Beastmaster of the Ages

Li Wushuang had eight bane-rings. The crazed Wind Swordlord had fully intended on killing her, but she managed to avoid a fatal strike. He still remembered how his beloved’s head had looked at him with pain and suffering after she’d been decapitated by Li Wushuang. Even after the Northdipper Swordsage’s reminder to not go too far, he immediately forgot it when he got a chance to strike. Since he couldn’t kill her, he would ruin her bane-rings!

The Wind Swordlord’s astralforce instantly destroyed one of the bane-rings, causing the totem ki of one of her totems to uncontrollably explode and send the Wind Swordlord flying off.

“Ugh….” Totem ki continued wildly rampaging around as one of the ghostface moongoddesses shattered into countless shards before being absorbed back into the broken bane-ring. Li Wushuang was stunned and in disbelief, the shocking pain immediately causing her psyche to sink to its lowest point. The pain and frustration she felt was impossible to describe with words as all those feelings boiled up within her and rushed to her head. Ever since the two previous losses she had suffered, she’d been made to endure an amount of hardship she never had throughout all her life, and losing a bane-ring only made it far worse. She only had seven remaining, a far cry from the eight she’d had before!

“Empyrean Sword Sect!” she howled with a hoarse voice. Her bloodshot eyes turned to the Wind Swordlord like that of a beast.

“Die!” The Wind Swordlord came back with a strong assault unrelentingly. His lifebound beast, the windfiend, immediately scattered into a storm, surrounding him as he charged in for another clash.

“Stop!” the Northdipper Swordsage yelled, but the Wind Swordlord could only hear the raging winds around him.

It was as if he could still see Li Wushuang holding the head of the Rain Swordlord. “Rain, even if I’m going to die, I’ll drag her down with me!” He no longer cared about the consequences of killing her.

Li Wushuang, having suffered a huge injury, was in no place to face off against the two of them. Fortunately, the Northdipper Swordsage stopped attacking, relieving much pressure on her and giving her time to recover. Then, her rage began gushing out like a powerful torrent. “Very well, Empyrean Sword Sect, I’ll never be finished with you for the rest of my life.”

As she spoke, she took out an eerie black book. It was common knowledge that top-tier battle arts were passed down through legacy formations. In Orderia, there were also divine ordered tomes created by combining the best divine herbs with impressive patterns in blank books. Even though there were very few tome gurus in Orderia, the divine patterned tomes that they created were far more potent than formations of the same grade, making high-grade ones even rarer.

This particular tome had a cover filled with patterns that depicted a black moon that looked like it was alive. The moment it appeared, darkness seemed to spread outward, swallowing all traces of light within ten thousand meters of it and plummeting the world into darkness. Li Wushuang used her blood to activate the tome; the book flipped open rapidly in the darkness and silence. Though it looked small, it had tens and thousands of pages, each of them filled with intricate and arcane celestial patterns that all formed black moon diagrams. When the book was flipped to its end, Li Wushuang’s expression grew even more savage. Then the grade-six or possibly greater tome suddenly exploded.

“It’s the myriadghoul voidmoon tome! Run!” yelled the swordsage, after which everyone, including the Wind Swordlord, fled from the danger. The name of the tome and its frightening might was enough to make anyone flee.

A shocking explosion was unleashed with Li Wushuang at its core, forming a black sphere of energy that continued to expand like a star, swallowing many lifebound beasts, beastmasters, and even part of the divine tree inside. Even light itself was sucked into the black mass, causing the surrounding area to darken. Screams of pain and agony began ringing out. Even people far away could feel the ground beneath them shake. For an instant, everyone seemed shrouded in darkness and unable to see.

Even after such utter annihilation, the remnant energy still destabilized the surroundings. Countless people around Li Wushuang had died, among them tens of thousands of people and beasts, ground to dust by the divine ordered tome’s sheer force and leaving nothing behind but the odor of blood and death.

There was nothing else noteworthy about the scene apart from what looked like black, burnt residue. The entire area where Li Wushuang had been standing was void of any matter at all. She was nowhere to be seen. Naturally, she hadn’t been harmed by the tome she had activated with her own blood, which could only mean she’d successfully escaped. Not only that, she had taken down tens of thousands of elites of the Myriad Solar Sects with her, not leaving any remains at all and dealing the alliance a critical blow. Even the nearby Yin Chen units had been eradicated, causing Tianming to lose track of her.

People began gathering around the explosion site. The Northdipper Swordsage found a bloodied old man amidst the pile of corpses. “Old Wind… we promised that we’d only give her a scare so that she wouldn’t cause any more trouble. All we needed to do was to kill her subordinates and leave her be. Yet you destroyed one of her bane-rings…. Do you think I’ve lived too long already or something?” He was so mad he couldn’t help himself from stomping.

“I wanted to… kill her…” the Wind Swordlord weakly said.

“Kill her my ass! Your wife is already gone, and everyone mourns for her. But it still isn’t right for you to make our allies pay the cost with their lives for your revenge. Our goal today was to kill off every enemy on the continent and leave Li Wushuang alone. We’d already achieved that goal in a massive victory, yet your destruction of her bane-ring messed all of that up! A single rat is all it takes to ruin a pot of porridge!”

The swordsage wasn’t an aloof and cold figure like many imagined. Instead, he was quite casual and would call everyone in his sect his brother or sister. Some even affectionately called him the Bossman of the Sword Sect, which sounded more like something one would call the leader of a group of bandits rather than a ruler of the Empyrean Continent.