Chapter 691: In This Old Man’s Eyes, That’s Worse Than Being a Beast!

The deafening roar of collapse ricocheted through the narrow rocky chamber, like ten thousand muffled thunderclaps tearing their way out of throats.

After Elder Woodheart severed the contaminated channels, the three main auxiliary roots underground could no longer withstand the crushing Manifestation Realm pressure from above. They gave off a dull, teeth-grinding crunch. Millions of pounds of gray-black fossilized stone and foul-smelling mud came crashing down like a raging tide. The azure formation lines atop the ancient sleeping hall flickered under the immense pressure, threatening to go dark altogether.

“Pfft!”

Elder Qingheng, standing in the center of the hall, staggered violently. He nearly lost his grip on the short, broken deadwood staff in his hand. His legs, already shriveled until only skin and bone remained, slammed onto the floor littered with splinters. A crisp crack of breaking bones came from beneath his knees.

Su Ming crouched behind an old root at the outermost ring, gripping his lifebound formation plate in his right hand as he instantly analyzed the situation.

If the hall were completely buried beneath the debris, the twenty-four dying soul cocoons hanging around the outer ring would perish in an instant, and Greenwood Court’s foundations would be utterly destroyed. Buried beneath a hundred zhang of rock, his Golden Core cultivation would be no protection; the shockwaves would grind him into meat paste. If he tried to use his Ruo Shui spiritual energy to hold up the ceiling, it would be like a mortal trying to catch a thousand-zhang boulder with his bare hands. The only result would be throwing his life away. As for an escape route, the underground river exit lay thirty zhang below, deep in a sloping branch passage. He only had to activate the formation plate’s third hidden path and let the current carry him out of this death trap.

But the faint blue light in Su Ming’s eyes gathered slightly. Instead of pressing the escape node, he tilted the formation plate and wedged it into the hollowed-out crack in the wood beside him.

He could tell that since Elder Woodheart above had dared to make such a drastic move at this moment, Qingheng and the others must have more than just this shield that was on the verge of failing!

Just as the falling rocks were about to crush the last layer of azure light around the ancient sleeping hall, Qingheng drew a deep breath of cold air heavy with the smell of rotting mud.

The ten battered elders standing behind him stepped forward in unison, each striking their own Spiritual Platform with their remaining palm or severed wrist!

Above the hall, the remaining half of the royal seal’s phantom spun violently.

The broken ancient seal, which had previously given off only the faintest hint of resistance, now rang out with a clear, wooden chime that pierced the clouds of the highest heavens.

Twelve pale azure soul flames, more than ten times larger than before, erupted from the twelve bodies, which were little more than deadwood skeletons. They transformed into twelve beams of light wrapped in ancient seal script. Meeting no resistance, they pierced through a hundred zhang of falling rock and layer upon layer of ash, plunging straight into the root marrow of the main root deep within the ten-thousand-year-old luminous banyan above!

This was the Qiming Royal Court’s Spirit Communication Blood Oath.

The instant those twelve pale azure soul flames were branded into the broken main trunk, a heavy, indescribable cry of grief rang out from deep in the tree’s heart. The ten-thousand-year-old luminous banyan above, whose vitality had been stripped away by the pressure of deathly stillness, suddenly stirred.

The main trunk shuddered violently. The great swathes of dull, withered green branches suddenly blazed with dazzling emerald divine light. It was as if an old desert tree that had been dead for centuries had, in a single instant, welcomed the boundless return of spring from the frozen north.

High in the black clouds, the Lord of the Nether Abyss’s enormous, faceless manifestation had just brought down its second Heaven-Covering Palm Seal.

As the black palm touched down above the luminous banyan, he suddenly realized that the lone tree was no longer struggling alone.

Deep inside the trunk, twelve azure channels belonging to the elders of Qiming had appeared. The elders, whose bodies had nearly withered into skeletons, were using the last few drops of their true essence to forcibly pull Elder Woodheart’s displaced law channels back into alignment.

The palm met heavy resistance. The black mist formed from the laws of deathly stillness shrieked like a pack of wolves crashing into an iron wall.

“Qiming remnants, you’ve clung to life for ten thousand years, and this is all you’ve learned? Burrowing underground like maggots to eke out a miserable existence?”

A thought devoid of any living person’s emotion fell from the purple moon like a blade of winter ice, sweeping directly over every living soul in the ancient sleeping hall. “Since the laws are so deeply flawed, the spirit realm must be broken before it can be rebuilt. This shattered remnant of a heaven has long been a dry well and a deep prison. Only by smashing those layers of locks on the Abandoned Lands, welcoming the great calamity and merging with death energy, can the living beings of this realm find their sole path to breaking free! You are so short-sighted that you would rather be cowardly turtles hiding in your shells, yet you still want to drag all life into the same grave?”

In the ancient hall, Qingheng listened to the cataclysmic pronouncement pressing down on his heart without so much as moving his lips.

He tightened his grip on the short staff pointed toward the hall’s entrance by only a fraction, yet his hoarse voice surged straight upward along the royal seal’s boundless azure light.

“You’d throw the lives of all living beings into some unknown abyss of death to buy the path you speak of. In this old man’s heart, that isn’t saving the world from ruin. It’s slaughter worse than anything a beast could commit!”

The words held not a trace of tact. They struck the other side in the face like a blunt butcher’s cleaver.

Crouched in the shadows to one side, Su Ming remained calm.

The Dark Current Sect’s argument truly wasn’t just an excuse to kill. They believed that only by breaking everything could they build anew. But on this harsh, brutal path of cultivation, if their way forward required using other people’s flesh and bones as stepping-stones, or even sealing off their own retreat in exchange for some new realm as vague as a mirage, then it was a completely mad abyss.

There was no room to work with people who acted this way, nor could they coexist. The only way to survive was to give them a wide berth.

Just as the Lord of the Nether Abyss’s manifestation above the sky paused for the briefest moment, and the force pressing down with the black palm dispersed ever so slightly, three extremely concealed winds of murderous Manifestation Realm energy tore through the tripwires Qingluo had previously set deep in the dim passageway outside the ancient sleeping hall.

They were three Manifestation Realm experts from the Dark Current Sect, driven back by the previous wave of royal-seal power but still lurking nearby instead of retreating.

They were clever enough not to foolishly ram themselves into the main entrance, guarded by the royal seal. Instead, like three blind snakes swimming through nocturnal sludge, they became gray-purple streams of ghostly energy and raced toward the outer ring on both wings of the ancient sleeping hall.

The outer ring was where Woodheart had suspended the twenty-four dying soul cocoons with chains.

“They’re going to destroy those cocoons, those sleeping elders who haven’t even opened their eyes!” Qingluo’s shout rang out from afar. The green vines in her hands lashed wildly toward them, but help from afar could not stop the danger at hand. The fastest wisp of deathly murderous energy had already burst through the earth along an old root passage on the right.

Su Ming clamped his hand around the formation plate he had just pulled from the crack in the wood. Azure spiritual energy burst from his fingertips.

Thirty-six formation beads, their sharp edges worn away until only a gentle, cool gleam remained, shot out of his storage pouch. They formed a tightly interlocking ring of water-patterned walls in midair.

Before the death energy could fully spill out, the two Dark Current root passages on the left were instantly sealed by the suction formed by the water patterns, cutting off their retreat. Water was yielding by nature, and in that confined space it stripped away a full three-tenths of the Manifestation Realm murderous energy’s leading force.

But the gap in the death energy at the far edge on the right had been thrown two inches off course by the falling rocks shifting the earth veins, and the formation beads missed their mark.

The strands of deathly black smoke were now no more than seven zhang from the outermost mottled, leaf-shaped soul cocoon.