Chapter Eighty-Five: The Forbidden Taboo

The world of heaven and earth changed without warning.

A scarlet radiance burst from Nightless Abyss, and a fierce sword intent shot straight into the clouds.

Boom.

The wind rose, the clouds churned, and the heavens and earth suddenly darkened.

“Come!”

Nightless Abyss swallowed a mouthful of wine and drank deeply.

As though answering a summons, the swords at the waists of more than a dozen maidens of the Moonlit Immortal Sanctuary began to hum in unison, as if they had awakened with souls of their own.

“What is happening? My sword is out of control.”

“Mine too.”

“What on earth is going on...”

One cry after another came from the maidens. All of them unleashed their cultivation to suppress the swords in their hands with every ounce of strength.

“Do not resist. Let them go,” said the saintess after a moment’s thought.

“Yes.”

The twelve maidens replied at once and released the swords before them.

Twelve sword lights whistled through the air toward Nightless Abyss.

The slightly drunk Nightless Abyss staggered, and a trace of intent spread from beneath his feet.

One meter, two meters, ten meters, fifteen, twenty.

It stopped only after spreading twenty meters.

“What is this?”

Someone among the twelve maidens asked.

At that moment, they seemed to have been cast into an entirely different world: black clouds smothered the sky, scarlet light bathed the earth, and one flying sword after another danced in graceful arcs.

“Where is this?” As they spoke, the maidens continuously drew upon their spiritual power, forming protective barriers around themselves.

Their instincts told them this place would threaten them, and so those defenses were released of their own accord.

Everything before their eyes sent a chill down their spines. The whole world was shrouded in red; within this region, there was no sign of life, desolate beyond measure. Dark clouds roiled overhead, and twelve flying swords circled the man at the center.

Those swords seemed intimately attached to him, like children at the sight of their parents.

“Protect the saintess!”

With a sharp cry from one maiden, all the others immediately took positions at six different points around the saintess, two to a side, forming a six-pointed star formation. Their placement was exquisitely calculated, able to attack or defend, like a living array.

In an instant, the sky shifted. A vortex appeared overhead and emitted a powerful suction force.

“Form the array!”

One maiden shouted, her body erupting with beams of divine light in a blaze of colors, dazzling beyond measure.

At the same time, from the other six directions, eleven beams of radiance burst forth together, and ancient arcane patterns appeared beneath the feet of the twelve maidens.

The patterns quickly spread to the other group. In the blink of an eye, a luminous disc appeared beneath the people of the Moonlit Immortal Sanctuary, resplendent beyond compare.

The disc took the shape of a hexagon, with a six-pointed star at its center formed by linked array patterns. On each of the six points stood two maidens, each radiating brilliant light and becoming the source of power for the entire array. An overwhelmingly mighty pressure spread outward, no weaker than the aura the saintess had unleashed with her secret art.

The saintess still watched Nightless Abyss in silence.

More and more swords flew toward him from the ruins.

Along with them came a surge of bloodlust.

The entire ruin had become a slaughterhouse, a place of death and doom.

One cultivator after another was struck by the divine radiance within the ruins and burst apart into clouds of blood mist. Deep within the ruins, blood flowed like a river, and no bones remained to be seen.

The swords of the fallen cultivators scattered across the ground, covered in blood. As if summoned, they let out faint moans and trembling tones, then with a sudden whoosh tore through the air and flew out of the ruins.

From deeper within, screams and the sounds of fierce combat still echoed on and on.

Cultivators kept dying, while the stronger ones struggled desperately to hold out. They battled against heaven and earth, unleashing every kind of immortal technique and divine method, each surrounded by swirling sacred radiance.

“What is going on? These swords are actually flying outward!”

“It is not just the swords. The blood energy is leaking out too!”

“Damn it, we have been trapped! The inheritance of the demon empress is a scam! Tens of thousands of our Eastern Wastes cultivators have fallen here!”

Cries of shock and furious roars erupted from deep within the ruins.

“I say this was a trap laid by the demon race. Haven’t you noticed that all the demon race members in the ruins have already withdrawn?”

“That’s right. There isn’t a single demon in the entire ruin anymore.”

“The demon race and the human race have never been on good terms. We have been set up this time and played by those demons!” An old man blocked a beam of light with a purple gourd and spoke through clenched teeth.

“This great array covers the entire ruin. If we want to get out, I’m afraid it will not be easy!”

“Hold on first. Endure as long as you can. Now it all depends on whether those two can break this array!”

Another elder brought out a bronze ingot and blocked two beams of divine radiance surging up from beneath the ruins. The two forces collided with a heavy thud, and two cracks instantly split open across the old man’s bronze ingot.

“This slaughter array must have cost the demon race a tremendous amount of effort. It covers the whole ruin, drained all the spiritual energy inside it, and turned it into the activation power for this killing formation, leaving us with no spiritual energy to recover ourselves!”

“From the looks of it, this slaughter array should have been prepared for human powerhouses at a higher realm. What a pity those people never came. We were the unlucky ones left to bear the blame!”

“Everyone, try to hold out for now. Heaven never seals off all paths. We absolutely must not give up until the very end!” Another powerful cultivator, his whole body wrapped in surging green light, radiated an immense vitality.

“At this point, all we can hope is that those two have a way to destroy this ancient hall. If even they cannot do it, then this time we will truly have fallen into the gutter and capsized!”

Another cultivator, wielding a huge saber, joined the others.

Deep within the ruins, groups of three and clusters of two had scattered into dozens of small and large teams.

More than ten thousand cultivators, perhaps even more, had entered, and now fewer than two hundred remained before their eyes, still struggling bitterly.

In the sky above, an ancient hall was enveloped in multicolored divine radiance, radiating all manner of mysterious and powerful energies.

Two figures hovered nearby, each exuding an incomparably terrifying pressure; even the whole sky trembled.

No one here rose above two hundred meters, because this slaughter array forbade flight. At the two-hundred-meter mark, four or five people were bombarding it, unleashing wave after wave of profound arts and divine spells.

Yet none of it could shake that invisible barrier in the slightest.

“The demon script on that ancient hall was personally written by the demon empress, and has long since condensed her Dao and momentum. With our power alone, there is no chance of destroying it,” sighed the cultivator floating in midair.

“Indeed. To witness the Dao text and force of the demon empress in my lifetime is enough; I can die without regret! As expected of an emperor: even after her body has perished and her Dao been damaged, her inheritance is not something we can hope to pry into.”

“I have heard that the demon empress was unmatched under heaven, and her imperial might shook all nine heavens in unison. In this age, where the emperor does not appear and the sages reign supreme, the emperor has long since become a forbidden subject...”