Just as Tantai Wuji understood Lang Jiuchuan’s character, so too did she understand the man who had been by her side for more than ten years — both master and something like a father. Until the very last moment, he would never lay bare all his cards. He would always keep one final retreat held in reserve.
She had never forgotten the antique Blood Soul Lantern that Tantai Wuji had fled with all those days ago. As long as he did not use it, he retained the means to escape with it. She had already poured everything she had into this battle. If she let him slip away again, her Dao would be extinguished.
Tantai Wuji was cautious without question — yet fortunately, so was she.
And so she had never given everything she had all at once. Even as her fellow companions arrived to help and fell one by one, she had still held in reserve the fighting strength for one final, full-force strike.
Now, the formation and the Demon-Slaying Talisman had together reduced Tantai Wuji’s demonic bones to powder. Even though he still retained some combat strength, under the accumulated weight of grievous wound upon grievous wound, his power was stretched to its breaking point. To win, he would have no choice but to commit everything to one final, desperate gamble — no thought for retreat, no path left open. Otherwise, what awaited him was the dissolution of both soul and spirit.
Lang Jiuchuan was the same.
Tantai Wuji had become a demon. His heart-devil could easily stir the darkness within the souls of ordinary people. To purify that demonic energy, the price she had paid was no small thing. Her great fortune was that she had the help of countless companions of the Dao and the self-rescue of the common people themselves — otherwise, relying on her alone, how could she have ever hoped to shake a demon lord?
The so-called savior is nothing more than becoming a light. If the light shines brightly enough, others will naturally be drawn toward it and together resist the great Dao.
Every last person was contributing their small and humble share of strength for the sake of this perilous mortal world.
Now, both she and Tantai Wuji were spent arrows at the end of their range. The moment of truth had arrived.
At that moment, the Blood Soul Lantern appeared. A torrent of sky-filling blood energy surged forth from the lantern’s flame, radiating a bone-piercing coldness.
This entire land of dead silence seemed to transform into a boundless, endless sea of blood — an independent space unto itself. Blood plasma, thick as a swamp, gurgled and bubbled. The sea of blood was filled with fresh souls of those who had died in recent days, and with accumulated resentment and malice. They struggled and wailed, turning their accusations upon Lang Jiuchuan, transforming into blood-demons seething with venomous hatred, their demonic cries piercing the ears, trying to drag her into the sea of blood to drown together.
Tantai Wuji transformed into a blood-shadow as tall as a mountain peak and bore down upon Lang Jiuchuan at terrifying speed. His pair of crimson demonic pupils churned with ultimate madness and the intent to destroy all things. He condensed a blood-colored spear and drove it straight toward her soul.
This was his true foundational essence — the genuine demonic domain from the void-emptiness demonic scriptures. The Blood Sea Void — transforming souls into demons, using souls as the domain itself.
Tantai Wuji had only one thought: Lang Jiuchuan must die.
And her Dao-body — must be reclaimed by him.
Outside, as the hour of midnight drew near, ordinary people stared up in horror as the full moon was swallowed bit by bit by the encroaching blood energy — the sky seemed poised to plunge once more into boundless darkness. They could not help but reach for their bronze gongs and iron basins and beat them with all their strength.
The Celestial Hound had come. It would swallow heaven and devour earth.
“You want to seize my Dao-body? You are not worthy.” Lang Jiuchuan regarded with cold eyes the enormous, hideous blood-shadow bearing down upon her. Brilliant golden light blazed from her entire body. The little remaining power of her Golden Core condensed into a righteous spiritual shield that blocked the blood spear and reduced it to nothingness. Then she cast a glance at her fellow companions of the Dao who were still stubbornly, fiercely holding their ground against the demonic energy, and her gaze filled with release and absolute resolve.
She was not fighting alone.
“Tantai Wuji — though you were born of the orthodox righteous path, you have willfully sunk into demonic corruption and become an evil demon, bringing calamity upon the mortal world, bringing harm upon living beings. Both humanity and the divine despise you. Heaven and earth shall together strike you down.” Lang Jiuchuan’s eyes suddenly blazed with fierce intensity, and she issued a clear, sharp command: “Now — I, Lang Jiuchuan, walk in unity with the Dao of Heaven, bearing its authority, becoming its divine weapon, to slay the wicked and guard all living souls!”
Her voice seemed to resound from the highest heavens, rumbling like thunder, carrying across all the world beneath the sky.
Every person who had been struck with terror at the Celestial Hound’s swallowing of the moon looked toward the west. Tears streamed down their faces. They fell to their knees, pressed their palms together, and silently sent their prayers toward heaven, earth, and all the divine.
In the Lang Family home, every member of the household knelt in the ancestral hall, holding a stick of incense, beseeching their ancestors to protect this final thread of their bloodline.
Countless threads of faith and wishing-force transformed into golden light that poured toward Lang Jiuchuan.
Clang — a deep, resonant, long-pealing toll of a bell rang out, reaching straight to the highest heavens.
She held the Dizhong Bell in hand. She took one step forward, and beneath her feet, lotus blossoms of void manifested. A streak of golden light runes flashed away with her will, and the power of her Golden Core together with her soul burned at a frenzied, extreme pace.
Stepping upon the constellations of Gou Chen and Bei Dou, walking the nine paces of the Great Yu, the bell’s toll carrying the Dao — communing with the will of the laws of heaven and earth.
Her slender figure traced path after path of profound and abstruse trajectories through this blood-drenched void sky and earth, never allowing that blood-shadow to come within so much as half a step of her. And as the lotus radiance bloomed beneath her feet one after another, her whole being grew gradually transparent — the vast and limitless power of primal chaos gathered above her head.
“Outrage — you dare!” Tantai Wuji was seized with heart-pounding dread. He violently drove the sea of blood. “Ten Thousand Souls Devour the Heart.”
The sea of blood surged and heaved. Countless resentful souls let out ear-splitting shrieks, taking shape as a ferocious and hideous blood-colored giant python that coiled and lunged toward Lang Jiuchuan, seeking to wrap around and bite her.
“ROAR!” Jiang Che surged in from some unknown direction, his killing energy fierce as a blade that scattered and shattered that giant python. He lunged directly at Tantai Wuji’s soul with bared jaws.
“This vile beast deserves to die.” Tantai Wuji’s soul was already critically weakened. That sudden fierce bite drove his fury through the roof. He summoned a surge of demonic flame and hurled it forward. Jiang Che’s roar was extinguished within the demonic flame.
The next instant, his soul trembled violently. Terror showed in his eyes, and he felt the impulse to retreat.
Madwoman. This madwoman.
She kept burning her own essence, blood, and soul — sacrificing herself to the formation, until in the end there would be nothing left but the dissolution of her soul and the extinction of her Dao. Was it worth it?
But she watched as Lang Jiuchuan took the final step forward and stopped before the main pillar of light at the summit. Above her head, the vast primal chaos power formed a golden vortex, radiating dazzling golden light and awesome divine authority.
Tantai Wuji chanted demonic incantations with frantic urgency, blood energy blazing skyward, completely obscuring that last point of the full moon’s clear radiance. The blood moon had arrived. No light remained in all the world. The cold was bone-cutting.
He could not waver any longer.
A thread of madness flashed across his blood-red eyes. His entire demonic core and soul contracted and condensed at once. The sea of blood erupted in towering, sky-filling waves of blood. Space trembled and warped. His soul too was burning, giving off ghostly blue demonic flame — as though summoning something terrifying, as though performing a sacrificial offering.
The Dao’s resonance and the demonic breath contended in fierce resistance, racing to see which would prevail.
Lang Jiuchuan cast a contemptuous sidelong glance at Tantai Wuji, paying no heed to his sacrificial ritual. Instead she looked toward her fellow companions of the Dao within the formation who still clung to the last breath of life, and gave a faint smile — a smile of unprecedented clarity and serenity.
“My body may fall — my Dao is not alone!”
The moment those words left her, her figure completely dissolved. Together with the primal chaos vortex, she transformed into the most pure and blazing light of the Dao and poured herself into the pillar of earth-vein light.
Hum.
The demon-slaying formation let out a resonant hum, erupting in a blazing radiance capable of incinerating every last trace of blood-colored demonic flame. All the star force, the five elemental energy, the Eight Trigrams Dao-resonance, and the primal chaos energy fused together in perfect harmony, invoking the wondrous mechanism of heaven and earth. They transformed into one enormous Taiji Eight Trigrams form, like a hollow silhouette hanging in the void — the Yin-Yang fish seemed to turn slowly within the primal chaos flood. With one sweeping arc of the fish-tail, it swept both that boundless sea of blood and Tantai Wuji — who had only just finished chanting his demonic incantation — into the flood-current of heaven and earth’s primal chaos.
Heaven’s stars slay all demons. Primal chaos has no limit.
“No…” Tantai Wuji’s desperate shriek was swallowed by the flood-current and extinguished in an instant — cut off abruptly.
The primordial chaos flood-current — imbued with the will of the chaos that existed before the separation of heaven and earth, at its most righteous and most unyielding — erupted without warning into a cluster of chaotic flame like a golden lotus. Golden light scattered in every direction. Wherever it passed, demonic energy retreated like a receding tide.
The blood moon, scorched by those blazing flames, had its blood energy dissolve away. Gradually, gradually, the clear radiance that belonged to the moon began to reemerge — bright and pristine, like mercury poured across the heavens.
“Lang Jiuchuan!” A roar blazing with fury broke through the sky and shook the earth.