Chapter 558: Surviving The Impossible Time And Again
Time returned to the present.
Kang Village's forces had suffered heavy casualties.
Si, watching from the shadows, felt his eyes nearly burst with rage.
He had never imagined that Han Yi could truly summon celestial fire from the heavens like a deity.
Not only had the plan to surround and kill Han Yi failed utterly, but Zhu Village, where Si had lived and grown since childhood, had been nearly destroyed in the chaos. Countless familiar faces were now nothing more than broken, charred corpses.
Fury, jealousy, resentment... a torrent of emotions surged through him and coalesced into a single, all-consuming thought.
Kill him. Kill him.
In the vast darkness of night, Han Yi had vanished completely.
But Si had served as High Priest for decades; his methods of communing with the divine were not just for show. Though the fluctuations emanating from Han Yi differed from those of the deity he himself served, Si followed the faint residual disturbances in the air, tracing them until he finally closed the distance.
"Die! So-called deities have no place upon this earth!"
His face twisted with rage, Si voiced the words he had long suppressed in his heart.
As he chanted, Han Yi watched in horror as the wind itself began to gather, pooling and coiling into Si's hands. Si compressed it to its absolute limit, then launched it forward.
So heavenly providence can be used this way?
Han Yi felt both shock and fierce elation. Even as another wound opened in his flesh, his eyes grew brighter. He dodged and studied simultaneously, learning Si's method of shaping the wind into blades.
Eventually, though he was drenched in blood and teetering on the edge of death, he had finally mastered it.
The first wind blade he summoned ran a deeper hue than those Si had called forth, its presence far more imposing. It shrieked through the air, shattering Si's blade without losing momentum, and under Si's gaze of shock and bitter resentment, it drove clean through his body.
Battered and bleeding, Han Yi let out a slow breath of relief and sank into a deep, heavy sleep.
When he awoke, every wound had healed in the span of a single night. Unable to account for it, he did not dwell on the question. He simply continued his flight into the desolate, uninhabited wilderness.
But search parties were soon hunting for him everywhere.
The spectacle of falling stars had been too magnificent to conceal. Within one village destroyed and another shattered, rumors of a deity's descent spread rapidly across the wilderness.
Whether Han Yi was truly a deity mattered little. His ability to command the wind and rain and call down meteors from the sky was undeniably, irrefutably real.
If anyone could control such a being, unifying the entire wilderness in both legitimacy and sheer power would no longer be a dream.
Driven by ambitions of imperial supremacy, nearly every tribe launched hunts for Han Yi. And his entirely human appearance stood out far too conspicuously in a wilderness teeming with demonic beasts. There was no concealing it.
To preserve his life, Han Yi had no choice but to flee in constant, wretched desperation.
Fortunately, with heavenly providence protecting him, his sensitivity to impending danger was exceptionally sharp. And from his battle with Si, besides the wind blades, Han Yi had also comprehended the art of riding the wind. It could not match a cultivator's flight arts, but it was considerably faster than traveling on foot.
Though the pursuit left him exhausted, he was never caught.
***
"Wind, water, fire, thunder... they are all part of the world. With heavenly providence, I can seize control of these energies. Using them to slay foes is no issue.
"According to the Heavenly Providence Scripture, the earliest practitioners of the Dao seemed to work this way. They beseeched heaven to grant them authority over all things.
"Back then, they called themselves Sorcerers."
He had long since grown accustomed to a life of hiding and scurrying through the wilderness, and had lost all sense of how much time had passed. On this particular day, Han Yi lay inside a freshly dug burrow, murmuring to himself.
At his fingertip, a small tongue of flame danced, casting faint light through the dark space around him.
Even without spiritual qi, he had accomplished what should have been possible only for true cultivators.
If I can fully merge with the scattered heavenly providence of this world, the power I could wield here would be on par with that of an Eternal Heavenly Venerable from the Xuanhuang World.
A look of yearning crossed his face. The hope that had flickered back to life within him was immediately interrupted by a faint trembling of the earth.
Boom!
Boom!
Footsteps thundered in the distance, growing louder with each beat, as though something immense was approaching.
Han Yi's expression shifted. A tide of crisis flooded through him. Cursing under his breath, he burst from the soil, got his bearings, and took to the wind.
Close on his heels, giving relentless chase, was a white elephant the size of a mountain.
Colossal as it was, it was not slow. It ignored every obstacle in its path, four massive feet hammering the ground as it charged.
Han Yi pushed his wind-riding art to its limit and still could not shake it.
The chase drew the attention of nearby demonic beasts. They spotted Han Yi's figure and joined the pursuit. More and more poured in, and his room to maneuver shrank steadily.
Cornered, a flash of ferocity crossed Han Yi's eyes.
The heavenly providence he had absorbed during this time had reached a considerable level. If he unleashed it all at once, it would be enough to bring mountains down and split the earth open, burying all these damned creatures. But doing so would render all his efforts futile, and the backlash would leave him severely wounded.
Just as Han Yi hesitated slightly, he suddenly sensed a faint fluctuation of spiritual qi in the surroundings.
Though it was weak, Han Yi, who had gone so long without the nourishing touch of spiritual qi, could not possibly be mistaken.
The presence of spiritual qi meant he could perform arcane arts. Even the weakest technique from the Qi Refinement realm was beyond what these demonic beasts, relying solely on their physical bodies, could withstand.
Overjoyed, Han Yi immediately raced toward the source.
He came to a halt at the edge of a deep ravine.
This place is...
Faint threads of spiritual qi flowed from somewhere below, halting just at the boundary. His chest tightened with excitement.
Is this a passage leading back to the Xuanhuang World?
Ever since arriving in this minor world, he had thought of nothing but returning. He had searched all around Zhu Village and found no trace of the passage through which he had come. The wilderness was vast and sprawling; searching it alone was no different from hunting a needle in the ocean.
He had never imagined that through some bizarre twist of fate, he would stumble upon the way home by sheer accident.
Heaven truly has not forsaken me.
Han Yi glanced back at the horde of demonic beasts clambering over one another in frantic pursuit.
Just you wait. Once I cultivate to a higher realm and make proper preparations, I'll come back and settle this score with every last one of you.
With that, he plunged headfirst into the ravine below.