Chapter 600 — How Could This Be

"What ferocious divine power!

" Shen Mu's excitement rose unbidden. The nine-headed phoenix had not even reached him, yet the hurricane kicked up by the might of that great divine art had already blasted the band from his hair, sending his black mane streaming behind him, pulled taut as a bowstring!

The skin of his cheeks was scoured into ridgeline after ridgeline, and the searing air was hard to breathe.

Zhe Huali and Shen Mu were evenly matched, and Qi Jiuyi struck at both of them at once — a clear measure of the man's confidence.

He was certain he could take down two young masters like these together!

As the disciple of an ancient being of the Heavenly Court, he had excelled even in that most exalted of places. On this descent to the lower world, he presented a gentle, cultivated face and behaved with impeccable courtesy toward foe and friend alike, yet at heart he looked down on the strongmen of the mortal realm, dismissing them all as country bumpkins. This time his great divine art had been long brewing, and in the course of probing exchanges with Zhe Huali he had at last brought Nine Phoenixes Alight on Cangwu to flawless perfection.

It was a supreme divine art of the Imperial Throne method — a stroke which, once complete, sufficed to shatter any opponent of the same realm, matchless, absolutely without rival!

He would take both Shen Mu and Zhe Huali at once, proclaim the Heavenly Court's authority, and teach these mortal bumpkins where Heaven's might truly lay!

Shen Mu's blood boiled.

Qi Jiuyi was attacking both of them at once, and yet Shen Mu felt as though he alone faced the onslaught — this youth from the Heavenly Court was plainly a foe more terrible than any he had ever met; never had he seen such a dreadful opponent! Though Qi Jiuyi's great divine art needed time to shape and condense, the might of the technique left Shen Mu thrilled beyond all reason!

Never had he faced so fearful a foe!

He could not stop himself from sending out a long howl; within his body dragon roar after dragon roar detonated, eight peals in the space of a breath, and once the Eight Sounds of the Ancestral Dragon had rung, the Mystic Body Three-Elixir Art ran a full circuit through his frame!

The nine-headed phoenix shrieked toward him, a blaze of streaming light, dazzling and gorgeous, yet steeped in dreadful power!

In the instant of dropping from the tree it was already before Shen Mu.

Perched aloft it had seemed vast beyond measure, yet when it came at him it had contracted to less than a foot in size. Smaller its body, but all the greater its might, and all the keener its threat.

At the same time, Qi Jiuyi slammed out a palm seal, and the Cangwu tree swept down with a whoosh to greet the demon blade.

Blade met tree, and wave after wave of force spread across the field; the hurricane brimmed with flames and leaping knife-light, howling past to engulf everything around. The ground melted on the instant into magma, and all through the magma danced darting blade-glints.

In that single instant when two great divine arts collided, demon blade after demon blade flung itself up from the molten rock, each wielding a different form of knife-play, each hilt grown with a demonic eye of the most uncanny sort. Those eyes fixed dead upon Qi Jiuyi, and the track of every leaping blade seemed steered by those eerie pupils. Out of the magma likewise rose tiny Cangwu trees to hold off the blades — trees bearing phoenix nests and trailing rays of rosy light, smashing blade after blade as it flew from the lava. In the same instant, Shen Mu's sword elixir flew up to float between his brows; and as his sword finger lightly tapped his forehead, the tiny elixir of eight thousand swords burst into dizzying transformation.

Eight thousand swords became one blade of light, and with the thrust of his finger that blade-light kindled to immeasurable intensity, all his strength and all his energy gathered into it, and stabbed to meet the nine-headed phoenix. With a swish, the sword-light met the Nine Phoenix.

The beam was thick as a pillar when it burst from Shen Mu's fingertip, but after it left his sword finger it became infinitely fine, a needle of frigid light. And yet, when looked at closely, that needle of light seemed to harbor the great visions of a thousand worlds.

His first move in the Tribulation Sword was called the Sword That Opens Tribulation. The strike centered on the Carefree Sword, whose body had eight faces; upon those eight faces blazed the runes of Shen Mu's Mystic Body Three-Elixir Art, radiant on every side.

The sword-light cast the runes across the sub-swords one by one, and the power of each was kindled, the light rebounding from one sub-sword to the next, for every blade was an eight-sided mirror; in a bare breath all eight thousand stood alight, driving every last ounce of their power!

The positions of the eight thousand swords changed ceaselessly too, each tracing a different path, until at last all their force was gathered into the Carefree Sword. Such was the secret of the Sword That Opens Tribulation.

On the surface, Shen Mu had done no more than touch his brow and thrust one sword — the very picture of simplicity.

Yet behind that simple-looking strike lay his lifelong comprehension of cultivation, his physical body, his primordial spirit, his Dao arts and divine powers, everything he possessed. The Butcher and Fu Riluo had both spoken of reducing the myriad to the one; why did Shen Mu feel those words so keenly?

Because he had already reached that very stage! Compared with Qi Jiuyi's great divine art, which was slow to launch and needed time to prepare, Shen Mu's great divine art — his Tribulation Sword — fired with extraordinary speed! Such was the difference between a method created for oneself and one learned from another.

Shen Mu had set foot on the road where one's own method carries one into the Dao; since he had created the Tribulation Sword himself, his reaction was incomparably swift.

Zhe Huali's road was the blade; his knife techniques were his own creation, but his cultivation method was another's — he had studied Luo Wushuang's art and Fu Riluo's demonic method alike — and so his Dao-entering swordplay was a trace slower than Shen Mu's.

But even that trace slower was faster than Qi Jiuyi's great divine art. What set Qi Jiuyi above them both was that his method was the Heavenly Court's Imperial Throne method; the might of its divine arts was crushingly matchless, rarely seen in the world — in raw power alone it passed any number of True God methods!

But this great divine art of his was split in two: the Nine Phoenixes attacked Shen Mu, the Cangwu tree harried Zhe Huali, and the force of the move was likewise halved!

Shrrrk! Shen Mu's blade-light pierced the nine-headed phoenix through the skulls; the Carefree Sword drove straight through the body that the divine art had formed.

The phoenix looked small, yet it was composed of countless lesser divine arts, and all the arts forming its body burst out at once!

But the eight-thousand-sword might hidden within Shen Mu's thrust burst out with equal violence: eight thousand infinitesimal swords danced through amplitudes invisible to the naked eye, each executing a different sword move, slashing the divine arts within the phoenix's frame to ribbons. In one brief moment of collision, the nine-headed phoenix was annihilated, and the needle-fine sword-light flew straight for Qi Jiuyi.

His great divine art broken, Qi Jiuyi grunted dully.

Flames suddenly erupted behind him; his neck twisted, and from around it grew eight long necks densely covered in tiny phoenix feathers, every feather a sheen of seven colors. At the end of each neck lay a phoenix head, plumed like a sovereign of birds, and head after head struck down — ding, ding, ding — against Shen Mu's sword-light.