Chapter 1020: Advance

Many things are not known simply because one does not want to get involved in certain disputes; after all, for a Second Grade, knowing often means intervening.

After all, to know, one must look at another's Dharma Body or go to the scene in person.

Taizi Changqin immediately continued to display his Dharma Body, forcing Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom to also display his Dharma Body, directly raising the intensity of the battle once again.

The two sides were already in a bayonet charge, and now it was a direct bloodbath.

Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom's body also swelled, and his Dharma Body was forced to manifest in people's hearts and in the obsessions of all living beings.

The public display of the two Second Grade Dharma Bodies instantly attracted the attention of many Great Powers in the Universe.

However, some bolder ones looked directly, while many others chose to avoid it.

Looking at this glance might mean toiling for trillions of years afterward for that single glance, and one might even get involved in some Karmic secret; it would be better not to know.

Secrets are like the address and key code of a local armory, too hot to handle.

If one takes these things without sufficient need, things can become very difficult.

However, Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom at this moment said angrily, "Changqin! How dare you!?"

"How dare I what? Fight you to the death? No way, you put on an act of a decisive battle to the death, and I thought you really wanted to decide the victor, but it turns out you're just putting on a brave front, just for show?" Changqin said with a smile to Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom.

"You Demonic Overlords are formidable when you unite to create momentum, seeming like you're one in life and death, but when it truly comes to deciding life and death, which one of you is willing to die?" Changqin scoffed, and the music played by his Dharma Body became even more intense!

Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom took a hit and retreated from the battlefield.

The First Grade Opportunity belongs to the Heart Demon, and now that it truly came to deciding life and death, he was unwilling to die for the Heart Demon.

Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom's withdrawal directly led to the collapse of Golden Monkey's battlefield on the other side.

Golden Monkey's killing power was already immense, enough to match the most top-tier Star Officials and Heavenly Gods, almost only inferior to a formidable person of the World Honored One Tathagata's level, and the Demonic Overlords were already barely holding on.

Demon of Bodhi-Wisdom's withdrawal almost immediately caused a chain reaction; Golden Monkey exerted his strength, and his Golden Rod exploded in the sky!

This strike directly shattered the Dharma Body of the Impurity Demon!

Three Bodhisattvas appeared in an instant to suppress him; the Impurity Demon's Dharma Body shattered, actually splitting into three parts!

The Impurity Demon, a Second Grade of the Demon of Affliction lineage, is what is called 'disorder due to manifestation without substance', which is impurity.

The inability to solve life's problems, the problem lies in ignorance and unenlightenment.

Unenlightenment means not understanding, lacking wisdom, and being unable to correctly perceive the truth of the Universe and one's own life.

Without the distinct substantiality of mind and matter, and with the arising of dualistic grasping in the mind, leading to confusion, that is the Destiny of impurity.

Impurity is different from evil; impurity is tainted, impure, and has no relation to good or evil. It is simply due to wrong cognition, leading to inversion and confusion, without eradicating vexations, ultimately leading to taint, which is impurity.

There are three impurities, all born from illusory discrimination. These are divided into three impurities:

First is the Impurity of Afflictions, which are ignorance, craving, and grasping in the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination.

Second is the Impurity of Karma, which are volitional formations and becoming.

Third is the Impurity of Birth, which are the remaining links.

And now, three Bodhisattvas, plus Golden Monkey's strike, actually shattered the Impurity Demon. He was torn into three Third Grades, and although they were much stronger than ordinary Third Grades, it was as if his Dao Resonance was separated; the three combined were not as strong as the original one.

And the Impurity Demon himself was almost equivalent to death.

Want to revive? Then wait, wait until the Opportunity descends in the future; perhaps there's a tiny possibility of revival, after all... even the Demon of Death revived.

As long as one can wait until the human Shaman Dao dispute, the World Honored One's parinirvana, and changes of the level of the Buddha's demise in one of the Nine Lands Under Heaven, then it might not be impossible to find an Opportunity.

Under the siege of Golden Monkey and the three Bodhisattvas, the Demonic Dao Second Grades retreated and one died.

Thus, the remaining Demonic Overlords began to contract their defenses.

It was clear that the Demonic Overlords had arrived with great Aura, but they were beaten to such a state, which made Li Qi feel a little amused.

However, at this stage, the Grand Elder remained the same as before.

So Li Qi did not let down his guard; the advantage seemed huge, but the actual situation was still hard to say.

But in any case, the battle situation instantly reversed.

After the high-grade power imbalance, the battle quickly entered the no-suspense phase.

The Qi Palace's combatants, including the Third Grades, immediately launched a counterattack, because the protection given by the high-grade existences completely disappeared from the Demonic Dao.

Originally, both sides had protection from the Second Grades, but now... the Demonic Dao's protection was scattered, and the remaining Second Grades could only protect themselves, not the ordinary combatants, which directly led to the complete collapse of the lower-level battlefield.

And the collapse of the lower-level battlefield would cause a chain reaction; the wave of victory was like dominoes, from small to large.

The Ninth Grades won, so they could help the Eighth Grade battlefield.

The Eighth Grades won, so they could help the Seventh Grade battlefield.

Layer after layer, this chain reaction was caused by the losses in the Second Grade battle.

However... the battle continued.

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Those Fourth and Fifth Grades are now deep inside the Demonic Army, where activated stars gather like demons, filled with hot and young star bodies.

Bai Lu is here now.

Bai Lu was once a Fifth Grade (details in Chapter 986), but in the earliest days of the Qi Palace's establishment, she was fortunate enough to see Li Qi's Dharma Body and received an invitation to join the Qi Palace. After that, she received ample resources and knowledge there, coupled with her excellent Aptitude, and eventually successfully became one of the top Fifth Grades.

To be honest, she was not far from the Fourth Grade, only needing to break through that last layer of window paper.

Unfortunately, she didn't get to Breakthrough before the war with the Demonic Dao began again.

In the first year, the Qi Palace retreated, but after a thousand years of fighting, the situation was finally stabilized.

Those activated planets and celestial bodies, enlightened, were like mother ships, carrying other Demonic Overlords on their bodies, rampaging through the Universe and spreading to every corner of the galaxy.

Within just a few hundred years of the expansion, the Qi Palace fought countless battles with these planets. It was difficult because they were almost imperceptible in the flickering starlight.

It sounds strange, as those planets are so huge, and they never hide their existence, yet it is still hard to find them.

But the reason is so obvious: these living planets blend into the starry sky and are simply invisible, like water hidden in the ocean.

Water is certainly easy to see, and the ocean itself is very conspicuous, but when water is hidden in the ocean, it becomes difficult to distinguish them, like trying to find a slime in water.

This is a disaster for most civilizations, including the Qi Palace itself. You might wake up to find your sun gone, this star likely devoured by another co-existing star body.

Or... this star simply grew legs and ran away.

Worlds and civilizations were frozen as a result. At the beginning of the battle, the Qi Palace always avoided direct combat, focusing on large-scale disaster relief, trying to save these civilizations.

From Bai Lu's perspective, this was very effective.

Although the Demonic Dao won the first few battles, for the subsequent hundreds of years, due to the disaster relief efforts, the Demonic Dao's advance was blocked outside the defensive line.

Disaster relief not only didn't lose strength but also led more people to join the Qi Palace, all of whom harbored hatred for the Demonic Dao.

And now, it was time for the counterattack.

Bai Lu withdrew her thoughts and looked at a disk-shaped star.

This object was very close to them; it was one of the stars in this galaxy's binary System.

The green companion star next to the star was her target this time.

That green companion star was an activated star that had penetrated deep into the Qi Palace's sphere of influence. Under the baptism of artillery fire, the planet's surface was covered with scars left by raging flames. Huge spaceships were gathering above the planet to annihilate the Demonic Overlords on the planet. Spaceships were visible everywhere, and the Qi Palace's large-scale war machines were pouring out of fast-Universe.

All of this happened within the time of a single heartbeat.

This activated planet also counterattacked in its own way; huge solar flares and prominences could be seen sweeping across, the star's tongue licking its surroundings.

This eruption and licking released immense energy capable of scorching stars and affecting several light-years. The stellar wind impacted the magnetic field, creating beautiful auroras on the surface of the spaceships, and massive radiation caused significant damage to the spaceships.

These attacks, in the form of tangles, vortices, and rings, were comparable to repeated supernova explosions.

However, for spaceships, this was immense damage, but for individual powerhouses like Bai Lu, such attacks were insignificant.

So she charged through the eruption.

"Target at Gou 35, Xian 76, Gu 65," Bai Lu reported a string of codes.

These numbers were obviously out of proportion and did not conform to trigonometric functions.

But they conformed to reality, because the triangles here had been distorted; in the warped space, the sum of the interior angles of a triangle was no longer one hundred eighty degrees.

The spaceships reacted immediately, quickly discovering the enemy.

The crews of these spaceships were well-trained and very familiar with combat in three-dimensional battlefields. They were proficient in converting positional data between spherical coordinates; they only needed sine data to react naturally.

In this kind of battlefield, individual powerhouses have the advantages of speed, high mobility, and accurate attacks, but spaceships have more rapid output, so individual powerhouses are generally responsible for reconnaissance, and the spaceships and formations in the rear provide fire suppression.

This was part of the battle.

Bai Lu felt that such a battle would continue for a long time, perhaps thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands of years, then after a vacation and rotation, she would return to the battlefield and fight for tens of thousands of years more.

Ultimately, after tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years of tug-of-war and attrition warfare, the victor would finally be decided.

Bai Lu thought it would be like this.

However...

Just then, as the living planet once again flung out its huge tongue and began to lick its surroundings, Bai Lu was about to cast a spell to resist, but she found that the power within her body had increased severalfold, as if she had Divine Light protecting her, and her Qi recovery speed was like having taken a Nine Revolutions Great Rejuvenation Pill.

"This is... we didn't call for support, did we!?" Bai Lu was startled.

This wasn't right.

She had experienced this level of enhancement within her body before.

During very important battles, the Qi Palace's Shaman often performed rituals to invite Great Powers to descend and provide protection, and sometimes, they would receive a response.

At that time, Divine Power would descend from the heavens, as if the Ancestral Master had possessed them, increasing their power a hundredfold and making them immune to all spells.

However, because the Great Powers were also entangled in high-grade combat, they didn't always respond, like a limited skill; it depended on luck and would only be triggered in extremely important battles or when in some extreme disadvantage.

Furthermore, this kind of blessing was usually bidirectional; if one side received it, then the Demonic Dao's Great Powers would also provide corresponding blessings to the Demonic Overlords, ultimately turning into a battle of gods.

And now, everyone in this place, all those spaceships, had received this blessing.

And the enemy did not.

What was going on?

Bai Lu didn't know, but she knew that this Opportunity could not be missed.

Almost instantly, the order for a Dao Resonance offensive was given.

The battle lasted only fifteen minutes, or a quarter of an hour.

Overwhelming attacks crushed the activated star body, simultaneously destroying the Demonic Overlords attached to it.

If one was far enough away, one could clearly see the activated star body's expression in the Universe, twisted in a way that caused intense nausea.

The fleet rushing out of the nebula had a snake-like light hanging in front of each ship.

On the flickering ruins of starlight, the star curtain turned deep blue, the star collapsed, imploded, and then dissipated as a flash of light.

Bai Lu looked behind her.

Behind her, the starry sky also changed.

The halos between galaxies were stretched, and the light changed from red to blue—this was blueshift, a product of light speed and wavelength being forcibly modified.

Star clusters, like clouds, obscured and softened the starlight.

Bai Lu seemed to realize something; she stretched her neck, observing the sky.

That was... falling stars.

The rose-red sky was filled with falling stars, like an endless rain from all directions.

One could see the billions of years of a star's life rapidly ending, its faint flash of destruction hanging high overhead in the sky.

All the falling stars, so beautiful, the light generated by the exploding and falling living planets filled the entire Universe.

Bai Lu suddenly realized that not only had they received the blessing, but everyone had received the blessing at the same time.

Was it because the Great Powers had won?

However... what Bai Lu didn't know was that another voice echoed in the Void Realm.

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"Grand Elder, I've got you." Li Qi made no attempt to conceal his power.

"Really?"