Chapter 856: He Is Not Alone

But He Lingchuan still could not figure out exactly how Naluotian had managed to communicate with the lid.

“The Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid is an independent ancient divine artifact, while the Generous Pot originally had no lid at all. The two were never meant to fit together; they were forcibly paired afterward. Heh, even the gods of Lingxu don’t know this secret.” Perfected Sanshui’s sword began to glow. “The treasured lid sheltered me and allowed me to merge with Perfected Sanshui so that together, we could oppose the Generous Pot.”

As for the brat standing before them, neither the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid nor Naluotian gave him any real consideration.

At last, He Lingchuan understood the entire chain of cause and effect.

So the king of the que beasts was staying beside the Red General’s cenotaph all this time because it was waiting for its old enemy to emerge from the pot!

The Generous Pot had been grinding them down for a long time, relying on slow, relentless attrition to wear away the lid’s resistance bit by bit. The struggle between divine artifacts certainly took some peculiar forms.

And the que beasts, born from the will of the treasured lid and the remnant soul of an ancient immortal, were hostile toward everything that moved inside the pot.

They were not truly bodies of flesh and blood. Naluotian’s avatar had merely fused with the king of the que beasts and borrowed Perfected Sanshui’s power, so this did not actually count as divine descent.

Still, the ability to adapt so flexibly and, in an instant, draw both a divine artifact and the remnant of an immortal onto the same side was probably not something every god possessed.

No wonder Naluotian had needed barely more than a century to rise from being an obscure wild god into one of the great powers of the divine realm.

As for the king of the que beasts, no wonder it could wield so many intricate and distinctive divine techniques and grasp the timing of battle with such uncanny precision. Part of it had originally belonged to Perfected Sanshui, a great immortal of antiquity!

He Lingchuan looked at him and shook his head. “You call yourself the god of fate, but your luck is honestly terrible. You didn’t arrive until the battle on the ground was already over. This is the Generous Pot’s secret realm, my territory!”

Otherwise, if Naluotian’s avatar had descended into the king of the que beasts one step earlier and chosen any one faction to join forces with, none of the others would have been a match for them.

He reached back and drew Fleeting Life, angling the blade slightly as killing intent spread through the air.

Pulse after pulse traveled through the saber, carrying an excitement it could no longer suppress. Ever since Naluotian’s avatar appeared, Fleeting Life’s fighting spirit had grown increasingly fierce, until the saber had actually manifested on its own.

Cut him down!

Whether the opponent was the king of the que beasts, Perfected Sanshui, or Naluotian’s avatar.

Cutting him down meant cutting away this tedious, ridiculous so-called fate!

“Useless.” Naluotian’s avatar chuckled. “Has no one ever told you? Since my mark is planted in your sea of consciousness, you cannot attack me. A skin-sack cannot rebel against its master, just as a magical artifact cannot betray and murder its owner!”

That was precisely why it could stand alone inside the Panlong Secret Realm and still remain so utterly composed.

So what if the brat before it had turned Lingxu City upside down? So what if he had become so closely entangled with the Generous Pot?

He was still nothing more than a skin-sack. Before his true master, he was to crawl on the ground, bow and worship, and submit to the arrangement of fate.

Sure enough, the moment He Lingchuan aimed his blade at Perfected Sanshui, his body became unbearably heavy, as though lead had been poured into all four limbs. The divine seal mark in his mind had activated, forbidding him from attacking his “master.”

He forcibly raised his wrist, only for his hand to tremble like a leaf in the wind.

Facing an enemy this powerful while his own body refused to obey him, how was that any different from being sentenced to death?

Naluotian’s avatar had just begun to step forward when a third voice suddenly sounded at the scene, “Who says so?”

It was a woman’s voice, and it was cold and disdainful.

The Gale Army mark on He Lingchuan’s wrist began to glow and burn hot. Beside him came the faint rasp of armor plates shifting against one another. The Red General’s battle armor, which had stood completely motionless, suddenly turned halfway around and seized He Lingchuan by the wrist!

For that instant, it seemed to come alive.

Then the entire suit of armor transformed into flowing light and flowed onto his body.

It happened in the blink of an eye.

He Lingchuan straightened and discovered that his entire body had been completely covered in crimson fish-scale armor—

Never even in his dreams had he imagined that one day he would wear the Red General’s armor!

He Lingchuan was taller and more powerfully built than the Red General, so the armor looked very different on him than it had on her. Yet it fit without the slightest gap, as though made specifically for his body.

No. More accurately, it seemed to have grown directly out of him.

At the same time, all the scars and weathering vanished from the armor. It became majestic and magnificent, seemingly reborn, utterly out of place amid this ruined and desolate battlefield.

The ghost-face mask formed last. At last, he gained the Red General’s field of vision.

So this is how she normally sees the world.

An inexhaustible torrent of power suddenly surged through his body, filling every meridian, every bone, every strand of muscle, even every hair!

It was a vast, overwhelming, invincible strength unlike anything he had ever experienced, making him feel as though a single punch of his could shatter the stars and a single stomp of his could split the earth.

This is the power the Red General is lending me?

Can a human truly possess strength like this?

Most importantly, through the Gale Army mark on his wrist, he and the armor were connected mind to mind.

All he needed was a thought, and the armor would respond with perfect coordination, carrying out his will exactly as he intended!

Having the will was enough.

The divine seal mark Naluotian had left in him could restrain his body, but it could not bind his thoughts.

As long as he wanted to attack, he could!

He Lingchuan’s blood surged. Unable to restrain himself, he roared loudly and appeared before Naluotian’s avatar in an instant, his saber qi blazing red—

This slash could cleave through not only towering waves, but an army of tens of thousands!

He was more than ten times faster than he normally was. His sudden advance came without warning and was so fast it did not even leave an afterimage.

Even with Perfected Sanshui’s agility, he failed to evade it. Before the sword art he had prepared could be released, He Lingchuan closed the distance and drew his blade straight across his throat!

Of course, he was not so easy to kill. No blood sprayed from the severed neck. Instead, the entire body collapsed with a splash into flowing water, then reformed into human shape several meters away.

That was only fitting for someone called Perfected Sanshui[1].

Even so, his expression finally turned grave. A small puddle of clear water beside his feet wriggled as though alive, yet refused to re-form.

After being cut by Fleeting Life, even ordinary water could no longer take shape.

What shocked Naluotian’s avatar even more was that its skin-sack had attacked it cleanly and decisively, completely unaffected by the mark.

How is this possible?

“How did you...” The words had barely left its mouth when Naluotian’s avatar drew out a long, understanding “Oh.” It then said in realization, “Mitian, so you really aren’t dead!”

Both it and He Lingchuan had heard the woman’s voice.

To He Lingchuan, it had been the Red General. But to Naluotian’s avatar, that voice belonged to Mitian!

Mitian was interfering, preventing it from claiming its own skin-sack.

From its perspective, every attack was being carried out by the Red General’s armor. The armor had completely enclosed its prey from head to toe without leaving even the smallest opening, giving Naluotian’s avatar no opportunity whatsoever.

But from He Lingchuan’s perspective, the promise Zhong Shengguang had made him had now been inherited by the Red General.

His attacks against Naluotian were restricted? It mattered not. The Red General’s power would suppress the divine seal mark for him.

He could not fight, so she helped him fight.

He could not resist, so she helped him resist.

Even for He Lingchuan, challenging fate alone would have been far too difficult. But with the Red General lending him her full strength, he was no longer fighting alone.

“Surrender, and you won’t suffer.” Red light flared along Fleeting Life. It was clearly the Red General’s armor, yet the voice beneath the ghost-face mask belonged to He Lingchuan. “Struggle until the end, and you’ll meet a worse fate than Perfected Sanshui!”

He was not bluffing.

This was the Panlong Secret Realm. This was inside the Generous Pot. It was the Red General’s home ground, and it should have been his as well.

“I truly don’t understand. What’s so bad about becoming my skin-sack? You won’t even die. I can fulfill every wish you and your father have!” As Naluotian’s avatar spoke, it snapped its fingers.

Ever since their previous exchange of blows, rain and snow had been drifting through the air.

At the snap of its fingers, every droplet of water floating around He Lingchuan exploded.

Each one was a miniature bomb, yet its force was a hundred times greater than ordinary explosives!

By comparison, the explosive arrows Tao Ran had fired earlier did not even possess one percent of their power.

The violent power born from the gentlest of water was one of Perfected Sanshui’s signature techniques.

He Lingchuan raised an arm, and the Soul-Stealing Mirror transformed into a round shield in front of him. Dense true energy flowed across the armor and condensed into a thick layer of vigorous qi, dissipating most of the explosions’ force.

Even so, the Soul-Stealing Mirror still screamed, “Aaaah! It hurts! It hurts!”

An immortal... No, this is only a remnant soul of that Perfected Sanshui, and the king of the que beasts that this guy transformed from was already ground down quite a bit by the Generous Pot. He should be far from as strong as he was in his prime.

But still!

Using me to block the attacks of a half-immortal, isn’t He Lingchuan giving me far too much credit?

Only then did the mirror belatedly realize something. “Wait! Are you even still my master?”

The power of the armor felt completely foreign to it.

He Lingchuan could not be bothered with the chatterbox. He merely shot back at Naluotian, “I don’t understand either. What’s so bad about staying inside the Generous Pot? You won’t die. At worst, you’ll swallow a few mouthfuls of seawater!”

With a thought, his body became a streak of red light and closed in on Naluotian’s avatar once again. Amid the swirling mist, three enormous water pythons appeared from nowhere and wrapped around him first.

One was pink-gold, one pitch-black, and one pale blue. Each was thicker than a barrel.

They had been refined by an immortal from the spirits of three great rivers. At the height of their power, these giant serpents had been as massive as hills and could suppress enemies with the combined might of three rivers.

Most terrifying of all was the black serpent, Xiliu[2]. According to the legends of foreign peoples, the Xiliu River pierced both the material and immaterial realms and flowed all the way to the underworld. No living creature or soul that fell into its waters could ever rise again. They would remain forever imprisoned on the riverbed and eventually become river stones. The giant python refined from Xiliu River’s stones could not only release vengeful dead spirits to devour a person’s mind, but could also pass straight through armor and weapons to strangle the soul directly.

With all three giant pythons wrapped around him, He Lingchuan was nearly buried beneath their coils.

The resentful spirits released by Xiliu squeezed through every opening they could find, but crimson radiance shimmered across He Lingchuan’s armor. The instant any spirit touched it, it was burned away so completely that not even ash remained.

The deadly flames of that armor were terrifying indeed.

Naluotian’s avatar leaped into the air and drove its sword downward with utterly unreasonable speed.

The two intertwined python bodies immediately parted just enough behind He Lingchuan’s neck to leave a narrow opening for the strike.

Xiliu stone had also been incorporated when this treasured sword was forged, allowing the blade to shift between the material and immaterial. If Naluotian’s avatar stabbed it into the back of He Lingchuan’s neck, the blow would injure only his soul without damaging the body itself.

After all, it still intended to use this body. It could not afford to damage it too badly.

1. Note that the shui in Sanshui is water. ☜

2. Literally, this would be slender willow. ☜