84: Chapter 84 The Sword Saint of the Broken Sea

Canglan Strait. Frontline Outpost.

Sword Saint Lu Changsheng stood at the canyon entrance, his silver battle armor reflecting a blinding white light under the noon sun.

The beast bone pauldrons expanded menacingly to the sides, nearly doubling his shoulder width.

The Sword Intent mask covered the lower half of his face, while the holographic tactical panel inside the mask scrolled real-time battlefield data.

His legs—legs that had been devoid of any sensation for three years—were planted firmly on the gravel ground.

He lowered his head and glanced at his feet.

His toes wiggled inside his combat boots.

His ankles rotated half a circle.

His knees bent once.

Muscles atrophied for three years were reawakened by the neural bridging circuits built into the silver battle armor, with every tendon responding to brain commands with over ninety percent of their original precision.

Mana began to surge from the Tier 8 core in his chest, flowing along his spine into his legs, then recoiling back to his arms.

The entire cycle took less than 0.3 seconds.

"...I can walk."

He took his first step.

His combat boot crushed a fist-sized pebble.

The second step sank three centimeters into the sandy soil.

The third step, the fourth, the fifth.

Each step accelerated, each step became steadier.

He went from walking to fast walking, from fast walking to jogging, from jogging to sprinting.

Sword Intent exploded from his back, dragging a dark golden tail flame dozens of meters long.

The rock walls on both sides of the canyon were shredded by the airflow into dense patterns of sword marks.

He stopped.

He was three hundred meters away from the Six-Armed Bone Demon.

"Sword Saint of Breaking Seas, Sword Saint Lu Changsheng, deploying."

Chu Yin stood in front of the main hall's holographic screen.

Her hands were clenched into fists, her nails digging into her palms.

She was surrounded by people.

It was so crowded she couldn't even draw her scabbard.

An older woman's elbow had rested on her shoulder at some point, but she hadn't even noticed.

She was just staring fixedly at the figure in the silver battle armor on the screen.

"Master..."

The transformation sequence for the Beast God Armament was truly cool.

It was hundreds of times cooler than the magical girl cards Su Bai had shown her.

When she had said "So ugly" to her master's face earlier, half of it was just her putting on a brave front.

Now, separated by a holographic screen, she finally didn't have to pretend.

Comments were scrolling wildly at the edge of her vision.

[The light effects of the transformation!! Seven golden rings!!]

[Tier 9 stats!! Output pushing towards Tier 9 intermediate!!]

[Three seconds!! It only took three seconds to accelerate from a wheelchair state to supersonic speed!!]

[Sword Saint Lu Changsheng!! Sword Saint Lu Changsheng!!]

[Slice that Bone Demon in one strike!!]

Sword Saint Lu Changsheng drew his sword.

The long silver sword spun half a circle in his right hand, blade pointing upward.

Seven golden rings simultaneously detached from the sword, lining up in a straight line in front of the tip.

Each golden ring shrank rapidly, the space inside the rings began to distort, and the air ionized into a pale blue plasma under the high heat.

Then, the golden rings vanished.

They didn't explode; they were absorbed into the sword blade.

All the compressed Sword Intent converged onto an infinitely small point.

"Break."

A vertical slash.

There was no sword energy wave.

No shockwave.

No visible trajectory of attack.

There was only a straight black fissure extending from the tip of the sword toward the Bone Demon.

The space on either side of the fissure rolled back like torn fabric, revealing the pitch-black imaginary space beneath.

The Bone Demon's two uppermost appendages and the shoulder scales split open simultaneously.

The cut didn't look like it had been slashed—it was as if the laws of matter for that part had been temporarily rewritten.

The scales turned into paper, the bones into wax.

The Tier 9 defense of the Abyss monster didn't even count as a layer before the Sword Intent of Breaking Seas.

Dark purple blood mist gushed out from the fissure.

The entire crowd erupted.

"One strike!! One strike and he cut off two of its arms!!"

"That's a Tier 9!! A real-deal Tier 9 Bone Demon!!"

"Sword Saint Lu Changsheng!! The Sword Saint of Breaking Seas is back!!"

Chu Yin almost jumped up.

She held back.

But she punched her clenched fist into the air.

The host was screaming hoarsely about "This is the power of the Beast God Armament" and "This is the true value of an orthodox transformation."

Comments flooded the screen like a rainstorm, and even the server began to lag.

Zhao Dahai stared at the Bone Demon on the screen that had been split by a single strike, his mouth hanging open, forgetting to close it.

The cream puff in Lin Xiao's hand stopped at her lips, and her eyebrows arched up half an inch.

"...He's actually quite capable of fighting." Her tone carried a hint of surprise.

Su Bai didn't speak.

He was watching the blood mist seeping from the Bone Demon's fissure; the direction the mist was spreading was wrong.

The wind was blowing from north to south, and the Bone Demon was at the north end of the canyon, so the blood mist should have drifted south—but it didn't.

It was moving against the wind.

Against the wind, it climbed up along the edge of the fissure, as if something inside the blood mist was actively controlling it.

Then he heard Kyubey's voice.

[Su Bai. That Bone Demon's Mental Power wavelength—it just changed.]

— Sword Saint Lu Changsheng felt that something was wrong.

The feedback from the Sword Intent of Breaking Seas was always faster than his eyes.

The moment the sword blade cut through the target, the Sword Intent would pass through the wound into the target's body, reflecting back structural information from inside the target.

This was an intuition that had never failed him in his thirty-year battlefield career.

When that strike just now cut into the Bone Demon's shoulder, the feedback transmitted by the Sword Intent was—hollow.

A Tier 9 Bone Demon's bones should have been solid, with a density exceeding adamant.

But the feeling just now was like cutting through a paper shell.

There was something under the paper shell.

Something that was pushing outward, something that was expanding rapidly.

The Bone Demon's split shoulder didn't heal.

The fissure continued to widen.

The scales began to peel off from the edge of the crack, falling off one by one, hitting the ground with the crisp sound of metal colliding.

What was revealed after the scales fell off wasn't bone.

It was another layer of scales.

Thicker.

Darker in color.

Each piece was opening and closing autonomously, and the spaces between the scales were embedded with dense Abyss runes.

The Abyss runes were glowing.

The Bone Demon's body began to roll outward from the center.

The scales, muscles, and bones all flipped outward, like a flower bud blooming in reverse.

And in the center of the bud, a dark purple core was shooting out a torrent of mana.

The torrent split into twelve streams in mid-air, smashing into the rock walls on both sides of the canyon.

The earth split open.

It wasn't one fissure.

It was twelve portals tearing open simultaneously on the opposite canyon mountain face, each one dozens of meters high.

The door frames were twisted Abyss keratin, and the world inside the doors was an absolute darkness that human Mental Power could not penetrate.

Then, that darkness began to squeeze things out.

First came the claws.

Seven or eight claws stretched out from the first door simultaneously.

Each was over ten meters long, the number of joints was wrong, the skin was translucent greyish-white, and underneath, one could see that what flowed in the blood vessels wasn't blood, but liquid Abyss mana.

Then the head.

Flat, eyeless, with the entire face half-occupied by a vertically split mouth.

Then the body.

And then, surging out from behind it, countless dense, slightly smaller, but equally menacing low-tier monsters.

The second door.

The third door.

The fourth.

Twelve doors opened simultaneously.

A sky-covering, sun-blocking tide of monsters poured out from every portal fissure.

Low-tier monsters spread out along the canyon floor like a flood, covering every inch of ground within sight.

Mid-tier monsters trampled on their backs as they charged forward.

High-tier monsters hovered in mid-air, each one wreathed in at least two bands of law-light.

And that Bone Demon stood at the very front of the fissures, all six of its intact appendages raised.

Bone giant blades arranged themselves in a ring behind it.

It raised its head, that vertically split mouth aimed at Sword Saint Lu Changsheng.

Abyssal language.

It wasn't the low growl of feigned submission from before, but a true Abyssal command carrying the authority of law.

It was ordering the monster tide behind it to crush!

To crush Sword Saint Lu Changsheng!

To crush the canyon outpost!

To crush the civilian settlements stretching for hundreds of kilometers behind the outpost!

At the same time, in the distant sky, Li Qingyue, who was dealing with other Tier 9 monsters, suddenly turned her head.

The moment she saw the Bone Demon reveal its true form, she lost her voice and exclaimed: "Demon Lord Xuangu!"

"What, Demon Lord Xuangu? Was Sword Saint Lu Changsheng fighting this guy just now!?"

Qi Yuan on the side was so shocked his jaw dropped, "No way, how does Sword Saint Lu Changsheng dare to!? This guy is a true veteran Tier 9 superior, even in his prime, Sword Saint Lu Changsheng couldn't possibly be its opponent!"

"It's a trap, their goal was never a feint, but a direct attack on the city... This guy has spatial teleportation abilities; once he enters the city, the Abyss will directly erode everything!"

Li Qingyue's voice contained hidden anxiety.

Demon Lord Xuangu was a true spatial-type powerhouse; once given the chance, it could teleport all the top combat forces of the Abyss over.

This guy was clearly trying to kill Sword Saint Lu Changsheng directly and execute its plan!

However, even if she wanted to stop it now, it was too late, because there were three Tier 9 monsters attacking her recklessly from the side!

"Damn it!" Li Qingyue gritted her teeth: "Sword Saint Lu Changsheng, that idiot, he's being used and he doesn't even know it!"

Her voice gradually faded, because with three Tier 9 powerhouses besieging her, she had to activate spatial teleportation to dodge.

The host was still shouting.

The tone had completely changed.

"—Audience members!! An unexpected situation has occurred at the front line!! A large number of teleportation fissures have appeared!! The number is uncountable!! The scale of the Abyss monsters—the scale far exceeds estimates!! No, that guy is Demon Lord Xuangu, my god, it's actually Demon Lord Xuangu!"

By the last word, the voice had changed from shouting to trembling.

Chu Yin's sword had appeared in her hand without her knowing when.

She gripped the sword, her knuckles white and turning blue.

The comments on the screen stopped for an instant.

Then they exploded.

[Twelve fissures!! That wasn't planned!!]

[The Abyss!! It's the main force of the Abyss!!]

[They're going to charge the outpost!! The city is behind the outpost!! Damn it, Demon Lord Xuangu is coming over!]

[Sword Saint Lu Changsheng can't stop it alone!! He can't stop the monster tide from twelve fissures!!]

Sword Saint Lu Changsheng held his sword horizontally in front of him.

The silver battle armor was cool, the beast bone pauldrons were domineering, and the Sword Intent mask was professional.

But all of this, in front of twelve Abyss fissures—in front of the overwhelming monster tide—in front of the garrison soldiers in the outpost behind him who had just received the alarm and hadn't had time to evacuate—suddenly became completely unimportant.

He didn't look back at the outpost.

He simply stepped his left foot half an inch into the ground, lowered his center of gravity, and gripped the sword hilt with both hands.

The sword blade was held horizontally in front of him.

The Sword Intent of Breaking Seas hummed and expanded outward.

The mana circuits of the silver battle armor all lit up.

Seven golden rings condensed on the sword again, spinning faster than before, their light more blinding than before.

Chu Yin, standing in front of the screen in the main hall, could feel that pressure from hundreds of kilometers away; the mana fluctuations her master was emitting had reached the critical line of a Tier 9 superior.

The comments exploded again instantly.

[He's charging up!!]

[He's going to face twelve fissures head-on!!]

[One against twelve!! With his own strength!!]

Above the Canglan Strait, the silvery-white sword radiance and the dark purple torrent spat out by the Abyss monster tide collided in the center of the canyon.