Chapter 694: Do Not Strike at My True Form. With the King’s Seal, I’ll Sever Your Phantom Flow!

Although the Nether Abyss Lord’s enormous black manifestation was still pinned to the center of the death-tide wall by the ten-thousand-zhang-long green spear, an even deeper, more disdainful cold hum erupted from its faceless void.

The black palm strained against the spearhead, stretching its flesh almost out of shape. Not only did it refuse to release the spell drawing in the great tide of deathly silence, it even tried to pull another enormous fragment of a purple waning moon, tainted to death by the great calamity of the laws, closer from the source cavern in its endlessly distant Abandoned Lands.

The momentum was that of a killing strike: one palm would snap the luminous spear, then bring the death tide down upon the main root of all trees for a second beheading!

At this critical moment, Qingheng pressed his left hand against the withered branch about to break off the top of the broken staff.

This old skeleton, whose breath and flesh were all but gone, had no intention of sitting where he was to recover his strength and composure. He stumbled and crawled up from the wooden ground.

His right arm, which should have long since stopped breathing, trembled as he raised it toward the empty space above the ancient sleeping hall. The sacrificial robe that had once looked somewhat venerable and dignified had been burned by the Manifestation Realm’s death flames when he forcibly suppressed the backlash from the royal seal. Now, only several charred strips of cloth remained, unable even to cover his back.

But when his withered foot stepped onto the old, one-foot-high stair at the center of the hall, where earth energy gathered, the eleven Qiming elders, clad in tattered robes and still dripping the last few drops of their origin’s tiny blood from the old formation marks covering their bodies, followed Qingheng’s extremely slow steps. Deep beneath the ground, they traced out a secret and ineffable ancient cycle.

They were certainly not trying to race the mighty beings in the heavens. Each time their feet landed on the cracked wooden floorboards, their twelve soul flames became a line of flowing lights, repeatedly tempering and drawing through the half of the royal seal fragment that remained in midair, with only half its surface intact.

Just as the Nether Abyss Lord’s black palm was about to press down from above, the half of the royal seal that had been floating in the air, its broken edge mottled, unexpectedly took shape in the void. Under the extreme tempering of the twelve soul flames and the ancient laws of the old court’s cycle, it became the phantom image of a colossal green leaf-shaped ancient seal, with every leaf vein vividly rendered!

“Do not strike at my true form. With the King’s Seal, I’ll sever your phantom flow!”

Qingheng’s lips were dry and cracked. His voice had lost the gentleness he showed his younger friends, revealing the decisive ruthlessness of a sacrificial elder who had survived a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, now pushed to the very end.

The leaf-shaped phantom neither collided head-on with the enormous black palm, whose depths could not be seen, nor targeted the spot pierced to death by the Heaven-Piercing Spear. It simply swept down sharply and silently through the space between the Nether Abyss Lord’s purple moon overhead and the dark channel of death energy drawing the black palm downward.

Like a knife severing flowing water, like an axe cleaving withered grass!

There was no earth-shaking explosion. The thick, heavy beam of black light connecting the Nether Abyss Lord to the distant dead moon was swept by the phantom of the complete leaf-shaped seal. It did not struggle for even half a breath before snapping cleanly in the middle, scattering into a storm of tiny specks of ash.

The instant the connection was severed, the Nether Abyss Lord’s black manifestation, which had been rolling about in the upper sky with an air of invincibility, was like a puppet whose strings had been cut from behind.

Its colossal body slumped backward by a third, like a punctured sack, toward the lawless dead end beyond, where a massive void had already opened up beneath it.

That pause lasted no more than the blink of an eye.

How could Elder Woodheart, who had been waiting deep within his own origin for so long, fail to see such a perfect opportunity to strike?

At this moment of unbearable pain, when the ten-thousand-year-old luminous banyan had lost half its great branches and countless streams of golden blood were spilling beneath the earth, all the ancient root passages Qingheng had just reconnected to the main root lit up at once, like a sky full of stars.

In the fury of golden light and green radiance, Woodheart immediately brought out his trump card. Following the severed depths of the main root, he used powerful natural resonance to snap from within three thick, central main-root segments that the Nether Abyss’s death tide had just contaminated by flooding into them.

He sent those broken root remnants, drenched in the dying origin, hurtling backward with tremendous force, carrying along the vast shockwave and the web of death energy trying to escape through them, and hurled them toward the old home of the Nether Abyss’s black manifestation, whose defenses had softened because of the void left behind.

“Boom!”

The massive shockwave tore several more long, deep scars into the ten-thousand-year-old luminous banyan’s own trunk. Even the golden divine liquid at the bottom of its heartwood continued to gush down outside, like a brief shower.

But the vast black cloud of death, which had hung over this land for several days and nights, pressing down so heavily that no one could even draw a full breath, was finally torn in two by the savage force of the great roots snapping and sealing the passage. Boundless emerald light pierced straight through the heavens!

A clear light, faintly tinged with the natural purple hue of the spirit realm’s sky, poured down from above and through the mud-covered withered roots!

Its roots severed, its path blocked by the remaining power of the King’s Seal, and its support for any further attack completely gone, the Nether Abyss’s manifestation slowly withdrew into the unknowable depths of its Nether Void. Amid a series of low, chilling chuckles, impossible to tell whether they expressed disdain or were laying the groundwork for a challenge in the future, even the last scraps of rotten flesh and black death energy vanished from the sky along with it.

That great Buddha had departed, but the other two Manifestation Realm elders still alive underground had lost all hope.

The Bone Staff elder, who had previously fought Su Ming across several layers of the void and been left gasping with a great deal of his strength gone, realized something was wrong as soon as the sky brightened.

Without even saying goodbye, he slapped the remaining concealing poison from the back of his hand up into the sky. He flipped through the air seven times in a row, then tried to flee desperately toward the southwest.

Seeing this, the Bone Armor elder in the robe looked a little less nimble, and his eyes held nothing but immense resentment at being abandoned.

He knew he could never outrun that slippery Bone Staff elder. In his madness, he simply clutched a small death stele carved from a contaminated broken root. He could barely turn around, but he was still preparing to use his last strength to smash the lowest level of the ancient sleeping hall of Qiming, directly across from him, into ruins!

Chiyan had never been able to stand this sort of thing, and at this critical moment, his temper finally got the better of him. The little fire-type true essence left in his body was like furnace iron glowing red from the cracks. Even if he had to burn away the last of the life force that should have been protecting his meridians, he would spend it all in this final instant. With a sweep of his hand, the burned cloth strips in midair transformed into a huge red-and-green firewheel, half a zhang in diameter.

He did not pursue the Bone Staff elder, who had already vanished into the distance. Instead, the red-and-green firewheel blocked the Bone Armor elder’s path and slammed straight into him as he tried to destroy the hall!

The blind elder beside them, who had barely spoken but had devoted his entire soul-consciousness to the matter, did not fall behind either.

He slapped his chest with the dry, withered wrists that were all that remained of his hands. His soul, which should have been too fragile to withstand even a few breaths of strong wind outside, was drawn out into dozens of fine, white-paper-thin threads.

As the Manifestation Realm elder was blocked by the firewheel, those soul threads made no attempt to kill him outright. Instead, they wound around twice and tightly bound the life-saving death-core he cared about most, the one he always kept hanging at the opening of his robe!

The two venerable elders, who had staked half of their very existence on this ancient hall, were not hoping to achieve the glorious feat of killing this mighty old villain with their own hands. With their combined strength, and the remaining wrath of the King’s Seal still suspended in midair above the hall, they precisely dragged their opponent, who wanted to die with them and tear out the roots, into a deep webbed pool of remnants from which he could not move even half a step!

The Bone Armor elder tumbled about so badly that he could no longer tell north from south. Let alone damaging even one of the twenty-four cocoons, he himself was trapped underground, with no way out at all!