Chapter 298 A Demonstration
Plop!
Huang Wenyuan’s head dropped to the ground.
The head of the dignified, self-important grandson of the Deputy Head of the Guanshan Pasture looked just as unpleasant as that of the old guard with white hair and a scar. When it was hacked off, the features screwed up against the pain and was swiftly stained by dirt. It jerked in quick spasms and soon stiffened.
Li Mu raised his foot and kicked the head to the bodies of the sixteen innocent victims.
“Offer the sacrifice.”
He said softly.
Feng Yuanxing and the other officials immediately set the head right as a sacrifice to the dead.
By the time, those maids, guards, and servants who tagged along Huang Wenyuan there were thunderstruck.
It was the least they thought would happen, even in their dreams. After all, their master was a real grand figure with awe-inspiring background and cultivation in the Celestial Being Realm. He should be able to travel across the entire Divine Land without any difficulty. But it turned out that… someone killed him as easy as killing a dog.
Liu Chong seemed to be in a trance.
A moment ago he made to stop Li Mu, but it was too late.
Li Mu’s move was too neat and brisk. The broadsword fell to Huang Wenyuan’s neck without hesitation, leaving him no chance to intervene.
Now… everything was screwed.
“Li Mu, you nasty scourge! You’ve incurred a terrible disaster! You’ll pay for what you did today!” roared Liu Chong, who had lost his elegant immortal look. At the time, he was bent out of shape. He looked ferocious, his eyes exuding intense killing intent and fixed on Li Mu, his white teeth bared to him, as though he was an enraged wild beast.
Li Mu curled his lips and said, “You’d better care about your own safety now.”
“Oh? You want to kill me, too?” Liu Chong let out a cold laugh and said, “Although I have no idea which wicked method you used to make your strength soar. Within a short period, you might resist me. But any secret way to make your cultivation shoot up will expire in some time, and there are serious after-effects for using it. So, you won’t be gleeful for long…”
He had retrieved his sanity and figured out something.
Shaking his head, Li Mu said, “Well, you just can’t get it. Like I’ve said, in this Taibai County, I’m invincible. Even an expert in the Sage Realm comes, he won’t beat me… Don’t you know the concept of the word ‘invincible’? Fine, I shall just demonstrate it to you.”
Liu Chong sneered and was on the point of answering back…
Li Mu jerked his right hand upwards.
Instantly, the heavens were stirred.
The sky over Taibai County, which was quite clear on that day, was overcast by dark clouds in a trice. Like thousands of galloping dark horses or sweeping waves of a tsunami, the cl.u.s.ters of dark clouds almost streaked across the sky within several hundred miles and shadowed the land in a minute.
Rumble!
Deafening thunderclaps blasted from the dark clouds.
As if ten thousand snakes were dancing wildly, countless shots of purple lightning dyed the nearby clouds purple, rendering them mysterious and abstruse.
At the rampant power of thunder and lightning, Liu Chong turned pale in a second.
He sensed that the power of thunder and lightning were enveloping the entire county, transforming it into a swamp of thunder and lightning.
Li Mu, however, slowly floated in the air like a real immortal.
Wings const.i.tuted of purple lightning sprouted from his back and unfolded, stretching to a kilometer away. Glamorous purple electric flashed in the void, evolving into layers of glimmering Taoist magic figures. It seemed that they were the product of nature, but also looked like an excellent inscription work. As those magic figures unfurled, they woke up the wind and the thunder.
Potent might that was beyond description flooded out from Li Mu.
“Keep your eyes wide open and watch carefully. This is the concept of ‘invincible’!” cried Li Mu. He had been wrapped by purple lightning, his eyes also filled with a sea of swirling purple lightning. He looked like the highest G.o.d controlling thunder and lightning, and his booming voice reverberated within the field overcast by thunder and lightning.
A vortex of thunder and lightning emerged from his palm. It absorbed the surrounding electric and developed into an electric ball in the diameter of a hundred meters in the blink of an eye. Then, at Li Mu’s will, it turned into a ma.s.sive broadsword consist of thunder and lightning, which seemed to be the thunder broadsword used by the ancient G.o.d of Thunder that contained violent, frightening, destructive, and devastating powers.
In front of such a thunder broadsword, Liu Chong, an expert at the peak of the Celestial Being Realm, s.h.i.+vered in fear like a little duck in a storm.
His face was written with terror because he found that even though he had summoned all his might to confront him, he was helplessly engulfed by a sense of humbleness as if he was just a grain of sand standing in front of a star.
He had no doubt that if that thunder broadsword hacked at him, not only him but also all the people in Taibai County and all the creatures, plants, rocks, rivers, cities, springs in a radius of several hundred miles… would be reduced to dust, dispersing in the wind and leaving behind a piece of land dwelled only by death.
“This is not the power a human being is supposed to have!”
“At least not a man below the Sage Realm should have.”
“But Li Mu is already strong like this?”
“How did he manage it?”
“Could it be that… he is some kind of demon from outer s.p.a.ce?”
There was a moment when Liu Chong almost dropped to his knees.
As to the dwellers of Taibai County, the folks, the soldiers, the government guards, the officials, the martial arts pract.i.tioners… and Huang Wenyuan’s guards, maids, and servants all fell to their knees and prostrated before Li Mu.
“Immortal!”
“His Honor Li is a real immortal!”
“Immortal Li, I beg you to withdraw your magnificent power!”
The scene was fanatical and staggering.
Feng Yuanxing, Ma Junwu, Zhen Meng, and the rest of Li Mu’s trusted subordinates were also on their fours, their heads lowered, their hearts pounding shakily.
All the fear, concern, shock, and anxiety arising from the offense they did to Guanshan Pasture… suddenly evaporated at that moment.
Li Mu’s great might, like a divine sword supporting the sky, pierced through all of their trepidation.
Meanwhile, in Taibai County and the surroundings within a radius of several hundred miles, all beasts, birds, fish, and other creatures shuddered uncontrollably at that moment. They all looked up at Li Mu, who was suspending in midair, and threw themselves down at his feet in admiration.
It was a surrender to a higher-level form of life driven by instincts.
“Power of thunder… Scatter away!”
Li Mu ordered.
In a fraction of a second, the widely strewn dark clouds, the rumbling thunder and violent lightning, the thunder broadsword in Li Mu’s hand, the electric wings on his back, the sea of lightning in his eyes… all vanished as if being swept away by a gust of wind. The startling aura and the energy fluctuation ebbed away even more speedily than they came in.
“In this county, everything is under my control. And that is the meaning of invincible. Do you understand now?”
Li Mu questioned him.
He unhurriedly descended to the earth.
Nonetheless, the horror in Liu Chong’s eyes did not reduce but intensified.
Because he felt in that instant the Spiritual Qi over the entire county had been sealed, or to put it in another way, had become the will of one person, forbidding any use or mobilization of the other Celestial Beings. Liu Chong had clearly detected that the power of heaven and earth in Taibai County was so rich that all the martial arts pract.i.tioners would go crazy for it. The power that a Celestial Being could mobilize in the environment was scores of times mightier than they could in other places. However, as Li Mu landed on the ground, he found he was no longer able to avail himself of any single bit of the power of heaven and earth there.
Battered out of his senses, Liu Chong gazed up at Li Mu with a dull look.
He did not have the willpower to fight against Li Mu anymore.
“Who… Who are you on earth?” uttered Liu Chong, who stared at Li Mu with a frightened look.
Showing him a poker face, Li Mu stated, “I can be whoever you think I am.”
Mystifying things was one of Li Mu’s best tricks. Only an idiot would choose to tell the truth instead of showing his style after creating such an invincible image with a tremendous effort. Well, it was an art to turn a simple remark into something no one could understand.
Sure enough, Liu Chong’s countenance became more pallid.
He believed that with that remark Li Mu had indirectly admitted something.
“Are you truly… a Sage? You… Your Excellency, could you tell me which Sage you are?” He asked in a trembling voice.
He knew that the means of putting such immense and thick Spiritual Power in the whole Taibai County under his control and combing it into his will while depriving other Celestial Beings of the ability to utilize the local power of heaven and earth could only be mastered by a superb master in the Sage Realm.
If Liu Chong was told that Li Mu was not a Sage, he would not buy it even if he was beaten to death.
But there was another question—how could someone become a Sage at such a young age?
Therefore, he reckoned the young man before him was either a certain rogue Sage under disguise or a real demon breaking into the human world from outer s.p.a.ce. If he was the latter, then, it was a total disaster.
In the history of the Divine Land, a huge calamity was triggered every time a real demon from outer s.p.a.ce came to this world. Blood spread across the land, creatures died, innumerable people were injured, killed, or drifted in the world. The appearance of those demons only brought about destruction… So, their advent was regarded as the descending of the G.o.d of extermination.
“Is that a question you can ask?” said Li Mu menacingly.
“Shoot! Why probe into such details? How should I answer that?”
Liu Chong shuddered more violently.
Out of fear, he volunteered to disclose the secret he kept even before Li Mu asked about it.
“Today… I did affront you a lot… I… however, just acted under the order of the executives of the Guanshan Pasture. The blessed places are rare on the land. Every time a new blessed place comes into being, it gave rise to a prolonged compet.i.tion over it. Only the most capable man could occupy it. Even a Sage may not be able to keep it solely to himself… Now that Your Excellency has taken up this place in the first place, I have to report that to the leaders when I get back. As to the consequence, I can’t be sure…”
“Blessed place?”
Li Mu was stunned for a second. But then, flashes of inspiration hit him, and he abruptly comprehended the whole thing.
“No wonder Huang Wenyuan, an arrogant youth from a renowned martial arts family who looked down upon everyone else, gave up so many lucrative posts in the Western Qin Empire and insisted to be a county magistrate in this Taibai County, the backwoods where even bird would not come and throw droppings, though his aim was further his cultivation in the secular world.”
“Turns out that he had come here for the blessed place that he a.s.sumed was here.”
As Li Mu was immersed in his thoughts, a clump of bird droppings pattered down at his feet.
“Huh?”
“The moment I thought birds won’t fly to this place to throw droppings a bird did so to prove me wrong, didn’t it?”
He looked up to see a falcon with grey feathers and golden wings crossed the sky and zoomed away.
“I’ll remember you, huge bird! Next time you dare contradict me, I’ll turn you into a roast bird!”
Li Mu cursed internally.
Then, his mind dwelled on the new discovery again.
“So, in fact, the Guanshan Pasture has detected the change in the Spiritual Qi around Taibai Mountain and took it as the birth of a new blessed place. For that reason, they sent one of their members here in advance so as to s.n.a.t.c.h the benefits, didn’t they? Fu*k! The change is made thanks to all the diggings I’ve done after working as painstakingly as a marmot and all the tactical deployments I’ve set up one by one!”
“But those jerks dare to reap the benefits before me!”
Li Mu found it both annoying and amusing.