Aspiring to the Immortal Path

Chapter 450: Go Board

The white crane phantom shot out like an arrow, but as it drew close to a cultivator, it suddenly turned solid and pierced through the cultivator’s chest, its long wings slicing through the cultivator like blades and taking the arm of a cultivator standing nearby with them.

Blood gushed out over the mountain slope. After killing the man, the white crane went back to being a phantom. It flew up into the sky and let out a smug cry, as if it was a real crane.

But as the cultivators threw countless spell arts at the white crane, all their attacks did was create numerous ripples, as if there wasn’t a single thing real about it.

Reality and illusion again!

This was the first time Tang Jie had seen a person develop a single Dao Will into so many Dao arts.

Catch the Wind, Seize the Moon; Black White Dimension; and now, this white crane phantom—all of them were linked to the Reality Illusion Dao Will, but their methods and uses were all different. Feng Buzhi had truly managed to maximize his usage of Dao Wills.

But what was the trick to undoing his white crane phantom?

Tang Jie was momentarily unable to find the answer.

And Feng Buzhi wasn’t planning to give his opponent the time to think.

After killing one person, the white crane flew at another cultivator like a bolt of lightning. Just when it seemed like this cultivator would get hit, a hand came out and pulled him to the side, thus evading that lethal peck.

The cultivator who had narrowly escaped death turned and saw that it was the ghost guard who had saved him.

Before he had time to express his thanks, a scream tore through the air.

Turning around, they saw Feng Buzhi drawing back his hand, another cultivator falling at his feet.

He moved again, saying before he disappeared, “Let’s see how you save them now!”

When he was just one person, the ghost guard could watch him and interfere with his movements, but now, he was moving in concert with the white crane, targeting two people at once. The ghost guard could block one, but couldn’t block both.

Feng Buzhi and the white crane retreated in unison, first becoming one, and then they became two, attacking two different cultivators.

His palm unleashed a white vortex while the long beak made a lethal stab. It seemed like those two cultivators were about to die.

The ghost guard’s figure appeared again, but there were two of them, striking at Feng Buzhi and the white crane and blocking their attacks.

The Thousand Ghost Shadows!

The Thousand Ghost Shadows could produce 36 illusions at most, but there was no need to create that many. 36 illusions used too much energy, and Feng Buzhi’s methods were similar to Tang Jie’s, using his tricks little by little rather than employing everything at once. The ghost guard didn’t know what else this guy would have, so he didn’t dare to immediately produce 36 illusions.

Rather than being shocked, Feng Buzhi was delighted to see the ghost guard turn into two. He hastily retreated and laughed. “I knew that you had a clone illusion art, so I was looking forward to seeing it. So you’re finally using it? No need to be polite. I know that you can produce more illusions!”

He was an avatar professional and was extremely interested in clones and other such things. The ghost guard using the Thousand Ghost Shadows to produce numerous illusions to attack the enemy had drawn Feng Buzhi’s interest long ago.

If he could grasp this art and use it together with his other body, the effect when used with his cultivation was bound to be incredible.

Thus, he had been waiting for this move from the ghost guard this whole time. Otherwise, he would not have targeted the others, leaving the ghost guard the opportunity to save them.

The ghost grunted, and another illusion appeared from it. The three ghost guards charged at Feng Buzhi. This was precisely the moment when Feng Buzhi was merging back with his white crane, so he couldn’t dodge.

As the ghost guard attacked, Feng Buzhi laughed. “You stay right there!”

He thrust out a finger of his right hand, and a bolt of lightning shot at the ghost guard.

The lightning struck the ghost guard, paralyzing it. And then large amounts of lightning spread, forming a cage around the ghost guard.

At the same time, the other ghost guards charged in and shouted, “Die!”

They both attacked the white crane.

Feng Buzhi paled and rushed to the rescue, a palm striking a ghost guard. But to his shock, the palm pierced through the ghost guard’s back as if there was nothing there. The ghost guard turned to glance at Feng Buzhi, an eerie smile on his face. “You took the bait.”

Feng Buzhi hastily fell back in shock, but at the same time, the third ghost guard suddenly accelerated at Feng Buzhi, swiping a claw at him.

It was a swift and ruthless attack. If Feng Buzhi didn’t dodge, the Nether Ghost Claw would plunge into his chest.

But at this moment, clear shock appeared on the ghost guard’s face.

The sensation from this grab was the same as Feng Buzhi felt when striking an illusion, like hitting empty air!

Feng Buzhi chuckled. “You also took the bait.”

White light blazed out and struck the ghost guard, sending him flying and vomiting blood with his head thrown back.

It was the white crane phantom.

But the white crane seemed extremely realistic at this time, not at all like a phantom. Meanwhile, Feng Buzhi’s body seemed to be the phantom, appearing transparent.

Its attack having succeeded, the white crane raised its head and joyfully trilled.

It spread out its wings and stirred up a mighty gale that blocked the incoming spell arts from the cultivators. Meanwhile, it was Feng Buzhi’s phantom that now appeared behind the white crane.

The man and fiend had reversed positions.

Tang Jie’s eyes narrowed, and a thought occurred to him. But this ethereal thought left before he could grab it, and he began to think hard to try to regain that sensation.

Meanwhile, Feng Buzhi merged back with the white crane, and his gaze stopped on the imprisoned ghost guard.

He laughed, “I’ve finally caught you. Let’s see how you get out of this one!”

He waved his hand, and the illusion ghost guard flew over to Feng Buzhi’s side. Feng Buzhi snapped his fingers, and a spiritual light struck the illusion ghost guard in the forehead. Feng Buzhi then closed and opened his eyes, revealing one eye to be pure black and the other to be pure white, like the sun and moon, heaven and earth.

In the middle of the battlefield, he was trying to probe the ghost guard’s secrets!

Tang Jie was aghast, and he quickly controlled the ghost guard to cut off the spiritual energy and make the illusion disappear. But even though the ghost guard cut off the connection, the illusion remained.

Feng Buzhi sneered. “It’s useless. Didn’t you already know that I was using reality and illusion? I was using illusion to deal with you then, making all things illusory. But this lightning cage is reality, making all things real. Your illusion has entered my reality, so how can it disappear? I have to research it first! Or do you really think I was just wasting my time messing around with you lot?”

He erupted in laughter.

Tang Jie coldly stared at him, and he controlled the ghost guard into saying, “Since you want to see it, I’ll let you get a good look!”

The ghost guard charged, using its Ghostshadow Traceless Step to the maximum. It instantly produced nine illusions that all charged at Feng Buzhi.

The nine ghost guard illusions joined with the main body in an unified attack. Even a Heart Demon True Person wouldn’t be able to take it directly.

Feng Buzhi harrumphed. “Only nine?”

He suddenly glanced back.

This glance fell on Tang Jie and the others, and his eyes shifted between black and white, countless rays of light shooting out of them. In a flash, the world turned black and white.

But it was different from the Black White Dimension.

The Black White Dimension had been half black and half white, black and white constantly cycling.

This dimension was more web-like, black and white crisscrossing and in patches, like pieces on a go board.

On this go board, everyone’s movements were affected. The ten ghost guards froze, immediately finding movement to be difficult.

At the same time, Feng Buzhi shouted, “All worlds are as a go board, all life simply pieces… Go!”

Nine white pieces flew at the ghost guards. Plush! Plush! The nine ghost guard illusions were shattered at the same time, dissipating into spiritual light.

Feng Buzhi chuckled and turned back toward the lightning cage. The go board world instantly disappeared.

The Heptademon Ghost Guard’s most powerful illusion clone ability had been easily undone by Feng Buzhi, leaving everyone frozen in fear. Only now did they realize just how vast the gap in strength was. It appeared that, if not for the sake of baiting out the ghost guard’s illusion, Feng Buzhi could have easily used that go board world to crush them all to death.

Everyone looked at Feng Buzhi, not daring to attack him but also unable to run. For a moment, they had no idea what to do.

Fortunately, Feng Buzhi’s attention was on the ghost guard illusion, so he stopped killing people. Bizarrely, the battle simply stopped.

Tang Jie frowned.

He wasn’t the sort of person who refused to face reality, and given Feng Buzhi’s cultivation realm and He Chong’s opinion of him, it wasn’t strange for Feng Buzhi to be this strong. This was exactly why he had already thought of a way out, but he felt like something wasn’t right.

This strange sensation of wrongness had been there from the moment Feng Buzhi let out the white crane phantom, but he hadn’t been able to find the reason for its existence. And when Feng Buzhi used the go board world, this sensation became even stronger.

He vaguely felt like there was something critical he was missing. As he was in the middle of pondering this, he sensed something and looked behind him.

He saw that Xu Miaoran was scrutinizing him unblinkingly.

Tang Jie realized that Xu Miaoran had probably recognized who he was.

In the battle just now, although Tang Jie hadn’t used any of his famous spell arts, there was no changing his battle habits. More importantly, he had been very focused on protecting Yiyi and Xu Miaoran. Because of her status, the others might also look out for Xu Miaoran, but nobody would care about that green rose, perhaps even accidentally stomping on it as they ran around.

Although the stomping wouldn’t kill it, how could Tang Jie let them stomp on Yiyi? He naturally used all the methods he had available to protect her.

Xu Miaoran was naturally able to tell that something was wrong.

Seeing Xu Miaoran’s gaze, Tang Jie smiled.

Suddenly, he thrust his palm at a distant tree.

The tree collapsed with a rumble, breaking into several chunks.

Xu Miaoran’s eyes brightened at this seemingly pointless action.

Only she understood what this meant.

This was necessary preparation for the Duplication spell.

In their time at Celestial River Island, Tang Jie and Xu Miaoran had exchanged teachings. Xu Miaoran had a keen understanding of some of Tang Jie’s spell arts and habits.

Realizing that her boyfriend had been at her side this entire time, Xu Miaoran was both shocked and delighted. Casting aside everything else, she rushed over and gave Tang Jie a pinch on the waist. “Bastard, if you were here, you should have told me!”

Tang Jie bitterly smiled. “Can’t you see I didn’t have the time?”

Xu Miaoran remembered that Feng Buzhi was looking for Tang Jie, and she grimaced and took several steps back. She whispered, “Feng Buzhi is watching me, so don’t say too much. Look for an opportunity to escape. Relax. He only dares to capture me, not kill me.”

“There’s no rush. It’s not the end of the line just yet,” Tang Jie chuckled.

“How is it not the end of the line?” Xu Miaoran stomped her feet in nervousness. “Feng Buzhi hasn’t been taking us seriously. This person is too strong! He could take all of us put together! Don’t forget that he’s a member of the Beast Refining Gate. He still has many refined beasts that he hasn’t used!”

Tang Jie chuckled. “It’s not like everyone in the Beast Refining Gate is talented with refined beasts. Feng Buzhi might be very strong, but his ability to tame beasts is probably average. He hasn’t used any beasts, not because he’s looking down on us and isn’t willing to use them, but because, like Chang Mingxin, his primary focus isn’t refining beasts.”

“Who said that?” Xu Miaoran stomped her feet in anger. “I’ve heard about this Feng Buzhi before. He was accompanied by fiend beasts, and he cultivated the Myriad Beast Union Mantra to the sixth level. He possesses two Transformation great fiends and four peak Mind Opening fiends: a bear, a crane, a leopard, a mouse, a fox, and an ape, all of them extremely powerful.”

“What?” Tang Jie was startled.

Feng Buzhi was already this powerful, and he still had six fiend beasts?

Suddenly, Tang Jie had a flash of insight, and he grabbed Xu Miaoran’s hand and said, “You just said he had a crane fiend? Is it a white crane?”

“Yes,” Xu Miaoran replied. “A black bear and a white crane. They’re both Transformation… Oh, heavens!”

Xu Miaoran and Tang Jie looked in unison at the white crane phantom at Feng Buzhi’s side.

“This… What’s going on here?” Xu Miaoran mumbled.

She suddenly didn’t understand what was going on.

Tang Jie muttered, “‘Any one of his fiend bodies can obliterate me’… any one of his fiend bodies…”

Tang Jie’s eyes widened.

He finally understood.

As he spoke, Feng Buzhi suddenly began laughing. “I see now! I understand!”

As he shouted, the white crane phantom behind Feng Buzhi suddenly flickered, and it became blurry as if numerous crane phantoms were overlapping each other.

Only Tang Jie could see that the white crane phantom was actually going from one to two.

A moment later, the white crane phantom flickered again, but it became much clearer this time.

Even the others could now see that the white crane phantom was about to divide into two.

This Feng Buzhi truly was a genius. In a short amount of time, he had seen through the secrets of the ghost guard’s illusion clones and even applied them on himself.

Through his constant attempts, as the illusion flickered again and again, a white crane illusion was almost forcefully pulled out of the white crane.

At the same time, on the summit, behind the black Feng Buzhi, a giant black bear phantom was also dividing into two large black bears.

“Hahahaha!” The black Feng Buzhi couldn’t help but wildly laugh.

This laughter resounded through the island, complementing that of the white Feng Buzhi at the base of the mountain.

Amid the laughter, the ghost guard finally said, “I see now… The current you actually isn’t the complete you, only an avatar, right?”

The laughter came to an abrupt stop.

The white Feng Buzhi looked at the ghost guard and chuckled. “Not bad, not bad. You truly do have some ability, to guess this correctly. But I had no intention of hiding this. There are actually many people in the Beast Refining Gate who know about this. That none of you know is simply because you’re ignorant and uninformed.”

When the other cultivators heard that this was only an avatar, they grew even more fearful and despairing.

Tang Jie simply chuckled, controlling the ghost guard to say, “Then how many people know that your avatar is actually a fiend body? Refined from your two Transformation fiends?”

Feng Buzhi’s body stiffened, and he looked at the ghost guard with eyes brimming with killing intent.

Tang Jie’s words had prodded his weak point.

Avatars could only be freely produced from nothing at the Violet Palace Realm, where one developed a divine connection and could grant spirituality to plants and communicate with the heavens. Other people could only create avatars by using a physical body as the medium, and with many other conditions besides.

Feng Buzhi hadn’t been as fortunate as Tang Jie, who had obtained the texts of the Five Gods Faith, but he had managed to design his own method for creating an avatar, using his Transformation great fiends as the media for his avatars.

Transformation great fiends could transform into humans and were extremely strong. This solved the problem of the medium, and with the Myriad Beast Union Mantra allowing him to link with the minds of the fiends, he could easily control them.

Thus, Feng Buzhi began to try to turn his fiends into avatars.

Not only that, he also melded in his comprehension of the Dao of Reality and Illusion, trying to create two avatars that could shift between reality and illusion. In this way, with three Feng Buzhis working together and constantly shifting between reality and illusion, he was bound to be explosively strong.

This man was truly overflowing with talent. He actually had managed to succeed in finding his own path.

But in the process, he still managed to make a mistake.

It was this mistake that prevented Feng Buzhi from achieving a complete success. His original body completely disappeared on completion of this art, replaced by the black and white Feng Buzhis, between which no one could tell who was the master and who was the servant.

With gain came loss.

When the original body was lost, the black and white Feng Buzhis both became the principal bodies, each with a corresponding phantom.

The black bear and the white crane.

After being refined by Feng Buzhi, the souls of these two Transformation great fiends had not dissipated, instead becoming phantoms that eternally followed him, and also serving as Feng Buzhi’s killing move.

The Dao of Reality-Illusion Conversion had achieved great success in switching between the fiend phantom and human body. The two Feng Buzhis could freely switch between their bodies and their phantoms.

When the physical body turned into a phantom, it was immune to the vast majority of spells, and when it returned to being a physical body, it could use any method it pleased to attack.

Different physical bodies had different methods of attack.

The white crane fiend body was powerful in its own right, its long beak able to pierce through metal and barriers. When he switched to Feng Buzhi’s body, he could use numerous spells, like Catch the Wind, Seize the Moon, and the Black White Dimension.

This was Feng Buzhi’s strong point. He had achieved an almost divine grasp of the reality-illusion conversion. Frequently, he would have the white crane phantom become real and deal a lethal strike, and then he would turn it back into an illusion while his human body became real and attacked again.

So long as he switched quickly enough, nobody would be able to tell.

This was precisely why, though many people knew that Feng Buzhi had an avatar, none of them knew the truth about it. As for those that did… most of them were dead.

But this wasn’t the most important part…

“True Person Feng is a peerless genius, creating a unique method of turning fiends into avatars, and then merging it with the Dao of Reality and Illusion. It is truly an admirable feat. But the most shocking thing of all is that True Person actually managed to have avatar and avatar work together in a joint spell,” the ghost guard continued.

Feng Buzhi grimaced.

The ghost guard continued in a sinister tone, “This go board world must be the result of True Person’s combination method, yes? But it requires two Feng Buzhis working together. There is black and white, and since you are wearing white, the other should be wearing black. Only when black and white work together can one create a complete go board… I just wonder if there is a third Feng Buzhi. Regardless, if the black robe were here, we definitely wouldn’t have a chance. But now… there is still some hope of victory.”

The ghost guard roared, “Since you like this old man’s illusion clones so much, what if I give all of them to you!?”

He crazily sprinted forward, creating countless afterimages. This time, all 36 illusions were present, all of them charging at Feng Buzhi while shouting, “Kill!”

Feng Buzhi might appear invincible, but that’s only when two of them are around! Did he miscalculate by only sending one of himself?