Chapter 1000: Reverse Qiankun

The black-clad fox-man and the two old men desperately poured demonic power into the tentacles to suppress them, but it was useless.

The three were dragged downward with the collapsing mass before finally flashing away and breaking free.

They landed amid a continuous roar.

Looking back, they saw a mountain-like wave of mud and water crashing toward them.

The three swept their sleeves repeatedly, blasting the oncoming mire apart.

There was no sign of Niu Youdao.

They saw only the tentacles retracting underground.

The vines churned below the surface, making the entire swamp roll like an overturned sea.

Hundreds upon thousands of foxes lost their footing and swayed with the rising and falling ground, leaping desperately from one temporary slope to another.

The black-clad man shouted, "He's attacking the root underground!"

The old man carrying the great ghost-head saber looked deeply unsettled. "He can burrow that deep? Clan Chief, where did this man come from?"

The black-clad man said, "If he dares go under the swamp, he's courting death. Go down! Don't let him escape!"

"Awooo..."

The two old men released howls.

The surrounding foxes immediately plunged into the swamp and dove downward like schools of fish.

Halfway down, the foxes suddenly discovered that the wildly thrashing tentacles had all fallen still and were sinking quietly into the mud.

The black-clad man, descending among them, reached out to examine one.

Shock crossed his face.

The enormous organism growing underground like a mountain was already dead...

It truly was dead.

Nearly a third of the massive Corpse-Rot Vine's root system had been carbonized.

Seeing that it no longer moved, Niu Youdao removed the palm he had pressed against it and shot upward through the mud like a swimming fish.

Partway up, he suddenly sensed something unusual.

Something was closing in from every direction.

He accelerated toward the surface.

Just as he was about to break through, an enormous force suddenly crushed inward.

Pressure came from all sides and trapped him in the center.

The terrifying force made the mud and water surrounding Niu Youdao seem to harden.

It compressed violently around him, leaving no opening through which to escape.

Because of that bizarre pressure, the swamp surface began rippling outward.

Mud and water rolled away from a central point in expanding waves.

At the center, a gigantic ball of mud emerged.

Niu Youdao was trapped inside it.

Around that mud ball, the black-clad fox-man and the two old men each occupied one of three directions.

All three thrust out their arms and pressed both palms against the sphere, combining their strength to crush Niu Youdao to death.

Yet even with all three working together, they discovered they could not kill whatever was moving inside.

Someone within the mud ball was spinning rapidly.

Alarmed, all three raised their heads and howled.

"Awooo..."

Demon Foxes immediately sprang from the surrounding mud and rushed toward them.

They leapt onto the three men's bodies and swayed their tails.

Hazy radiance visible to Dharma Eyes shone from every fox as they poured their own demonic power into the three men.

More and more Demon Foxes emerged.

Those arriving later leapt onto the bodies of those already there.

Eventually, a long chain of foxes stretched behind each of the three men like a dragon.

Every Demon Fox in the chain glowed with light visible to the naked eye, passing demonic power forward in great collective streams.

Had a cultivator flown overhead at that moment and opened his Dharma Eyes, he would have witnessed a bizarre spectacle in the swamp below: a ball of light with three long, glowing tails extending from it.

Inside the mud sphere, Niu Youdao had no idea what was happening outside.

All he knew was that the pressure around him kept increasing.

It rose to a terrifying level.

When he first felt the immense crushing force, he had intended to spin and dissolve the pressure before breaking out of the mud ball.

But the pressure that followed became greater and greater.

It forced his rotation faster and faster until he no longer dared stop at all.

As his speed continued rising, the center of the mud ball actually became hollow.

Within the powerful vortex, Niu Youdao floated at the exact center.

His robes snapped violently in the pitch-black world around him.

The pressure kept increasing.

Soon he no longer dared attempt to break out.

That vast rotational force had gathered all around him.

If the balance broke, the suddenly disordered shearing forces could probably tear him to pieces in an instant.

With his present cultivation, he would never withstand it.

If the pressure continued rising without limit, even Niu Youdao did not know whether he could maintain control.

Fortunately, once it reached a certain level, it stopped increasing.

Even so, the horrifying pressure surrounding him made him wonder whether even a Nascent Soul cultivator could withstand it.

For a moment, he could not understand.

Were there really Demon Foxes with strength this terrifying?

If they possessed power like this, killing him should have been easy.

Why waste effort maintaining such a stalemate?

He felt fortunate.

Back when he had been surrounded beneath Jiao Lake, he had comprehended a new way of wielding the Qiankun Art and grasped a new method of dissipating force.

Without that experience, he would almost certainly have died here today.

If power this enormous were concentrated into a single point and struck directly into his body, it would be too fast and too violent.

With his current cultivation, he would be unable to dissipate all of it.

Even the small remainder left after he redirected most of the force would still be enough to kill him.

But this vast force had not delivered a single fatal blow.

Instead, it pressed him from all directions.

That gave him enough room to maneuver and enough time to dissipate it.

Despite spinning at extreme speed, Niu Youdao was not expending much spiritual power to maintain the stalemate.

He needed only a small amount of power, applied with exquisite precision, to maneuver at the center.

One hand held his sword behind his back.

The other formed sword fingers, the two fingers standing upright before the point between his brows.

His eyes were closed in thought.

What exactly was happening outside?

He pushed the distracting question aside.

The immediate priority was escaping.

Gradually, he began to sense clearly where the immense pressure came from.

Three locations around him.

The instant that became clear, his eyes suddenly opened.

Joy flashed within them.

A realm of control within the Qiankun Art that he had long wanted to break through, something he had never been able to fully understand, suddenly became clear at this exact moment.

At times like this, he had no choice but to admire someone like Kunlin Shu, a man with extraordinary talent for cultivation.

Through secluded cultivation alone, Kunlin Shu had managed to master a supreme art that countless members of Tianhuo Sect could not.

There were many people in Tianhuo Sect who knew of the Heavenly Fire Limitless Art.

There were also many who knew the method of cultivating it.

The method and principles had been passed down fairly to every Tianhuo Sect disciple who studied it.

Yet with the exact same method, some people simply could not master it, like climbing a tree to seek fish.

Kunlin Shu might not have been the cleverest person in Tianhuo Sect, but in certain matters the differences between people simply could not be measured by the same standard.

They were often beyond explanation.

Niu Youdao considered himself no fool.

Even so, he had remained blocked before the final two stages of the Qiankun Art, unable to find the gate.

One was Reverse Qiankun.

The other was the highest realm of the Qiankun Art:

Qiankun Unification!

Once Reverse Qiankun was mastered, the art would no longer merely dissipate force.

It could advance another level and make use of the force being dissipated.

If Qiankun Shift moved force aside and dissolved it, making it a defensive art, then Reverse Qiankun was offensive.

It borrowed force to strike with force.

Only after learning to dissipate force could one borrow force and return it.

In other words, one had to master Qiankun Shift before progressing to Reverse Qiankun.

Borrowing force to strike with force sounded simple, as though there were little to it.

But that was not the truth.

This was the use of cultivation arts acting through the forces of Heaven and Earth.

It was not an ordinary contest of physical strength.

Niu Youdao had struggled with the concept for a long time.

He had always felt as though he half understood it, as though his fingers had touched the edge, yet he could never find the way through the door.

As for the Qiankun Art's highest realm, that was still more profound and mysterious.

The formula recorded in the Qiankun Art summarized it in a single line:

Qiankun unites as one; shatter the void!

Reverse Qiankun alone had baffled him until now.

As for Qiankun Unification, the supreme realm, Niu Youdao had no expectation of reaching it in a single leap.

All this time, he had tried every method he could think of to comprehend Reverse Qiankun.

When others sparred with him, he would place one hand on an inanimate object, such as a cliff wall, and use the other to receive an attack.

He could borrow the incoming force and transmit it into the dead object.

But an inanimate object was still dead.

In the end, that method amounted only to dissipating force.

It did not truly count as borrowing force to strike with force.

When he tried the same thing between two living opponents attacking from opposite sides, everything fell apart.

He could not redirect and make use of both forces properly.

Who could have imagined that the mystery he had struggled over for so long would finally reveal itself in the extraordinary environment he found himself in now?

He was completely enclosed by immense force without the slightest gap, spinning at extreme speed within a perfectly rounded pressure field.

Immersed body and mind in that all-encompassing power, feeling the formation of a new force within the rapid rotation, his perception of force itself suddenly changed.

And he understood.

It was like standing before a tightly shut gate he could never push open.

Then, without warning, the gate loosened.

With one push, it swung wide.

Everything beyond it became clear at a glance.

Understand one point and a hundred become clear.

The world opened before him.

He could sense perfectly where the immense force came from.

Three directions.

He could sense perfectly how the power continued circulating.

He found the method to resolve the trap.

He was the center guiding that rotation.

He understood how to control it.

More precisely, he understood what he himself represented within the force.

It was only the subtlest realization.

Yet it was enough to transform everything.

Three points of force.

Borrow the force from above to strike the lower-left point.

Borrow the lower-left force to strike the lower-right.

Borrow the lower-right force to strike the upper point.

With the forces turned against one another in a complete cycle, the trap before him would naturally unravel on its own.

Just as he was about to raise his arms and guide the tremendous pressure into motion, the sword fingers held before his brow suddenly paused.

The power gathered around him was simply too enormous.

If he truly redirected it according to his new understanding, he estimated that none of the three people applying force outside would survive.

As he had told Qin Guan and Ke Dingjie, he did not want to make an enemy of the Demon Fox race.

Especially now that he had seen their clan chief.

Especially now that he knew the Demon Foxes still had three members capable of assuming human form.

He had spent too much effort laying his plans to casually destroy them now.

As he often said:

Ride the jianghu: you travel the roads, and you make friends!

Once his decision was made, Niu Youdao abruptly increased his spiritual power.

His floating body inside the hollow center spun even faster.

At that greater rotational speed, he seized hold of the immense surrounding force and drew it into his control.

Then both arms suddenly spread.

He drove the gathered power violently toward the left and right...

"Clan Chief, something's wrong!" the scythe-bearing old man suddenly shouted as he pressed both palms against the mud ball.

The black-clad man said, "What?"

The old man said, "Even if those nine dog thieves were trapped by us like this, they couldn't endure it without the slightest problem. Could his cultivation really be higher than those nine dog thieves'? This rapid rotation inside... why does it feel like the person from the legends?"

The black-clad man said, "Who..."

He never finished.

The three pressing against the mud ball suddenly sensed a change inside it.

All three men's eyes widened at once.

Fear appeared simultaneously in their gazes.

Boom!

A heaven-shaking explosion erupted.

The gigantic mud ball burst apart, and a vast expanse of swamp trembled.

Three explosive points appeared in the gaps between the men.

Violent power surged outward like three enormous dragons, seeming determined to smash through every shackle in their path.

They shot through the open spaces between the three fox-men and tore away across the swamp, plowing three enormous trenches through the mire.

"Aaah..."

The foxes' cries were swallowed by the thunderous blast.

The attack had not been directed at the three great chains of Demon Foxes.

Even so, the terrifying air currents brutally hurled every fox in all three formations into the air, instantly scattering the three groups.

Below the flying foxes, shock waves spread outward.

Three dragon-like surges of force raced into the distance as though they meant to plow the entire Desolate Marsh Deadlands apart.

[End of Chapter 1000]