The backlash the druid had to face was not a normal backlash that Spirit cultivators might encounter rarely during their Spirit cultivation practice.
This was a backlash from the Spirit cultivation technique that allowed its users to cultivate negative emotions. One could only imagine the dire consequences of experiencing a backlash like this.
‘Now’s my time,’ Aksai thought to himself and smiled wickedly.
He had expected something like this to happen even before he gave the talisman to Zinnia. He decided to use this opportunity to strike hard at the corrupted druid.
Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh.
Aksai took out a bunch of scrolls from his storage ring and made them fly all around him. These scrolls opened up as they flew through the sky just a few meters above the ground before landing in a circular format about 200 meters from where Aksai was.
Finding the right opportunity and using one of the tree devil’s forms as a stepping stone, Aksai used the Celestial Harmony martial arts to jump high in the sky. With the help of automated hand-weaving, he made a series of complicated hand signs within the blink of an eye, triggering the scrolls he had thrown earlier.
Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh.
The scrolls caught fire instantly when Aksai finished casting his automated hand signs. The ground beneath the scrolls cracked and a series of illuminated Essence Equations started to get drawn on the ground, connecting one scroll’s location with the other.
Soon, an Array Formation was born with Aksai in its middle which was then activated as soon as Aksai’s foot touched the ground. This was the Array Formation that executed and amplified a bunch of metal-element spells.
Aksai had bought a bunch of Spirit spells from the Purple River Sect using the privilege token. He then created the scrolls himself to store the effects of the Spirit spells he would cast on them. These scrolls were special and expensive. Aksai had to use quite a lot of his wealth to get them from the Purple River Sect.
These scrolls only had one function. It was to allow Aksai to create an Array Formation and cast an area-wide Spirit spells at a moment’s notice.
As soon as the Spirit spell was activated, the ground beneath the feet, under the influence of the Array Formation, turned highly magnetic. It started attracting the weapons of martial artists to it with a fierce magnetic attraction force.
At the same time, this Array Formation incapacitated the tree devils as well. The tree devils had metal rods inserted in them that acted as the signal receptors. The demon tree would use these metal rods to control the tree devils.
When Aksai’s scroll-driven Array Formation was activated, it started pulling the black metal rods from the tree devils’ tree-like trunks and limbs. Within a moment or two, the ground was littered with countless big and small metal rods. Without the metal rods, the tree devils’ actions turned dull and they lost all the fight in them.
This was not all.
The Array Formation also targeted the tree devils specifically using the wood-element and earth-element Spirit spells. The tree devils that had been turned sluggish found themselves buried within the ground as if they had stepped into quicksand all of a sudden. Some other tree devils had dry vines surrounding them.
In the next moment, the dry vines that had trapped the tree devils caught fire. The tree devils that had sunk to their waists in the ground suddenly had their bodies surrounded by a corrosive mist that seemed to come out of thin air.
Within just a few seconds, Aksai had neutralized a majority of the tree devils that were preventing him from approaching the injured corrupted druid. When the Array Formation was dispersed, a large circle was created around him where only he and weaponless martial artists remained.
One could say that the investments and preparations Aksai had to make before confronting the corrupted druid were worth it at this point. They enabled him to get rid of a lot of obstacles from his path in one go, making it easy for him to approach the corrupted druid without having to experience a setback in return.
“He… he is one of them!” The one-eyed elder from the Grand Martial Hall had a shocked and fearful expression while looking at Aksai as he realized the latter had made use of the Spirit spells to get rid of the tree devils.
“He… he can use those strange powers too?” thought Master Jin Jolan with a bewildered expression on his face. He had to say that Aksai had hidden his trump cards well, even from someone like him who had interacted with Aksai for quite some time at this point.
The other martial artists were tongue-tied too when they realized a majority of the tree devils they were fighting had been eradicated by Aksai’s one move. They were so shocked by what had happened that they forgot to lift their weapons, which were no longer stuck to the ground.
Various claims and exclamations were thrown at Aksai by his own allies. However, he didn’t have time to answer any of them. With no opponent in the way, he started charging at the corrupted druid with increased momentum.
When he was close enough and assured that nobody would be able to stop him or target him, Aksai jumped onto his Flying Lian Sword and took to the skies, surprising the martial artists who were battling with their share of tree devils behind him even more.
“Immortal! He is an Immortal from the legends,” Lin Lan from Lotus Pavilion mumbled to herself, trying to capture what she was seeing forever in her core memories. “Can we also fly if we keep on progressing in our martial arts?” she asked herself with wild fanaticism in her eyes.
Lin Lan had never seen a person using a sword to fly. Not even an Argent Body Realm martial artist was capable of such a feat. As such, she subconsciously wanted to relive this part of the battle forever in her head.
Most of the martial artists who saw Aksai flying were of a similar mindset. They couldn’t help getting awed by a human defying the force of gravity using something other than the Qi energy.
The corrupted druid saw Aksai approaching him with bloodshot eyes and streaks of red blood dripping from his nostrils, ears, and corner of his mouth. “Don’t… don’t underestimate me,” he said before casting an area-wide Spirit spell he had access to inside the Devil’s Den.
Swoosh. Zoom. Kill.
===
AN: Aksai decides to sever the tree devil’s connection with the demon tree by removing the metal rods within them in chapter 117.