it was the Lancang Mountains’ divine tool.

At present, the spirit-conducting efficiency of spirit-conducting gold could reach sixty to seventy percent of a cultivator’s meridians. In comparison to true immortal tools and masters, a portion of the spiritual stones would still be wasted—and what was more, no matter how ample the Luwu’s preparations, they had still gone in ships; they hadn’t brought the Xuanyin Mountains with them. Their opponent, meanwhile, had the southern mines…in other words, the former Lancang Spiritual Mountains.

Pang Jian did swift mental calculations. How many rounds of fire could the Luwu hold out for?

Most critically, there were still so many mortals on the peninsula who hadn’t evacuated. Why hadn’t Xi Shiyong prevented the Luwu from staking everything on a single throw like this?

Was he…still alive?

Pang Jian broke out in cold sweat and quickly formed Heavenly Questions to send flying to the Xuanyin Mountains and the Kaiming Department’s head office.

Was Xi Shiyong—Tai Sui—dead or not? Wangge Luobao also wanted to know.

The passing of an ascended spirit would indeed make as much noise as the collapse of a mountain, but compared to the present circumstances, it wouldn’t have been worth a mention.

Wangge Luobao narrowed his eyes. Never mind approaching the peninsula, the spiritual wind dashed against him so hard that he could hardly stay in place.

He’d known that the genius on Moon Plated Peak would be doing what he could to make up for the “drought of high level cultivators”; besides, as big as Southern Wan was, though the upgraded immortal tools were a close-kept secret, it would have been impossible for a single word not to leak out.

But no one had expected these so-called “upgraded immortal tools” to debut in such a startling fashion.

Wangge Luobao’s throat was a little dry and his pupils had yet to recover from shrinking rapidly. The Luwu let off a second wave of firepower, and he suddenly cried out, “Oh!”

Compared to the first earth-shattering wave, the might of the second wave seemed to be considerably reduced, discounted by around twenty to thirty percent. The reaction of the Lovebird Sword Array verified his observations—this time, the divine tool of the mountains that had nearly been blown sky-high before didn’t move a sliver. It even bore down slightly.

Wangge Luobao worked out the crux at once: spiritual stones.

The Wan’s mysterious magic weapons also needed spiritual stones. The spiritual stones they had brought with them wouldn’t stretch far enough to match the Lancang Mountains!

“Ha!” Wangge Luobao at once sent separate messages to Kunlun, Yu Chang, and even the Sanyue and Lingyun Mountains—for the latter, he didn’t have means of contact and simply sent unencrypted notes flying to the nearest post stations to spread far and wide.

“How could I be alone in witnessing such a spectacle? I must invite my fellow cultivators from the various nations to have a look how the Xuanyin Mountains do without the stamina of cultivators who had established foundations… Hss, strange. Why is this evil wind so strong?”

To the east of the Southern He Peninsula was the East Sea, and to the west was the South Sea. Of them, the South Sea side was connected to the nations of Chu and Shu on the continent, and there were Southern Shu’s Three Islands on the sea. There was a lot of land to block the wind and waves. The waters had always been calmer than in the spacious and empty East Sea.

But now, a southeasterly wind had come out of nowhere on the East Sea and was blowing directly westward, along with the spiritual wind off the peninsula. The ships in the South Sea all turned into scraps of paper swirling in a gale. If not for the fact that the protective talismans Xi Ping had placed on the mortal merchant ships earlier hadn’t yet fully dissipated, many people would have become dead souls on the sea.

Even the waking dragon could hardly withstand the enormous waves. It wrapped around Wangge Luobao and rolled westward.

Wangge Luobao’s easy smile dimmed somewhat. His spiritual sense moved slightly. Suddenly, he had the sense that something was about to go out of control.

Also being blown around by the wind was the dying but not yet dead Xi Ping.

There was no ascended spirit on earth whose body could sustain two shed skin sword attacks within such a short span of time—not even if they were discounted.

Xi Ping’s skin sack had gone entirely to pieces, almost like back at the bottom of the Impassable Sea, when his bones had been crushed and scattered to the wind.

Fortunately, there was no “shizu”¹ here to trick his consciousness into a star stone. Also fortunately, he had blown himself up instead of being smashed up by the Lovebird Sword Array. His sword attack had won Wei Chengxiang time to react, and the upgraded immortal tools of the half-immortals had shielded him from the Lovebird Sword Array’s pursuit and attack, preserving his consciousness, which for him was the most crucial thing.

But the wretched thing was that his consciousness couldn’t form new bones at once.

Even with the hidden bones, a consciousness was still very weak. Without a body or the reincarnation wood, which was similar to a body, a cultivator’s consciousness was like a ghost in a folk legend; its farts wouldn’t even smell. This time he had really shattered too cleanly, like an ascended spirit foretaste of “escaping the mortal dust”… Even when he had been repeatedly struck by lightning in the Sanyue Mountains, he’d still had half of a charred body to take refuge in!

He felt as if he had turned into a puff of air, his dispersed viewpoint making him dizzy. In his daze, he even had a marvelous notion: if he flew any higher, wouldn’t he condense into clouds along with the water vapor, turn into rain, and “sprinkle his tears” upon the South Sea?

Goodness, he was even more poetic than the Blissful Village in Jinping’s southern outskirts, where thousands of beauties had been buried!

Xi Ping, so “poetic” he was rendered unconscious by it, was swirled out onto the water and bumped into a fierce wind off the sea, which rolled his hardly coherent consciousness into a cylinder. The hidden bones immediately seized the opportunity to rebuild his body with spiritual energy. When they had just formed a rough outline, the fierce wind crashed against an islet, and Xi Ping broke to pieces once again—this really was hovering between life and death in the literal sense. Xi Ping gave a start amid his daze, woken by pain.

The third wave of fire from the Luwu’s upgraded immortal tools surged up to the clouds, exploding in his ears.

Xi Ping was the Luwu’s main planner. How could he not know how things stood with his own people? At a single glance, he knew that the Luwu’s spiritual stones wouldn’t hold out much longer.

While everyone had yet to recover from the shock of the upgraded immortal tools, he took advantage of the wild wind blowing him toward the South Sea and made a prompt decision, leaping toward the “life and death mist” on the surface: there was no time for him to slowly grow a body; supposing there was anyone here who could still put up a fight against the Lovebird Sword Array, it could only be the Sword Slave!

As soon as his consciousness, light as air, landed in that peculiar mist, Xi Ping heard countless voices ringing in his ears. His consciousness seemed once again to have turned into a river, trying to hold the struggling watery ghosts of all those who had died in the vicinity since the time Pangu had cleaved apart heaven and earth to the present.

But Xi Ping breathed a sigh of relief. So this was what “the meeting between life and death” meant. He could relax now.

He was different from the others. Xi Ping had only too much experience with his consciousness fluttering around, being unable to find himself—when his body had been trapped in the Impassable Sea, his weak consciousness stranded outside had drifted through countless people living and dead. Now, innumerable thoughts flitted through his mind, but he concentrated and skillfully distinguished which thoughts were his and which were external.

He seemed to have turned into the canal, ignoring the swirling silt and garbage in the water, making his own way downstream. Soon he found the Sword Slave.

Xi Ping had never been so grateful for the Sword Slave’s conspicuous size!

“Senior, wake up!” Xi Ping’s consciousness contracted. Borrowing the spiritual energy inside the Queen Mother of the West’s hidden realm, it grew a finger bone and abruptly poked at the center of the Sword Slave’s forehead.

The center of the forehead was the seat of the spirit, the most sensitive spot; reasonably speaking, she ought to wake up!

But Xi Ping had underestimated the hardiness of a shed skin grade half-puppet body. The weak finger bone which could hardly gather spiritual energy couldn’t arouse Wanshuang’s vigilance. The Sword Slave stood there unaware, letting him poke, and the finger bone Xi Ping had worked so hard to grow snapped!

Xi Ping: “…”

Another roar. The Luwu’s fourth wave of firepower had been shot.

The sound was obviously even weaker. Xi Ping glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw that there were only established foundation grade upgraded immortal tools in that barrage; he knew at once that those colossal ascended spirit grade things had used up all the spiritual stones on the Luwu’s ships.

The ascended spirit grade ones could bear up, but beneath the divine tool of the mountains, established foundations were nothing. Facing the upgraded immortal tools whose tempo had become disordered, the Lovebird Sword Array pressed down like a heavenly tribulation upon the ants on the Southern He Peninsula who had dared irreverence.

In a moment of desperation, Xi Ping’s broken finger gathered weak spiritual energy and exerted a force that should have been beyond it. He actually succeeded in using his incomplete limb to pull out Yu Chang’s Discard the False and Keep the True book and used the lowest grade power replicated in it—the discounted version of the grit projection. He burrowed into the Sword Slave’s enormous shadow.

The grit projection was either the user’s true body hiding inside another’s shadow or a grit projection talisman activated at long range; even Yu Chang himself hadn’t tried out this method. After all, apart from Xi Ping, anyone whose consciousness left their body would fundamentally be near death.

Moreover, while each person had their own shadow, they overlapped when they fell on the ground or the surface of the sea; the shadow at the Sword Slave’s feet belonged to more than one person.

And this was the boundary between life and death.

The special place, the special technique, and the special consciousness all came together. Xi Ping’s vision blurred, and a marvelous change occurred to his point of view: he saw a tall, broad man, unfamiliar to him, with a soft sword very much like the Blind Wolf King’s wrapped around his waist. Behind him was a half-transparent Sword Slave.

Xi Ping was astonished. He could find people whose consciousnesses were stuck to those from the far side of the Wangchuan River, and he could see what they were experiencing now from a spectator’s point of view.

The Sword Slave seemed to be in a daze, following along closely like a balloon. She was looking into the sky along with the man’s stunned gaze—Xi Ping also looked in that direction, just in time to see a man self-destruct his own essence and use his Way of the Heart to attack the Lovebird Sword Array.

Xi Ping didn’t consider which period of history this was. If he’d had eyes, no doubt he would have used the hands he had spared no effort to grow to rub them thoroughly: he had seen another half-transparent person stuck to the Way of the Heart attacking the Lovebird Sword Array—Yao Qi!

Then, like a stamp, Ziming-xiong pressed against the hilt of the Lovebird Sword Array’s main sword with a bam!

The place where the Sword Slave had fallen into the mist just happened to be not far from Yao Qi. Their two shadows must have overlapped.

Taking advantage of the way his consciousness could spread and change form, Xi Ping flew in pursuit of Yao Qi. His dispersed consciousness congealed into a hand. A qin string with both ends melting into nothingness jumped out beneath the bones, and he played a shrill note into Yao Qi’s ear.

Yao Qi had originally maintained a thread of clarity because of his lack of skill with the foreign language. He was immediately awakened by the music.

Xi Ping heard Yao Qi, stuck face downward to the sword hilt, give a cry of happy surprise: “Shiyong!”

The qin strings held by the bone hand multiplied. Xi Ping played qin sweet notes: What’s happening?

Yao Qi said, “I don’t know. I seem to be possessing Lancang’s Sect Leader!”

The Sect Leader had rammed his Way of the Heart against the Lovebird Sword Array, embedding it in the hilt of the main sword; most likely it had yet to break!

And meanwhile, news of the upgraded immortal tools exploded like sudden thunder throughout the northern and southern continents. Kunlun’s High Priest instantly looked alarmed. The Sect Leader muttered briefly to himself. “Call the Third Elder. Have him bring some people and come south with me.”

In the Sanyue Mountains, the Silver Moon, which had been vacillating among the Principal Peaks, abruptly sank toward the East Peak. In the Lingyun Mountains, the Nine Dragons were uneasy. Yu Chang, desperately putting out fires, suddenly looked across the sea toward the Southern He Peninsula.

On the Wan-He border, a beam of light flew out of the moonlight frost tree in the courtyard of the Heaven’s Design Pavilion branch, so fast that even the karma beast on the wall didn’t have time to blink. A person had already landed at the courtyard gate—Zhi Xiu had walked out of his accompanying plant in a single step.