“Since you’ve become a dog of the natives, I trust that the Defeng miss will no longer want to marry you. In that case, you can die now!” Jiang Kui erupted with rage as soon as the Curse King stopped talking.
He never imagined that the Curse King would reveal the secrets of the Land of Reincarnation to its natives. This was a grave taboo! While Jiang Kui dared join the Corpse Refiners, he would never breathe a hint of the land’s secrets to others.
A sword appeared in his hand—carved from divine wood instead of forged in metal. Jade-colored sword light flashed through the air when he waved it and forced Lu Yun’s hellfire back.
Clang!
A sword hum resonated in the void as a white longsword whistled into the Curse King’s hand. The man’s aura immediately underwent a drastic change. He previously exuded a dark, malevolent, and gloomy air at every second. Like a coiled viper, the Curse King constantly hunted for a chance to deliver a lethal strike to its prey.
But now, he was much younger and dressed in white. His long hair was as black at night and his robes as pristine as snow. A small crown of gold held his topknot together and a jade-colored belt threaded with gold silk wrapped around his waist. He looked completely different from the Curse King.
Nothing about his features had changed. It was still the same otherworldly beautiful face, skin so fair that it was almost translucent, but a certain fey quality had been added to his beauty. The Abyssal Hell seemed ready to burst with exuberant joy because it’d been graced by his presence. In this moment, he was no longer the Curse King, but Darklake Crown Prince Chu Xingran.
Chu Xingran’s sword deepened into crystalline blue and he flew at Jiang Kui with a hundred million water ripples.
……
“Is, is this what the guy really looks like?” Haidong Lin stared, tongue-tied, at the current Chu Xingran. He didn’t know what else to say.
“Probably,” Lu Yun nodded dumbly. “So would you say he’s a man or a woman?”
Haidong Lin shook his head. “How would I know? He would be the greatest source of trouble in the world if that face belonged to a woman, and he’d be the greatest enemy of all men if it belonged to a man!”
Lu Yun was very much in agreement. “I can’t let Qing Yu or the little fox see him. …well, the little fox is on par with him when she’s in man form. They’re all huge troublemakers.
“Now isn’t the time for these two to settle their differences though. Chu Xingran is only willing to give me fragments of the great dao outside and the Firmament Prison. He won’t tell me anything else. If I capture Jiang Kui and refine his soul…” He transformed into a streak of black light and dove the two. At the same time, he summoned three soybean replicas and targeted Jiang Kui.
“Heir to the god of Mount Tai!” Jiang Kui roared with anger. He spun his wooden sword and stabbed the void three times, shattering the soybean replicas.
Jumping with fright, Lu Yun hastily dodged to the side.
“These sword methods! Even Jian Bu’er might not be a match for him if he was here!” If any of those strokes had landed on Lu Yun, he’d be dead! No wonder Mo Yi had wanted him to leave behind a failsafe before he set out. The powerhouses of the outside world were much more terrifying than he’d imagined.
Lu Yun took a deep breath and retreated, abstaining from their conflict. Chu Xingran was holding his own with Jiang Kui! If the Curse King had turned back into Chu Xingran early on, Lu Yun wouldn’t have stood a chance.
But since he’d discarded his disguise, any karmic repercussions having to do with who he was before were no more. After the affairs of the Abyssal Hell concluded, he was going home to the outside world.
“But no matter who they are, they won’t be taking the world of sequence!” Lu Yun set his jaw and reconstructed the hell cannons in the void. He couldn’t stand his ground before Jiang Kui or Chu Xingran, but he was far superior to the two when it came to formula dao.
Formula dao was the medium of supplemental dao—once it grew to a certain level, it would absorb all supplemental daos and turn them all into formula dao. It would epitomize all daos becoming one.
It was happening to Lu Yun first.
There was no more supplemental dao on him, just formula dao. He could use formula dao to cultivate all of his supplemental paths and use formula dao to execute them. Soul force flooded the area when he called upon it, creating ninety-nine hell cannons that then combined into one.
“Haidong Lin, come!” Lu Yun called out to the man. “Chu Xingran can’t win against Jiang Kui, so blast him to death with the hell cannon!”
He could clearly tell that Jiang Kui was here in the flesh and not through a battle zombie or anything else. Killing him would be the end of Jiang Kui as a person.
Since Lu Yun was the creator of the hell cannons, that made them part of him. Killing Jiang Kui with a cannon would turn him into an Infernum. Lu Yun’s true cultivation level was now on par with the Nihil World Sovereign realm that the Tome of Life and Death had given him. In fact, he’d outstripped it. Thus, all of the abilities that the treasure had bestowed upon him were accessible once more.
Anyone he killed would become one of his ghostly servants.
“Alright!” Haidong Lin landed near the hell cannon without hesitation and activated it with a reverse thrust.
Kaboom!
Gray light spewed from the cannon’s mouth; it seemed to absorb the strength of the entire hell and blasted it back out.
Chu Xingran had kept an eye on Lu Yun’s movements all this time and frantically sped for the sky the moment Haidong Lin approached the cannon. Neither was Jiang Kui a fool. He ran in the opposite direction the second that Chu Xingran abandoned their fight. One blow from one hell cannon had caused serious injuries, one from ninety-nine cannons would vaporize him!
“How—what?!” Jiang Kui’s eyes went round as a doorway suddenly appeared in front of him. The gray pillar of light from the cannon erupted from the bronze door frame and hit him dead and center.
Jiang Kui’s consciousness faded away.
……
“Huh? He’s not an Infernum?” Lu Yun raised his eyebrows with surprise when Jiang Kui died. There was no sign of the man in either the kingdom of hell in the world of immortals or the Disordered Hell.
“Is he dead?” Haidong Lin panted.
“No,” Chu Xingran responded. “He’s the greatest genius of Rising Sunriver, he won’t die that easily.”
Instead of reverting back into the Curse King, Chu Xingran took a look at Lu Yun. Everything about his former identity had faded away upon the wind. For the primary and secondary worlds of the Land of Reincarnation, the Curse King was dead.
etvolare’s Thoughts
Lu Yun’s not seriously letting this guy off the hook just because he has another identity, is he?
