Book 3: Chapter 70: Aobōzu

The grotesque giant demon monk that appeared from the dense fog was shrouded in the powerful aura of the early Spirit Jade Stage.

Although Lily had vanquished plenty of monsters, she had never seen such a grotesque and peculiar monster until now!

“Master, although this Aobōzu is in the early Spirit Jade stage, he has a ma.s.sive figure and possesses exceptional strength. Also, be wary of the prayer beads in his hand!” Kagura cautioned Lily.

The undead monks also besieged Lily from all directions.

Except for the Aobōzu, these undead monks were all just in the Awakened Stage. However, Lily hadn’t donned armor, so the power packed behind the cudgel strikes and blade slashes were very dangerous for her!

Lily didn’t plan to get entrapped in their besiegement, so she accelerated her speed and charged forward towards the Aobōzu.

The Aobōzu seemed to bear an intense hatred for humans. He opened his wicker-like beard-stubbled mouth and revealed a mouth full of yellowed teeth as he spoke in a deep and reverberant voice, “Why haven’t you hung yourself?!”

His words sounded a bit strange, so Lily couldn’t understand them and there was also no effect on the control of her body.

Thus, she approached the Aobōzu, but the only choice left for her was to cut his feet because of his ma.s.sive stature!

And so, she attacked the feet first!

Lily unsheathed her blade and slashed at the monolith-like huge, tattered, azure kasaya of the Aobōzu based on her estimate about where the leg lay behind this kasaya and struck at that location.

Although the Aobōzu’s body looked ma.s.sive and heavy, the string of coconut-sized stone prayer beads struck towards Lily with lightning speed!

“Dammit!” Lily’s blade only managed to leave a shallow cut behind on the Aobōzu before she was forced to roll sideways to dodge the prayer beads!

“Boom!” The prayer beads smashed against the ground and left a hole behind!

The Aobōzu’s movements didn’t slow down by the least and he stomped down towards Lily’s direction with feet, showcasing unexpected agility!

The attack with the prayer beads was also pretty bizarre as its speed was too quick and path hard to predict. Lily failed to decide whether to block the prayer beads with her katana momentarily and was forced to dodge them.

“Boom!” The prayer beads struck a 100m tall 1m wide tree and snapped it into two, making its upper half fall into the woods and give rise to a huge commotion.

“Master! You need to deal with this Aobōzu as quickly as possible or flee from this location. Such a loud voice is bound to draw the nearby monsters. We’re within the Land of Hundred Demons right now, so you must take care not to get besieged by monsters again!”

Since she had already attacked, Lily naturally wasn’t willing to flee!

She mustered all of her spirit power and crimson red akin to sakura petals bloomed across the blade!

“Sakura-Clad Moon!”

A crescent beam of crimson sword light shot towards the Aobōzu and he brandished the prayer beads forward to block the sword light. However, the moment his prayer beads touched the sword light, the sword light split into dozens of sakura-shaped blades and a.s.saulted the Aobōzu from all directions.

Even the robust and ferocious Aobōzu was unable to resist so many blades and suffered through the onslaught of the blades, his dark red blood splattering about randomly!

The undead monks nearby attacked her from all sides and struck at her with their katanas and cudgels!

Lily dodged a monk’s katana and spun around to swing her katana single-handedly.

“Splatter!” And the monk’s hands were cut off.

A heavy golden cudgel came down smashing towards Lily’s head at this moment, and was a moment away from smashing it, making Lily feel an intense wind pressure along with the encroaching shadow.

“Clang!” Lily didn’t have enough time to pull back her odachi, so she took out Kagura’s Brocade-Patterned Koi and blocked the enemy’s cudgel strike with it!

“What a powerful strike!” The land underneath Lily’s feet caved in. The power packed behind the strike from the 6th-stage Awakened monk’s golden cudgel was much denser than the sword strike of a 7th-stage Awakened samurai!

However, Lily also possessed a considerable amount of strength, so she made the monk lose his balance with a shake of her hand and raised her fair leg up to kick forward.

The lower end of Lily’s kimono tore apart because she used too much force, but she didn’t mind it and struck the monk in the stomach with her foot!

“Bam!” The 100 or so kilos monk flew back like a cast pebble and crashed into the tree behind him, breaking both the tree’s trunk and his vertebra in the process.

Lily felt that the skirt of the kimono hindered her a bit, so she decided to just tear it apart regardless of whether it would expose her fair-skinned body. She used the edge of Brocade-Patterned Koi to cut the long skirt of the kimono and used her exquisite cutting skills to neatly cut it into a miniskirt that barely covered her front.

Lily felt her movements become much lighter and quicker with this miniskirt, especially her legs.

She leaped onto the fork of a tree and avoided the attacks of the monks, resulting in them injuring themselves!

The Aobōzu was covered in injuries all over his body, but his momentum hadn’t weakened at all. After all, he possessed a ma.s.sive body and tough skin which provided him with extremely strong defense and vitality. He rushed towards the tree Lily was on and snapped its trunk into two with a kick, but Lily had long leapt down from it and used this opportunity to climb onto the Aobōzu’s back. The Aobōzu flailed his body randomly and lifted his hand to grab Lily, but Lily stabbed Brocade-Patterned Koi into the Aobōzu’s palm and pierced Crescent Moon into the humongous eye on the Aobōzu’s giant head!

“Splotch!” This attack of Lily’s was exceptionally resolute and ruthless!

The Aobōzu issued a heart-rending scream and smashed the prayer beads towards Lily in spite of the fact that it would injure his own body.

Lily wedged the handle of her katana in between her bare feet and hung upside down the back of the Aobōzu’s body and stabbed Brocade-Patterned Koi into his tough-skinned back!

Lily then clutched the handle of Brocade-Patterned Koi with both hands and pulled it up with force while hanging upside down!

“Splatter!” The Aobōzu’s tough skin and flesh were cut open and splattered blood outside like a fountain of water.

Lily was hanging on the Aobōzu’s back, so she couldn’t see him flail his hands and feet crazily, injuring a lot of nearby monks accidentally in the process!

Lily’s slender and powerful legs coiled around her katana’s handle as she mustered strength in her waist and rode the momentum to swing down.

“Splatter!” The odachi sliced down between the Aobōzu’s eye and face right to the base of his neck!

And thus, the Aobōzu’s huge head split open to two sides and a fountain of blood shot up to the sky.

Lily pressed her palm against the ground and turned over to grab Crescent Moon with her other hand and pulled it down with force once again!

“Splatter!” The blade sliced down to the Aobōzu’s waist.

“Bam!” Contrary to her expectations, the Aobōzu whose body had almost bisected into two, still possessed an inhuman vitality, and kicked Lily in her stomach, sending her crashing into a rock and shattered it into pieces.

This one kick had expended 70% of Lily’s spirit power!

The defense of a samurai woman was really too weak!

However, Lily was no ordinary samurai woman. She used the anima of the monks she absorbed into the cursed katana to replenish her spirit power.

The Aobōzu had almost bled out by now and even he couldn’t heal from such a grievous wound.

Lily noticed a shimmering jade-like object in his abdomen at this moment.

“Spirit Jade!”

Lily turned into an afterimage as she shot forward and struck at the Spirit Jade directly with her katana.

The Aobōzu issued a pained scream along with the release of spirit power!

The Spirit Jade shattered!

And a large amount of eldritch energy oozed out from within the shattered Spirit Jade before dispersing into the surroundings.

The Aobōzu was finally dead.

And his ma.s.sive body fell to the ground.

“Hmm?” However, Lily discovered that the shattered Spirit Jade was still oozing mouth-watering spirit power.

As such, Lily used Brocade-Patterned Koi to carve the Spirit Jade out from the Aobōzu’s body.

As the Aobōzu had a ma.s.sive body, the shattered Spirit Jade was also ma.s.sive and weighed about 3 kilograms, feeling quite heavy in her hands.

“T-This… is…”

Lily sensed that this shattered Spirit Jade was emitting the same kind of fluctuations as magatama fragments.

“Master, you’ve finally discovered it. This is the other method to obtain magatama and magatama fragments, by killing Spirit Jade Stage powerhouses!” Kagura continued, “The core within the body of a Spirit Jade powerhouse, that is, the Spirit Jade, is actually a magatama! They might even contain some distinctive attributes or an intense grudge, but it’s pretty difficult to obtain a complete Spirit Jade while battling. Thus, it’s common to shatter the Spirit Jade in battle and fetch the magatama fragments after killing the enemy! The Blood Spirit Magatama that you have is also probably the Spirit Jade of some great demon that Shuten Doji obtained after killing it!”

Although it was a shattered magatama, it weighed about 3 kilograms! This was pretty beneficial towards Lily’s advancement, so she collected the magatama fragments into the mirror straightforwardly.

Lily saw the Aobōzu’s anima fly out from the shattered Spirit Jade at this moment. It still seemed to have some consciousness remaining, so it started speaking with a quiver, “Lady Blade Maiden, please spare my life so that I can reincarnate… I was actually a monk in that temple, but I became a monster slowly because of my sloth and began chanting the scriptures continuously after becoming a monster and acc.u.mulated an intense grudge because of it. If I ran into a woman who wanted to hang herself, I would ask her why she hadn’t hung herself immediately. If she hangs herself, I help her soul transcend into the other life and if she doesn’t answer me, I attack her and use my prayer beads to strangle her to death, just like a hanged woman. If she possesses decent looks, I violate her first and then strangle her to…”

“Buzz!” Lily didn’t wish to hear any further, so she swung Crescent Moon down and absorbed the Aobōzu’s anima.

This was the first time Lily had obtained the anima of a Spirit Jade powerhouse, so Crescent Moon also got strengthened tremendously and shimmered with a desolate golden glow.

Crescent Moon’s grade finally reached the 7th grade after getting tempered by the anima of this Aobōzu!

Since the Aobōzu was dead, Lily didn’t fear the remaining monks and withdrew from this spot while fighting them. Although Lily could kill them one by one, there were too many of them and she was also worried that fighting too long would draw more monsters over.

Lily killed her way out for a few kilometers and finally broke free from the besiegement of the monks.

“Haahh… Haahh…” Lily gasped for breaths while bracing her body using her thighs and even though she was overflowing with spirit power, her body was pretty fatigued.

Lily checked the surroundings vigilantly and employed a spirit probe at the same time and sat down on a comparatively hidden rock behind a huge tree within an underbrush after determining there were no monsters nearby.

She then began to a.s.similate the 3 kilograms of magatama fragments as well as the shattered magatama that was equivalent to about a 300 gram or so magatama since they were quite beneficial towards the advancement of her strength. After going through such an intense battle, Lily decided to a.s.similate all the magatama and the magatama fragments she had obtained in this battle.

If she had tried to obtain a complete Spirit Jade in the prior battle, she could’ve obtained a Spirit Jade that weighed 3 kilograms! This was a really huge harvest, but it was too difficult to achieve this as the monster possessed vitality as long as the magatama existed, so it could have attacked Lily at any moment. Lily was also susceptible to danger, so she shattered the monster’s Spirit Jade as quickly as possible in order to kill the enemy.

Lily’s strength experienced a minor rise after absorbing these magatama fragments, but she was still a long way from attaining the Spirit Jade Stage.

Lily heard the sound of flowing water from nearby when she got up, so she went over there and discovered a mountain spring. She crouched down and used a wet towel to wipe the inside of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, neck, and thighs as she had acc.u.mulated a lot of sweat from her prior battle, but she didn’t dare to bathe in this region.

However, Lily didn’t know that a green-skinned, bald-headed monster hidden in the reeds of the spring was looking at her as she wiped her body1.

1. Silva: KILL IT! KILL THE PEEPERS! Robinxen: How envi- I mean, how insidious!