Chapter 1423 - Contest of Sword Arts

Just relying on sword intent alone, Pei Hong could kill ordinary cultivators at the Void Realm, genuinely living up to his title as the Sword Maniac. That was what everyone thought as they watched, their faces turning pale even before he unleashed the God-Slaughtering Sword.

The upper echelons of the Heavenly Dragon Sect all wore tense expressions, and none of them could say for sure whether Liu Wuxie would be able to withstand Pei Hong's onslaught.

As Pei Hong's sword intent continued to rise, the sword cloud above seemed ready to crash down at any moment, and those at the lower levels of the Void Realm felt an oppressive weight bearing down on them.

As for ordinary cultivators at the Primal Origin Realm, they had already retreated far into the distance, not daring to come within ten thousand meters of the fight.

Chi Heng glanced at Hua Feiyu, who nodded slightly. Chi Heng immediately began to gather his strength, prepared to intervene without hesitation the instant Liu Wuxie's life was in danger.

Sun Xiao also watched with mounting anxiety, trying his best to communicate with the artifact spirit in his sword to provide as much aid to Liu Wuxie as he could.

Meanwhile, Liu Wuxie's sword intent climbed at a much slower pace, and it appeared far less terrifying than Pei Hong's overwhelming aura.

"Liu Wuxie's sword intent doesn't seem weak, but it's a pity that his cultivation is lower than Pei Hong's. Otherwise, the victor of this fight would be uncertain," discussed the Heavenly Dragon Sect disciples among themselves.

In their hearts, they already felt that fighting Pei Hong to a draw would be a great victory for Liu Wuxie.

After all, Liu Wuxie had just made a breakthrough into the Void Realm, whereas Pei Hong had long been a veteran in that realm. Not to mention, Pei Hong was much older than Liu Wuxie. Few believed this was a fair duel.

Liu Wuxie activated Ghost Eye and dared not show the slightest carelessness. His senior brother had already warned him, via voice transmission, that Pei Hong was not as simple as he appeared.

For years, while pursuing sword dao, Pei Hong had almost severed all worldly ties and poured his entire heart into the sword alone.

The Heavenly Dragon Sect had many disciples who cultivated the Great Asura Sword, and they quickly noticed that Liu Wuxie's way of wielding the technique differed significantly from theirs.

"This is strange... Senior Brother Liu's stance on the Great Asura Sword is completely different from ours," said a Void Realm disciple, who now addressed Liu Wuxie as "Senior Brother Liu" instead of junior brother.

"Let's wait and see," said the Heavenly Martial Institute's disciples, one of them rubbing his hands together in excitement. In their eyes, Liu Wuxie was already a mythical figure, crushing all opposition from the day he joined the Heavenly Dragon Sect to reach his current glory.

The God-Slaughtering Sword was famous for its speed. Once unleashed, its strike would reach the enemy in less than one ten-thousandth of an instant.

Most importantly, Pei Hong had poured all of his strength into this one sword. Beyond its blistering speed, the power it contained far surpassed that of ordinary sword techniques.

In the blink of an eye, the sword cloud broke apart into countless streams of sword aura that flowed back into Pei Hong. The next instant, Pei Hong vanished at a speed that eluded the naked eye, and an even more terrifying scene unfolded as he began to blur, merging completely with his sword.

That was true unity with the sword. Many people appeared to become one with their swords when they executed specific techniques, but a closer look always revealed that their flesh and steel had not truly fused with their sword.

However, Pei Hong was different. He had genuinely become one with the sword. He had even gone so far as to remove one of his own bones in his pursuit of sword dao. When he performed the God-Slaughtering Sword, the longsword in his hand fused into his body and turned into a sword-bone.

This was a level of madness that defied description. Only a man utterly obsessed with the sword would go that far, and Pei Hong had pushed himself into that very extremity.

With his sword as bone, his true essence as blood, and his sword intent as soul, he had achieved the most perfect unity between man and sword.

This meant that his body was the sword, his blood flowed as sword aura, and his sword intent itself became the blade.

He was the sword, and the sword was him. To defeat him, one would have to shatter the sword-bone, disperse the sword aura, and cut through the sword intent, making Pei Hong's sword nearly impossible to counter.

The instant Pei Hong unleashed the God-Slaughtering Sword, Chi Heng narrowed his eyes and gathered his power. Even Hua Feiyu's expression turned solemn.

The sword had already closed in on Liu Wuxie, yet he still had not swung his own blade and merely held his stance with the sword pointed toward the sky.

The Undying Sword Intent spilling from him continued to rise and even stirred the vegetation in the surroundings. Liu Wuxie's muscles tightened in an instant, but he refused to transform his body into a sword.

In fact, he disdained the very thought of it.

Perhaps one day, when his physique reached its absolute peak, he would be able to transform into anything he wished—a weapon, a stone, or even a segment of a tree trunk. This was the profundity of unity with heaven and earth.

In one-thousandth of an instant, Pei Hong's longsword appeared in front of Liu Wuxie. That was the God-Slaughtering Sword—moving at ten times the speed of light.

Right then, Liu Wuxie's sword descended from above like an asura hell falling from the heavens. Boundless asura intent surged around him as an Asura Palace emerged from the void in front of him—the manifestation of the Divine Purgatory Palace.

There was no deafening explosion or overwhelming burst of sword aura. At a glance, it looked like an ordinary sword strike. When it fell, however, countless experts at the Heaven Gaze Realm frowned, for they had only managed to glimpse the surface of the sword art.

They could all tell that this sword was mighty, but none of them could gauge exactly how terrifying it truly was.

"Is that really the Great Asura Sword? Why does it feel a few hundred times stronger than the one I cultivated?" asked a Heavenly Dragon Sect disciple, completely dumbfounded. He could not accept that the same sword art could differ so significantly in another person's hands.

The two peerless swords collided at a speed that mortal senses could barely conceive. The impact made no sound at all, as a massive black hole appeared at the point of contact and swallowed every noise in the surroundings.

In the next instant, everyone felt as if a blazing sun had risen above the Auspicious Cloud Hall. A blinding radiance erupted, forcing countless people to clamp their eyes shut, not daring to look directly at it.

The light was so fierce that it could burn through their eyes.

The black hole had devoured all sound, but the shockwaves it failed to contain surged outward like a raging tidal wave.

The slabs beneath their feet were lifted from the ground, disintegrating into dust before vanishing entirely. Fortunately, the elders of the Heavenly Dragon Sect had prepared themselves and erected barriers in advance to contain the shockwaves.

Even so, Liu Wuxie felt a ball of fire churning in his chest. The sword aura Pei Hong had released was powerful enough to ruin his internal organs. Despite having just comprehended the profundity of undying and having just forged an indestructible physique, he could still smell the stench of death.

Pei Hong's sword intent clearly contained a strand of deathly power.

Time seemed to freeze as Liu Wuxie's sword successfully intercepted Pei Hong's strike, leaving the two swords locked in mid-air. The God-Slaughtering Sword, which had never failed before, had finally been stopped.

At the sight, the uneasiness in Song Siqi's eyes at last faded away. Although Pei Hong had failed to slay Liu Wuxie, at least his junior brother remained alive. Earlier, he had feared that his junior brother could end up dying beneath Liu Wuxie's sword.

The clash continued as Pei Hong's entire being melded into a longsword, making it impossible for anyone to see his figure. This also meant that Liu Wuxie had to force him to revert to human form to secure victory.

This realization made Sun Xiao even more nervous, his heart tightening as he worried that something might happen to his junior brother.

"With one glance back, the Asura beholds all living souls, and hell offers no return," Liu Wuxie sang, and the sword in his hand erupted with a brilliance so dazzling that even experts at the Heaven Gaze Realm had to narrow their eyes at the sight of it.

"What terrifying radiance!" The White Mist Manor's manor lord exclaimed in shock, deeply stunned by the light blooming from Liu Wuxie's sword.

The various sects' sect masters immediately raised defensive barriers to shield their disciples from the aftermath. The battle had far surpassed the usual limits of the Void Realm and reached a level comparable to the Earth Immortal Realm.

As waves of sword aura raged and tore across the sky, the surrounding space collapsed even more violently, and the fractures continued to spread outward. Yet the God-Slaughtering Sword did not cease; it kept transforming and striking thousands of times in the span of a blink.

Ordinary eyes could no longer follow the speed of Pei Hong's sword. Only those at the higher levels of the Earth Immortal Realm could probably see a fraction of what was happening.

In contrast, Liu Wuxie's sword showed very little change. Despite looking effortless, light, and unadorned, each strike carried the weight of a mountain.

In his hand, Liu Wuxie pushed the essence of sword art to its limit, every move flowing as naturally as breathing. Even he himself was wholly immersed in the sword. This was the most perfect version of the Great Asura Sword, derived through countless deductions from the Heavenly Dao Book.

"Wait, this isn't right. That doesn't look like the Heavenly Dragon Sect's Great Asura Sword," said an Earth Immortal Realm elder from the Heavenly Dragon Sect, his brows furrowing.

After all, the Great Asura Sword was one of the Heavenly Dragon Sect's ten supreme arts, and many elders had cultivated it. Yet this was the first time he had seen such a version or anyone using it in this manner.

"It's not just the Great Asura Sword. Even the Dragon-Grasping Hand and the Nine Heavenly Dragon Forms were more profound in the hands of Liu Wuxie," said an elder at the Heaven Gaze Realm with a wry smile. They were all desperate to dissect Liu Wuxie's methods and see how he had accomplished this.

Even they could not grasp the essence of this Great Asura Sword, and none of them understood how Liu Wuxie had achieved such mastery.

The God-Slaughtering Sword exchanged thousands of blows with Liu Wuxie's strikes in the blink of an eye before spinning in mid-air and slashing down toward him once more.

Just then, Liu Wuxie finally altered his attack.

The song he sang described an asura delivering salvation to all beings, stepping into hell with no path of return. It portrayed a road beyond hell from which one could never turn back.

Each of Liu Wuxie's strikes perfectly manifested the profundities of yin and yang, of life and death. Sword art at this level left even those elders who had practiced the Great Asura Sword utterly bewildered.

It was a sword art containing countless transformations, yet whether it was a sword technique or a blade technique, everything returned to the same fundamental core as Liu Wuxie's sword spun in the air and morphed into a yin-yang cross.

No one could fathom how Liu Wuxie had accomplished this, as the pattern resembled a yin-yang diagram that locked down Pei Hong's God-Slaughtering Sword.

The surrounding space collapsed even further, pressing against the barrier's edge.

"Time to end this game," Liu Wuxie said. His voice carried no joy, anger, sorrow, or delight—only a calm resonance that swept across heaven and earth, sun, moon, and stars like an invisible tide.

Everyone finally realized how severely they had underestimated Liu Wuxie's sword dao. He seldom used a sword, but it never meant he was lacking when it came to swordsmanship. He seemed to cultivate countless mythical arts, but he had pushed every one of them to perfection.

"JuniorBbrother has lost," Song Siqi murmured.

He knew that his junior brother had lost the moment this sword descended. Pei Hong had not lost in cultivation or technique, but in his comprehension of the sword itself.

Clearly, Liu Wuxie's understanding of the sword far surpassed Pei Hong's.

Jian Yiming remained silent, watching without saying a word. When the Great Asura Sword descended for the second time, it carried a terrifying, destructive force that completely enveloped Pei Hong's God-Slaughtering Sword.