Radiant Blade of the Wilderness

Chapter 302: A Variable

The moment Shang Liangyun of the Returning Abyss Order opened the abandoned house’s wooden door, a spark of cold light flashed and shot straight for the center of his brow.

An attack!

And a strong one!

There was no time to wonder why his own "disaster-averting" ability hadn’t worked. The void around Shang Liangyun instantly dimmed, as if even the moonlight and starlight had dissolved into this patch of heaven and earth.

Somewhere to his right, a dark vortex suddenly formed and turned into a bottomless abyss, drawing in all the "water" from every direction and creating a terrifying suction.

It tugged at the spark of cold light that was the refined-steel longsword, forcing it to veer sideways, no longer stabbing at Shang Liangyun’s forehead.

Seizing the chance, Shang Liangyun raised both hands and clamped the steel sword between his palms.

His body suddenly turned hollow, as if he had become the Returning Abyss itself, steadily drawing in the enemy’s true qi, his strength, and even the material of the longsword.

It was like hundreds of rivers returning to the sea, the ultimate principle of heaven and earth, one that was impossible to resist.

The steel longsword kept breaking down, and along with the enemy’s uncontrolled true qi and strength, it poured wildly into Shang Liangyun’s body, filling the Abyss that could never be filled.

In the end, even the opponent’s body was torn into flesh and blood and melted into Shang Liangyun’s palms, clump by clump.

Shang Liangyun still wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t enough, and his hunger hadn’t eased in the slightest.

No, I’ve absorbed so much true qi and flesh. How could I feel nothing at all...

As if they were fake!

His boundless, insatiable desire made Shang Liangyun sense something wrong.

The thought flashed by, and the scene before his eyes collapsed inch by inch. The deep dark void that had devoured even the moonlight and starlight quickly shattered.

A dream.

He had just been dreaming.

When he woke, the gleaming tip of the sword was only about four centimeters from his brow.

Shang Liangyun jerked his body backward and opened his mouth.

He sucked in a sharp breath, using his own stomach as the Returning Abyss to swallow this patch of heaven and earth.

Whoosh!

The airflow twisted into the shape of a waterspout and poured into Shang Liangyun’s mouth with a piercing sound, carrying all sorts of things along with it, including that steel longsword.

The sword tip descended out of control, no longer pointing at his brow but heading straight for his mouth.

Shang Liangyun’s tiger-like teeth snapped shut, biting the steel sword tip.

Then a smile full of greed and craving appeared on his face.

His body turned into the "Returning Abyss," and a terrifyingly intense suction surged from his teeth and mouth.

With one draw, the smile on Shang Liangyun’s face froze.

He couldn’t suck it in!

He couldn’t pull in the other side’s true qi!

Not only that, his "suction" was stuck to the enemy’s sword tip, rapidly becoming part of the enemy, tinged with dark color, strangely assimilated.

What... For a moment, Shang Liangyun thought he had become a traitor and was under attack by his own order’s Dharma King.

He quickly realized it wasn’t the Returning Abyss Divine Art but a quite similar martial art, one that could even absorb his own Returning Abyss.

Shang Liangyun’s heart froze with fear. He tried to break free of the predicament but found that his true qi was absorbing and dissolving the other’s true qi while the other’s true qi was assimilating and converting his own. The two were entangled, impossible to separate for the moment.

Stall! The longer I stall, the more likely a good variable will appear! The thought suddenly burst into Shang Liangyun’s mind.

He practiced the Returning Abyss Divine Art, which came with a "disaster-averting" ability.

There were two kinds of "disaster-averting." One worked beforehand: by a lucky twist of fate he would escape many calamities, and might even brush past an enemy without being noticed. This was affected by many external factors, including whether the source of the calamity was truly hiding its strength and realm and whether it had sealed off its own thoughts.

The other kind worked while something was happening.

In a fight or a desperate situation, good variables often appeared, letting a Returning Abyss Divine Art practitioner escape with his life and avoid being killed. The longer the fight lasted, the more likely a good variable became. But at the Dharma Realm, such a variable would only appear once, and if even that variable couldn’t save the practitioner, it meant the calamity couldn’t be avoided.

Shang Liangyun didn’t know why he hadn’t luckily avoided this attack. All he knew was that this wasn’t the time to investigate. He had to do everything he could to resist this terrifyingly strong enemy with a special martial art, and stall to wait for a change.

Feeling his own true qi and tiger teeth steadily turning dark, Shang Liangyun’s mind stirred, and he reversed the Returning Abyss Divine Art.

The true qi in his body surged out, crashing against the enemy’s dim, dark sword tip like a mountain flood or a towering tsunami.

Over all these years, Shang Liangyun had absorbed the true qi of countless opponents, and even drained a large share of them, flesh and blood included.

What he swallowed and dissolved didn’t vanish into thin air. Part of it strengthened his body, and part of it became part of his true qi.

It could be said that, as long as he wasn’t compared with other Returning Abyss Order Grandmasters, the depth and vastness of Shang Liangyun’s true qi was second to none in the entire Great Wilderness, and few could match it.

Often, even without using the Returning Abyss, he could defeat opponents of the same realm by crushing them with true qi alone.

At this moment, Shang Liangyun poured out a huge amount of true qi without holding anything back, intending to burst through the enemy’s conversion and escape this awkward and dangerous situation.

With a roar, his tidal wave of true qi, like mountains calling and the sea roaring, exceeded the attacker’s limit of conversion.

The steel longsword was blasted to pieces, fragments flying everywhere, and some of the uncontrolled true qi turned into a gale that howled in every direction, stirring up a chaos in which all senses were badly weakened.

Shang Liangyun was delighted. He tapped his toes, about to dodge the sword fragments and open some distance from the enemy.

Just then, pain stabbed his throat. He looked down and saw a dark, murky Chaos sword qi that had slipped up silently during the chaos and pierced his neck.

Impossible... In that chaos, ordinary sword qi would all be affected and quickly collapse... This sword qi... Shang Liangyun was shocked to find that the sword qi that had struck his throat was not only exceptionally stable but was also transforming the scattered true qi and chaotic energy to sustain itself.

In a single breath, Shang Liangyun’s throat was pierced through by the dark sword qi, exposing horrifying flesh.

A wound like that would be extremely fatal even for a Dharma Realm Grandmaster. Anyone else might already be dying, but Shang Liangyun practiced the Returning Abyss Divine Art.

In desperation, he used the flesh around the wound as the Returning Abyss, creating a terrifying suction that drew back all the blood about to spurt out and filled the wound.

Shang Liangyun gave it everything, fighting the fatal wound to escape the "summons" of the underworld.

Striking while his enemy was weak, Ding Songyan thrust out his left index finger and pressed it against this Returning Abyss Order Grandmaster’s brow.

The finger was stained with deep darkness, as if from the end of the Returning Abyss.

......

The man in the bamboo hat who had met with Shang Liangyun circled a few breaths through the sparse woods when a thought suddenly struck him.

He wanted to follow that Returning Abyss Order Grandmaster and secretly find out whether they were using him and whether they had set traps for what came next.

After brief deliberation, the black-robed man in the bamboo hat and face cloth lightly and swiftly slipped back to the dried-up pond.

Before he could even observe his surroundings, he saw at the door of the abandoned house a man in a brown short coarse jacket pointing a finger at Shang Liangyun’s forehead, while Shang Liangyun had a hideous wound at his throat, the blood trying to gush out but unable to.

The Returning Abyss Order Grandmaster seemed to have lost all ability to resist, with death only a moment away.

The man in the bamboo hat was shaken to the core, never expecting such a scene.

Ambushed?

I was gone for only a short while, and Shang Liangyun, a Returning Abyss Order Grandmaster, is already badly wounded and about to be killed?

And he has only one enemy!

The black-robed man in the bamboo hat believed that if his thought had come a few breaths later, all he would see now would be a corpse, and the killer would be long gone, identity unknown.

It was like visiting a friend and, just after leaving the courtyard, remembering something and hurrying back, only to find the friend lying on his back in the main room, blood everywhere, no longer breathing, and this friend wasn’t a helpless scholar but a powerful martial artist.

In a flash, the man in the bamboo hat reached out from his sleeves, each hand gripping a honeycomb-shaped sphere that seemed to hold dozens or hundreds of beads.

The two spheres whistled out. Ding Songyan’s mind stirred, and he changed his extended finger to a grab and flung Shang Liangyun behind him to block the entrance of the main room.

He himself bent his back and darted into the abandoned house.

Halfway through the air, the two spheres suddenly burst, and the beads inside shot at the main room’s doorway with extreme speed and great force, almost blanketing the whole area.

Rat-a-tat-tat!

Shang Liangyun’s eyes went wide, but he had nowhere to dodge. Bead after bead slammed into his body and ripped it into pieces.

The variable he had been waiting for did come, but he died in it.

Rat-a-tat-tat!

The remaining beads snapped wooden pillars and punched through walls, and the long-abandoned house quickly collapsed.

The crashing sound echoed far, reaching the ears of the martial artists and soldiers toward the city gate.

The man in the bamboo hat took out a sleeve arrow, cast from some unknown material, flowing with a golden glimmer and giving off scorching, pure light.

He flicked his right hand, and the sleeve arrow flew to the side of Shang Liangyun’s corpse and burst into a blinding blaze like a great sun.

When the golden sleeve arrow spun back into his hand, the black-robed man left at once while trailing afterimages, and vanished deep into the night, leaving only a cold wind.

On the other side of the dried-up pond, Ding Songyan emerged from the earth. Watching that figure he couldn’t catch up to, he frowned slightly and muttered silently,

Superb movement technique, beyond me, and skilled in hidden weapons and mechanisms too...

Someone from the Xie family or the Fang clan?

As for the sleeve arrow that destroyed souls, that wasn’t worth making a fuss over. It was clearly a rare item made of special material, the kind even top-tier factions might not have.

Sensing several martial artists approaching, Ding Songyan sank back into the earth and fled far away.