Final Regression of The Legendary Swordmaster Chapter 42

The ruins of the Vistro manor grew eerily quiet, like waiting for something awful to happen. The smoke from where lightning struck drifted up, and the burned ground in the garden stopped sizzling. Right in the middle of all the mess, the Marquis stood straight. The healing elixir had finally healed his bones and closed the worst of the wounds. Even so, his fancy robes were torn to pieces and stained with blood.

He didn’t seem beaten at all. He looked like someone who’d finally lost their mind.

The Marquis let his head drop, his shoulders shaking in a weird, steady way. Then, he coughed, a dry, raspy sound that turned into a loud, crazy laugh that echoed all over what was left of the courtyards.

"Great! Great! Just great!" the Marquis yelled, his eyes wide and bloodshot, staring up. "I don’t need the Silver Knights! I don’t need anyone! I have myself! Forty years of cultivation, forty years of everything... they cannot and will not be outmatched by a boy! Prepare to face your end, Edward!"

Edward didn’t wait for him to finish talking. In a flash of purple light, he disappeared and then reappeared high up in the air, looking down at his father with the detached gaze of a judge.

The Marquis offered a smile that was less human and more a jagged rift in his face. Suddenly, his jaw unhinged, stretching to an impossible width. The sound of cracking bone filled the garden as his mouth opened wide, revealing a throat that had become a portal to a pitch-black void.

From the depths of that darkness, multiple shriveled, skeletal hands began to claw their way out, pulling at the edges of the Marquis’s lips as they scrambled to escape. Then, the true horror emerged. A singular, massive hand made of bone shot out from the Marquis’s mouth. It was gargantuan, the forearm stretching ten, twenty, fifty feet into the air, yet it remained anchored inside the Marquis’s throat.

Edward’s eyes narrowed, and a cold smile touched his lips. ’There it is,’ he thought. ’The Underworld Finger.’

The Underworld Finger

Edward knew this spell intimately. It was a demonic art, an Epic-Ranked demonic spell that bypassed the standard laws governing mana. In the world of cultivation, true longevity for humans only began at the True Mage stage. Apprentices and Adepts lived lifespans no different from ordinary people, bound by age, but a True Mage gained the capacity to live for up to 250 years. Only upon reaching the Archmage stage could a human willingly halt their physical aging, freezing their appearance in a chosen state while time continued to pass around them.

But the Marquis was desperate. To summon the Underworld Finger, a practitioner had to sacrifice half of their total lifespan. In an instant, the Marquis had traded over a century of his life for a single strike of demonic authority. His hair, once dark, began to turn a brittle, ashen grey as his vitality was siphoned into the skeletal construct.

The hand glowed with a dark purple aura—an abyssal shade that was darker and more suffocating than even Edward’s High Mage aura. The hand moved with a terrifying speed, its index finger stretching out while the remaining four fingers remained curled into a fist.

The finger locked onto Edward and shot forward.

Edward moved again in a blur, teleporting again and again across the open sky. But the bony finger never stopped. It kept stretching, bone growing longer like a living vine, its base still rooted deep within the Marquis’s open mouth. It chased Edward through the clouds, carving a crooked path through the air and leaving behind a trail of foul, corrupted energy that poisoned everything it touched.

Edward raised one hand mid-flight, quickly tracing glowing symbols in the air directly in the finger’s path.

Three massive defensive seals slammed into existence between him and the advancing bone. Under normal circumstances, each of those walls could halt a charging army. But the Underworld Finger was a demonic spell. In the world of magic, demonic arts were always stronger than their rank suggested, empowered by the sacrifice demanded to cast them. A high-tier demonic spell could rival techniques normally reserved for an Archmage.

The bony finger struck the first wall.

CRACK!

It didn’t slow down in the slightest. The magic barrier shattered like fragile glass. The second wall followed, then the third, each one breaking apart in seconds, reduced to drifting dust. The finger pushed forward without resistance, as if the defenses meant nothing to it. It had only one purpose: to reach its target.

On the ground below, the Marquis barely resembled a living man anymore. His body looked shriveled and drained, skin drawn tight over bone, yet his eyes burned with wild, unhinged excitement. His mouth was still stretched unnaturally wide, the bony arm continuing to emerge from within as he watched his son flee through the sky.

The finger was bound directly to the Marquis’s life force. As long as that connection remained, it would follow him anywhere. The only way to stop it was to sever the link—or overwhelm it with greater power.

Edward stopped midair.

The purple lightning around him intensified, crackling louder as the pressure of his mana surged. He gripped his sword with both hands, blue lightning and deep violet mana twisting together along the blade, merging into a violent, unstable glow.

"You traded your life for a single attack," Edward whispered, his voice nearly lost to the roaring wind that snapped his clothes. "Can you be any less pathetic."

Edward’s comment quickly made the marquis to have an expression of anger, to him Edward was foolish to be so arrogant in face of a demonic spell.

Edward’s gaze hardened and he swung.

The blade carved a massive arc through the sky, releasing a roaring wave of purple-blue energy. It collided head-on with the dark, demonic bone in an explosion of blinding light. The clash marked the terrifying peak of the battle for the Vistro title.

The collision of sword intent and the Underworld Finger tore the sky apart, birthing a violent magical storm that swallowed the battlefield whole.