The longsword spun like lightning, leaving nothing but a gleam of cold light.
Amidst the surging beast tide, Jiang Wang had no time to cast Dao arts. He could only rely on his sword techniques to weave and dodge among the ferocious beasts.
The golden light arrow inscribed upon his blade had long since been shot into the eye of a lion-shaped beast. The next strike would take a long time to recover.
Were it not for the ferocity of the Four Spirit Body-Tempering Art, Jiang Wang could hardly have survived.
In truth, in this wave of beast attacks, more than a hundred cultivators had been killed in battle! Not even their corpses had been left behind.
Jiang Wang pressed close to a huge ox-shaped beast, circling it left and right, both sending the beast into a furious rage and making it hard for the other beasts to strike him.
But he was fully aware that the time of safety was far from at hand. He was still dancing on the edge of a knife; a single lapse would leave not even his bones behind.
He did not even yet know where the beast that had loosed that pillar of light was, or what it looked like.
And he had become separated from Zhao Rucheng.
If he was coping with such difficulty, how was Zhao Rucheng faring?
Jiang Wang did not dare to imagine.
He had already unleashed all of his strength, and while weaving through the battle, he strained to search for Zhao Rucheng, all the while watching the direction of that pillar of light.
As the ox-beast thundered on, Jiang Wang was the first to catch sight of the beast with the innate talent art.
Even in such a furious tide of beasts, driven by instinct, the others had cleared a stretch of open ground for it.
It was a ferocious beast that looked like a black cat, surprisingly small in build. Yet it stood quietly amid the raging beast tide, like a rock in the midst of a torrent. Only a pair of blood-red eyes revealed its true ferocious nature.
At that moment it seemed to yawn lazily, but its mouth gaped wider and wider, wider and wider, until in a trice it was the size of a wooden basin. And at the center of its opened maw, a ball of crimson light slowly took shape.
Following the direction it had aimed, Jiang Wang looked and instantly his eyes nearly split with fury. There, Zhao Rucheng was being surrounded and torn at by seven or eight ferocious beasts, in peril at every turn.
Jiang Wang vaulted onto the back of the ox-beast, flicking a stroke of his sword to provoke it into a frenzy, then with swift steps along its flanks, shot forth!
He was dancing on the heads of the beasts!
Dodging the countless bites and strikes along the way, he suddenly rose into the air.
The Fourth Killing Stroke of the Purple Qi from the East Sword Art — his sword-light burst out violently.
Wrapped in an extraordinarily resplendent radiance, Jiang Wang burst through the pack of beasts, charging at full speed to Zhao Rucheng's side. He grabbed the young man by the shoulder and hurled him backward!
The instant Zhao Rucheng was flung away, Jiang Wang spun three times in the air. And only then did the crimson pillar of light blasted by the black-cat-shaped beast whistle past, narrowly brushing by him.
It was tension carried to the extreme, and skill carried to the extreme.
But he had overlooked the ox-beast that he had been "toying" with all this while.
It was a Deer-Ox, shaped as if a bull and a deer had been mixed together, yet with hide as thick as stone, skin as sturdy as iron, and boundless strength. After being used as a shield for so long, it had disregarded everything else and fixed its eyes solely on Jiang Wang, charging blindly wherever it went.
At the very moment the crimson pillar of light again blasted open a path, Jiang Wang spun and landed upon a mountain spider, leveling his single sword to slash through the giant spider's compound eyes.
But just then, the Deer-Ox leaped into the air and slammed head-first into Jiang Wang!
Caught unprepared, Jiang Wang could only raise his sword before him. His whole person was sent flying high, and behind him — there was a cliff!
How tall was Jade Scales Peak? At least from halfway up, the view downward was already obscured by clouds and mist.
"Third Brother!"
Zhao Rucheng rushed forward almost madly, but what met him was a pack of ferocious beasts lunging wildly.
...
Their battlefield was at the edge of the cliff on the north side.
Ye Qingyu advanced, fighting as she went, having sought Jiang Wang all the way here.
Before the second, even more dreadful eruption of the beast tide, proud and haughty as she was, what she had thought of was: she absolutely had to save Jiang Wang at least once in return.
Setting aside how many lifesaving secret treasures she had spent along the way, faced with the ever-swelling beast tide, she thought darkly to herself: she still had two secret treasures left; if she could not find the person up ahead, she would have to withdraw from this place.
Then she saw... a stretch of mangled corpses and shredded flesh.
It was the battlefield where, of all the ones she had passed along the way, the ferocious-beast corpses had been cut into the most thorough fragments.
The whole mountain ground was also rugged and uneven, with three most conspicuous gullies ripped out by some kind of force.
Sitting in one of those gullies was a man.
Catching only a glimpse of his profile, one could tell he was already extremely handsome.
Blood ran in streams around him and mangled corpses lay everywhere, yet the man merely sat on the ground, head slightly bowed, long hair tumbled loose.
"...Hey?" Ye Qingyu probed.
The man slowly raised his head and cast her a glance.
What a cold and savage look it was!
But then he gave a wobble and collapsed into the pool of blood.
...
At this point in the battle for Jade Scales Peak as a whole.
The dean of Sanshan City's Dao Academy had died in battle. Of the more than five hundred cultivators mustered this time, over half had been killed.
The pack of beasts had breached every line of defense; the furthest had nearly charged all the way down to the supply base at the foot of the mountain, slaughtering wantonly.
Small wonder defeat loomed.
Perhaps, even from the moment the flock of Yin-Yang Two-Headed Eagles appeared, defeat had already been sealed.
Amid a desolation of despair, Dou Yuemei, City Lord of the Three Mountains, once again stepped forward.
But no one believed she could work a miracle.
Back then, Sun Heng, at the Inner Prefecture realm, had gone alone to reverse the beast tide, slaying the head of the beasts to turn the tide of battle. But he too had met his end, body and soul destroyed.
And everyone knew — Dou Yuemei was only at the peak of the sixth-grade Dragon-Rising Realm. In those days, the Zhuang court, moved by Sun Heng's sacrifice, and on the collective petition of the cultivators of Sanshan City, had let her succeed to the post of City Lord.
Otherwise, although the office of City Lord could be inherited by lineage, it demanded at least the fifth-grade Inner Prefecture realm.
Back then, the old City Lord of Fenglin City, precisely because he had no heir, had stepped down in his frail old age and moved to Xin'an to live out his years in honor.
And yet Dou Yuemei stood before the beast tide.
She was a woman, but she stood prouder than any of the men.
She was only at the peak of the Dragon-Rising Realm, yet suddenly she erupted with a ferocious, overwhelming aura.
As if something inside her was detonating, one after another, booming sounds exploded from within her body.
Her aura climbed higher and higher!
It was known to all that the next stage after the appearance of the Dao meridian's Dragon-Rising was the knocking open of the Inner Prefecture.
So what stood between the Dragon-Rising and the Inner Prefecture?
It was the exploration of the limits of the body — the awakening dragon of the Dao meridian roaming the sea of the torso!
Generally speaking, this process was extremely long and meticulous.
Only after a cultivator had probed the greater part of the sea of the torso would they attempt to knock open the Inner Prefecture.
And the human body had five prefectures, each one concealing a secret treasury.
The greatest undertaking of the Five-Prefecture stage was precisely the development of these five secret treasuries. Depending on the depth of one's exploration, the differences in personal talent, and each cultivator's particular experiences... the eventual reward differed as well.
In many cases, that determined the difference between the strong and the weak.
And of all the secret treasuries of the human body, the hardest to obtain and the most precious was, without question... the divine power!
To be precise, the seed of divine power — that is to say, the incomplete version of true divine power. But so long as one had the seed of divine power, sooner or later one would be able to develop it to completion and shake the world with might.
And now, what was Dou Yuemei doing?
When the sea of the torso was not yet fully explored, she chose to blast open the Inner Prefecture ahead of time.
And she broke through all five prefectures in one stroke!
This was almost completely giving up the future, severing her own path of the Dao.
In each of the prefectures, she only skimmed its surface and never considered exploring it carefully. Yet finally, at the fifth prefecture, she found the divine power!
She was that confident — confident that, without having fully controlled the sea of the torso, she could knock open the Inner Prefecture, and even more confident that she was certain to reap divine power!
And she did it!
"Sun Xiaoman! Shake the Mountain!" she cried.
The barefoot girl, mid-battle, followed without a second word. Flinging her twin hair-braids, she raised the Mountain-Shaking Hammer high in both hands and drove it down against the ground with finality!
Boulders shattered, and the ground, with the Mountain-Shaking Hammer at its center, split open in an extremely deep fissure.
And Dou Yuemei merely crouched down, pressing her hands — soft as if they held no bones — against the ground.
The divine power she had found by breaking through all five prefectures in one stroke.
Its name was: Uprooting the Mountain!