Chapter 68: Victory Belongs to Voldemort

Facing the giant skeletal hand, Lin Zhen’s combat power had plummeted drastically. The spiritual energy shield before him was as fragile as paper, offering not the slightest bit of resistance. The skeletal palm pierced straight through his chest, bursting open a massive spray of blood.

“No, impossible! Under the heavenly tribulation, the divine soul is locked on! No cultivator can escape it!”

Looking at the remaining skeleton of Jiang Xuanwu, Lin Zhen spat out a mouthful of frothy blood, unwilling to believe that his enemy was still alive.

“The tribulation is relentless and unending—of course it cannot be escaped. Jiang Xuanwu is dead; the one who lives now is Jiang Xing!”

Within the bedchamber, a middle-aged man wearing an imperial robe and possessing a heroic visage stepped out.

As his voice fell, the giant skeletal hand clenched shut. Without giving Lin Zhen a fraction of a second to react, his entire body was crushed into a pile of mangled flesh, with zero chance of survival.

A treasure as precious as a Third-Rank Space-Escaping Talisman was exceedingly rare, even in the hands of Core Formation masters; there was no way a second one existed.

Yet the once-heroic man in the imperial robe had barely stepped outside when the corpses scattered across the ground triggered something within him. His gaze suddenly flickered with a hint of struggle, and his expression grew uncharacteristically cowardly.

“What on earth is going on here? Why am I in this place?”

“Ancestor! Ancestor, where are you?!”

“Idiot, shut your mouth!”

The man’s expression shifted drastically. He had never expected that the divine soul which had been suppressed all this time would suddenly awaken, and he issued a low reprimand.

“There are still hundreds of thousands of rebel soldiers outside. Take off that imperial robe right now, put on the clothes of a rebel soldier, and get out of the palace first!”

“Who are you? Why are you inside my body?”

“This old man hails from the main branch of the Jiang family, and I am your ancestor. Now that a monumental upheaval has occurred, I had no choice but to possess your body. Hurry out of the palace—I can already sense someone approaching!”

The voice grew increasingly urgent.

Deep within the man’s body, Jiang Xuanwu felt a surge of annoyance.

He was no reckless fool, so naturally, he had left himself a fallback plan.

In order to completely evade the locking-on effect of the heavenly tribulation, he had long ago used a secret technique to preserve a sliver of extremely faint residual soul, concealing it within this flesh-and-blood vessel he had refined for over a decade.

Should he fail to survive the heavenly tribulation, he would still have a chance to start over.

Yet the residual soul he left behind was far too weak; it was utterly insufficient to immediately seize this physical body. He could only temporarily exist through the form of possession and coexistence.

Once he recovered a fraction of his strength, he would be able to suppress the original body’s divine soul and then be reborn by borrowing the flesh.

This kind of soul-seizing could not inherit one’s cultivation base and meant starting entirely from scratch, which was why it had originally been just a backup plan.

However, he now had the experience of undergoing the heavenly tribulation, coupled with this quasi-third-rank golden skeleton that was bound to him by blood and tempered by the tribulation itself.

Jiang Xuanwu was confident that he could return to the peak of Foundation Establishment before his lifespan expired, and once again pursue the Dao of Core Formation.

Unfortunately, the man in the imperial robe had been refined in a blood pool for over a dozen years.

At this moment, his memories were still frozen in the time more than a decade ago when he was the Supreme Ruler of the Realm; how could he easily obey a voice that had suddenly appeared inside his head?

“What on earth has happened? Where is my Imperial Guard? What has become of my empire?”

“Damn it!”

Seeing that this fellow was hopelessly obstinate, Jiang Xuanwu had no choice but to expend the very last bit of power in his residual soul, once again forcibly taking control of the man.

As he was about to strip off the imperial robe, he spotted a white-haired young man in the distance, nimbly scaling the walls like a monkey and rapidly approaching.

“Where is the Guild Master?”

Scanning the area, the youth caught sight of Lin Zhen’s mangled head lying near Jiang Xuanwu’s feet, yet he did not recognize it at all.

Whenever Lin Zhen served as the Guild Master of the Azure Dragon Guild, he always wore a mask and acted with extreme secrecy, so much so that even after his death, no one knew his true identity.

“Are you the Emperor?”

Not seeing the Guild Master, the white-haired youth shifted his gaze to Jiang Xuanwu, his eyes brimming with utter contempt.

“Everyone else is dead, yet you’re actually still alive?”

Jiang Xuanwu suppressed the impulse to use the skeleton to slaughter the white-haired youth.

The power of his residual soul was severely depleted, and controlling the emperor had already drained almost all of it. He could only rely on bloodline instinct one last time to make the skeleton unleash a single strike—this was his trump card for self-preservation, and he could not waste it here.

“I am the Lord of Yue. Even in defeat, I should be treated with the courtesy due a sovereign.”

Hearing this, the white-haired youth delivered a fierce kick, sending Jiang Xuanwu sprawling in a massive tumble.

“So you’re the one they call the Emperor!”

“Damn it, I’ve been wanting to mess with you for ages!”

“After all these years, where have you been hiding? Do you have any idea what the outside world has turned into? Not attending court or managing state affairs for over a dozen years—you really something else.”

“I was living a peaceful life in seclusion, farming and fishing. Just because you neglected your duties, my fields were seized and my wife ran off!”

“And now you still expect me to show you courtesy? Courtesy of your mother’s—!”

*Bang, bang, bang!*

The white-haired youth rained down kicks upon him, feeling immensely vindicated.

Being trampled under the feet of a mere mortal martial artist made Jiang Xuanwu’s lungs feel fit to burst with rage.

Yet he constantly reminded himself to endure. Back then, he had merely been a collateral branch member of the Jiang family, and stepping up step-by-step to reach where he was today had relied entirely on the virtue of forbearance.

Little did he know that because of his silent forbearance, a pair of eyes hidden in the shadows was growing brighter and brighter.

***

Yu Xian had thought of himself as a salted fish simply waiting to be discarded. Let them fight however they wanted; he was just going to lie right here and do nothing.

However, when he witnessed Old Ancestor Jiang and Lin Zhen taking each other down in mutual destruction, he suddenly experienced an epiphany.

Hunker down until the very end, and you shall have everything!

As a master of playing dead in the shadows, he seemed to have become the ultimate winner behind the scenes.

Heaven and earth be his witness, he really had only come to watch the show; the thought of scavenging leftovers had long since been cast a hundred thousand miles away.

Yet if he refused to pick up these free spoils now, he would practically be turning away the feast that the heavens were spoon-feeding him.

With a flick of Yu Xian’s thought, a ethereal voice chimed directly beside the white-haired youth’s ear.

“The Wayless Demonic Monarch deserves to be executed by all! Kill him, and you shall be a hero in the hearts of the common people! This old man bestows upon you the Great Dao of Immortality.”

The white-haired youth paused mid-action, realizing that a cultivation immortal had arrived in the shadows.

Yet he spat on the ground and scoffed disdainfully, “Don’t try to fool me. There must be something weird about this little emperor fellow, or why wouldn’t you kill him yourself?”

“I’ll kill him!”

It was another bold martial artist who had rushed over right after the white-haired youth.

Earlier, the great battle between two Foundation Establishment masters had wreaked havoc and affected countless innocent bystanders, and the spectacle of a peak Foundation Establishment expert forcibly crossing a heavenly tribulation had been so earth-shattering that it had long since terrified the rebel soldiers.

Coupled with the loss of their Cult Master—their guiding beacon—many people had grown fearful and fled, taking the stolen treasures with them.

Only those who were daring, or those hoping to pick up scraps, remained behind.

Even if it was just a fraction, the initial base number had been so enormous that the people left behind were still substantial in number.

Especially these martial artists from the Azure Dragon Guild—they were utterly unscrupulous, and among them were quite a few who yearmed to tread the path of Dao. Now that someone was offering the Great Dao of Immortality as a reward, they were willing to give it a try, hazard and danger be damned.

Yu Xian had transmitted his voice to a dozen martial artists simultaneously, and naturally, several of them accepted the offer.

Suddenly, a blade-flash cleaved through the air as a martial artist unleashed a beam of sword qi directly targeting Jiang Xuanwu.

The white-haired youth did not make a move himself, but he did not stop the others either.

Anger flared in Jiang Xuanwu’s eyes. Wisps of blood qi emerged from the skeleton behind him, and it threw a punch forward. The blade-wielding martial artist exploded mid-air like a shattered watermelon.

“I am the Lord of All Under Heaven, and I have immortal families protecting me from behind! If any of you dare to strike against me, your entire nine clans shall be implicated! Otherwise, why hasn’t the person hiding behind the scenes made a move himself?”

“If you all turn back from your delusions now, I promise that whether it is wealth, power, or the methods of cultivation, I can bestow them upon you.”

“Really?”

Quite a few people were tempted.

“Watch out!”

Hearing the warning, Jiang Xuanwu—lacking the reaction time of his mortal flesh—watched as a streak of green light burst forth from beneath the ground, splitting him straight down the middle.

“Aaaaah!”

Jiang Xuanwu’s residual soul was forced out of his physical body. Staring straight at the ruins in the distance, he finally discovered the hidden mastermind behind the scenes who had been playing dirty all along.

“Come out!”

“Come out right now!”

His residual soul attempted to dive back into his skeleton to regain control of its power, but a flash of lightning flickered across the bones—the residual energy of the heavenly tribulation—and Jiang Xuanwu’s final thread of soul was instantly vaporized in mid-air.

The others were oblivious to the underlying mechanics; they only felt a massive pressure bearing down from the air.

The martial artists in the courtyard suffered splitting headaches, their movements growing sluggish and labored. By the time they finally snapped out of it, the three corpses on the ground had completely vanished.

From beginning to end, no one ever saw who the attacker was.

Later on, cultivators from the Jiang and Lin families rushed over from the cultivation world. They seized the martial artists who had breached the imperial palace and subjected them to various secret arts for interrogation, yet not a single person could provide even a shred of a clue. They could only deduce that the mysterious attacker must have been a Foundation Establishment cultivator.

As time passed, the incident eventually became an unsolved mystery.