Riot

As that single sword-stroke came forth, a marvelous sensation followed close behind. Yu Ci felt as though he had returned to the very moment his flying sword had beheaded Daoist Yan, only this time, the circumstances were somewhat different.

Last time, he used the Seven Star Talisman Sword he had condensed himself; rather than calling it a flying sword, it was more like a flying talisman. He had simply broken through the barrier of his orifices in the nick of time, able to summon spiritual resonance with his divine intent, which produced that sort of incredible effect.

Yet this time, the sword-strike he swung possessed no talismanic arts attached to it. It held only pure form and spirit Killing Intent, naturally and seamlessly united with the sword, resembling Daoist Yan's bizarre sword-piloting technique. But his sequence of actions—pursuing the enemy, locking on, swinging, and executing—flowed like moving clouds and streaming water, bearing almost no trace of deliberate exertion, coupled with the state where his hands, eyes, heart, and courage blended as one between life and death. The moment he swung the sword, it was truly exhilarating to the absolute extreme.

While he was still savoring this hard-won sensation, down from the side, Ye Tu's joyous cheers rang out once more. Still unsatisfied even then, the boy leaped up like a madman and waved at him. Yu Ci also waved back in that direction, slid down the cliff face, and quickly returned to the top of the slope.

"Uncle Yu, awesome, awesome!"

Ye Tu jumped up and down, praising him continuously and repeatedly. First he had seen Lu Quan's corpse fall from the sky, and then he had watched with his own eyes as the "number one villain under heaven" had half his skull sliced off by Yu Ci's sword. Following that came that dazzling sword-strike. After the initial discomfort of witnessing bloodshed, what replaced it was profound admiration.

In truth, in the eyes of Ye Tu, whose living environment was extremely peculiar, the so-called standards differed vastly from those of ordinary people. However, everything feared comparison. He was clearly no match for the Poisonous Snake Monk, yet Yu Ci had not only neatly and decisively slain the monk, but also wiped out two accomplices whose strength was by no means inferior to the monk's. More importantly, Yu Ci had accomplished all this under the unfavorable condition of clearly being inferior in cultivation, and won so brilliantly that he had no choice but to admire him.

"Awesome!" The youth was as excited as if he had slain the enemy himself. "Three at the Initial Divine Connection stage... No, that last guy was already getting close to the Intermediate stage. You slaughtered them like chickens, Big Brother Yu. Too awesome!"

He gestured with the posture of Yu Ci swinging his sword, praising endlessly, "So Uncle's primordial spirit sword-piloting is already this practiced. Truly incredible! With this divine skill, no wonder..."

"Primordial spirit sword-piloting? Isn't it divine soul?"

"Ah?"

Ye Tu was taken aback by the question instead, only then remembering that Yu Ci was a rogue cultivator who had just crossed the threshold. He scratched his head, just wanting to offer an explanation, when his mind suddenly went blank. "You didn't know? If you didn't know, how did you pull it off?"

"It's my first time pulling it off."

Yu Ci didn't feel as though it were any big deal, and patted the youth's head once more. "I just drew my sword and killed someone, where'd all these labels come from!"

"The first time!"

The youth listened with eyes glazed over. Seemingly thinking of something else, in a state of semi-distraction, he muttered, "But this is different..."

"What's different about it?" Yu Ci had successively slain three adversaries whose cultivations were all above his, and he was precisely in a state of high spirits. Taking the opportunity, he lectured the youth, "No matter what sword technique or secret skill, in the final analysis it's just killing people. Do you still need to divide it into different ways of killing? I've practiced talismanic arts as my main discipline since childhood, and my understanding of swordsmanship is merely superficial. I haven't even practiced a few sets of sword forms, yet aren't I still drawing my sword and killing people?

"When you're truly facing an enemy, thinking too much is useless. First you must summon your blood and courage, making your hands, eyes, heart, and courage blend as one so that you aren't shaken by external foes. With a clear mind and intent reaching wherever the sword reaches, sometimes when you get carried away by excitement, what marvelous moves can't you execute? It's the same for yourself, and for the enemy you must do the reverse—slaying the enemy means slaying their courage. No matter how strong an enemy is, once their courage is beaten down, they're nothing more than chickens waiting to be slaughtered. Take the Poisonous Snake Monk and that Xu Lao Er for instance. If they hadn't lost their courage, given their cultivation, how could they have lost their lives so easily..."

This was not merely lecturing Ye Tu; Yu Ci was also summarizing his own experiences. Just as he said, he had never systematically studied swordsmanship and lacked established rules in his hands, but he relied on extraordinary courage and a mind that remained clear and transparent throughout. Time and again he sought survival in danger and victory in peril.

Tracing the secret of his swordsmanship down to its roots, it all fell upon the two words "bravery" and "danger"—using bravery to awe the enemy and danger to achieve victory. Meanwhile, his ability to seize a fleeting opportunity tempered between life and death, coupled with his unflustered state of mind when facing peril, served as the foundation for both. With internal and outside forces thus combining and his mind and body becoming as one, this was his magic weapon for repeatedly subduing enemies and seizing victory.

After a string of words, Yu Ci felt another surge of smoothness in his heart. He understood somewhat why there was the saying "fondness for playing the teacher." Setting aside psychological superiority, merely expressing the knowledge in one's heart clearly through speech so that it became known to others was an incomparable enjoyment.

It was just a pity that this brat Ye Tu possessed a temperament completely at odds with his own. Toward such discourse, he clearly absorbed very little, and his expression was even more absent-minded, making Yu Ci feel that this saliva was probably wasted in vain.

Just as Yu Ci and Young Master Ye failed to sort out their discussion, a deafening roar suddenly exploded. At first one could still hear the original sound of the roar, but in the blink of an eye, the grand sonic waves reverberated back and forth, turning into rumbling thunder that swept through the gorge. In comparison, the thunder sounds produced earlier by the Five Thunder Talisman were truly pitifully thin.

Yu Ci and Ye Tu stared at each other in dismay, not yet understanding what had happened, when a caw abruptly rang out from the clouds and mist, followed immediately by identical sounds merging into one. Passing another breath or two, a howling blood-red cloud burst forth from the depths of the mist and, without the slightest pause, rushed toward the upper reaches of the gorge.

Blood Vultures! And not just one, but nearly a hundred Blood Vultures gathered together, rushing upward in this hurried and panicked posture.

Yu Ci grabbed Ye Tu by the collar, retreating toward the inner side of the slope. Amidst the howling gale, this flock of Blood Vultures quickly passed over their heads, and their sharp cries grew distant as well.

Yet this was only a beginning. Soon enough, both people on the slope saw that the fierce birds and ferocious beasts in the valley seemed to have collectively gone mad. Those with fast speeds exhausted every ounce of milk-fed strength to flee upward, while those with slow speeds fought crazily with other living creatures. Yu Ci saw two flying apes of the same kind tearing at each other as they tumbled down into the deep valley. As for those fierce beasts that constantly slaughtered each other on ordinary days, they fought to the death without end, waging life-and-death struggles with the closest living creatures beside them.

"What is going on here?"

Ye Tu was dumbfounded by this, yet unusually, he was not frightened by the scene before him. Yu Ci patted his shoulder to signal him to keep quiet. Within this brief period alone, two or three waves of fierce beasts had charged onto the slope, very fortunately none of them lingering, but rather leaving at an even faster speed.

Yu Ci moved to the edge of the slope to look downward. The scene that met his eyes made his heart wrench fiercely. He saw that among the boundless clouds and mist below, a snake-like creature dozens of Zhangs long—just like the cloud-riding Teng Snake of legends, which originally coiled within the clouds and mist—was now struggling and thrashing madly. Its long tail whipped against the vapor, occasionally striking the cliff face and sending large swaths of shattered rocks splashing down with a clatter. Amidst the impacts, clear tremors transmitted even to the slope.

That appearance, no matter how one looked at it, was precisely like a death struggle.

Yu Ci recognized that this massive fellow, which he surmised to be a Teng Snake, was one of the most powerful living creatures in combat strength within the range displayed by the Zhaoshen Map. On ordinary days it would leisurely roam about in the gorge's clouds and mist with simply no natural enemies; what on earth had happened to it now?

The "Teng Snake" struggled for nearly half an hour, countless raptors and fierce beasts being beaten to smithereens by the long tail it lashed around its perimeter, before it gradually subsided and finally sank deeper into the clouds and mist, where its prospects were surely grim. Influenced by this, the riot among the fierce beasts within this range somewhat abated, at least with fewer of those ferocious fellows running up onto the slope.

Yu Ci let out a breath, then turned to tell Ye Tu, "This place cannot be lingered in for long, let's move fast!"

Ye Tu now obeyed Yu Ci's every word. Nodding, the two of them climbed up together. Yet after only a quarter of an hour, they slid back down, covered in dust.

They could not break through. That flock of Blood Vultures that had just flown over their heads seemed to have brought the chaos of the gorge's depths up to the upper levels. Within a mere scope of several miles upward from the slope, conflicts between raptors and fierce beasts were not the least bit inferior to those down below. It was fine for the two of them to stay on the slope, but once they moved, they would immediately become targets of attack. If it were just Yu Ci alone it wouldn't matter, but dragging Young Master Ye along made things very troublesome.

With no other choice, the two had no option but to retreat back onto the slope and wait for this wave of chaos to pass. This wait lasted an entire night.

Yu Ci was not anxious, for he possessed the Zhaoshen Map. Even though the range illuminated at night was still reduced to within thirty miles, he possessed sufficient ability to grasp the circumstances of the surroundings. In comparison, he was more worried about Ye Tu's state.

At this moment when raptors and fierce beasts had gone mad into a calamity, Young Master Ye suddenly displayed unusual calmness—or more accurately, the brat had entered a state of severe absent-mindedness, completely immersed in his own world, turning a blind eye to external things and a deaf ear to external sounds.

To put it nicely, this was called self-forgetfulness; to put it harshly, this was going mad...

When daylight dispelled the darkness and the range of the Zhaoshen Map gradually expanded, Yu Ci let out a long sigh. Since entering the Sky Rift Valley, the most difficult night to get through had just passed like this. Over the course of the night, he had slain four raptors and fierce beasts that intended to storm the slope, temporarily safeguarding the peace of this place. And through the observation of the Zhaoshen Map, this wave of chaos seemed to have premonitions of subsiding; he prepared to wait a while longer—at least until Ye Tu recovered his normality.

With nothing to do in his idle time, Yu Ci began to clear out the Shrimp Whisker Grass remaining on the slope. Amidst this boring and tedious labor, time flew swiftly. When he pushed the total number of Shrimp Whisker Grass he possessed past four thousand stalks, the shrill, extremely excited screams of the youth reached his ears.

The youth's voice was once again filled with vitality. Yu Ci turned his head to see Ye Tu waving and greeting him, even dancing with joy. The intense transition from a static to a dynamic state made Yu Ci want to feel his forehead even more.

Ye Tu cared not a whit what Yu Ci was thinking, vigorously waving his hand. "Come over quickly, come over quickly! This time what I'm explaining, Uncle Yu, you'll definitely be able to understand!"

It took two extra turns of Yu Ci's brain before he understood Ye Tu's meaning. So this brat had been acting batty for days while still considering passing on cultivation common sense to him?

Before he could display any emotion, Ye Tu had already rushed up, laughing merrily as he dragged him to the flattest patch of ground on the slope. A regular circle had already been drawn here, and a relatively smooth stone was placed right at the center. The youth pointed at the diagram and proudly announced:

"This is my latest achievement!"

Yu Ci looked at this crude diagram, raised his head after a long moment, and didn't know what on earth he ought to say: "This?"