The long sword spun like lightning, until almost nothing was left but a gleam of cold steel.
Lost in the surging torrent of beasts, Jiang Chen had no time to cast Dao arts. All he could rely on was his sword skill as he wove and turned among the savage creatures.
The Golden Light Arrow engraved on his blade had long since been fired into the eye of a lion-shaped beast. The next strike would take a long time to recover.
Were it not for the brute strength granted by the Four-Spirit Body Refining Art, Jiang Chen could scarcely have survived.
In truth, more than a hundred cultivators had already fallen to this wave of beasts — their very corpses torn beyond recovery.
Jiang Chen pressed himself against a bull-shaped beast of monstrous size, darting left and right around it. He kept the creature frothing with fury, while at the same time making it hard for the other beasts to reach him.
But he knew full well that he was nowhere near safe. He was still dancing on the edge of a blade.
He did not even yet know where that beast which had fired the blazing pillar of light was, or what it looked like. And he had lost Zhao Yan.
If he was struggling so hard, how was Zhao Yan faring? Jiang Chen dared not imagine.
He had already unleashed his full strength. Even as he fought and dodged, he desperately searched for a glimpse of Zhao Yan, all the while tracking the direction of that pillar of light.
As the bull-beast charged about, Jiang Chen was the first to catch sight of the creature possessing an innate Dao art. Driven by instinct, the raging beast tide yielded it a clearing.
It was a beast shaped like a black cat, surprisingly small of build, standing serene like a reef in a rushing current — only its blood-red eyes betraying the savage nature beneath. At that moment it yawned lazily, its mouth gaping wider until it became a wooden basin, at the center of which a ball of crimson light slowly took shape.
Jiang Chen followed its line of sight — and his eyes burned with rage. There, Zhao Yan was surrounded by seven or eight beasts, every moment a brush with death.
Jiang Chen vaulted onto the back of the bull-beast, goaded it into a frenzy with a casual stroke of his sword, then kicked off and shot forward like an arrow, bounding across the beasts' heads!
Past a hundred snapping jaws and lashing attacks, he suddenly flung himself into the air. Violet Dawn Sword Art, killing move, fourth form — a blaze of sword-light erupted outward.
Wrapped in that dazzling radiance, Jiang Chen crashed through the beast tide at heart-stopping speed, reached Zhao Yan's side, seized his shoulder, and hurled him clear!
The instant Zhao Yan was thrown free, Jiang Chen spun three times in midair. And it was then that the crimson pillar of light from the black-cat beast roared past, missing him by a hair.
It was tension carried to the absolute extreme — and skill carried to the same.
But he had overlooked one thing: the bull-beast he had been "playing" for so long.
It was a Deer-Ox, a creature shaped like a mix of ox and deer, blessed with thick hides and boundless strength. Used as a shield for half a day, it had at last fixed a single-minded fury on Jiang Chen and charged blindly along.
At the instant the crimson pillar blasted open another path, Jiang Chen twisted and landed on a giant mountain spider, sweeping his sword crosswise to slice through the great beast's compound eyes.
But just then, the Deer-Ox leaped into the air — and crashed head-on into Jiang Chen!
Caught off guard, Jiang Chen barely managed to raise his sword before him as the whole of him was sent flying high into the air. And behind him yawned a cliff!
How tall was Jade Balance? From at least its middle slopes, looking down, everything was veiled in cloud and mist.
"Third Brother!"
Nearly mad, Zhao Yan surged forward — but what greeted him was a pack of beasts lunging furiously in his direction.
...
The battlefield they occupied was on the northern cliff edge.
Ye Qingyu had fought her way here, step by step, seeking Jiang Chen. With a second, still more terrible surge of the beast tide about to break, proud and haughty as she was, her only thought was that she must also save Jiang Chen once.
How many life-preserving secret treasures this journey had cost her went without saying. She calculated that two treasures remained — if she failed to find him before long, she would have to retreat.
Then she saw... a field of shredded corpses and flesh. It was the most shatteringly cut battlefield of beast corpses she had witnessed in all her passage here. The whole mountainside was pitted, gouged by three clearest furrows.
In one of those furrows sat a man — exceedingly handsome by the profile alone. Blood ran in rivers around him and severed limbs lay everywhere, yet he only sat on the ground, head slightly bowed, long hair spilling loose.
"...Hey?" Ye Qingyu called out tentatively.
The man slowly raised his head and looked at her.
What a cold and murderous look it was!
But then, with a sway, he toppled into the pool of blood.
...
At that moment, taking the battle of Jade Balance as a whole.
The dean of the Three Mountain City Academy had fallen in battle, and more than half of the five hundred-odd cultivators gathered here were dead. The beast tide had broken through every line of defense; the farthest had nearly reached the base at the foot of the mountain, slaughtering wantonly. The battle, plainly, was lost.
Perhaps it had been doomed from the moment the flocks of Yin-Yang Twin-Headed Eagles appeared.
In the midst of that despair, the lord of Three Mountain City, Dou Yuemei, once again stepped forward. But no one believed she could work a miracle anymore.
Back then, Sun Heng, a cultivator of the Inner Palace realm, had faced down the beast tide alone, slain the chieftain of the beasts, and turned the tide of battle — but fallen in the doing, his dao extinguished.
And everyone knew Dou Yuemei only stood at the peak of the sixth-rank Soaring Dragon realm. Years ago, Zhuang Ting had appointed her as city lord out of regard for Sun Heng's sacrifice. The old city lord of Maple City, with no heir, had stepped down in his failing years and moved to Xin'an in ease.
Yet Dou Yuemei stood before the beast tide.
She was a woman, but she held herself more proudly than any man. At the peak of the Soaring Dragon realm, a formless, overwhelming aura suddenly erupted from her. As if something were bursting open inside her, a series of booming cracks rang out, and her presence climbed higher and higher.
As every cultivator knew, the next realm after the awakening of the Dao meridian in the Soaring Dragon stage was to knock open the Inner Palace.
So what lay between the Soaring Dragon and the Inner Palace?
It was the exploration of the body's limits — the swim of the awakened Dao-Dragon of the meridian through the Sea of the Body. In general, this process was extremely long and meticulous. Only after a cultivator had surveyed most of the Sea of the Body would they attempt to knock open the Inner Palace.
And the human body had five palaces, and each palace held a secret treasure.
The greatest cultivation of the Five-Palace realm was the excavation of these secret treasures. Depending on the depth of exploration, the difference in talent, the distinct experiences of each cultivator... the final harvest differed. Often, it determined who was strong and who was weak.
And among all the secret treasures of the human body, the rarest and most precious was, without question... the divine skill!
More precisely, the seed of a divine skill — the incomplete version of a true divine skill. But once one possessed the seed, one could in time develop it to full, and command the world.
And now, what was Dou Yuemei doing?
Before she had fully explored the Sea of the Body, she chose to knock open the Inner Palace ahead of schedule — and broke through all five palaces at once!
This was nearly an outright abandonment of the future, a severing of her own path. Through each palace she passed in a fleeting glance, never troubling to explore carefully. And yet at last, in the fifth palace, she found a divine skill!
She was so confident — confident enough to knock open the Inner Palace before commanding the whole Sea of the Body, and confident still that she would reap a divine skill! And she succeeded!
"Sun Xiaoman! Topple the mountain!" she shouted.
The barefoot girl, even in the thick of battle, said not a word. She flicked her twin braids, raised her Mountain-Toppling Hammers high with both hands, and smashed them into the ground in a decisive instant!
Rocks shattered. With the hammers at the center, the ground split open into an enormously deep crack.
And Dou Yuemei merely crouched low, pressing her two boneless-soft hands against the earth.
The divine skill she had sought by breaking through all five palaces.
Its name: Moving Mountains!