Evil Venerable of the Sword Dao
Chapter 395 - 045: The Path Ahead is Blocked

Chapter 395: Chapter 045: The Path Ahead is Blocked

Zhou Yan stared at the youth’s still trembling, closed eyes.

Suddenly, he realized that he was very close to this youth—not just in physical proximity, but also in spirit.

Zhou Yan felt his heart was about to leap out, to fly away, to surge into the heart of the youth in the crystal coffin.

He felt as though he was about to be devoured by this corpse, to be reduced to ash.

Never before had he felt so close to death.

When this sensation arose, Zhou Yan felt a chill through his entire body.

His heart seemed to be bound by an inexplicable force, shrouded and fettered by a completely suffocating, deathly still air.

This was not about facing a formidable foe; there was no enemy at all.

It was as if he had suddenly grasped that the true day of death had arrived, and when such a feeling came, Zhou Yan had no way to resist.

A sense of resignation overwhelmed his spirit, and Zhou Yan suddenly gave up resisting, letting go of all the obsessions he could not relinquish before.

"Perhaps, in this lifetime, this is as far as it goes... Although many secrets remain unsolved, although many promises are doomed to go unfulfilled, although I can’t erect a tombstone for Master Lee Ran on Earth and take care of his family, though I can’t save Gu Xi...

But now, this lifetime has reached its end.

It seems that the Ten Thousand Ghosts Sword Tomb is my final resting place.

In my previous life, I survived death by a hair’s breadth and seemed to have escaped as a mere ghost, barely living out this life, only to find myself inexplicably buried here."

"Did I, in my previous life, die here, buried at this place?"

"Now, still to be buried here, this... perhaps also resolves all the emotional entanglements of the past and present lives..."

Zhou Yan could not resist, nor did he know how to resist, because that feeling of desolation and death had reached its peak.

There was no killing power, only the sorrowful heart before death.

An Ran, a future of bleakness.

Or rather, no future at all.

The path ahead had ended here.

The wind was howling, sobbing like the wails of ghosts.

The wind between heaven and earth was gloomy, cold, and icy.

The enormous gravity made it extremely difficult to move.

Zhou Yan’s hands clung to the crystal coffin, gradually pushing it open.

But, at this moment, a scorching wind blew over, fluttering Zhou Yan’s soul armor robe, making it fly and flutter.

The hair tie in Zhou Yan’s long hair suddenly broke, and his jet-black hair suddenly flew about, blocking his vision.

Through the dancing black hair, Zhou Yan could no longer see the person in the crystal coffin clearly.

Also, at this time, the crystal coffin was suddenly brushed by the warm wind, and the originally resplendent, crystal-clear coffin suddenly dimmed.

As if eaten by insects, it became riddled with holes.

The handsome youth within aged gradually, withering away bit by bit.

At a visible speed.

"Crack—"

The youth, in an instant, decayed into a piece of human skin, like a shed skin.

Zhou Yan vaguely saw this scene, and the feeling of suffocation in his heart suddenly loosened a lot.

He seemed to regain control over his body, and the sensation of his heart wanting to leap out vanished.

Zhou Yan subconsciously reached out to smooth the flying black hair in front of him but suddenly discovered that a person was standing in front of him, an old man dressed in ancient black ’Funeral clothes.’

The sudden appearance of this figure startled Zhou Yan, almost instinctively stepping back several paces, his expression uncertain.

"It’s over, all gone."

"Decayed, destroyed..."

The old man mumbled like a madman, his entire body exuding a strong aura of death.

This aura of death, assaulting the spirit, made one uneasy.

"Old man..."

Zhou Yan restrained the inexplicable bone-chilling coldness in his heart and greeted him.

The old man did not glance at Zhou Yan but kept his eyes dull, staring at the hollowed-out tomb and the crystal coffin inside it, continuously mumbling to himself.

Facing Zhou Yan, the forthcoming Sacrificial Heaven Ancient City, Heavenly Destiny Tea Tree, and the Yin Spirit Evil Spirits carried by the Eight-carried Sedan Chairs, all were invisibly repelled, with no malign entities able to enter this place.

But he did not notice, still mumbling to himself, as if crying and laughing.

Zhou Yan instinctively retreated a few more steps.

"Decayed, destroyed, then it’s all dead, all gone, all completely dead..."

"All gone..."

"All gone..."

The old man’s words were terribly chilling, causing Zhou Yan to almost gasp in a cold breath.

At that moment, the old man reached out to caress the crystal coffin, as if touching the most precious treasure.

"I won’t let you decay again, I will make heaven and earth eternal, I will reverse time..."

The old man said, gently patting the crystal coffin.

A very light tap.

But the terrifying space suddenly violently shook.

"Boom—"

Heaven and Earth burst apart, the horrifying space had shattered, and endless terrifying Sword Qi erupted like Divine beings unleashing their ultimate killing intent, instantly turning chaotic.

Sword Qi filled the sky, each strand was a thousand times more powerful than the one Zhou Yan had encountered upon entering the Ten Thousand Ghosts Sword Tomb.

This was an irresistible Sword Qi.

As soon as the Sword Qi manifested, Zhou Yan felt as if he had plunged into an ice cave.

His body hair stood on end as if he were facing the suppression of a Divine being, a terribly frightening pressure of death bearing down on him directly.

This was truly an ultimate killing intent, irresistible and indefensible.

"Pfft—"

Zhou Yan unleashed his unparalleled ability, delivering the strongest strike and defending with his Soul Armor, yet it was still insufficient to block even a sliver of Sword Qi, nearly reducing him to dust.

His body was drenched in blood, narrowly escaping death at first encounter.

Such Sword Qi covered the sky and filled every corner, dense and omnipresent.

"Whoosh—"

Suddenly, inside the tomb, a warm energy swept through and hastily pulled Zhou Yan’s body into a dark space, avoiding the omnipresent killing intent.

...

Time passed, and Zhou Yan slowly opened his eyes, finding himself in a very dark space, resembling a huge cave filled with Yin Qi.

The air was thick with a terrifying bloody scent and residual terrifying Sword Qi.

The space was utterly silent and chillingly cold.

With Zhou Yan’s constitution, he still felt a bone-piercing chill.

"Thank you... for saving my life, senior."

Zhou Yan whispered.

As soon as he spoke, he couldn’t control his coughing, and blood spurted out of his mouth like a fountain.

His voice echoed in the cave, as did his coughing, but no one responded.

The surroundings remained deadly silent.

The insane old man in funeral clothes had disappeared, along with the Crystal Coffin.

Zhou Yan looked up and could see an opening above, resembling a tomb, a place he recognized as previously he had dug open a solitary grave.

Nothing was left in the tomb except a broken stele fragment.

Zhou Yan climbed up from the cave’s cliff and saw the solitary tomb again, but now it was nothing but ruins.

Only a Broken Stele remained, but the script and emblems on it had vanished.

Zhou Yan looked around; the once solitary grave-filled land had now all turned into desolate ruins. The shadows of Sacrificial Heaven Ancient City, the Eight-carried sedan chair, and the Heavenly Destiny Tea Tree, and so forth, had all been destroyed by the Sword Qi.

Continuing to cough blood, Zhou Yan sighed after observing his surroundings and picked up the fragment of the stele, returning once more to the underground cave.

Upon the stele, faint traces of Sword Qi manifested, seemingly the residual energy from the encompassing Sword Qi.

Zhou Yan, cradling the stele, walked step by step in the cave.

Everywhere in this world had nearly ten thousand times the gravity, making every ability ten thousand times more difficult to use. Even the simple Nirvana Technique was hard to perform, let alone the Undying Rebirth Technique?

Zhou Yan could only rely on his own immense recovery ability to heal naturally.

The cave was very dark, with dark yellow water on the ground, turbid as if water from a decaying corpse.

Uniquely, the cave had no odd smell; even though the ground was flooded with corpse water, there was no decay or foul odor.

Zhou Yan cautiously avoided the corpse water as he moved forward. Along the way, he saw many broken openings appear overhead, like wells that had been dug.

But at each opening, bodies piled up like mountains.

Many genius cultivators, even some Mystics, had died.

Their bodies were pierced through by the Ten Thousand Dao Sword Qi, their spirits unable to struggle, dead.

After their deaths, their Essence Qi Spirits emptied, leaving just the bodies piled up, devoid of any Essence Qi Spirits.

Zhou Yan struggled forward, forgetting how far he had walked and how many ’corpse mountains’ he had passed.

After a long journey forward, a glimmer of dawn light came from ahead; in the distance, more bodies seemed to have piled up.

But among these bodies, Zhou Yan for the first time found a cultivator who hadn’t died yet.

Although this cultivator hadn’t died, his body was horribly mangled, bloody and unrecognizable, with no intact part visible.

His soul armor was also shattered and scattered, barely clinging to life.

As Zhou Yan approached, the cultivator extended a hand, now devoid of flesh and only a pale bone, tremblingly seeking a sliver of help—perhaps he already knew there was no hope of living, and it was just an instinctive act, like clutching at a straw.

Zhou Yan initially wanted to just kill the cultivator directly, but because of the influence of the earlier solitary grave, he temporarily had no killing intent.

He approached, suddenly feeling an instinctive sense of crisis.

Acting on impulse, he kept his composure, not showing any signs of abnormality.

Having just regained some ability, a surge of strength emerged in his body.

With this strength, Zhou Yan applied the Nirvana Technique from the Nirvana Scripture to himself, instantly restoring 20 percent of his strength.

Only then did Zhou Yan apply the Nirvana Technique to this skeletal cultivator, nearly reduced to a skeleton.

"Buzz—"

The skeletal cultivator received the energy, resulting in a massive surge in his life level, manifesting tremendous potential.

He directly stimulated his hidden essence, and his body rapidly healed.

In an instant, a halo of rainbow appeared before Zhou Yan, and within the rainbow materialized a perfectly formed classical woman, entirely nude, refined and pure. Apart from her head, her body was devoid of any hair, smooth and clean... as if a Fairy after bathing, radiating robust vitality.