Chapter 371: A Cannon Fodder's Final Scream

Shen Yu did not rush toward the altar to snatch the beast egg, nor did he make any move to flee.

Instead, he swept his tattered, blood-soaked robes aside and sank slowly into the full lotus position right at the edge of the stone platform.

He rested his forearms casually across his knees.

Streaks of dried black blood crisscrossed his pale cheeks, his broken eardrums still leaking faint crimson, but his blood-red irises remained locked onto the two figures across the chasm like the unblinking gaze of an ancient predator watching trapped prey.

“Cross the thread, dogs,” Shen Yu rasped, his cracked lips pulling back into an unhinged, feral grin.

“Come. This sovereign will wait right here to tear your limbs apart.”

Across the boiling and freezing void, Du Sha’s pale face darkened with venomous malice.

“A crippled rat daring to put on airs. Ou Ba, suppress your heart demons. We take his head and divide the treasures.”

Ou Ba gritted his teeth, his single bloodshot eye bulging with murderous intent, but as he stepped toward the edge of the gorge, a cold sweat broke across his bald, tattooed scalp.

The River of Seven Desires was not a simple chasm.

The iridescent mist swirling above the abyss churned violently, carrying the intoxicating whispers of Lust, the suffocating illusions of Greed, and the blinding madness of Wrath.

Worse, the thread-thin Yin-Yang Balancing Silk vibrated violently between the freezing Absolute Yin waters on the left and the roaring Supreme Yang fire on the right.

Du Sha knew they could not cross with pure physical arrogance.

Flipping his wrist, he retrieved a treasure from his spatial ring, a miniature, eight-sided bronze parasol etched with dense Daoist talismans, the Soul-Warding Spirit Umbrella, a low earth grade defensive artifact.

However, the artifact was in terrible shape.

The bronze ribs of the umbrella were warped and bent, several spiritual silk panels were torn and charred, and deep spiderweb fractures ran along its central shaft.

In the third trial, when the ancient Asura Bone Phantoms had launched their catastrophic soul-shrieks, Du Sha had been forced to burn half the umbrella’s origin essence to shield himself and Ou Ba.

The spectral shockwave had shattered the artifact’s core matrix and caused a violent soul-rebound, leaving both men with churning spiritual seas and lingering internal injuries.

“Channel your Qi into the umbrella’s secondary node,” Du Sha ordered coldly, coughing lightly as a trace of pale green bile rose in his throat.

“Its warding light can only hold for twenty breaths!”

Ou Ba nodded frantically, slamming his palms against the base of the broken umbrella.

HUMMMM—!

A pale, translucent dome of emerald light flared to life, though it flickered erratically along the cracked ribs.

Holding the damaged parasol above their heads, Du Sha and Ou Ba stepped onto the razor-thin Yin-Yang silk.

TWANG—!

The thin cord bowed instantly under their combined weight.

The moment they stepped over the void, the mist of Seven Desires lunged forward like ravenous wolves, slamming against the emerald barrier.

Phantoms of laughing concubines, heaps of immortal jade, and agonizing screams of dying kin clawed at the spiritual light.

Sizzle… crackle!

The parasol groaned under the strain, its fractures widening.

Beneath their boots, the Absolute Yin frost bit upward, turning Ou Ba’s left leg numb and pale blue, while the Supreme Yang heat from the right scorched Du Sha’s green robes, causing his two-headed serpent to hiss frantically and burrow into his sleeve.

“Hold the balance!” Du Sha snarled, his pale face slick with cold sweat as he dragged his heavy, burning legs forward.

Step by agonizing step, they advanced.

Ten paces… thirty paces… sixty paces!

The strain was immense.

Ou Ba’s remaining eye was bloodshot to the point of rupturing, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps as he struggled to maintain his footing on the vibrating thread.

His mind was battered by the horrific illusions of his brother’s burning corpse screaming for vengeance, threatening to shatter his fragile Dao Heart.

Yet, relying on the dying light of the broken bronze umbrella, they gritted their shared teeth and pushed through the final stretch of iridescent fog.

Eighty paces… ninety paces!

They were barely ten paces from the solid stone platform.

The emerald barrier gave a final, sharp CRACK and shattered into countless bronze sparks, the ruined umbrella dissolving into useless scrap metal.

“We made it!” Ou Ba gasped in exhausted triumph, a wild, sadistic grin breaking across his face as he raised his heavy venom-coated saber, preparing to leap the final distance and cleave Shen Yu’s skull in two.

“Die, you bas—”

Sitting peacefully in the lotus position at the edge of the platform, Shen Yu’s crimson eyes suddenly flared with cold, tyrannical slaughter intent.

‘Impudent worm.’

Shen Yu didn’t rise.

He simply raised his right hand, curled two fingers into a sword-flick, and sent out the refined Qi from his dantian.

SWOOSH—!

A crescent-shaped blade of condensed, blood-black Qi ripped through the air with the screech of a dying beast.

It did not aim for Du Sha, who was guarded by his protective spiritual beast, it shot straight toward Ou Ba’s exposed, frost-numbed left knee!

“WATCH OUT!” Du Sha shouted, his pupils contracting as he instinctively leaned back.

Ou Ba, completely drained from crossing the thread and mid-leap, had no room to maneuver in mid-air.

SPLAT— CRACK!

The blood-black Qi blade slammed directly into Ou Ba’s left kneecap.

The strike shattered the frozen bone into powder and tore through his tendons like wet paper, spraying a fountain of dark crimson blood into the mist.

“AAAAAAGH!”

Ou Ba’s triumphant roar morphed into a blood-curdling shriek of agony.

His airborne momentum was violently halted, his center of gravity collapsed as his shattered leg gave out completely.

Instead of landing cleanly on the solid stone platform, Ou Ba’s body veered violently off-course, his chest slamming hard against the jagged edge of the cliff before sliding backward toward the abyss.

“Senior Brother Du! SAVE ME!” Ou Ba screamed in utter hysteria, his fingernails scraping desperately against the basalt edge, leaving bloody streaks as the freezing Yin waters and boiling Yang flames below roared in anticipation.

Du Sha landed on the platform with a heavy roll, instantly scrambling to his feet.

He didn’t spare a single glance at Ou Ba’s pleading eyes

Instead, Du Sha drew his short-blade, his gaze locked entirely on the seated, blood-drenched monster before him.

“Useless trash,” Du Sha muttered coldly, letting Ou Ba’s bloody fingers slip from the rock.

SPLASH——!

Ou Ba plunged straight into the churning boundary where the two rivers collided

In less than half a heartbeat, the left half of his frame flash-froze into brittle, calcified frost while the right was incinerated into sizzling grease and boiling marrow, his shredded screams swallowed instantly by the roaring void.

As he sank into the abyss, the blinding light of the primordial river seemed to slow.

Amidst the swirling dark, the ghostly silhouette of his twin brother materialized before him, reaching out from the deep.

Decades of a shared life flashed violently through Ou Ba’s dying thoughts, the freezing winters of their impoverished mortal youth, the bloody oaths they swore upon entering the sect, every hardship they had survived shoulder-to-shoulder, and the hard-won triumphs that had brought them to this precipice.

Up on the platform, Shen Yu slowly uncrossed his legs and rose to his full height, his towering frame casting a long, blood-drenched shadow across the ancient stone.

He rolled his neck with a dull, sickening pop, his cracked lips peeling back into a wide, psychotic sneer as his bleeding crimson eyes bored straight into Du Sha.

“Now,” Shen Yu rasped, his voice dark and heavy with the promise of slaughter.

“It is just you and me, little snake.”

Du Sha’s mouth twisted into a cold, haughty sneer.

Even with Ou Ba’s dying shriek still reverberating across the subterranean chasm, not a single trace of grief or panic flickered across his pale features.

To a Head disciple of the Thousand Poison Sect, cannon fodder was born to be spent.

“A brute relying on trashy demonic techniques dares act rampantly before this young master?” Du Sha spat, dusting the ashes of the ruined umbrella from his emerald sleeve.

“You took out two dogs through cowardly ambushes. Now, taste the heritage of my Thousand Poison Sect!”

Du Sha slapped his spatial pouch.

Clatter—!

Three ornate vessels of pitch-black dragon-bone jade shot into the air, hovering around him in a protective triangle.

With a rapid blur of mudras, Du Sha bit the tip of his blackened tongue and sprayed a mist of dark green essence onto the vessels.

“Corpse-Melting Powder!”

“Heart-Biting Mist!”

“Seven-Step Soul-Severing Miasma!”

BOOM!

The jade jars detonated simultaneously

A torrential, multicolored tempest of lethal toxicity erupted, turning the air into a boiling, acidic fog.

The corrosive vapor was so vicious that the ancient Primordial Stone platform began to fizz and dissolve, emitting thick clouds of sickly yellow smoke.

The poison did not merely target the flesh, it carried a pungent, rotten musk specifically designed to corrode a cultivator’s spiritual Qi and seep directly into their meridians to curdle their blood.

“Die in agony, rat!” Du Sha roared.