Chapter Ninety-Five: A Hard-Fought Battle

A vast celestial river pattern hung high in the sky, identical to the one painted in the Valley of Absolute Yin with the blood of a sky serpent.

Within that river of stars, each star was as immense as a mountain, and the distance between heaven and earth seemed compressed by countless millions of times.

Beneath the starry river lay clusters of clouds, some refined from blazing fire, some formed from yin energy, and some condensed from poisonous miasma.

A gray sky, a gray earth.

On the ground lay a stone giant as large as a mountain range, its body sprawled on its back beneath the heavens. Save for a stone loincloth around the waist, it was naked, its muscles bulging, its features vivid as life.

At the heart of the giant’s chest, a faint starry radiance flickered.

That light continuously drew upon the power of the stars in the river above. The starlight from the celestial pattern poured down like rain, all of it gathering at the giant’s breast, at the place of its heart.

The stone giant, carved with uncanny divine craftsmanship, revealed every sinew and fine hair with startling clarity. Enlarged hundreds of times, one could see tiny black specks upon its body, like little ants crawling slowly over the stone.

On the palm of its right hand, one of those little ants was gazing up at the sky, its expression one of utter astonishment.

It was Shi Yan.

After arriving here, he had found himself standing upon the giant stone hand, with strange swaying plants circling around him.

Those plants moved with the wind, each over ten meters tall and as thick as a human waist, resembling strands of hair.

He did not know that, from high above, those strange plants looked exactly like the giant’s fine body hair.

To his eyes, the right palm of the stone giant was incomparably vast, larger than the Divine Stone Square of Fallen Star City by dozens of times.

Standing there, Shi Yan stared at the mysterious river of stars in the sky, his heart filled with shock.

He did not know that he stood upon the giant’s palm, nor how enormous the statue truly was. He only thought himself atop a small hill and had no idea where to go next.

Thump. Thump.

The yin beads within his chest, at the Heavenly Pass, Spirit Pass, and Yin Capital, suddenly began to beat. From the stone giant’s heart came a mysterious pull.

Shi Yan’s body jolted.

The miraculous place in the heart of the giant, where the starlight gathered from all directions, seemed to be calling to the yin beads within him. They pulsed insistently, as though urging him to hurry to that place at once.

Standing on the giant’s palm, Shi Yan’s expression turned grave. After a brief hesitation, he charged toward the giant’s heart without the slightest delay.

At the same time, many tiny black-specked figures scattered across the giant’s body also looked carefully and realized that the place where starlight gathered at the heart was the most wondrous point here.

Thus, after a moment’s thought, they too began converging toward the giant’s chest.

Among them were martial practitioners of the Dark Abyss, Mu Hui, Mu Yudie, Di Yalan, and Bei Mingce. So long as their cultivation had not yet reached the Earth Realm, they were all moving toward the giant’s heart.

At the base of the heels of both feet, Bei Ming Shang, Chi Xiao, Zhua Qi, the Dark Lord, Yin Kui, and Jiu Shan were currently being pressed down by a terrifying force.

The martial practitioners who had entered the Gate of Heaven and were above the Earth Realm were all suppressed beneath the heels of the stone giant, unable to move a single step.

At this moment, Bei Ming Shang, Chi Xiao, and the others were using the power of their Heavenly Realm cultivation to violently charge again and again against the terrifying force binding their bodies.

Yet no matter how hard they struggled, they could not shake off that dreadful oppression, nor move even an inch from the giant’s heel.

Thump. Thump.

The yin beads within Shi Yan’s body kept beating. With a darkened face, he held his breath, focused his mind, and raced swiftly toward the giant’s heart.

Around him, the stone giant’s body hair swayed like towering trees, blocking his view. It was as though he were trapped in a forest, utterly unaware that he was actually on the surface of a palm.

No one knew how long had passed before Shi Yan sped from the hill-like palm to the giant’s right arm.

Then his charging body suddenly halted, and he looked ahead warily.

Ahead, in a gigantic deep pit, stone men wreathed in flying flames suddenly surged up from below.

These stone men were three meters tall, their entire bodies spewing fire, and they even carried a faint aura of the Nine-Headed Sky Serpent.

If someone could look down from above, they would discover that the massive pit was in fact merely the Yang Pool acupoint of the giant’s right arm.

The twelve fire-raging stone men seemed to loathe the aura of life. The moment Shi Yan approached, they burst forth all at once and pounced straight at him.

Drawing a deep breath, Shi Yan’s expression did not change. Secretly activating his Stone Transformation Martial Soul, the skin on his body turned dark brown in an instant.

Once the Stone Transformation Martial Soul was complete, Shi Yan circulated his essence throughout his body and also summoned the Black Light Shield.

With the Black Light Shield formed, Shi Yan suddenly shot forward like a cannonball.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

In the midst of the flaming stone men, Shi Yan thrust his fingers like spears, stabbing fiercely at their bodies.

Finger Spear Art, which could pierce straight through the body of a Xiantian martial practitioner, struck those stone men and actually produced the sound of metal colliding.

The scorching fire force, upon touching the stone men’s bodies, surged into Shi Yan’s fingers, making them burn with searing pain.

No good.

His expression changing, Shi Yan immediately realized that the Finger Spear Art was useless against stone men with no flesh and blood.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

Six stone men exerted force together, their fire fists the size of millstones crashing down upon Shi Yan’s body.

The Black Light Shield on Shi Yan’s body could not withstand this barrage and shattered at once.

Under the pounding of those flaming fists, he was blasted backward, every inch of him stinging, his clothes catching fire one after another, a miserable sight.

Fortunately, Shi Yan’s Stone Transformation Martial Soul was hard enough. Though he suffered pain from the blows, he was not injured.

With a dark face, Shi Yan judged that each of these six stone men was more troublesome than a martial practitioner of the Human Realm.

Finger Spear Art would not do. He would need another method.

A thought flashed through his mind. White mist began to drift from Shi Yan’s left hand as negative force was stirred, surging out together with his essence and mingling into a massive magnetic field.

Under his will, the field moved swiftly and suddenly fell among a group of charging stone men.

A strange suction force erupted within the field. Every stone man was affected, their bodies forcibly restrained as they struggled inside the field.

It works!

Delighted inwardly, Shi Yan intensified the field’s strangling power and focused all his attention on twisting it.

Crack! Crack!

Under the field’s terrifying crushing force, one stone man was shattered, its flaming arms and body splitting apart and being hurled directly out of the field.

Shi Yan had only just exhaled in relief when his expression changed again.

After being split apart, once outside the field, the stone man’s body actually drew itself back together on its own. In merely three seconds, it had fully recovered and charged at Shi Yan once more.

It could not be killed.

A chill ran through him. Shi Yan’s face grew even darker as he once again activated the field and shifted its position.

The stone man that had nearly charged forward was once more dragged into the field, where its body was wrung and entangled by madly surging force.

This time Shi Yan did not insist on killing the flaming stone men. Once he found that all the stone men had been trapped, he did not hesitate in the slightest. He quickly crossed beyond the field and continued sprinting forward.

Half an hour later, from a deep pit at the acupoint beneath the right arm’s support groove, wisps of yin fiends suddenly drifted out.

Yin fiends are formed when the undispersed souls of martial practitioners absorb the yin energy of heaven and earth. They are dead things, yet can wield part of the martial techniques they knew in life, possessing a battle instinct and a hunger to devour more souls to strengthen themselves.

One after another, those yin fiends flew out from the pit, baring teeth and claws as they pounced at Shi Yan.

He merely glanced at them once, and his expression turned cold.

Within the yin beads, strands of pure yin force drifted out, drawing along three yin vortices. As the vortices spun, a crazed force of suction erupted suddenly.

The charging yin fiends all showed fear, and in their panic they actually fled toward the pit, as though risking their lives.

Think you can escape?

Shi Yan sneered, and the rotation of the yin vortices accelerated once more.

One by one, the yin fiends struggled against the pull of the vortices within Shi Yan’s body, their translucent forms trembling and resisting, yet they still moved inch by inch toward him.

The closer they came, the more strongly they were affected by the vortices.

Suddenly, one yin fiend could no longer resist. It turned into a dense stream of yin energy and was abruptly drawn into Shi Yan’s chest.

Inside the vortices, the yin fiend was rapidly broken down by their power, becoming strands of pure yin force that attached themselves to the center of the vortices.

The remaining yin fiends struggled in terror, yet none could escape the suction of the vortices in Shi Yan’s chest. One after another, they were pulled in, quickly becoming points of yin light at the vortices’ core.

Before long, all the yin fiends had been completely absorbed, and Shi Yan did not linger. He continued onward.

At the same time, similar scenes were unfolding across every corner of the stone giant.

Bei Mingce, Mu Yudie, Di Yalan, Mu Hui, and the martial practitioners of the Dark Abyss were all encountering different perils. On the road toward the giant’s heart, each of them was beset with trouble, overwhelmed by the flaming stone men, yin fiends, poison demons, and mud dragons emerging from the giant’s pit-like acupoints.

Shi Yan pressed forward without hesitation.

Along the way, he encountered more flaming stone men and yin fiends, all of which he dealt with by the same methods, slowly making his way to the elbow of the giant’s right arm.

Shi Yan stopped again.

Ahead, five martial practitioners of the Dark Abyss, all at the first and second levels of the Human Realm, seemed to have been deliberately assigned to this area by the Gate of Heaven. At the moment, they all reeked of scorch and looked utterly disheveled as they hurried toward the giant’s heart.

The five Dark Abyss martial practitioners also spotted Shi Yan rushing toward them.

The five turned back, glanced at him once, and instantly reached a tacit understanding. Their eyes were icy and sinister as they slowly walked toward Shi Yan.

“Of the Dark Abyss?”

Shi Yan’s gaze was like lightning. On one man’s bare shoulder, he noticed the Dark Abyss’s special mark, and his expression turned frost-cold at once.

“Kill!”

The man gave a low cry. The other four suddenly scattered and advanced in a semicircle to surround Shi Yan.

“Courting death!”

Shi Yan’s face was cold. In his eyes, there flickered a savage excitement for blood. With a furious shout, his body shot out like a sword.

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