novelraw Chapter 452: Tell Me, What Is Your Desire
Chapter 452: Tell Me, What Is Your Desire
A yin wind howled. In an instant, heaven and earth fell into darkness. Ghostly cries and wolfish wails tore through the sky.
Ancestor Sui Bian, who had set these events in motion, felt his heart hammer up into his throat. The next moment, darkness swallowed his vision and his consciousness plunged into a boundless night.
He did not know how long had passed before a voice, faint and indistinct, sounded by his ear: “Tell me, what is your desire…”
“Desire?” Ancestor Sui Bian smacked his lips and answered cheerfully: “There are far too many. First, I want to become a Mahayana Cultivator. Second, I want the Five Elements Dao Sect to become the greatest sect in the Three Thousand Worlds. And then I want my beloved confidantes…”
“Choose only one.”
“Only one? One is far too few. Isn’t this where I make wishes? Why are you so stingy?”
The voice did not reply. Ancestor Sui Bian pouted: “Fine, fine, give me a moment to think. Only one is really hard to choose.”
At the same time, Yu Zhao faced the same darkness.
“Desire?” she murmured. She thought of that seductive breath that tugged at the heart and of the black undercurrent within the White Bone Flower’s stamen, and a guess coalesced in her mind. She asked instead: “If I speak it, can you truly fulfill it for me?”
The voice grew honeyed with temptation: “Yes. Whatever you want, I can grant.”“I want to go home.”
“Go… home?” The owner of the voice clearly had not expected such an answer and was, for a moment, at a loss.
“Yes, home. Please send me back to the Cultivation World,” Yu Zhao said. With Tu Xiao’s Storage Bracelet in her arms, as long as she studied calmly, she believed she would eventually grasp the mysteries of spatial Formation Arts. Then, without relying on any other Cultivator, she could re-open the Teleportation Passage between the Cultivation World and the Seven Mists Realm.
“Aside from returning home, do you truly want nothing else? Power? Beauty? Wealth?”
Yu Zhao shook her head: “There are no pies that fall from the sky. Those, I can earn through my own effort. Returning to the Cultivation World is what I desire most.”
As if unwilling to believe she wanted nothing more, the voice turned into a coil of smoke and slipped into Yu Zhao’s Sea of Consciousness. She endured the discomfort and let it pry.
“No trace of the Dao of Sentiment. So it is the Ruthless Dao…” sighed the voice. The intrusive sensation vanished. Then countless fragmented images poured into her Sea of Consciousness.
Yu Zhao saw two women, faces indistinct, waging war beneath a sky like a vault of iron. Every lift of their hands and shift of their feet stirred mountain winds and ocean tides; the starry sea heaved. Even at a remove, Yu Zhao could feel the terror of the power coiled within them.
She had once thought the legends of the Land of Divine Remains were exaggerations. Today she realized she had been the frog at the bottom of a well.
The battle raged for ten days and ten nights. Mountains were leveled, rivers changed course, and the planet beneath them became a wasteland. Just as the world seemed on the verge of collapsing under the strain, a phantom palm descended from the heavens and enveloped both women. From Yu Zhao’s vantage, the handprint blotted out the sky, nearly as large as the planet itself; she could even see the ridges of the palm clearly.
As the palm fell, the surrounding space compressed and caved at terrifying speed, shattering into countless fragments. A vast, devouring black hole opened its maw; everything was swallowed; the planet split into pieces. The two women halted midair. As the palm neared, the armor-clad woman suddenly flared her cloak and drew the other into her arms.
Yu Zhao’s consciousness was expelled. The images dissolved into nothing.
Her body trembled as she snapped her eyes open. A blood-red scene crashed into her vision. She brushed her fingertips across the corner of her eye. Her sight felt different again. In darkness she had been able to see before, but only the faintest outlines. Now her view was riotous with color. Every person was transparent to her gaze. She could see Spiritual Power coursing through their meridians, the Nascent Soul seated in their dantian, and the fluctuations of Spiritual Power rippling around them. It was no exaggeration: from the moment they even thought of moving, she could predict their actions precisely. Not a whisper of Spiritual Power could escape her.
Realizing what that meant, her breath hitched for a heartbeat. With equal Spiritual Power, she would stand nearly invincible.
[Who were those two? Why grant me such a power? Is it a reward, or is there some other design…]
Her heart lurched. In thinking only of herself, she had forgotten her ancestor.
With her sharpened sight, she found him at once amid the blackness—leaning against a pile of bones, cradling a skull and sleeping soundly, a suspicious gleam at the corner of his mouth, utterly at ease and utterly out of place.
Yu Zhao let out a breath she had not realized she was holding. She swept her gaze across the field. Many lay dead, faces dark as ink. Some were drowning in desire and struggling; some were sleeping peacefully. She focused on those she knew. The result did not surprise her. Whether the Wind, Fire, Water, and Earth clans, or the great houses of Nangong and the rest, their people were all intact. At most their auras were a little weak, but they had clearly weathered the worst of it.
Her eyes dimmed as she took a step forward. A dense crackling split the air.
Ka, ka, ka—
She looked down in shock. A vast fissure ripped across the earth at her feet and spidered outward in every direction, while threads of black wind seeped up from the depths. A Cultivator standing too close was brushed by the gale; half his body vanished at once.
Yu Zhao’s pupils tightened: “Astral Wind.”
She abandoned her previous plan and shot toward Ancestor Sui Bian. All around, the fissures multiplied, the tremors grew. Those still sleeping were wrenched awake, only to have their souls scoured by the merciless Astral Wind. The survivors who dodged destruction fled without looking back.
Ancestor Sui Bian also woke, and most reluctantly at that. Because there was no “whatever” option, he still had not made his choice. He had barely opened his eyes when he caught the fear on Yu Zhao’s face. Startled, he was about to ask when he sensed a deadly presence rushing toward him. He instant-shifted away and appeared by Yu Zhao’s side. But the moment before his feet touched ground, a Spatial Rift bloomed silently beneath him. At the same time, a gust of Astral Wind swept in from above.
“Ancestor!” cried Yu Zhao.