Chapter 692: A Heaven-Piercing Spear, Piercing Through the Death Energy!

“Get out of the way!” Inside the ring, Lin Yu was not making any of his usual idle remarks. “The formation pearl can’t seal this last needle. That Manifestation Realm death line carries Soul-Locking Fiendish Qi. The moment it touches that old gray cocoon, it’ll ignite!”

Su Ming’s eyes remained unwavering. His thumb pressed hard against the corner of a flesh-hugging Jade Box, tucked deep inside his sleeve.

With a single turn of his hand, several perfectly intact grains of Void Condensation Sand slid into his palm.

Trying to plug it with a conventional formation plate would be no different from trying to outpace the laws of those Manifestation Realm powerhouses. At this moment, only one method dared to completely seal this final path of death.

Su Ming gently crushed the grains between two fingers. The Void Condensation Sand, a resource that could be called an absolute means of survival, immediately crumbled into countless specks of stardust. He forced them into the tiny slot that had just opened along the edge of the formation plate.

The outer-path sand, which should have been used to tear open space and flee in an emergency, had now become the pinhole of a Minor Void Spirit Attraction Formation barely wider and longer than a grain of rice, right beneath his hand!

In the instant the formation was completed, it did not spew forth a vast torrent of Void spiritual energy.

The formation’s opening had been squeezed so narrow that what forced its way out from behind the fragile barrier of the spirit realm was not gentle Void energy, but an extremely cold, fiercely repellent pressure from a spatial rift.

“It’s open!”

A muffled cough rumbled in Su Ming’s throat. The leaf-shaped mark Qingheng had left on the back of his hand glowed with dazzling radiance, shielding him from the aftershocks outside. But the ear-splitting chill of the Void, escaping through the pinhole-sized fissure in the Void Spirit Attraction Formation, sliced straight through the two main meridians in his right hand like a razor. It even churned up a tempest in the soul lake within his Consciousness Sea, which he had only just finished nurturing. His meridians felt as if someone were sawing them back and forth with a blunt saw.

Just as his divine sense was about to grow painfully blurred from the cold pressing in from beyond, a mass of pure, dusky-golden soul water emerged from the Xuantian ring and settled heavily over the outer surface of Su Ming’s divine sense without a word.

Although Lin Yu did not mutter a single word in his ear, deep down he was already cursing those Manifestation Realm powerhouses for their unreasonable tactics. His solid, substantial Soul Body dimmed slightly, while his vast perception swept precisely across the intrusion, thoroughly clearing away all the stray thoughts trying to worm their way in through the rift and reach his little disciple.

Lin Yu sneered inwardly. If everyone in the cultivation world had the same scoundrel’s nature as those mighty beings, flipping the table and kicking the sick and helpless whenever they couldn’t win, then why bother teaching disciples that the Heavenly Dao had its order? They might as well all start practicing sneaky techniques for cutting off their opponents’ escape routes. Wouldn’t that be far more practical?

With his Master’s push, Su Ming ruthlessly brought his left hand together toward the right.

The rice-grain-sized spatial fissure lay directly across the narrow gap on the right, right at its critical point.

A strand of black death energy, which had just transformed into a purple-black spike and thrust its way in, was about to crash into the soul cocoon when the slight spatial repulsion emanating from the fissure forcibly pinned its tail in place.

As the two forces clashed, the death energy lost its support and was instantly torn into dozens of scattered wisps, like splashes of ink.

But the wisps were far too scattered. Even though most were swept away by the power of space, four or five stray gray threads, as fine as poisonous spider legs, veered away from the center and drifted toward an open space beside Su Ming’s shoulder, making for the pile of sleeping cocoons at the very back, where they could contaminate them.

At that moment, the dark shadow perched on Su Ming’s shoulder moved.

The feathers on Shadow’s body stiffened outward like the quills of a bristling hedgehog. It did not open its beak and try to devour the Manifestation Realm remnant filth, which was far too foul for its bloodline. Instead, its short, rounded wing roots gave off a faint, urgent boom, like an arrow in flight.

“Edge!”

Nearly solid black blade-lines lit up along the edges of its dark feathers.

Within the narrow, half-foot-square void, the bird-shaped shadow flickered three times, leaving behind three successive afterimages. Each time it darted forward, its feather tips, twice as fast as even a low-grade magical treasure, slashed precisely and viciously through the center of the drifting wisps of deathly fiendish ash.

After five faint puffs, so quiet they were almost inaudible, every wisp of death energy had burned away in midair, leaving only harmless ash.

Su Ming abruptly drew back his hand, cutting off the flow of the faint Ruo Shui spiritual energy inside the formation.

The pinhole formation’s opening remained between heaven and earth for only the shortest possible three breaths before the surrounding laws, surging in to crush it, forcibly closed it.

Su Ming lowered his head. The last two somewhat plump grains of Void Condensation Sand at his sleeve’s edge had been drained of all their spatial crystal. They had completely turned into a thin handful of dust, trickling down along the lines of his palm, no longer of any use.

His face was as pale as paper. A trace of blood, sweet and metallic, had welled at the corner of his lips from the strain and was beginning to spill out. But when his gaze fell toward the side of the hall, he saw the twenty-four peaceful cocoon shapes still hanging deep inside the old chamber at the roots. Though they swayed gently with their chains in the violent gale, they still retained their original, faint green glow.

At the top of the heavens, the heavy, dark clouds were stretched taut like hemp cloth being pulled by a giant’s hands, seemingly about to drop completely onto this enormous, three-dimensional tree nest.

Just as the enormous, faceless black image of the Lord of the Nether Abyss was about to use a third surge of momentum to rip the remaining three auxiliary roots out, the central trunk of the ten-thousand-year-old luminous banyan below, already looking hollow where the contaminated section had been severed, suddenly erupted with a brilliant green light a hundred times more intense than the midday sun.

Elder Woodheart had never shown much strain while fighting the Lord of the Nether Abyss.

This mighty being, who had fused his own life force with this ancient forest sea, was like a hunter crouched beside a well, watching his adversary thrash about in the water below. At the brief moment when the Lord of the Nether Abyss’s black palm paused, dragging the heaviest deathly stillness around him down toward the two main roots being yanked below, a chunk of condensed emerald essence, as thick as a tree trunk, broke off from the green Origin Pearl at the very center of the roots.

There were no needless words, nor any incantation.

In a single instant, this main-root origin, condensed from all the essence of his life’s cultivation of the wood element, burned away completely. Its vitality transformed into boundless life force and gathered before the gaping hole in the vast heavens, forming a ten-thousand-zhang-long greenwood spear that pierced the sky, its entire length flowing with countless ancient, natural formation lines.

“Pfft!”

The sound was not deafening. It was even somewhat muffled and brief, like a sharp blade slicing through an old cotton quilt.

The Heaven-Piercing Spear was like a wondrous spike growing from the earth, reaching the heavens. It passed straight through the very center of the Lord of the Nether Abyss’s palm, which only moments ago had carried the force to destroy heaven and earth, meeting no resistance at all.

The purple-black palm print, surging with death energy, was like a burst sack. Beneath the spear of concentrated life force, the purple-moon tide of death within it rolled and poured back out through the several-zhang-wide hole pierced straight through its palm.