Desolate star sovereign: Peerless God-king

Chapter 5: Blood on the Medicine Pass

The mountain pass was so quiet that the drip of condensation from the cliffside sounded like stones striking water.

Forty crossbow strings were drawn taut to their iron notches. The bolts were forged of refined black iron, grooved along their spines, and soaked in the bile of Corpse-Eating Vipers. A scratch would blacken a man's veins within ten breaths; a lung shot would turn his blood to thick, bubbling tar.

Zhou Chen stood five paces ahead of the line, his scarlet outer-disciple coat billowing gently in the rising mountain draft. He looked relaxed, almost bored, like a hunter waiting for a trapped rabbit to make its first futile twitch.

"Brother Han is currently lying on a medicine cot having his crushed knuckles set by third-rank bone-surgeons," Zhou Chen said, his tone conversational. "He screamed for three hours before the medicine kicked in. Uncle Chen was quite displeased."

Chu Yuan did not stop walking. His worn straw sandals made a quiet crunch against the gravel.

"He shouldn't have put his hand under my boot," Chu Yuan replied.

"A sharp tongue for a dead man," Zhou Chen chuckled softly. He tilted his chin, and the pleasant smile vanished from his face like grease wiped from a mirror. "Fire."

Twang—!

Forty bowstrings snapped in unison. The sound was not a sequence of clicks, but a single, tearing crack that echoed against the sheer stone walls of the canyon. Forty black streaks ripped through the morning air, whistling like diving hornets, instantly blanketing every inch of space between Chu Yuan and the cliff face.

Beside Chu Yuan, Meng Rou gasped, her hands instinctively flying to her face.

Chu Yuan did not retreat an inch.

Desolate Yuan Star — ignite!

Deep within the sole of his right foot, beneath the skin and the bone and the mortal meridian, the burning star flared with the silent, terrible fury of an ancient volcano waking from a thousand years of sleep. Thirty thousand jin of pure physical might detonated through his calves, his spine, and his shoulders in a microsecond.

BOOM!

The granite slab beneath Chu Yuan’s foot pulverized into powder. The air around him compressed into a visible, distortion-white shockwave that blasted outward like a cannon shot.

He did not dodge backward. He lunged straight into the teeth of the volley!

His left arm swept across Meng Rou's chest, shoving her backward behind a three-man-wide boulder on the path's edge. In the same motion, his right hand reached over his shoulder and tore the sackcloth from his back.

The rusted iron blade—etched with the ancient, slumbering characters of Xuanji—screamed as it cut through the air.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Sparks erupted in the mist like swarms of fireflies. Chu Yuan’s sword was not fast with the light, fluttering speed of common outer-sect routines; it was heavy, oppressive, moving with the terrifying trajectory of an iron plow turning over frozen earth. Seven poisoned bolts were batted out of the air, their iron tips sheared clean off by the jagged edge of the rusted blade.

Three bolts grazed his chest and ribs.

The outer disciples grinned with savage anticipation, waiting for the blackened rot of the viper bile to liquefy his flesh. But the moment the black iron tips gouged through Chu Yuan’s ragged burlap shirt, they met not soft mortal flesh, but the dense, jade-like bronze muscle tempered by the Desolate Star Tyrant Body Art!

Screeech!

The iron points screeched across his ribs like blunt nails dragged over an anvil, peeling only a thin sliver of skin before snapping under the sheer tension of his contracted muscle. The black viper poison hissed against his blood, only to be instantly consumed and incinerated by the blistering star-heat coursing through his veins.

"What?!"

"He didn't die! The poison did nothing to him!"

"How is a sword slave's body as hard as cold iron?!"

Panic rippled through the front rank. Crossbowmen fumbled with their iron winding-cranks, desperate to reload.

"Draw steel! Draw steel, you fools!" Zhou Chen roared, his pupils contracting into pinpricks. He had fought rogue cultivators and mountain bandits, but he had never seen a mortal take forty poisoned arrows head-on and emerge charging like a primeval horned beast.

Before the first disciple could clear his scabbard, Chu Yuan was already upon them.

Thud!

Chu Yuan's shoulder rammed into the center of the outer-court line. The impact sounded like two runaway iron wagons colliding at full speed. The disciple directly in front of him—a youth at Stage 3 of the Martial Path—didn't even have time to cry out. His ribs collapsed inward with a sickening crunch, and he was hurled twenty feet backward into his comrades, knocking down five men like dry straw.

"First," Chu Yuan whispered, his eyes pitch-black, cold and devoid of human warmth.

The rusted blade turned in his palm. Chu Yuan did not use fancy forms. In his second life as the peerless swordsman, he had long understood that all sword arts in the universe boiled down to two simple truths: speed and distance.

A horizontal cleave.

SHING!

A crescent of jagged iron whistled through the mist. Two outer disciples holding raised sabers felt their arms suddenly go light. Their weapons snapped in half, followed an instant later by two clean sprays of crimson mist across the cliffside. The two men collapsed to their knees, clutching severed tendons, shrieking in agony.

"Kill him! Surround him!"

"Use the Azure Cloud Cross-Slash!"

Four senior outer disciples, all at Stage 4 of the Martial Path, leapt into the air from both sides, their steel blades glowing with faint white true qi as they synchronized their strikes to cleave Chu Yuan's skull and shoulders from four separate angles.

Chu Yuan didn't even look up.

He grounded his left heel, twisted his hips, and threw a bare left fist straight toward the sky.

Fist of the Desolate Star!

There was no true qi in the punch—no glowing lights, no mystical runes. There was only raw, unadulterated mass moving at impossible velocity. The sheer air pressure displaced by the punch formed a visible sonic cone that blasted upward like an erupting geyser!

BANG!

The air detonated. The two disciples descending from the left felt their blades buckle before they even touched his skin; the violent gust shattered their wrist bones and threw them tumbling through the air like broken kites. The two disciples on the right barely managed to alter their trajectory, landing five paces away with their faces pale as lard, their ears bleeding from the concussion.

In less than ten breaths, forty armed men had been broken. Over a dozen lay groaning in the crimson-stained gravel, and the remaining twenty were scrambling backward, bumping into each other, their eyes wide with unmasked horror.

"Mon... monster!"

"He's not a slave! He's a fiend from the Nether Realm!"

"Shut up!"

A terrifying shout tore through the pass.

Zhou Chen stepped over the fallen bodies of his men, his face flushed with murderous rage, veins bulging along his neck. A faint, greenish-black mist began to seep from his pores—the hallmark of Stage 5 Martial Path cultivation, where internal qi begins to condense into elemental lethal force!

From his waist, Zhou Chen drew a three-foot-long, ink-black broadsword. The blade was etched with jagged tooth-like serrations, radiating a chilling, bone-scraping malice.

"Stage 5 Martial Path, Bone-Melting Saber Qi!" someone in the rear gasped, finding a shred of hope. "Senior Brother Zhou is using his ancestral treasure, the Black Viper Tooth! That slave is dead!"

Zhou Chen pointed the serrated tip straight at Chu Yuan’s eyes.

"I admit, you're a freak," Zhou Chen hissed, his teeth clenched so tight they groaned. "You must have eaten some wild spirit fruit in the trash heaps to gain brute beast strength. But in the martial world, physical force without true qi is nothing more than pig iron waiting for the forge! My Black Viper Qi can dissolve steel at twenty paces. Today, I'll turn you into a pool of yellow water!"

"Is that the blade you brought?" Chu Yuan asked softly, tilting his head.

Zhou Chen frowned. "What?"

"In front of the martial court, I told your uncle to tell you to sharpen your blade well," Chu Yuan said, stepping forward. With each step, the gravel beneath his feet turned into fine white flour. "Because when I take it from your corpse, I dislike dull steel."

"Courting death!"

Zhou Chen could no longer contain his fury. He kicked off the rock, his body blurring into a trail of greenish-black afterimages. The air howled like a weeping ghost as his broadsword came crashing down from overhead, trailing six feet of corrosive, flesh-rotting saber qi!

Martial Skill: Viper Cleaves the Mountain!

The blow was fast enough to split a galloping stallion in half. The green saber qi struck the rocky ground before the blade even arrived, sizzling and melting deep black gouges into the stone.

The disciples held their breath. No one at the outer sect could take Senior Brother Zhou's full-power strike without an iron shield!

Chu Yuan did not draw back. He did not raise his rusted sword to parry.

Instead, at the exact instant the green saber qi grazed his brow, Chu Yuan’s left foot took half a step forward—sliding directly inside the arc of Zhou Chen’s blade!

"What is he doing?!"

"He's suicide-rushing into the blade!"

In the eyes of ordinary disciples, Chu Yuan was throwing his chest against the steel. But in Chu Yuan's eyes—honed by the martial memories of three lifetimes—Zhou Chen’s strike was full of ninety-nine fatal openings. The balance was tilted forward by three inches; the right elbow was dropped half a knuckle too low; the recovery route was completely unguarded.

Chu Yuan’s left palm shot forward like a lightning bolt, slapping the flat side of the descending broadsword.

CLINK!

A gentle, seemingly effortless deflection. But backed by thirty thousand jin of star-force, that gentle slap redirected the entire force of Zhou Chen's downward cleave three inches to the left. The green saber qi slammed harmlessly into the cliff face, blasting a shower of molten rock into the air.

Zhou Chen’s chest was left wide open!

"You—!" Zhou Chen’s pupils dilated with animal terror.

"Too slow. Too sloppy. Too dull," Chu Yuan’s voice sounded right beside his ear, chillier than the frost of the Nether River.

Chu Yuan’s right hand whipped the rusted blade around.

He didn't use the edge. He used the flat, heavy iron spine of Xuanji, swinging it like an executioner's club straight into Zhou Chen’s ribs!

CRACK-K-K!

The sound of shattering bone echoed through the canyon like timber snapping in a storm. Zhou Chen’s protective Stage 5 true qi popped like a bubble. His ribs caved in, his lungs ruptured, and the scream stuck in his throat as a fountain of dark blood erupted from his lips.

Before his body could fly backward, Chu Yuan’s left hand reached out like an iron claw, clamping down on Zhou Chen’s right wrist with bone-splintering pressure.

Crunch.

Zhou Chen’s wrist bones turned to paste. His fingers spasmed open, and the black serrated broadsword slipped from his grasp.

Chu Yuan caught the hilt of the Black Viper Tooth cleanly in midair with his right hand.

He swung Zhou Chen around, slamming the broken young master onto his knees in the dirt.

The mountain pass fell dead silent.

The twenty remaining disciples stood frozen, their eyes bulging, their limbs trembling so violently their scabbards rattled against their thighs.

Senior Brother Zhou... the #3 Outer Disciple... the beloved nephew of Elder Chen... was kneeling in the dirt, held by the neck like a dying dog, with his own ancestral sword resting against his collarbone.

"Chu... Chu Yuan..." Zhou Chen coughed, blood bubbling from his mouth, staining his silk coat. His arrogance was completely shattered, replaced by the naked, sniveling terror of a spoiled brat facing true death. "You... you can't kill me... My uncle... is the Enforcement Elder... If you kill me... the entire sect will hunt you down... Fairy Luo cannot protect you..."

Chu Yuan looked down at him. His expression remained utterly tranquil, as if he were looking at an ant beneath a stone.

"Your uncle sent you here to peel my skin," Chu Yuan said softly. "Did he forget to tell you that when you hunt a tiger, you must be prepared to have your throat torn out?"

"Wait! Mercy—! I have pills! I have spirit stones! I—"

SWISH.

A black arc of cold steel whistled through the mist.

Zhou Chen’s voice cut off abruptly.

A thin red line appeared across his neck, widening by the breath. A moment later, his head slid cleanly off his shoulders, tumbling onto the gravel and rolling to a stop at the feet of the paralyzed outer disciples.

Chu Yuan stood in the spray of blood, his ragged clothes splattered, the Black Viper Tooth dripping crimson from its dark serrations.

He glanced up at the twenty surviving disciples. His eyes were like two deep abysses of eternal winter.

"Who else wants Brother Han's regards?" Chu Yuan asked quietly.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Swords and sabers hit the stones by the dozen. The disciples didn't even look back at their dead leader. They screamed, turned on their heels, and fled down the mountain path like sheep chased by a demon, tumbling over rocks, leaving their wounded behind in their frantic scramble to escape.

Chu Yuan didn't bother chasing them.

He bent down, hooked his fingers into Zhou Chen’s collar, and tore off an embroidered silk pouch hanging at his waist—a Low-Grade Storage Pouch.

Chu Yuan opened it with a flick of his fingers. Inside lay thirty low-grade spirit stones, three bottles of Grade Two Vitality Pills, and a folded piece of yellowed parchment.

He unfolded the parchment.

It was a detailed topographical map of Medicine Mountain. But unlike the common sect maps, certain areas were circled in dried animal blood. Deep in the central gorge, a cavern was marked with three ominous characters: Blood Demon Pit. Next to it, written in Elder Chen’s distinct jagged calligraphy, was a note:

Three hundred outer disciples sacrificed over three years. The Blood Ape is nearing the third transformation. Once the Blood Dan matures, this elder shall break through to the Core Formation Realm.

Chu Yuan’s eyes narrowed slightly.

So that was the sect's grand secret. Elder Chen wasn't just cultivating nephews—he was using the Medicine Mountain Trial as a slaughterhouse, feeding the sect's own disciples to a mutated beast to harvest an evil Blood Pill.

"Brother Yuan..." Meng Rou emerged cautiously from behind the boulder, her small face pale, stepping carefully around the pools of blood.

Chu Yuan tucked the map and the pouch into his robe and tossed the Black Viper Tooth to the ground before picking up his rusted blade, Xuanji. As the blade rested in his hand, a faint warmth pulsed from its iron hilt, as though pleased by the scent of fresh blood.

"Take whatever water and rations they left behind," Chu Yuan said, wiping a fleck of blood from his cheek. "We aren't turning back."

Suddenly, from the deep mountain mist ahead, a low, guttural roar rumbled through the earth. The ground trembled faintly, and flocks of black crows erupted from the ancient pine canopies, shrieking into the grey sky.

The beast in the pit had caught the scent of blood on the wind.

Chu Yuan looked toward the mist-shrouded gorge, the corners of his lips curling into a cold, dangerous arc.

"Good," he murmured. "Saves me the trouble of looking for you."