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Chapter 68: The Sword Venerable!

Towering peaks rose majestic, mist and cloud coiling about them, the first faint light of dawn breaking, dew not yet dried upon the leaves.

A boy walked along a mountain path, no more than ten years old by the look of him, travel-worn and weary, a basket full of medicinal herbs strapped to his back, a yellowed scroll in hand, silently reciting the lesson his teacher had set him that day.

His black hair was tied simply into a small knot at the back of his head, the hair at his brow damp and flecked with bits of grass. His eyes, intent upon the pages of the book, shone bright as morning stars, and even his coarse cloth and straw sandals could not hide the elegant bearing already taking shape in him, young as he was.

At ten years old, the boy had not yet fully grown into his height, the heavy basket on his back nearly rising above his head, and yet it could not slow his light, steady footsteps; he moved through the rugged mountain path with practiced ease, as though he had walked it countless tens of thousands of times before.

The forest stirred and swayed, and somewhere below the mountain a great river seemed to be rising with the tide; the boy lowered his arm and stood quietly for a few breaths, listening to the sound of the tide. When he moved to step forward again, he found that a figure had appeared on the mountain path ahead of him.

White hair, snow-white robes, a beauty that outshone even frost and snow.

The foot the boy had lifted settled back down in place. Having grown up his whole life in this mountain town, he had never seen anyone with such a bearing before, and for a moment his eyes went wide, at a complete loss for words.

Like an immortal out of an old storybook.

Dappled light fell through the forest leaves across the mountainside, and the boy heard a voice, extraordinarily pleasant to the ear: "So, here you are."

No beginning, no explanation, exceedingly strange.

The boy quietly took a step back, one hand slipping behind him, quietly closing around the sickle at his waist.

Then he heard what he suspected was the immortal's second sentence: "Do you wish to cultivate the Dao?"

The boy blinked, blinked again, and said nothing at all, only gazing up at the white-haired immortal before him.

The immortal, seeming to sense that he had not understood, paused a moment, then spoke again: "Do you wish to live a good life?"

"...What kind of good life?" the boy asked after a moment's hesitation. "One where my mother no longer has to toil night and day for my sake, where we could live in a great house, where she'd have more winter clothes than she could ever wear through? One where my teacher could drink the finest osmanthus wine from Zuixian Hall, where Aunt Wen could have the very best physician brought to cure her of her heart ailment?"

The white-haired immortal listened quietly to all of this, then said only a single word: "Yes."

The boy's eyes lit up. "Then, I want it!"

The white-haired immortal's expression remained as unmoved as ever. "In that case, you may take me as your master."

The boy thought it over for a brief moment, then carefully set down the basket full of herbs on his back, pressed his hands together, bowed deeply at the waist, and said in a young, earnest voice, utterly respectful: "This disciple, Chen Moqing, greets his master!"

A boy who met an immortal in the mountains, who took him as master and set out upon the path of the immortal path, only to later become renowned across the whole world, this had once been a beloved tale told throughout the Nine Thousand Prefectures.

A hundred years later, the mountain town's forest remained just as green, the great river just as vast, the towering blue peaks just as they had been, yet the master and disciple of years past were nowhere to be seen.

Chen Moqing raised his eyes and gazed quietly at him. Yu Bai's eyes remained like a vast, windless lake, exactly as they had been the very first time they had met.

His own expression betrayed no ripple of feeling at Yu Bai's words, only two words in reply: "Why."

Tianshu Sect, to what end, all of this?

And you, what was it all for?

Yanluo's blade gave off a towering, ghostly light, pressing down over the four directions. Yu Bai lifted a finger slightly, closing it around the hilt of his longsword, and said only: "Once you reach this teacher's level of attainment, you will understand naturally."

Cang Shun let out an utterly unceremonious scoff. "Is your level of attainment really so high?"

"You have cultivation but no Dao-heart, you hold the power of life and death and wield it without restraint, you walk the demonic path while dressing yourself up as a man of upright virtue."

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the sky changed in an instant. From the shadowed depths, ten thousand million blades sprang into being, ten thousand ghosts wailing in chorus, slashing down upon the Demon Emperor!

Cang Shun took a single step forward, shielding Chen Moqing behind him. "Is that all you've got!"

A thousand zhang away, the onlookers of the Grand Cultivation Tournament, who had already been relocated to this place once, were forced to retreat yet another ten thousand zhang, shifted tens of thousands of li further away through the teleportation array, until they had withdrawn from more than half the range of the Nine Thousand Prefectures entirely.

Earlier, when Tianshu Sect's Second and Third Elders had joined forces, the sheer pressure they had generated had already been more than the onlookers could bear; had it not been for the timely intervention of Qiushui Sect's Grand Elder, who had moved them to safety, no small number of them would already have suffered grievous injury.

And now, no one dared approach within several hundred thousand li of Tianshu Sect, to draw near, regardless of one's cultivation level, meant risking death itself!

What manner of battle could possibly be this earth-shattering?

The sovereign of the demon realm, who bore the mandate of heaven itself, against the Sword Venerable favored by Heavenly Dao—truly, this was a clash between the two most supreme powerhouses this world currently held, mountains crumbling apart, rivers and seas flowing backward, the earth itself caving in, the very heavens shattering, tearing open rifts into the boundless void.

Even unable to witness the battle directly, merely standing within its lingering aftershock was enough to leave a host of mighty cultivators with hearts pounding, unable to speak for a long while.

——And yet, once that initial shock had passed, a different, more complicated feeling began to rise in the hearts of certain clans and sects.

At the edge of the Nine Thousand Prefectures, Chu Langtao let out a cold laugh. "The Immortal Venerable Yu Bai certainly cuts an impressive figure, strange that he was nowhere to be seen during the battle at the Demon Abyss!"

Beside him, an elder of Shenlu Sect chuckled as well. "There were three people on the Tianshu battlefield, and only one of them never took part in the Demon Abyss battle, not hard to guess who, is it?"

Shenlu Sect, the Chu family, and quite a few other clans and sects who had likewise given a great deal of themselves in the battle against the Demon Abyss, all found themselves sharing the very same feeling in this moment.

Back then, they had fought with everything they had to hold back the Demon Abyss, suffering heavy losses in the process. Shenlu Sect's young master had once been trapped within the Demon-Blood Slaughter Array, very nearly losing his life, saved only by Chen Moqing's own hand—and it was precisely for this reason that, afterward, Tianshu Sect had gone out of its way to approach Shenlu Sect, having them cede a talisman path secret realm to Tianshu for a full century, as a form of compensation.

Even the Chu family lost as many as eight elders in the Demon Abyss alone, which was precisely how this once-foremost great clan of Luowu Prefecture gradually fell prey to the Sima family's encroachment.

As for Tianshu Sect, it wasn't as though they had contributed nothing, they too had sent out a great many sect disciples. And yet... back then, upon the battlefield of the Demon Abyss, Tianshu Sect's high-ranking elders had been almost nowhere to be seen, let alone this Immortal  Venerable Yu Bai, who could now fight the Demon Emperor to a standstill that shook heaven and earth alike.

It was only because Chen Moqing had shone so brilliantly on that battlefield, sheltering so many young prodigies through his own strength alone, and because of his standing as the sect's senior disciple, that few had thought to look any deeper into the matter, and even those who later came to suspect something had, given Tianshu Sect's overwhelming power, found themselves unable to speak of it at all.

Tens of thousands of li away in the Kingdom of Zhou, Ning Lili, having been shifted here through the teleportation array, found herself utterly shaken, yet the same doubt rose up within her as well, and she put a similar question to the mysterious turtle A' Bai.

The mysterious turtle A' Bai gazed up at the sky, and after a long moment, spoke slowly. "The Demon Abyss of five thousand years ago was, in terms of scale, actually far greater than the one from several decades ago, otherwise, there would have been no need for the Demon Emperor to sacrifice himself for the Dao in the first place... but when the Demon Abyss returned a few years back, the outcome of the battle was, in the end, nearly as disastrous as it had been a thousand years prior."

"The demon realm had withdrawn from the world, and the mighty cultivators of the human race did not come forward, Tianshu Sect's high elders especially had already gone into seclusion well in advance."

"In the end, this latest battle against the Demon Abyss was only brought to a close because Chen Moqing burned his own soul, exhausting his very essence and blood to suppress it. That final sword array of his, the Myriad Phenomena of All Heavens Formation, carried power far beyond the Body Integration stage, it may well have surpassed even peak Body Integration."

"Had he not paid such a tremendous price in that battle, Tianshu Sect would never have been able to drive him to the brink of death within the span of just a few months afterward... perhaps, this too was all part of his own sect's calculated scheme."

Ning Lili fell silent for a long while after hearing this, then let out a particularly foul curse.

Upon the battlefield at Tianshu, though the Demon Emperor and Tianshu Sect's sect head fought on in a clash that darkened heaven and earth and shook the very Dao itself, no small number of mighty cultivators could already see that the tide of battle was gradually tipping toward one side.

The shadowed underworld could not swallow the sovereign of the demon realm whole—instead, it was the cold, stern light of the full moon that began to pierce straight through that lightless darkness!

The moon hanging high above blazed with radiance, every searing beam of light sinking in an instant into the Demon Emperor's eyes. The moon vanished from the sky entirely, and in its place burned the blazing light within Cang Shun's own eyes, like twin miniature full moons.

He spoke a single word: "Bind."

In that instant, all things in creation seemed bound as though by some invisible decree, and Yu Bai too was sealed in place, unable to so much as stir!

Cang Shun raised two fingers together, standing poised high above the earth, his presence stern and majestic beyond measure, and pronounced a second decree: "Cut."

Heaven and earth fell utterly, deathly silent. Beneath the Demon Emperor's decree, cultivation level meant nothing at all, any living thing was doomed to perish!

Yu Bai's body was cleaved cleanly in two!

This Immortal Venerable, foremost in the entire world's sword path, the single strongest sword cultivator alive, had fallen!

Chen Moqing closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again, a figure in snow-white robes with white hair had once more appeared before him.

Yu Bai, still!

He reappeared high in the air, utterly whole, without so much as a scratch upon him!

——And in the very spot where his body had been cut in two, there now remained half of a shattered, broken sword.

It was not a true sword at all, but rather a condensed fragment of sword-intent given form, the sword-intent of Yanluo!

Life and death do not return to the mortal world; they return to Yanluo alone!

Cang Shun's brow lifted ever so slightly, thinking to himself that sword cultivators truly were a shameless lot, his own Moqing excepted, of course.

A breeze carried his cool, detached voice: "Yanluo can save you once. It cannot save you a second time."

The longsword Yanluo in Yu Bai's hand had already dimmed after that last strike, as though every trace of its luster had been drained away.

'Dead and brought back to life,' the Sword Venerable's expression showed no change whatsoever even at this, and he gave no reaction at all to Cang Shun's words. He merely drew his palm across the crimson-black blade, and in an instant, fresh blood surged into the blood-red veins wound through the dark blade's body.

In that instant, the once-dimmed Yanluo blazed red once more, its light piercing straight through the underworld's darkness; Yu Bai himself erupted with an astonishing sword-intent, as though holding nothing back any longer, his entire cultivation burning fiercely, pouring out of him completely, a towering sword-light transforming into the deepest, vastest sea this world had ever known, howling across ten thousand li, even forcing Cang Shun back half a step!

Not a flicker crossed Cang Shun's brow; he understood that his opponent had already begun to burn his own soul, that this sword cultivator, half a step from Tribulation Crossing, was staking everything on one final, desperate gambit.

He raised his palm slightly, and the bright moon reappeared in the sky once more, meaning to seal away that sword-intent, but this time, it failed!

The sword-intent poured forth without end, drawing forth a long, resounding cry from heaven and earth, as though unfurling some ancient great Dao across the whole of the Nine Thousand Prefectures, making the underworld's sword-light visible to the entire world!

Beneath the bright moon's radiance, Chen Moqing's gaze fixed in place, sensing a sword path aura beyond anything he had witnessed in his entire life, a sharp light rising in the depths of his eyes. "He's ascended to Venerable."

One of the ancient mighty cultivators watching cried out in shock: "He's truly become a Sword Venerable!"

To 'ascend to Venerable' meant to climb to the very summit of one's chosen Dao within this world, to claim for oneself the entire aura of that Dao's great way—among the hundred Daos a cultivator might walk, each Dao could claim only a single Venerable, just as the sky held but one bright moon, with all else reduced to mere decorative stars.

In this moment, sword energy swept across the entire breadth of the Nine Thousand Prefectures. Yu Bai stood poised high in the sky, his white hair and snow-white robes streaming wild and free, countless threads of sword-intent condensing together into one colossal crimson-black longsword, its hilt and tip spanning from earth to heaven, rooted deep beneath the underworld, piercing through the void beyond the very stars!

Ten thousand swords in the world went unsheathed, only a single sword remained visible!

This single sword plunged the mortal world into utter darkness. Heaven and earth were swallowed in a deathly, shadowed black, as if the gates of the underworld had thrown themselves wide open across the whole of the Nine Thousand Prefectures, dragging everything down into the shadows!

Yanluo, descended into the world!

The greater part of the cultivation world's ancient mighty cultivators were struck too dumbstruck to make a sound; every sword cultivator present found themselves utterly unable to draw their blade in that moment!

The Venerable of the sword path, untouched by all ten thousand methods, broken only by the sword itself!

And having already ascended to Venerable, there was no sword technique in this world that could surpass him, nor anyone capable of overpowering the blade of a Sword Venerable!

——This was the true might of the sword path! To ascend to Venerable was to stand unrivaled across the entire world, as though Heavenly Dao itself had descended into the mortal realm!

Cang Shun's expression remained unchanged; facing that Yanluo which pressed down upon the whole world, he showed not a trace of fear, and behind him, a second bright moon rose into being, twin moons hanging in the sky at once!

Chenjie and Ran Cang flew up at his sides in the very same instant, transforming into two streaks of sharp, flowing light; Chen Moqing landed beside him and said, without the slightest hesitation, "Lend me the ten thousand methods!"

"Done!"

Cang Shun did not pause even for an instant, reaching out his hand at once, pressing his palm to Chen Moqing's, their ten fingers interlocking.

The Demon Emperor's overwhelming, boundless cultivation transformed into a great river sweeping across heaven and earth, pouring without reservation into the young human beside him!

To transfer one's own cultivation into another required that their Dao-hearts be in harmony, their minds and spirits truly attuned to one another—and now, Cang Shun's cultivation sank deep into Chen Moqing's spiritual sea, absorbed by him in an instant.

Chen Moqing raised his head, a blazing sword-light erupting within his dark, deep eyes, piercing straight through the underworld-shrouded sky; his dark gold robes billowed, and with a single step forward, sword energy swept across every mountain and river at once!

Borrowing the Demon Emperor's power, in the span of a single breath, the foremost sword cultivator of the younger generation leapt from great perfection of Deity Transformation, straight to peak Mahayana!

Heaven and earth transformed once more, as though Heavenly Dao had reached down with a great hand and cleaved the world in two: one half remained the cold, lightless underworld, while the other blazed with the full, brilliant light of midday in the mortal realm!

Chen Moqing extended but a single sword strike, its sword energy cleaving apart yin and yang, day and dusk, carving the underworld away from the world of the living!

Every mighty cultivator watching was struck speechless once more, each one feeling as though caught in a dream—

Another Sword Venerable, risen just like that!

In the entire ancient history of the cultivation world, never once had two Sword Venerables existed within the same era! For such was the law of this world, a single great Dao could acknowledge but one who had reached its very summit!

This meant that, in time to come, once Chen Moqing truly stepped into Mahayana, without even needing to reach peak Mahayana, his mastery of the sword path alone would be enough to see him inevitably ascend to become the new Sword Venerable!

Yu Bai would fall from the throne of Sword Venerable, replaced by his very own disciple, reduced to nothing more than a scattered star of the sword path, left to gaze up at a newly risen bright moon!

"...Extraordinary. Truly extraordinary!"

Shenlu Sect's elder was shaken to his very core, his mouth hanging open for a long moment before he finally recovered the power of speech.

"No wonder Tianshu Sect couldn't tolerate him! With one Sword Venerable already in place, how could they possibly allow a second one to rise up in the future! And all the more so when Chen Moqing is still so young, to reach Mahayana, and without even needing a thousand years to do it!"

A Mahayana cultivator's lifespan stretched to ten thousand years; the youngest Mahayana cultivator among the human race had been Yu Bai himself, breaking through from peak Body Integration to Mahayana at a mere thousand years of age, and yet the talent Chen Moqing had already displayed far surpassed even Yu Bai's own in his youth, having once been universally recognized throughout the cultivation world as the human race's future pinnacle of achievement.

In this moment, two Sword Venerables stood revealed before the entire world at once, locked in a duel of blades!

The corner of Cang Shun's mouth lifted slightly; he thought to himself that sword cultivators truly were exceptional, that among the ten thousand beings of this world, not one could compare to his own human.

Holding half the world beneath him in the underworld's shadow, Yu Bai gazed across at his former disciple, his voice still as unchanging as the eternal, frost-bound peaks of some ancient snow mountain, his blade extended from afar: "Come. At equal cultivation, let us see whether you can surpass me."

In the blazing, midday-bright world of the living, Chen Moqing stood with sword in hand, its tip pointed straight toward the heavens, reflecting in its edge that pair of sharp, clear brows and eyes, calm and unmoved, without joy, without anger, with nothing at all in them, not even Yu Bai himself.

Only a single sword.

His spirit settled into perfect stillness, his spiritual sea a mirror reflecting nothing but sword-intent itself.

The young Sword Venerable at peak Mahayana extended a single sword strike toward his former master.

The instant this sword was loosed, all sound in creation fell silent, not a single noise from all of creation could be heard!

Between heaven and earth, there existed only this one sword! Every cultivator, every living being in this world, saw nothing but this single sword!

A thousand years later, the mortals who knew nothing of what had truly happened would write it down in their history books thus—on this very day, of this very month, in this very year, the gates of the underworld flew open, the darkness swallowed the sun, and a sword immortal descended into the world, splitting the blue heavens wide with a single stroke of his blade!

The sword-light shattered the cold night of this world; amid the utter, absolute silence, only Yu Bai's long, drawn-out sigh could be heard: "Just as I thought..."

Before Yanluo, Chen Moqing loosed but a single sword!

And with that single sword, he struck down the Sword Venerable!

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