Chapter 161: Xie Dao Ling
Translated by: La0o9
Edited by: VindiFan#1
"Let us move out, have the army begin the assault!" Venerable Xin ordered.
Hearing that, one Beast Saint waved the army commanding flag and shouted: "Advance!"
All the demon and beast soldiers roared in excitement.
They moved so quickly it kicked up a torrent of dust, assaulting the human's army.
At the same time, within humanity's own ranks.
Countless spirit beast bags that were hung next to cultivators' waist suddenly blew up, as the spirit beasts inside jumped out and began attacking their master with reckless abandon.
Many human cultivators had already fallen from their own spirit beast's attack before the demons even reached.
A few particularly strong spirit beasts took the chance to move towards the defensive formations set up around the camp, breaking them after two to three attacks.
They moved from one place to another, breaking all the defensive formation plates to ensure that when the demon army comes, the humans would have already lost all means of protection within the camp.
Inside of humanity's camp, countless lights suddenly lit up flashing brightly in their eyes, then quickly dissipating into particles of light and disappeared.
This was the scene of defensive formations breaking one after another.
At this moment, it was only a few breaths until the demons broke into humanity's ranks and begin their bloody and merciless massacre.
Without the large-scale defensive formations, the demons would only need to press their attack at a single point to break apart humanity's ranks and pick them off.
The demons and spirit beasts' attacks were perfectly coordinated.
This campaign is already as good as won.
Venerable Xin joyfully declared: "Brothers, advance forward, feast on these humans, and the world shall belong to us beasts!"
The demons and demon beasts roared again to answer his declaration, then successfully broke apart humanity's ranks.
The one-sided massacre had begun.
Humanity's fate was sealed.
Beasts will finally rule this world.
Venerable Xin clasped his hand behind his back, then ordered the ones behind: "You lot also move out, no need to have the little ones die too much"
"Yes" all the remaining Beast Saints replied.
Turning into afterimages, they quickly assaulted humanity's camp.
Venerable Xin nodded in satisfaction.
This was the proudest day of his life.
When the Demon Lord returns, he'll surely be praised very highly.
He could possibly even get to go with the Demon Lord during the next world invasion.
Apparently, conquering an entire world brings a lot of benefits.
The next time he has the chance, he'll have to look into this mysterious phenomenon carefully.
While he was thinking, a small problem seems to have erupted at the frontline.
Venerable Xin glared intensely.
———no, that doesn't look like a small problem at all.
As the large-scale defensive formations all broke down, the demon army successfully entered humanity's ranks, but then something unexpected happened.
A chilling, dull light emitted from inside humanity's camp.
The light was as thin as a thread, but sharper than any knife. Within a single second, one split into two, two split into four, multiplying exponentially into countless blades of ice, attacking anything and everything inside humanity's camp.
In a single moment, humans and demons alike were shredded to pieces, raising agonizing screams of pain.
The entire camp was covered in a white layer of frost mist.
When the cold essence subsided, a bright red glow instantly followed, which also covered humanity's entire camp.
The overflowing flame essence erupted like a torrent of magma, bathing all the spirit beasts, demons and even human cultivators in the scorching heat.
And then came a brilliant yellow light that manifested as countless Swords and Blades, rampaging inside humanity's camp, slicing and dicing anything and everything without resistance as streams of blood rose all the way to the sky.
Suddenly, as the thunder roared and the wind of storm screamed, a literal meteor shower descended upon them as thousands of millions of creatures caught inside couldn't do a thing to stop it and died.
Furthermore, dust was kicked up from all around as a tsunami of yellow sand rose up and struck the camp from all sides, burrowing the remaining bodies of flesh that were still in one piece into a grave of earthen spikes below, before quickly being covered with sand again.
Venerable Xin felt his heart went cold.
This was... humanity's large-scale attack formations!
But the most unbelievable thing for both the Beast Saints and Venerable Xin was that, these large-scale formations doesn't attack the outside of humanity's camp like they always do.
———-they were all directed inside humanity's camp instead!
The attack formations activated one after another, as the humans, demons and spirit beasts inside were killed so thoroughly that even the luckiest ones are the ones that managed to keep their bodies in large pieces.
Humanity's attack formations were directed at themselves instead of their enemy, this was so unbelievable because it has never happened before.
It was as if the humans had made the preparations to sacrifice themselves to kill the demons from the very start.
The few demons that were lucky to be outside humanity's camp before the formations activated were running away, but most of them had already died in the layered large-scale suicidal attack formations.
The three Saints were successfully sent away, the demons held such an overwhelming advantage of number, together with the spirit beasts' betrayal, and yet humanity still managed to decisively mount the final resistance by giving up their own lives.
The amount of casualties for both demons and spirit beasts was devastating.
Countless Tianma Enchantresses appeared from the bodies of dead spirit beasts, faces cold as ice and flew towards the Demon Palace temple on the other side of what used to be Demon Clouds River.
"Humanity, really were respectable..."
Venerable Xin sighed and could do nothing but accept the fact that a "sure-win" battle become a "barely won" one.
Although most of humanity's elites have entered and died in that battle just now, there's definitely a few people remaining in the larger sects.
Humanity's sects all have their own protection formation, so any future battles will be exceptionally hard.
With so many subordinates dead, when the time comes for them to attack the sects, he might have to do it himself.
To break through those defensive formations or sects with thousands of years of tradition, even he will feel deathly exhausted.
But there's no way around it now.
Let's just quickly conclude this battle before thinking about whatever comes next.
Together with Venerable Xin's sigh, the countless attacks formations also slowed down and stopped.
Everything was over.
Suddenly, Venerable Xin's eyes opened wide.
He saw over a hundred thousand demon and spirit beast corpses in humanity's camp.
But all the humans had disappeared.
There's no active invisibility formations, no stragglers trying to run for their lives, no screams of despair as the human try to blow themselves up.
Every single human cultivator, even their corpses, disappeared without a trace.
They disappeared in the truest meaning of the word, there wasn't even a hair left.
"What's going on? Where are all the humans? Quickly look for them!"
Venerable Xin unconsciously shouted.
He quickly flew towards the camp, searching for them together with the other Beast Saints.
All the demons still alive just stared at each other on both sides of the battlefield, not knowing what to do.
The lucky spirit beasts that were still alive fell down on the spot and breathed their last.
More and more Tianma Enchantresses let go of the spirit beast corpses and took to the sky.
They seem to have noticed something and ignored helping the Beast Saint, only flying as fast as they could towards the Demon Palace temple.
As the Tianma Enchantresses flew, they were chanting: 『Zhuo zhi zha zha luo zhuo zhi, lu he li, Mo He lu he li, A Luo, Zhe Luo, Duo Luo, Sha He』 (1)
A mystical light emits from the Demon Palace temple, manifesting itself into a transparent palace, accepting the Tianma Enchantresses inside.
On humanity's camp, a thin layer of spirit residue was being blown away by the wind.
"This spirit residue..."
One Beast Saint suddenly realized something and muttered.
Venerable Xin grabbed this Beast Saint, shouting in frenzy: "What's wrong with this spirit residue? Quickly tell me, or I'll kill you!"
The Beast Saint was shocked and quickly spoke: "This spirit residue looks very much like spirit energy that's left behind after undoing a spell"
Venerable Xin let him go and shook his head: "No, it can't possibly be"
A spell...
Ridiculous, what kind of spell would enable almost a hundred thousand cultivators to instantly disappeared?
In this world, there's no way humans actually have such a spell.
Even if the three Saints were still here, they wouldn't be able to do something like that.
Venerable Xin forced himself to calm down and carefully thought about it.
The Great Monk of Sorrow is a Buddhist cultivator, even though they're experts in dealing with Tianma, such perfect hiding and presence concealment techniques aren't his expertise.
Xuanyuan Tianzun is an expert in talisman and 5-Elemental attack spells, but as far as he knows a talisman can't produce such an effect unknowingly.
Not to mention, Xuanyuan Tianzun had never shown to be capable of such a miraculous feat like this in the past few hundred years.
Bai Hua Fairy couldn't possibly have done it either, aside from her overwhelming Martial Thaumaturgies and her multitudes of attack spells, she only knows ———-
She only knows ——-
She ———
In the split second that he realized, his entire body shook uncontrollably and coughed up blood from rage.
"Xie Dao Ling!"
His eyes shed tears of blood, shouting in extreme unwillingness to accept the truth.
Note:
(1): it's not gibberish, but there's literally no way to translate this, or any of the Tianma's incantations. So if there are any more in the future, I'll just keep them as is.
In earlier chapters, Gu Qing Shan had said that one of the three Saints was a Martial God, can you guess who that is before the next chapter?