Eternal Swordmaster
Chapter 397 - 391: The Path to Supreme Strength Six

Chapter 397: Chapter 391: The Path to Supreme Strength Six

Lin Xin clasped his sword in both hands, still bending over, but his eyes now showed traces of intoxication and confusion.

The power of the Divine Shadow rushing into his body due to the slaughter was crazily enhancing his cultivation at the moment.

The Yuan Dou Demonic Technique originally required entrance to the Fifth Layer, apart from the necessary Taoist Intent, a massive amount of Demonic Qi was needed, but now this vast force of the Divine Shadow was surging in like a tsunami, quickly filling half the required amount of Demonic Qi in a short time.

And this sensation of enhancing cultivation while undergoing a subtle qualitative change in life, was like the addictive rush one feels when taking drugs.

"Truly wonderful....."

Lin Xin set down the Demonic Sword, his eyeballs now thoroughly dyed blood red.

If it had been the normal him, seeing his current state, he would definitely know that something was eerily off. But now, he didn’t feel any discomfort or the sense of being controlled at all.

The power of the Divine Shadow surged into his body.

All along, to facilitate the Red Leaf Sword Master freeing him from the clutches of the Divine Shadow, he had refrained from rampantly slaughtering to enhance his cultivation.

But this time, he had finally lost control.

For some reason, this enhancement didn’t seem to be as troublesome as he had imagined.

With the suppression of that silver fruit, he indeed wouldn’t be in trouble, but he would still feel minute changes, as if his body was being constantly eroded and altered by the power of the Divine Shadow.

But this time, it seemed completely different from before.

Lin Xin could distinctly feel an incredibly powerful resistance within his own body, not passively being transformed by the power of the Divine Shadow, but instead fighting back in a frenzied battle, attempting to devour it.

"Could it be due to the enhancement of my attributes?" Lin Xin hypothesized inwardly.

After dealing with the people from the Lion Fist Sect, he guessed there wouldn’t be anymore fools coming to seek death.

He collected his thoughts, rapidly flying forward, and soon arrived at the corpses of the Lion Fist Sect members.

The ground was littered with corpses and limbs in disarray. Severed hands and legs were everywhere. Two giants lay across the floor, one of them seeming to still have a last breath in him, but could only stare at Lin Xin with venomous eyes.

The giant was holding the previously terrifying Golden Phoenix Fight, a weapon Lin Xin himself didn’t dare to withstand directly.

If it hadn’t been for his horrifying Evasion Attribute, anyone else might have actually been cornered by these people.

This treasure was at least a top Fourth Grade, and potentially even stronger.

With a thought, Lin Xin reached out towards the giant. But the Golden Phoenix Fight merely loosened slightly and did not fly out of the giant’s palm.

He simply walked over instead.

Suddenly, a hand slowly extended from behind the giant, lightly grasping the Golden Phoenix Fight.

The hand seemed like jade, with a faint yellowish semi-transparency. And on the fingers, there were several sparkling yellow gems.

"Who!"

Lin Xin’s gaze sharpened, the Golden Phoenix Fight being his most coveted item here, and now someone was attempting to rob him midway. His Evasion Attribute had not sensed the other party’s presence at all.

Obviously, it meant the person either possessed an extremely terrifying ability to conceal themselves, or their strength was absolutely far beyond his own.

Either of these scenarios was exceedingly troublesome.

"Remove your filthy hands." Lin Xin spoke in a deep voice.

The owner of the hand, as if unheard, directly picked up the fight—a silver-robed cultivator with a snake’s head and human body.

It seemed as if there was no aura on him at all, but the more this was the case, the more Lin Xin dared not be careless.

"Are you Lin Xin?"

A faint smile appeared on the other’s face, although how a snake’s head could smile wasn’t something Lin Xin was clear on, but he felt as though the other was indeed smiling.

"You know me?" Lin Xin felt a sense of foreboding, his Evasion Attribute not reacting until now; he had never encountered such a situation even in the Underground Palace. Therefore, it was clear that the other party’s concealment technique was even more formidable than those Yuan Jing cultivators in the palace.

"I not only know you." The snake-headed person began to smile again.

"I am also going to... kill you!"

No sooner had these words fallen than they thrust out their hand, their right arm swelling and elongating in a flash, reaching out to grab Lin Xin.

The speed was swift, the motion fierce, on par with the old Yuan Jing monsters Lin Xin had encountered before.

What was more terrifying was that as the person moved their hand, it felt as if the entire world around them was compressing against him instantaneously—the air, the space, everything was crazily crushing Lin Xin’s body, as if trying to tear him apart. This was the true hallmark of a Yuan Jing’s power.

"Yuan Jing!!"

Lin Xin’s expression changed, and he quickly retreated.

But it was useless; space seemed to extend, and despite his rapid backward rush, under the opponent’s grasp, it seemed as if it made no difference at all, as though he was still marching in place.

"Die!"

With a low shout from the snake-headed person, that attracting and compressing force surged even more, gradually pulling Lin Xin toward them.

"If you have to blame something, it’s that you’ve offended someone you shouldn’t have."

The snake-headed person laughed softly.

"Someone I shouldn’t have?" Lin Xin’s power surged wildly, the Demonic Qi constantly vibrating.

As a circle of black Qi had just spread out, it was swept away like by a fierce wind, quickly absorbed by the other party’s hand and devoured.

"A venerable Yuan Jing elder to personally deal with a junior like me..." His speech was extremely difficult, but he still tried to continue, "Since the elder has made a move, naturally, I cannot escape. But may I ask, before I die, could you enlighten me, so I may die a well-informed ghost and know who exactly it is who has commissioned such a formidable opponent to act against me?"

Lin Xin lowered his head, his tone carrying a hint of despair and resentment, but at an unseen angle, his eyes were still shimmering with sharpness.

The snake-headed person, who was indeed the Demon Emperor Kun Ji from Brahma Net Mountain, didn’t find this surprising at all.

A mere Fourth Grade expert at the Golden Core realm, insignificant if not at the Yuan Jing level. The fact that he could hold on this long under Yuan Jing control was already a testament to his exceptional talent.

Death was but a matter of time.

"There’s no harm in telling you." Kun Ji said calmly, "Hong Gui from Tian Yun Tao has given the order, and I happen to owe him a favor."

"Tianyun Taoist..." Lin Xin’s mind instantly made sense of it all. It seemed that his destruction of the other party’s plans and interception of the Evil God’s primordial essence twice had driven them into a rage, leading them to go as far as to call in a favor from an ancestor of Yuan Jing to pursue him for thousands of miles.

"Thank you, senior, for the clarification... Junior..." Lin Xin’s voice grew increasingly somber, but in the next moment, a blinding silver light exploded suddenly in his hands.

A sound reminiscent of a sharp object tearing through the air erupted from him in an instant.

Ah!!!!

Amidst the terrible, ear-piercing noise, Lin Xin’s entire body suddenly became enveloped in a deep, ink-like dark red aura.

For the first time, after enhancing his attributes, he fully invoked the Heart Eye Sword Path and unleashed his own Red Flower Sword Intent, as well as the enhanced and sublimated Mundane Fire Formation that he has engraved.

"Divine Shadow! Qilin!!!"

Roar!!

Blood-like flames converged at a terrifying speed to form a gigantic Qilin’s head, which, with a powerful dragging force, fiercely smashed into the Demon Emperor Kun Ji.

Boom!!!

A massive explosion flared up directly between the two of them.

The blast and flames spread out dozens of meters around them, instantly swallowing and melting trees, rocks, and bodies—everything in its path.

In an instant, the surrounding forest burst into flames reaching for the sky.

Within the blaze, a figure shot through the air and sped away into the distance without pause.

The figure was none other than Lin Xin, who had just freed himself from his bonds. His entire body had transformed into a Demon Body state, and all three of his right arms bore varying degrees of recoil injuries, which were rapidly healing under his tremendous regenerative abilities. In just a few breaths, wounds deep enough to expose bone vanished without a trace.

"Just now, I burst forth with all my might, and after releasing the Demon Body, combined with the amplified attribute strength, I managed to break free from Yuan Jing’s constraints on my own.

But the gap is still quite clear..."

Lin Xin estimated in his mind. Cultivators of Yuan Jing, whether from the Southern or Central Prefecture, were at the very pinnacle. For Tianyun Taoist to resort to such high-level figures to assassinate him indicated just how deeply they despised him. Continuing to move about freely and unguarded as before would likely be difficult from now on.

He glanced back but still saw no one following him.

"Perhaps my all-out burst just now injured that person too?"

He speculated in his mind.

After all, with an average of over one hundred in attributes and previously focusing solely on Demonic Qi, he had annihilated a large group of experts from the Lion Fist Sect in an instant.

And now, not only had he fully utilized the Qilin, but he had also transformed into a Demon Body while tripling his original power.

The lethality of that instant could easily be more than five times that of the previous sword strike!

Even for a Yuan Jing Cultivator, caught off guard...

Before he could finish the thought, Lin Xin suddenly felt a chilling sensation on his back, as if something extremely deadly could erupt and crush him at any moment!

He turned around again, but saw nothing. Clearly, his pursuer had not followed him, and behind him was only an open forest.

*****************

In the center of the sea of fire.

Kun Ji slowly walked out from the flames, seemingly surrounded by an invisible wall that kept any encroaching dark red fire from nearing him.

Lin Xin’s full-powered strike had no effect on him.

"Interesting... had it been an average Yuan Jing Cultivator, they might indeed have been caught off guard and allowed him to escape. Too bad... little fellow, you still don’t understand how deep the gap is between yourself and us..."

He extended his hand and made a grabbing motion, and soon a golden longbow slowly emerged from the void.

The longbow itself was shaped like a flying swallow with outspread wings.

An exquisitely crafted sharp arrow with countless runes emerged automatically on the bowstring. Swarms of tiny dark green insects buzzed and flitted around the arrowhead.

"To think of escaping from a Yuan Jing Elder who has mastered the rules of space in such open terrain... wishful thinking. Goodbye... the one who should have become a Yuan Jing in the future, Third Crown Prince."

A trace of regret appeared on Kun Ji’s face, as though he was lamenting the loss of such a talented individual.

The bowstring was slowly drawn back, and around his drawing hand, clusters of fist-sized, distorted orbs of energy gathered.

Whoosh!!

The bowstring was released, and the arrow disappeared in front of him as if it had burrowed straight into the void.

Far away, over ten miles away, Lin Xin’s face suddenly drained of color, as he franticly plummeted down towards a waterfall pond below, trying to dive into it to conceal himself.

His sense of impending doom continually emanated from the Evasion Attribute’s intuition, spreading throughout his body.

He had clearly already put some distance between himself and the other, but the sense of crisis felt as if it were right in front of him.

Splash!

With a leap, Lin Xin plunged into the pond and furiously swam towards its depths.

There was a pitch-black cave at the bottom, apparently a hiding place for some creature.

He struggled to swim toward the cave entrance.

Pop!!!

Suddenly Lin Xin thought he heard a subtle sound, as if something was buzzing right by his ear.

Then there was a pain in his chest.

He smelled a strong scent of blood from his nostrils and looked down.

To his shock, he saw a gaping hole the size of a human head had appeared in his chest without him noticing it...

"How can..." He only got half a sentence out before Lin Xin could no longer hold on.

Boom!!!

His entire body suddenly exploded into two pieces from the chest, and as the blood and flesh flew, a green light soared into the sky, turning into an arrow and shooting up into the clouds, disappearing from sight as if the arrow was being retrieved.

In the pond, blood slowly spread, becoming more and more abundant and dense......