Chapter 102: No More Entanglements!

Life energy surged through Ding Yan’s right arm, while death energy surged through his left. Two utterly opposite powers, life and death, burst outward from his forearms.

Confronted by the awe-striking radiance of the Heaven-Rending Sword, the Ding Yan of the Frenzied Realm seemed to have all his latent power awakened at once.

Between life and death, his features became more sensitive than ever before; the rhythm of the two forces flowing through his hands remained in perfect sync.

His right arm swelled, double its usual size. His left arm shriveled, contracting to half even in the wild state, like a strip of skin wrapped around bare bone—uncanny and chilling.

Suddenly the lines on both palms flared with dazzling light. Two immense, surging torrents of force exploded outward together from the center of his hands.

Seven Life Seals and seven Death Seals formed, each flying out from each palm at the same moment.

As soon as each seal appeared, it fused at once. In an instant, the seven life seals and seven death seals paired and merged into one.

Life-and-death seals were complete.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

The seven life-and-death seals suddenly expanded many times over, like seven glowing panels of light, and crashed at full force into the descending Heaven-Rending Sword.

A terrifying roar suddenly burst open. The crimson and ice-blue sheen of the sword dimmed at once. An uncanny, unfathomable force surged from the life-and-death seals into the blade.

A deep hum answered.

The Heaven-Rending Sword cried out into the air, was knocked aside, and kept tumbling through the sky, all its luster gone.

Bei Mingce, the one whose mind guided that sword, went deathly pale, blood streaming from all seven of his orifices as he let out a piercing scream.

The sword and his mind were bound together. When the blade was shattered, he suffered the impact as if through his own body. A mind-sword master, once his blade was damaged, could not avoid severe injury.

Clang.

The Heaven-Rending Sword spun and tumbled before landing over a hundred meters away, dim and devoid of spirit.

Bei Mingce stopped screaming. He repeatedly called the sword back with his mind, but it did not respond. For the first time his face showed raw fear.

One cast of the life-and-death seals had drained one-third of Ding Yan’s strength, and he was noticeably weakened.

Yet when he saw that the spirit-grade Heaven-Rending Sword had, under that single blow, lost its sheen and became inert, he felt a dark, secret joy. His spirit trembled with fierce satisfaction.

When he later noticed blood flowing from all seven of Bei Mingce’s openings, he felt even more exhilarated.

Mu Yudie and Diya Lan stood frozen, staring at Ding Yan. Their shocked expressions were impossible to hide; Mu Yudie even covered her mouth with one hand, so she wouldn’t cry out.

Only a practitioner in the Human-Position Realm, by brute force alone, had defeated and sent flying the spirit-grade Heaven-Rending Sword of a Hundred-Catastrophe Realm master like Bei Mingce, and stripped the weapon of its soul.

What on earth was happening?

Mu Yudie was stunned beyond belief. Could this truly be the boy from the Dark Forest?

At that moment she no longer recognized Ding Yan. The man before her had become so formidable that he seemed a stranger, one she no longer knew how to face or position herself to in relation to.

“Ding Yan!” Diya Lan cried out. “What are you doing?”

Mu Yudie also snapped, terrified. “Ding Yan, don’t be reckless. Bei Ming Shang is here too. If you actually move against Young Master Bei Mingce, neither you nor the Shi family will come out of this well.”

Ding Yan stood stone-cold, silent, ignoring both women without a word.

At that moment, Bei Mingce was trapped again by the Magnetic-Keystone Domain.

He stood there motionless, unable to perceive it, and whether through heedlessness or calculation he could not evade its pull.

This time another layer had been added by Ding Yan: negative energy.

Inside this new Domain, three completely different and strange forces now coexisted—yin force, primordial essence, and negative force—and their mixture sent the Domain’s crushing power soaring well beyond double.

In the new Domain, Bei Mingce looked utterly miserable. His skin trembled; as it spun wildly, all his essence was bound tight.

Only the extreme-cold ice-flame martial soul inside the field remained untouched. It kept surging into his ice armor, stubbornly guarding his body.

Ding Yan moved through the field in an instant.

With a sweep of his left hand, a Death Seal condensed from negative force blasted out without hesitation toward Bei Mingce’s head.

Crunch.

A sharp, brittle crack sounded from Bei Mingce’s skull. The Death Seal carried corrosive, annihilating death qi into his head, severing his life force.

Thick, heavy breaths of energy burst outward from his body all at once.

Soon Bei Mingce had become a dried-out corpse, all his vital force sucked into Ding Yan.

The Domain vanished at once.

Thud.

Bei Mingce’s corpse crashed to the ground, eyes wide open in a face that had died without blinking.

He had not even had time to utter one last threat.

When Bei Mingce died, his body shrank, and the ice-clear armor he had worn became loose, as if it were one size too large.

Ding Yan drew a long, steady breath. His expression remained unreadable as he peeled the cold armor from Bei Mingce’s body and, without courtesy, tucked it into his pack. He did not even glance at the stunned Mu Yudie and Diya Lan. He then rose into the air and gathered up the now-dim Heaven-Rending Sword.

On Bei Mingce’s body, those two were the most formidable of all, and they left the deepest mark on Ding Yan.
Whether or not he could use them himself, he was not about to let those two women get them cheaply.

“Ding Yan, you’re mad, mad as fire,” Mu Yudie whispered in a dazed voice. “Bei Mingce is the life root of Beiming Shang. If you kill him, Beiming Shang will not only come for you—he’ll extinguish you and your entire Shi family. You are wrong, terribly wrong. You’re digging your own grave.”

“Wretch,” Ding Yan said, turning on her with a chill gaze, and he said in a fierce tone, “If you keep babbling, I’ll kill you right now.”

“W-what did you say?” Mu Yudie could barely believe it. She pointed at him and shouted, “I saved your life, and this is how you repay me?”

Ding Yan showed no patience, his eyes cold and merciless as he stepped beside her.

A sharp crack sounded.

His palm struck Mu Yudie’s face, snapping her backward in a stumble. Five bright-red handprints bloomed across her cheek.

“Listen carefully, you wretch. I owe you nothing. If you keep chattering beside my ear, I’ll make you keep silent forever.” He glared at Mu Yudie, whose face had turned frenzied. “You know who I am. I am never gentle in killing. Women included.”

“Ding Yan!” Diya Lan cried out. “How can you hit Xiaodie?”

“Shut up,” he said.

He gave her a cold laugh, his eyes ice-cold as he faced her. “The moment we parted in the Stone Forest, we had no relationship left. You have no right to tell me what to do. Don’t think that because I took shelter in you, there was something between us. Ask yourself what you got from me. You know exactly what you owe me, and I owe you nothing.”

Diya Lan’s delicate body trembled. Facing Ding Yan’s cold, remorseless look, she felt as if she stood within an icy cavern, her entire being freezing through and through.

Diya Lan bit down hard on her teeth, refusing to cry, yet tears still flashed in her eyes, brilliant and clear. It felt as though a sharp blade had torn her heart open.

Only then did she fully understand how much she had cared for this man. Looking at his cold, detached face, she suddenly understood what she had missed all her life.

“Ding Yan, you will regret this. You will regret it,” Mu Yudie wailed, her face covered, a hysterical cry ripping from her. “You will regret it. You and the Shi family will both be annihilated by Beiming Shang.”

Bang.

Ding Yan, who had just turned to leave, spun back and struck Mu Yudie once more. His expression was dark, contemptuous: “You think because you have attached yourself to the Beiming household that Beiming Shang will pay you back? Laughable. Do you imagine Beiming is some petty tyrant who would feud with Anming to the end of death for one woman?” he said. “Do you know why Anming’s men are here? Do you understand what fate will greet you the moment you leave this place?”

Mu Yudie’s pretty face drained white as paper, and fear and despair filled her eyes. No sound came out.

She had long suspected this was possible, yet she had refused to admit it. Now Ding Yan, without mercy, had spoken it aloud. She could no longer ignore the thought. A chill consumed her; it seemed all her efforts had been a mirage in the heat waves, a false illusion.

“From this moment on, you two have no ties to me anymore.” Ding Yan shot them one last cold glance and headed toward the deep pit, speaking over his shoulder. “Do not interfere with me, or Bei Mingce will be your fate.”

With that, he walked slowly toward the chasm.

Diya Lan’s face was covered with tracks of tears. Her hands and feet felt icy cold, as if all life force in her body had been drained away. Her heart felt torn apart beyond mending.

Mu Yudie’s face, scarlet with handprints, was full of despair. Her vitality seemed cut off; she stared at the sky with hollow eyes, not knowing where to go, not knowing which path remained.

“Little Diya… we were wrong.” Diya Lan choked, covering her face as she cried.

“Waa—”

Mu Yudie could no longer hold back. She too covered her face and broke into sobbing, a howl from the depths of her chest, as though she wanted to tear all her pain apart and throw it out.

Ding Yan stood at the edge of the deep pit, expression utterly unmoved, as if he had not heard their crying at all, merely frowning at the ground before him.

Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud. The dark pearls in the three chest points—the Divine Gate, Heavenly Gate, and Yin Gate—began to beat with increasing urgency. Upon reaching this place, their activity hit its peak.

He looked at the radiant, prismatic crystal chunks suspended in the abyss and understood that these were the things called forth by the call of the dark pearls. The mysterious energy pouring from the crystal and the energy of the pearls answered each other across distance, linked by some hidden kinship.

But standing outside the pit, Ding Yan did not yet know how to reach the crystal.

After a moment’s thought, he tried to summon a Yin Vortex, condensing yin energy in his palm.

The dark qi gathered slowly, drifting out from his hand and taking shape as a vast, jet-black hand, stretching toward that crystal.

From the six dark pearls, strange currents of yin force streamed out, each like invisible threads, seeming to sink into the center of the crystal.

The black hand lowered slowly, dropping toward the wall of light that floated above it.

A sharp crack answered.

The wall of light split open. That same wall, which had once stubbornly blocked Bei Mingce’s extreme-cold ice-flame to the end, now yielded of its own accord, opening a gate for Ding Yan’s black hand.

The crystal suddenly blazed with fierce brilliance, and it too began to float slowly toward the black hand.

P.S. Please cast your Moon Tickets—Version V.