Chapter Ninety-One: A Merciless Slaughter

At the end of the trial, everyone stared at one another in astonishment. They had never seen such a colossal sword before, and all of them wondered just how heavy it must be.

Zhen Ba said to Li Hao, “Young Master, let us go take a look.”

“All right. Be careful, everyone.”

When Li Hao finished speaking, the seven of them stopped three paces away from the crimson greatsword. Beside the blade, countless lines of writing were densely packed together, though they could not be seen clearly. Qin Zhen asked curiously, “What is this?”

None of them knew what the text by the sword was for. Only after Lin Xueyou activated her Eye of Law did the writing beside the greatsword become clear. She read aloud:

The Sword Song of the God-Demon World-Extinguishing Sword

Do not ask how many times my family sword has rested;
the spirit ascends in the east, the flesh is tempered anew.

If one truly knows gods and demons,
then ask not whether the blade holds evil or corruption.

It cuts down every sin beneath the heavens,
yet time still drives men to their rest.

If you would wield this sword and depart this world,
no man can make the sword-heart follow.

With a hundred thousand rivers of stars roaring like dragons and tigers,
one stroke seals the throat, never to meet again.

To pass it on, one must possess the power of heaven and earth;
peer through good and evil, for in truth they have no root.

The sun god joins with the night demon of his own accord;
some, in ignorance, climb the wrong tower.

Not betraying the living, not betraying the heart;
deceiving neither the old nor the young, nor the poor.

Do not ask me what I cultivate for;
I roam free through the nine heavens.

If people of this age ask where I return,
first pass the towering Eighteen Stars.

Of its own accord, thunder and lightning shake the nine firmaments;
the sword leaves its scabbard and flows toward the east.

Sword qi sweeps away the waters of the star river,
striking down the gods above and extinguishing demons below.

When the sword is drawn, do not ask whether the road is open;
it must surpass the stars, the sun, and the moon in endurance.

If someone asks me how I practice the sword,
I point to the sun, moon, and stars on the far horizon.

I take joy in the mortal world by my own will,
crossing seas and oceans, flying wherever I please.

Alone I climb the star river to gaze upon the Eight Peaks;
after the black clouds part, the moon remains solitary.

In this boundless universe, there are countless people;
how many men truly count as heroes?

A single day’s effort spans the star river of the cosmos;
I ride neither phoenix nor dragon.

I would cut down ugliness and evil with a flying divine sword,
and crush eighty thousand peaks of the star river.

East and west I go through the curtain of wind,
my sleeves hiding dragons, my courage vast.

How many times have I entered the mortal world unseen?
I seek to roam freely, leaping across the Nine Provinces.

A journey of eight thousand miles takes but half a day;
yet the road back is still never found.

Beneath the stars, at night, jade hairpins gleam coldly;
beauty knows only sorrow and joy.

When sword mastery is complete, I leave you behind;
wherever evil exists, there I shall strike.

If you ask the heavens where I shall return,
I seal the sun and moon and declare myself heaven.

The treasured sword in its case roars at all times;
it shall never be passed on unless it meets a kindred soul.

The secrets of heaven and earth may not be spoken;
human nature wanders and is lost, by the tens of thousands.

At the ends of the earth, people come seeking me;
once I have walked to the horizon, I seek no one.

With the sword rising, stars race for ten thousand miles to slay;
wind and thunder chase after it, amid the rough sound of rain.

Wherever the sword points, nonhuman things are there;
one stroke cuts off the heads of the Five Continents.

A sword raised into the sky for ten thousand miles,
departing in spring, never to return.

Today we meet in this cavern,
a trace of scarlet warns you to stop.

If you bear the three-pace sword in its case,
you would right the wrongs of the world.

Li Yao, Li Hao, Zhen Ba, Li Zhan, Qin Zhen, and Kui Hu listened with rapt attention as Lin Xueyou recited, utterly absorbed. Yet as the words went on, drowsiness crept over them. In the end, only Li Hao remained standing.

After Lin Xueyou finished reading, she felt as though all her strength had been drained away. Looking around, she saw everyone slumped at odd angles. With no time to worry about anything else, she could only sit down in meditation to recover her strength.

Though Li Hao did not fall, his spirit was already adrift across the Nine Provinces, his body seeming devoid of a soul. Not long after Lin Xueyou sat cross-legged, she too drifted into sleep without realizing it.

After Li Hao and the others fell asleep, their consciousness entered a boundless starry cosmos. Of course, this was not the true universe, but a special space of memory.

Each of them stood in a different place, yet the scene reflected in every pair of eyes was exactly the same. Each felt as though they were standing at the highest point in the starry vault.

Beneath their feet lay an endless battlefield, strewn with severed limbs and corpses. Humans, demons, and countless other races were locked in brutal conflict. The war dragged on without cease. After a month, all the warriors were exhausted. The two sides reached an unspoken accord and ceased fighting, beginning to arm themselves for the battles to come.

In the more powerful faction, many young warriors began ravaging villages far and wide, slaughtering, burning, looting, and committing every evil imaginable. The old, the weak, and the wounded were mercilessly killed. Whatever they could take, they took; whatever they could not, they destroyed on the spot.

Beautiful young women were tormented to death by their monstrous cruelty. Wherever they passed, smoke and flames spread thickly, and no one survived. All that remained were the bodies of the elderly, the infirm, and the dying, along with the naked corpses of young women stripped of their clothing.

These scenes made Li Hao’s eyes turn bloodshot. He wanted to save those ordinary people who had no power to resist; he wanted to tear the whole pack of vile beasts limb from limb. Yet he could not move, and could only drift above, watching scene after scene unfold.

In his heart, he resolved that he must grow strong. He must protect the loved ones beside him. If he remained weak, the tragedy before his eyes would one day become his own. He thought of the scenes he had seen in dreams twelve years ago; fortunately, those had only been war. They had not dragged down the old, the weak, and the sick of his own homeland.

Lin Xueyou and Lu Yao, two unmarried maidens, very much wanted to close their eyes and not look at these scenes. Yet at that moment, they did not even possess the right to shut their eyes. Reality was so cruel in its treatment of them. Tears fell from both women’s eyes for those innocent lives, two cold lines of sorrow.

They had grown up sheltered from hardship. To them, the world had always seemed beautiful. They had never imagined that it could show such a merciless side. Their pure hearts were struck hard by these scenes, almost to the point of collapse. Strangely enough, they could not even faint as they wished.

Zhen Ba, seeing all this, could not help imagining the calamity that had befallen his own homeland, the Stellar Radiance Domain. The hatred in his heart kept swelling, and with every passing moment he felt himself wholly consumed by its blazing fury. He felt as though he might lose his reason at any instant, yet a faint clarity somehow remained, preventing him from collapsing into unconsciousness.

Kui Hu, Li Zhan, and Qin Zhen also trembled inwardly at these unbearably horrific scenes. They too had been flowers grown in a greenhouse, and the most they had ever seen were petty quarrels and minor disturbances. How could they ever have witnessed such cruelty?

Just as Li Hao and the others reached the peak of their emotions, a scarlet sword light, ten thousand fathoms long, descended from the heavens. At last, those beasts received their punishment. One moment they were still immersed in the screams and pleas of the girls they had ravaged; the next, they were annihilated to dust by that overwhelmingly domineering strike, vanishing forever from heaven and earth.

A middle-aged man then appeared in the starry sky, stern-faced and clad in black. He held a crimson giant sword and stood proudly amid the void, his authority inherent and unspoken. His eyes were bright and piercing, daring no one to meet his gaze.

Without speaking, he gathered the laws of heaven and earth from ten thousand miles around into the giant sword in his hand, then slashed down toward the ground with irresistible force. Li Hao and the others had believed this unstoppable strike would sweep away those inhuman scum like dry weeds before a storm, but the result was beyond all expectation.

As the sword light fell three thousand miles, a black giant spear rose from below, thrusting up to meet the strike. The sword and spear collided in the starry sky.

With a thunderous boom, the shockwave spread for a hundred thousand miles. Wherever it passed, spatial storms raged. After that single exchange, a gray-clad middle-aged man appeared before the black-robed one. His expression was grim, and even the long spear in his hand seemed to radiate a chill that sank to the bone.

The two men faced each other in the air. It seemed they were speaking, though Li Hao and the others could not hear a word. None of them knew what was being said.

A few breaths later, the two erupted into battle. Every move they made caused space itself to tremble, and all living beings who came near were blasted to ash by the shockwaves of their struggle. The black-robed middle-aged man struck only with the sword; after a hundred exchanges, the spear-wielder began to fall behind and was forced into retreat. By the one hundred and twentieth sword, the spear-wielder was sent crashing into the ground.

Centered on the spear-wielder, a radius of a thousand miles was flattened into rubble. Mountains and rivers were leveled by the shockwaves, and the camp of the spear-wielder was buried under rolling dust and smoke. After several dozen breaths, corpses already lay everywhere within the battle’s reach.

The sword-wielding man struck again, and the camp of the spear-wielder was razed to the ground. This strike was also the middle-aged man’s final blow; once it fell, he vanished.

Seeing this, Li Hao and the others felt an immense sense of satisfaction. As the sword-wielding man disappeared, the scene shifted again, and they found themselves inside a cavern.

All around them flickered lightning and thunder, and they could only keep moving forward. With every step they took, the path behind them vanished. If they stood still, they would be struck by lightning.

Yet the farther they went, the heavier their bodies became, and the more difficult each step felt. After Lin Xueyou and Lu Yao had walked about three hundred meters, they could no longer continue. Just as they tried to stop and rest, a thunder sphere struck them, and they vanished at once.

Li Hao and the others seemed not to notice that Lin Xueyou and Lu Yao had disappeared, and kept straining forward.

This was an illusion designed to test the strength of a cultivator’s soul. Within it, the cultivator’s soul would be deceived by the scenes before their eyes. They could not see the people beside them; only fear and stubborn refusal in their hearts drove them onward.

Qin Zhen made it five hundred meters before he could no longer continue, and was blasted back to reality by a thunder sphere. Li Zhan reached five hundred and fifty meters, Kui Hu six hundred, and Zhen Ba eight hundred. All of them were sent back by thunder spheres.

By then, only Li Hao remained, struggling on with all his might. His soul was now more than ten times stronger than Zhen Ba’s and the others. The reason for such formidable spirit power was that it had long been nourished by the primal force of chaos and refined through the Reincarnation Breath-Concealing Soul-Tempering Art.

As long as they could break through the seal over the cave entrance, they would have a fifty percent chance of obtaining the crimson greatsword before them. If they opened the stone door and took the sword, their chances would rise to sixty percent. If they could pass the sword’s trial, the odds would reach eighty percent. The remaining twenty percent would depend on whether anyone could truly master the blade. If they missed this chance, the heavens of the inner world would seal this place again, and it would drift at random into another space.

Now, apart from Li Hao, the others had all awakened. Recalling the scenes they had witnessed, a bitterness and desolation they could not put into words still lingered in their hearts. Lin Xueyou and Lu Yao suffered the most, followed by Kui Hu, Li Zhan, and Qin Zhen.

Qin Zhen was the first to speak. “Why has the Young Master not awakened yet? I do not know what he is enduring at this moment.”

Li Zhan asked, “Yes. Did all of you enter a soul trial?”

The others nodded, and the answer was plain enough. Seeing that Lin Xueyou and Lu Yao looked somewhat pale, Zhen Ba asked, “Are the two princesses injured?”

Lin Xueyou and Lu Yao shook their heads.

“No,” Lin Xueyou said. “I was only struck by the illusion. My heart has not yet recovered.”

Kui Hu asked, “What did you all see? I saw scene after scene of gruesome wartime slaughter, and I also underwent a soul trial.”

“So did I. So did I. So did I.”

Only then did they realize that what everyone had seen and experienced was exactly the same.

While they were speaking, Li Hao suddenly stood up and walked toward the crimson greatsword.