Volume Two: Mortal Realm, Chapter Ninety-One: Confrontation in Wind and Snow

With his sword case and Aru on his back, carrying his saber and bow, Ye Mingke had gone far into the wind and snow.

His wary, icy gaze swept across that desolate wilderness, flickering now and then in the flash of purple lightning.

The sky was still a void of darkness. Night was long, and far from over.

His instincts had never ceased warning him. He felt as though a pair of malicious eyes had been watching him from the road ahead all along, yet that person had never shown himself, merely shadowing him beyond the reach of his perception.

Ye Mingke did not know what to do. He changed direction several times in the storm, but it was useless.

He did not know what that person was waiting for.

So he could only keep walking step by step, slowly steadying his breathing, gripping the saber and bow in his hands, waiting.

Waiting.

And then it came.

In the black night of the blizzard, it was as if a great torch had suddenly been lit skyward.

Ye Mingke’s senses jolted. His hand on the saber and bow instantly broke into a cold sweat, and a presence far stronger than the several immortals he had encountered before abruptly cut into the snowstorm ahead.

That person had finally come.

In the dead of the blizzard night, when lightning was absent, the world was black as pitch; even when lightning flashed by, one could see no more than thirty paces.

Ye Mingke’s figure, which had been advancing at a measured pace, suddenly twisted. He lowered his body and surged through the snow like a prowling beast, eyes sharp, the long saber clenched between his teeth. With his right hand he flung the arrows forward into the storm above.

Though they seemed to be cast out all at once, the arrows traced different paths in flight, some fast, some slow, some high, some low.

Ye Mingke raced forward with those arrows, swift as a cunning rabbit across the snow, yet leaving no sound behind. At the same time, he reached up and plucked three arrows from those cast overhead, nocked them, and drew the bow to a full moon.

Thunder rumbled from the horizon, dull and heavy, drowning out the hiss of the arrows as they tore forward through the snow-filled distance.

With no clash of energies, Ye Mingke chose to strike directly, using the darkness of the snowy night for a sudden ambush.

Those three arrows were only the beginning. As he pressed closer, he repeatedly snatched arrows from the quiver with blinding speed, stringing and releasing them in one motion. In the blink of an eye, more than a dozen had already closed in on the figure ahead.

Behind those arrows came Ye Mingke himself, the saber already between his teeth, bearing down on the figure from not far away.

This was the same tactic he had used against the plump immortal and the tall, thin one: using the bow to suppress and entangle the enemy’s immortal arts from afar, then closing in by force, and once near enough, relying on his monstrous physique and savage predatory instinct to butcher these immortals, whose bodies were not especially formidable.

He had brought that method to its peak against the thin, tall immortal. That man had only managed to defend with immortal arts the entire time, and even his final desperate sword strike had been anticipated and blocked with the sword case. Before he could fully unleash his powers, he had been instantly killed in mere moments.

Unfortunately, Ye Mingke had no memory of his battle with Yi Laoliu in the forest. If he had, he would have understood that not all immortals were equally frail.

As the arrows and Ye Mingke himself surged toward that figure from front and rear, his pupils suddenly contracted. He lowered his head, and a blue halo far greater than the fiery radiance of the thin, tall immortal before him abruptly spread from the storm ahead, expanding in an instant to cover a radius of sixty paces.

The snow and wind before Ye Mingke suddenly parted.

There, standing within the storm, was a handsome swordsman in a green robe, gazing at him with cold indifference. In his hands were the three arrows he had just caught barehanded. Before him, not far away, was the onrushing rain of arrows, already almost fused into a single sheet.

Yet he seemed not to see them at all. Those cold, quiet eyes merely met Ye Mingke’s in silence.

There came a sharp creak.

The more than ten arrows that had reached him seemed to be twisted by some force, giving off a grating, brittle sound. Then, to Ye Mingke’s astonishment, one after another they suspended in the air, stopping mere inches from the green-robed swordsman’s face.

Bang.

Ye Mingke, still charging forward, stomped hard into the ground, trying to check his momentum.

Because the suspended arrows slowly pivoted and turned toward him, then shot back with no less speed than they had come.

Wood-element spiritual power? Control over wood?

The thought flashed through Ye Mingke’s mind. At that moment his body was still unable to halt completely and continued to pitch forward, but as he moved, he used the tip of his foot planted in the snow as a pivot and spun his body.

Sharp whistles cut past both his front and back. Several arrows skimmed dangerously close to Ye Mingke’s cheek and the cloth on his back.

But two arrows still came straight for his face. With the saber still clamped in his mouth, Ye Mingke exhaled, and the long blade in his teeth rang as he struck the first arrow, knocking it aside. The clash rang like bronze striking a temple bell, and the immense force on the arrow sent the saber spinning in his mouth.

A hand reached out and seized it.

The second arrow had already driven close. Ye Mingke, having dodged the others, raised the saber level with his eyes and slashed horizontally, cleanly severing the arrow into two halves.

But just as the arrow was cut through to the end, a cold and handsome face had already pressed close to him.

Until now, Ye Mingke had always been the one using arrows to pin the enemy and seize the moment to close in. But this time his opponent had used the arrows to disrupt his rhythm and force the approach instead.

Ye Mingke had already breathed out fully. As the cut reached its end, he once again exerted sudden force and swung toward that cold, handsome face.

The blade drew near, but the green-robed swordsman did not even draw his sword. Instead, he leaned in further, and both hands, wrapped in blue spiritual power, gently laid themselves upon the snow-white military saber.

Those fingertips were slow and tender, yet the instant they touched the blade, Ye Mingke seemed to hear a shrill peal of thunder in his ears. A tremendous force surged through the metal and directly split the flesh at the base of his thumb. The saber flew from his hand and shattered between his crazed, demonic stare and the green-robed swordsman’s icy gaze.

A deep chill flickered in the swordsman’s eyes. He waved his hand coldly. The motion was still slow and gentle in appearance, yet Ye Mingke felt utterly unable to evade it. With overwhelming force, it struck him together with several shards of flying blade, slamming into his unstable, forward-leaning body.

With a dull, heavy thud, Ye Mingke was sent flying backward and crashed hard into the snow. He lay face down in the hollow, coughing up several mouthfuls of bright, searing blood.

He had not chosen to roll with the impact, because Aru’s frail body was on his back. He could not allow her to be hurt.

Only... he would break his promise again, wouldn’t he?

Ye Mingke, his face smeared with blood in the snow hollow, gave a bleak, bitter smile. He struggled to crawl out, only to see that the green-robed swordsman, carrying a blue spiritual sword upon his back, was walking toward him step by step. Those handsome, narrow eyes held the same indifference one might grant to an ant.

What an infuriating look.

His pupils reddened, and with a ferocious, crazed light in his eyes, he stared back at that indifferent gaze and forced himself upright.

He thought of the invisible, expressionless eye that had opened in the sky when the town was shattered. He thought of the Emperor, with those dazzling golden eyes looking down upon them from on high. He thought of how, when they first met in the Sea of Mist, Ying Kui had looked at him with indifference and mockery.

Then suddenly, in the advancing green-robed swordsman’s originally calm eyes, Ye Mingke saw a violent contraction of the pupils, and profound terror.

The green-robed swordsman abruptly stopped, then retreated swiftly backward, drifting away through the snow.

Ye Mingke froze, but he quickly turned his head. Just as his senses had told him, a woman carrying a heavy sword was standing behind him without his noticing when she had arrived. And the old beggar stood not far behind her in the storm, upright as a pine, motionless as a mountain.

So they really had been following behind me all this time. And they are no ordinary people. Friends, not enemies.

Ye Mingke felt a burden lift from his heart, as he had already suspected as much. But just as the tension in his mind began to loosen a little, two even more blazing torches suddenly appeared in his perception, one so bright that it nearly approached Li Guifan’s presence from the Sea of Mist.

They were two cultivators whose spiritual power fluctuations were extremely formidable.

He lifted his eyes toward the rear of the green-robed swordsman and saw two figures slowly walking through the snow.

As though intentionally mirroring the pair behind him, one of the figures, whose radiance was slightly dimmer, held an odd wooden case and walked in front, then stopped not far behind the green-robed swordsman, corresponding to the woman behind Ye Mingke who bore the heavy sword.

And the other, an immortal with white hair and a childlike face, whose brightness in Ye Mingke’s perception was like a small sun in the dark night, stood smiling with hands behind his back in the snow, just as the old beggar did, behind the green-robed swordsman and the wooden, taciturn man carrying the strange case.

Two sides, three pairs, six people, all came to a halt.

The snow that had been howling through the field seemed to still for an instant, then, as if crushed by some immense pressure, it whirled upward toward the sky and spread in all directions. Between the two groups, the ground remained untouched by snow, clear and bright.

Only the two sides stared each other down.

In what seemed to be the calmest place amid the storm, invisible currents flowed, twisting and strangling one another like eddies in a river. Fierce killing intent and oppressive auras that tore through the air crashed and resisted in collision after collision.

As the weakest link among the six, Ye Mingke could not help but taste blood again at the corner of his mouth, his chest feeling as though a boulder had been pressed against it.

In truth, he was not the only one feeling it. Apart from the old beggar and the Spirit Dust Immortal standing at the rear, who appeared completely untroubled, the other five, caught within such terrifying pressure, had all begun to lose color in their faces.

Yet the old beggar and the Spirit Dust Immortal seemed not to care about anyone else at all. They simply looked at one another from afar.

“Old friend, I trust you have been well. Ten years without seeing you, and this old man has missed you deeply.”

At last, it was the Spirit Dust Immortal who broke the silence in the field first. He gazed at the old beggar’s weathered face from afar and asked with a smile, though his eyes were ice cold.

“Of course I am well. I have missed you just as much.”

The old beggar suddenly threw back his head and laughed aloud. In that instant, all his former dejection vanished. He stood like a pine, his gaze like lightning, his bearing as vast and steady as a mountain lord. With grand, fearless spirit he declared, “I hear your realm has advanced greatly, and that before long you will be promoted to Northern Territory Guarding Office Master. This old friend has specially come to take your head as a congratulatory gift!”