Chapter 668: Elder Dry Leaf, It’s a Shame You Didn’t Win Best Actor with That Performance

Boom!

Deep underground, it was as if an invisible thunderbolt had been detonated. The immense life force of the outer defensive formations around Greenwood Court had originally been circulating along its fixed routes, but under the guidance of Su Ming’s Phantom Flow Circuit, it was like a surging river that had suddenly found a gigantic outlet. With overwhelming force, it poured backward through the earth veins in a frenzy!

The extreme vitality and the extreme decay collided violently, without the slightest buffer, at that node forty zhang beneath the ground!

It was like forcibly stuffing a ten-thousand-year-old iceberg into a furnace pipe spewing flames.

“Crack, crack!”

A terrifying splintering sound that made one’s teeth ache came from underground. Immediately afterward, the ground throughout the spiritual plant cultivation area began to shake violently, as though a magnitude-twelve earthquake had struck.

The scene aboveground was nothing short of apocalyptic. The rare spiritual plants that had already been listless seemed to be enduring unimaginable torture. Their thick branches twisted and convulsed wildly. Then, amid a dense series of explosive sounds, the gray membranes covering their surfaces burst apart with a bang. Streams of rich, dark-purple murderous mist erupted from underground like fountains, shooting dozens of zhang into the air.

This sudden upheaval instantly shattered the deathly silence of Greenwood Court’s night.

“Enemy attack! The Dark Current Sect has broken in!”

“Run! The earth veins are collapsing!”

The spirit-race guards patrolling the outskirts were frightened out of their wits by the horrifying sight. Their shrill roars rose and fell throughout the night sky. Countless spirit-race warriors stumbled away in all directions, and the entire cultivation area instantly descended into chaos.

At the very center of that chaos, Su Ming’s gaze remained calm. He paid no attention to the surging murderous mist. The instant after the backlash erupted, he suddenly bit through the tip of his tongue and forced out a mouthful of reversed blood, causing his face to turn as pale as paper.

He staggered backward more than a dozen steps before heavily leaning against a glowing vine. He gasped for breath in great gulps, his chest heaving violently. He looked completely weak, as though his spiritual energy had been exhausted and he had suffered a grievous injury.

“Disciple, with acting like that, it would have been a loss to the cultivation world if you hadn’t won Best Actor in your previous life.” Lin Yu let out a mocking laugh within the Consciousness Sea, his Soul Body leisurely swaying inside the Xuantian ring. “That scapegoat, that old piece of wood Dry Leaf, has taken the blame so firmly that he couldn’t wash it off even if he tried.”

Su Ming ignored Lin Yu’s teasing. Clutching his chest, he stared fixedly at the place where the murderous aura was erupting most violently.

“Who was it? Who ambushed this old man?”

A furious roar filled with extreme pain and despair emerged from the rolling murderous mist like the cry of a vengeful ghost.

Boom!

The hard ground was forcibly blasted open, leaving behind a massive pit.

Elder Dry Leaf’s humanoid incarnation burst out of the pit in a wretched state. How could he still possess even the slightest trace of an elder’s dignity? His originally neat robe had been torn into strips of cloth by the violent backlash of vitality. His gray-and-white hair was disheveled, and black-purple contaminated blood seeped from all seven apertures of his face.

Most eye-catching were his cuffs and both hands. His skin, originally dry as tree bark, now looked scorched and withered, as though it had been burned by terrifyingly high temperatures. At the instant the backlash occurred, he had tried to use the vines of his true body to erase the traces he had left beneath the soil, only to be heavily injured by the still-unsettled aftershocks of the backlash.

With his appearance, an intense stench of twilight qi, impossible to conceal and carrying the foul odor of one whose lifespan was nearing its end, spread in all directions like a plague, mixed with the unique fluctuations of the Dark Current Sect’s decay laws.

“Who dares cause trouble in Greenwood Court!”

A furious roar like the peal of a colossal bell descended from the sky.

A spark of earthy-yellow spiritual light fell like a meteor. Elder Panshi’s sturdy, half-petrified body crashed down in front of Elder Dry Leaf, and his powerful life-force pressure instantly crushed the surrounding murderous mist until it dispersed.

Immediately afterward, countless dark-green thorny vines burst from the earth like spirit serpents from every direction. In the blink of an eye, they sealed every entrance and exit of the spiritual plant cultivation area so thoroughly that not even air could pass through. Elder Qingluo leaped lightly down from a massive vine, her face covered in frost, her eyes as sharp as blades as she stared at Elder Dry Leaf, who was surrounded at the center.

The last to arrive was Elder Genxu. Leaning on his ancient wooden staff, he made the ground tremble faintly with every step. When he saw the person standing at the center of the scene, whose entire body radiated the decaying aura of the Dark Current Sect, his wrinkled face instantly turned livid, and his eyes filled with disbelief and heart-wrenching grief.

“Dry Leaf... it’s really you?!” Elder Genxu’s voice trembled. He struck his wooden staff heavily against the ground. “You’ve been the elder in charge of the cultivation area for three thousand years! You... you actually colluded with that madman, Nether Abyss?!”

The spirit-race Enforcement Team had already surrounded the area so completely that not even water could pass through. Countless sharp wooden spikes and crossbows were aimed at Elder Dry Leaf in the center.

Elder Dry Leaf gasped heavily. He glanced at the formation surrounding him, then lowered his head to look at his charred black hands and the twilight qi continually leaking from his body. The panic in his eyes lasted only a brief instant before being replaced by a venomous madness.

His gaze passed over Panshi and Qingluo before pinning itself like a venomous snake onto Su Ming, who was leaning against a vine with blood still trickling from the corner of his mouth.

The night wind howled, sweeping up the withered branches and fallen leaves scattered across the ground. Although the dark-purple murderous mist in the spiritual plant cultivation area had been forcibly suppressed by Elder Panshi, the nauseating stench of decay refused to disperse.

Elder Dry Leaf stared fixedly at Su Ming a short distance away. His originally shriveled features twisted violently under the force of his overwhelming resentment, and the wrinkles on his face crawled like ugly centipedes.

“I colluded with Nether Abyss? What an absurd joke!” Elder Dry Leaf suddenly straightened his hunched back. Extending one charred, withered finger, he pointed directly at Su Ming and shrieked, “It was him! This human guest official! Elder Woodheart was blinded and actually allowed an outsider to interfere with the root-vein formations of our Greenwood Court! He recklessly altered the earth-vein routes, causing the vitality of the outer defensive formations to pour backward and trigger the collapse of the earth veins!”

His voice was enormous, echoing throughout the empty cultivation area with a madness born of total desperation.

“When I noticed the abnormality in the earth veins, I intended to sneak underground and erase those incorrect formation lines. Unexpectedly, I ran into the trap he had laid, and that was how I was severely injured by the backlash of vitality!” Elder Dry Leaf was clearly a master at shifting the blame onto others. He turned toward Elder Qingluo, his eyes filled with heart-wrenching indignation. “Qingluo! You’ve always been the most wary of the human race. Can’t you see it yet? This human is the spy the Dark Current Sect sent to hollow out our foundations!”