pjbooks Chapter 107 The Most Essential Self
Chapter 107 The Most Essential Self
The moment the tip of the Severing Thoughts Sword was aimed at Balsaron's brow, the seventh demon god made a move that no one expected.
He smiled.
The laughter squeezed out from the crack between half a goat's skull and half a withered old man's face, hoarse and broken, yet carrying a madness suppressed for countless years. Dark green blood seeped continuously from the severed part of his right arm, dripping onto the sand, each drop corroding a pit several feet deep, but his body no longer trembled. He used his left hand to support himself on the ground, slowly straightening his body, his tattered black robe fluttering in the morning wind. The twisted, wailing faces on the robe all fell silent at the same moment, as if waiting for something.
"Immortal Emperor." Balsalon uttered these two words, his tone no longer filled with mockery and disdain, but with an extremely complex, almost pious madness. "You're right. The seventy-two Demon Kings cannot fathom your limits. Their lives are nothing but weeds in your eyes."
He raised his left hand, fingers spread, palm facing the severed end of his right arm. Dark green corrupting power surged from his palm, enveloping the arm destroyed by the sword intent. The broken bones began to dissolve and reshape under the erosion of the corrupting power, and the shattered muscle fibers were peeled away and regenerated layer by layer. In less than three breaths, a brand new right arm grew from the severed end.
"But do you know what the biggest difference is between the Demon God Realm and the Apostle Realm?" Balsalon flexed his newly formed energy arm, his fingers cracking as he opened and closed them. "Those useless Apostles, cowering in the heavens, inscribed their core laws into the void's origin, thinking that would make them immortal. And what happened? The void's origin was ground to dust by your sword domain, and they died. Astra died, Morgana died. But we Demon Gods are different."
His dark green eyes suddenly lit up, the light piercing through the slowly wriggling parasitic patterns along the edges of his eye sockets, like a will-o'-the-wisp being lit in the dim light of dawn.
"Our power does not come from the void, but from the abyss. As long as the abyss exists, the demon god will never die."
The moment the words left his mouth, the sand beneath Balthalon's feet, which had been corroded by the power of corruption for an entire night, suddenly cracked open.
The entire Gobi Desert began to tremble. The defenders on the city wall felt the violent shaking beneath their feet. Cracks began to spread upwards from the base of the wall, and the reinforcing runes on the alloy wall surface lit up and went out layer by layer. The defensive barrier emitted a piercing alarm.
"What is he doing?!"
"He's connecting to the abyss! He's opening a rift through the abyss here! If the rift is fully opened, all the power in the abyss will surge out! Then the entire western border will be corrupted!"
Ye Wuhen's knuckles, gripping the hilt of the broken sword, had turned white. He took a step forward, but Zhou Tianze reached out and stopped him.
"Old Ye." Zhou Tianze's voice was hoarse. His left eye was fixed on the increasingly thick, dark green pillar of light below the city. In his eye, which Jiang Chen had healed, was reflected the wildly expanding Balthalon within the pillar, as well as countless twisted figures vaguely visible deep within it. "You no longer have a sword. Save your life for when it's useful."
Ye Wuhen's thumb lingered on the hilt for a moment before slowly moving away. He knew Zhou Tianze was right. His sword was shattered; his swordsmanship, unified as one, couldn't withstand even a single move against Jiang Chen's sword domain. But the person standing below the city, facing that abyssal rift, was not him.
It's Jiang Chen.
His dark green eyeballs cracked open under the infusion of corrupting power. They split from one into three. Three dark green eyeballs were set side-by-side in the sockets of the withered old man's face, each rotating independently, countless parasitic lines swirling wildly deep within the pupils of each. On the right, the goat skull's jawbone had completely detached, replaced by a churning mass of dark green mist, within which countless distorted human faces could be vaguely seen, wailing silently.
"The Abyss True Body." Chu Tianxiong's voice was low, but every word made the temperature in the command hall drop several degrees. "He used the Abyss True Body. In the past three hundred years, the Seven Great Demon Gods have never used the Abyss True Body in any battle. Because once it is used, he temporarily becomes a part of the Abyss itself. In this state, his corrupting law is no longer 'corrupting matter,' but 'corrupting all existence'—including space, time, and causality."
On the holographic projection screen, the energy reading had exceeded the instrument's upper limit. The technician's fingers furiously typed on the keyboard, but the screen only displayed a single, repeating line of red text: "Out of measurement range. Out of measurement range. Out of measurement range."
Jiang Chen stared at the colossal figure before him, its height exceeding ten zhang. The hem of his school uniform fluttered wildly in the wind whipped up by the corrupting power. His right hand, gripping the Severing Thoughts Sword, remained unchanged, as did his expression. But he took a step forward.
"As long as the abyss exists, the demon god will never die." He repeated Balsaron's words, a slight, almost imperceptible smile playing on his lips. "Then if I annihilate the abyss as well, will you still be alive?"
He raised the Sword of Severance.
This time, he didn't strike with his sword. Instead, he loosened the hilt, letting the Severing Thoughts Sword hover in front of him. The blade slowly rotated above his palm, emitting a very faint hum, like the tolling of an ancient bell. Then he formed a hand seal. It was the most basic sword technique starting stance in the cultivation world—interlacing the ten fingers, index and middle fingers together, thumbs touching, palms facing upwards. A thousand years ago, Qingyunzi used this starting stance when teaching him his first sword technique. At that time, he thought it was some profound secret technique, but later he realized it was simply telling the sword: I'm going to use you.
"The Way of the Sword—" Jiang Chen's voice remained clear amidst the roar of the abyss rift, each word seemingly etched into the void itself, "—All Things."
The ten fingers that were forming the hand seal suddenly opened.
The Sword of Severance emitted a clear, resonant sword cry. That cry pierced the roar of the abyss's pillar of light, the howling of the corrupting power, and the lingering echoes of battle across the Gobi Desert, landing clearly in everyone's ears. Then, the Sword of Severance began to multiply. One became two, two became four, four became eight. Eight became sixteen, sixteen became thirty-two. A thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. Each sword was a sword of Severance, each sword radiated the same pale golden light as Severance, each sword hovered in the void, slowly rotating, its tip pointing in the same direction—Barthalon.
But this sea of swords is completely different from the one in the Apostle Hall. The sea of swords in the Apostle Hall is silvery-white, a manifestation of the sword domain, and consists of millions of energy blades condensed from sword intent.
The sea of swords spun. Millions of swords simultaneously drew arcs in the void, each arc precisely targeting a specific point on Balsalon's body—throat, heart, dantian, brow, joints, the root of bone spurs, the forked point of his horns—leaving no blind spots, no omissions. The gaps between the swords narrowed, the boundaries between sword lights blurred, until finally the entire sea of swords transformed into a golden vortex stretching across the heavens and earth. At the center of the vortex was a wildly spinning golden core. That was the core of Jiang Chen's sword path, condensed with his true essence, the source of power for the entire sea of swords, the ultimate manifestation of the myriad aspects of the Immortal Emperor's sword path.
Balsalon's three dark green eyes contracted simultaneously. He sensed that the power of this golden vortex was on a completely different level from the silver sword light that had just shattered more than forty demon kings.
He opened his goat-like mouth, formed of dark green mist, and let out a deafening roar. The abyssal pillar of light expanded more than tenfold in an instant, and the dark green corrupting power surged outwards like a tsunami, distorting space into irregular prisms, stretching time into fragmented pieces, and tangling cause and effect into an inextricable mess. He squeezed the power of his abyssal true form to its limit, pushing the corrupting laws to the limit that the abyssal origin could withstand. He wanted to corrupt that golden vortex, corrupt Jiang Chen's sword core, and corrupt the Immortal Emperor's fundamental Dao body.
The golden vortex collided with the corrupting tsunami.
There was no explosion. No loud noise. Only an eerie silence, as if time itself had been torn apart. The dark green corrupting power began to dissolve the moment it came into contact with the golden vortex.
The essence of the Law of Corruption is "to corrupt all existence into its own nourishment," but Jiang Chen's Sword Dao Myriad Manifestations is a level higher—"to sever all existence." Corruption is transformation, severance is negation. Transformation requires a process, negation does not.
Before the corrupting power could even begin to transform Jiang Chen's true essence, it was denied by the very existence of the Sword Dao Myriad Phenomena.
The dark green beam of light began to collapse from the edges.
Golden sword light seeped inward from the point of collapse, peeling away, shattering, and evaporating the dark green corrupting power layer by layer. Balthazaron's body trembled violently in the center of the pillar of light, and his energy arm, formed from the laws of corruption, began to disintegrate from his fingertips—dark green runes peeled off his knuckles piece by piece, the peeling runes scattering as dark green specks of light, only to be evaporated into nothingness under the illumination of the golden sword light.
"impossible--"
Balthazar roared. The pupils in his three dark green eyes shrank to the size of pinpoints in the same instant. He looked down at his collapsing energy arm, watching the abyssal runes he had nurtured for tens of thousands of years being peeled away and evaporated piece by piece by the sword light, like watching a tree he had planted for thousands of years being chopped down from the roots by an axe.
"Impossible!! The Law of Corruption is the foundation of the Seven Pillars of the Abyss!! It is the manifestation of the Abyss's origin!! How could a mere cultivation civilization possibly—"
His roar abruptly ceased. The core of the golden vortex—the sword core condensed from Jiang Chen's true essence—had pierced through the final barrier of the corrupting tsunami and appeared before him. His three dark green eyes reflected the rapidly spinning golden core, the countless intricate sword intents flowing across its surface, and the pale golden figure sitting cross-legged in its very center.
That was Jiang Chen's Dao Self, the manifestation of the Immortal Emperor's Dao Heart, and the most essential self he had honed through a thousand years of battles in the cultivation world.