Chapter 639: Kunlun Sect vs Blood Thunder Sound Temple (15)

An array is a real phantasm.

It twists the energy of nature to affect people, so a person’s senses are warped—seeing false things, unable to pull themselves together.

Those who haven’t been caught in an array click their tongues: why flail at a cheap illusion?

Look from outside and you’d see them circling the same spot, dueling the empty ground alone, slashing at the air, stomping the floor and tumbling—pure chaos.

But knowing it is false does not let you escape—it was not that kind of simple eye-trick.

What of it if you know you are trapped in a formation.

Your eyes, nose, ears, tongue, and skin—all your senses—insist it is fact, not false.

So, as far as you are concerned, it is a concrete phenomenon: your own skin splits and is cut, you go flying like you were struck and your bones break; you sweat rivers and collapse though it isn’t hot, or shiver and freeze to death though it isn’t cold.

Of course, arrays that deceive by effect alone and kill—absolute death arrays—are extremely rare.

Most just pen you in, make you wander in circles until you get out—or show things that are psychologically harmful and leave deep wounds.

And to handle those who keep wandering, there exists a Life Gate.

A Life Gate is a spot inside the array that is unaffected by the array’s effects, and a way out to the outside.

So you lay the array, then handle them with poison or traps, or those who memorize the Life Gate route go in and do the job themselves.

The Great Blood-Annihilating Heaven Array was a Blood Cult extermination array infamous for fear and shackling.

The world took on a horrific form; the weak of nerve fainted on the spot and lost their minds.

Even those with the stomach and gall to endure were the same—helpless.

Countless boneless arms stretched from the flesh-ground, pinning them so they couldn’t budge, leaving them flat on their backs and subdued.

The Great Blood-Annihilating Heaven Array was notorious for having no Life Gate at all.

Since the Blood Cult’s assorted monsters were unaffected by formations, it was built that way.

And even if a rescue somehow came, cases of crippling trauma or long years of nightmares were legion.

Anyway.

It doesn’t work on Qing.

As it hadn’t back in the Heavenly Demon Tomb.

So she strode straight in and ransacked every inch of that enormous temple of the Blood Thunder Sound Temple.

Except—where was the center?

At first she thought it would be easy.

Just go into the biggest building—if you could call a structure of bone and viscera a “building”—and it would be sitting there.

A moment’s thought says otherwise.

A Translucent-level master sees through formations, but in truth, even a Flower Realm master is hard to keep penned up long.

An array has a keystone—and a framework that supports it.

Those are objects, people, buildings.

So a Flower Realm warrior can simply broadcast Steel Qi in all directions and smash anything and everything; sooner or later the array collapses.

The more sophisticated the formation, the more you bury it in the ground so it can’t be destroyed—or hide it so blind blades can’t break it.

So it was only natural that Qing wandered.

She was rifling through the fourth hall of worship in the Blood Thunder Sound Temple when—

“Excuse me?”

A sudden call—Qing whipped around with her point leveled.

A head poked out past a wall.

Only, the wall in question was the heaving image of slick white bone inside writhing viscera, with parasites sprouting everywhere.

So the smiling woman’s head peeking from between them made quite the uncanny tableau.

“Heavenly Flower Sword, right?”

Qing eased the blade down.

Suspicious to the utmost.

But she was using polite address for one.

And those eyes, bright and harmless, looked like the adoring gaze of the young woman warriors who squealed whenever Qing visited minor sects.

“Who are you?”

“Wow. The real Heavenly Flower Sword! The most beautiful under heaven! Are the rumors true? They say you judge faces—won’t you show me just once?”

Inside a grotesque intestinal maze like being inside a giant beast—and this was her tone?

Qing hesitated, then obediently tugged down her face veil and showed her face.

The woman’s eyes flew open.

She nodded briskly, satisfied.

“You sly witch! You thieving cat! You seduced her with that face! I approve—strongly approve!”

“Excuse me?”

“Ah—right. Great Blood... Blood-Annihilating Heaven... what was it?”

Qing only shrugged.

Because she didn’t know exactly either.

Blood-Cult bastards—always drunk on their own style, slapping on pointlessly difficult names.

“Anyway, you came to find the center, yes? Here, I’ll guide you. This way, this way.”

Qing hummed.

Ghost? Person?

She was the peculiar sort who wasn’t affected by formations—yet could see others’ phantasms quite well.

She followed, peeking at the Western numerals hovering over the woman’s head.

Her ill deeds topped a hundred.

An evildoer, yes—but not at the level of the Blood Cult scum she’d seen so far.

What was she? What did she do?

A trap?

Mm. Even so, there was no guarantee she’d find the array’s center by bumbling around.

Even if it was a trap, best to stick her head in first—

The place the woman led her to was the third building they’d turned upside down not long ago.

“I checked this one earlier—”

“Tch, you didn’t check properly. Here, here—right here.”

The woman groped over the floor—meaning the pulsing viscera—then suddenly—RIP—lifted a section clean as if cut.

Beneath, where sticky blood stretched like glue, a passage sloped down underground.

“Here we part. My name is Siang—means a woman born under the sun, you know? You must remember me, okay? Ah, but keep it secret that I showed you—otherwise the Blood Cult will try to kill me.”

“Wait—”

“Next time we meet, don’t pretend you don’t know me!”

With that shout, the woman—Siang—flung herself into the wall of viscera.

CRACK—like a wooden window frame splintering. Oh—so that was a window.

She flipped through and vanished at speed.

Qing tilted her head.

What was that?

For a trap it was awfully sloppy.

Or perhaps she meant to lull her by cooperating and then spring something.

But Siang’s attitude was so friendly—like someone meeting a long-admired idol.

And if it was an act—well, then it was so good she deserved to be humored.

So Qing raised her sword and went underground.

Because of the array’s influence, everything still squirmed—viscera and fat and bone and parasites—thoroughly unpleasant.

The descent was deeper than expected.

About three levels, she thought—then a thick iron door suddenly blocked the stair’s end, wedged in the meat.

Talismans of an obviously baleful sort were slapped all over the door.

Qing felt relieved.

Looked like the woman had guided her true.

Siang, was it? She’d remember.

Qing shoved the door with all her strength.

Strength beyond human, and still—it didn’t budge. Just how solidly was it sealed?

If it won’t open, I’ll cut it.

Starlight rose from Moonlight Sword—red as sunset along the blade.

By feel, the plate was solid iron at least ~2½ in thick.

Moonlight Sword’s qi changed shape; spikes sprouted along the blade’s edge.

Three soul-flames flared clear in Qing’s pupils.

Wheel-Eye of Turning-Wheel Cataclysm—the Great Ten Demonic Arts.

And just as the soul-flames began their slow rotation—

“Ah.”

Qing spotted a handle in the corner of the iron door, sheathed the sword, and gave it a tug.

SCREEEEE—an awful rasp of iron-on-iron.

Oh. Not “push.” “Pull.”

Thus the underground room within revealed itself—

The instant it opened, a bloody tang didn’t just flow—it burst out like an explosion.

“Mm.”

Qing’s expression—sniff, sniff. Oof. Blood-scent.

Fresh as it gets. Delicious.

Humans are subjective beings.

Blood-scent isn’t a stench to everyone.

Drawing a long breath, Qing filled her lungs with the coppery reek and stepped into the hidden chamber.

Before her lay a perfectly normal stone room—floor, ceiling, and walls in stone.

Only—with real human organs worked in.

A very avant-garde style.

Hearts, lungs, livers strewn everywhere; from the ceiling, intestines dangled in bunches, nailed in place.

And in the middle, countless characters “written” in blood—no, not written.

Grooves carved into the floor and blood poured in—so finely incised it was a wonder how they carved all those lines.

At dead center, a mountain of meat—something piled up, with the top of a head poking out.

Eyes rolled back—what, a kid?

A child, face still baby-smooth, was buried in the meat.

Startled, Qing flashed forward, flung meat aside, and reached to pull the child free—

Qing froze mid-motion.

Her eyes rolled up to show only whites; her mouth fell open; drool thick with the blood-scent pooled and ran, dripping from her chin—and she didn’t even notice.

****

A sensation of floating alone because the world itself does not exist.

Nothing—where not even “nothing” exists—only a blend of brightness and darkness, a mere chaos—an unseen, unfelt void.

Within it, Qing felt the Blood Thunder Sound Temple.

That was exactly right.

The Blood Thunder Sound Temple was inside me.

That vast temple had taken its place as part of my blood, flesh, bone, and viscera.

Strictly speaking, not the temple.

The formation was Qing’s interior and Qing herself—and the temple only felt like it was within because it lay inside the array’s domain.

In an instant Qing grasped the situation.

Ah. This is—that.

I become the formation.

And so Qing understood everything about the Great Blood-Annihilating Heaven Array.

Because Qing was the array and the array was Qing.

And a Flower Realm warrior is someone who understands herself completely.

Inside the Heavenly Demon Tomb, Qing had seen how the demonic warriors’ most painful memories—hidden deep within—formed the world as mind-images.

That was a horrific method that gouged at each person’s memories—their personal wounds.

But the Great Blood-Annihilating Heaven Array was a world formed from a single person’s mind-image.

The child at the array’s core—the one Qing had come to save—who had reached communion with that baleful star of ten-thousand slaughters.

In a flash, Qing saw the child’s memory.

A child forced to take up a blade, to torture and kill countless people—and to live on nothing but the blood and meat of the ones he butchered.

To the child, “human” meant only “to be killed” or “to be something you want to kill.”

And the Blood Cult scum abused the child.

They beat and whipped him—faces blank—not for fun but out of “necessity.”

So the child was injected with hatred—taught hatred.

A manufactured murderer—a kill-nature.

Before Qing could be angry at that monstrous making, something else presented itself first.

A man-made killer, forced into contact with a baleful star, spreads his mind-image as the array’s core.

That was the heart of the Great Blood-Annihilating Heaven Array.

And now—

Qing had touched the core.

Qing had become the formation.

Not some counterfeit glued to a baleful star by force—but the true master of the Star of Ten Thousand Slaughters.