Chapter 644- Sudden Upheaval, Upward Gaze, Golden Tents - Part 2

In some faraway land, veiled in shadows and mystery, a black crow beat its wings and crouched before a maze-like tomb, waiting.

In the Western Extremes, the ice and snow had melted. The thaw swept clean the once corpse-strewn graveyard of the gods, washing everything down into the roaring river below, where it vanished without a trace.

Before the Deathless Tomb, the towering, blue-tinged pillars that once stood like a garden of giants had disappeared. In their place now rose thick groves of trees.

And the terrain, far from level, was now shockingly elevated.

Only after the snow and ice had melted did the true nature of the Deathless Tomb's location reveal itself.

It sat atop a towering, majestic mountain, shrouded in drifting clouds and mist.

Looking out from this peak, one could see that the vast plains that were once easily traversable had been reshaped into endless mountain ranges, ridges and peaks rolling on forever, like a sea of stars spread across the land.

Despite it being the heart of winter, the climate here was surprisingly mild.

Trees swayed gently in the breeze, their branches rustling with life. One could faintly hear the hum of bees in the air, their wings buzzing as they danced through the forest.

Among the trees darted small, goat-like creatures, leaping, frolicking, stopping now and then to drink from babbling brooks that threaded through the mountainside. They moved without fear, full of joy.

It was paradise, untouched by time.

And yet, atop this mountaintop, the Deathless Tomb remained, a silent, brooding presence entirely at odds with the world around it.

The tomb had never changed. And even now, it remained the same.

But months ago, from the mouth of the tomb, a woman's scream had torn through the air, raw and pained.

It was Sheng'er.

That moment came shortly after she had guided the second expedition team back to the tomb.

She had stepped just beyond the entrance to take a breath of the new world’s air, hoping to savor a moment of peace before the end times arrived.

But the instant she left the Deathless Tomb’s protective boundary, disaster struck.

A wave of bone-chilling cold surged in from every direction, and with it came a violent invasion, an ancient, malevolent soul from a forgotten age. It rushed into her body, trying to claim her as its vessel.

This malevolent being, the very same ghost that had once been sealed away inside the Ghost Sealing Pagoda by the Radiant Treasure Buddha.

Li Yuan had once believed the ghost had never emerged. But in truth, it had already slipped into Sheng'er unnoticed.

What exactly this ghost was, where it came from, no one knew.

But along the way, Ping'an had seen just what kind of man the Radiant Treasure Buddha had been.

He was a being of terrifying strength, one who had carved out 3,000 realms by sheer force, who even after being pulled into the Hall of Life and cast into reincarnation, still managed to orchestrate not one, but two deadly traps.

So then, what kind of entity could force the Radiant Treasure Buddha to chip off a piece of material from the Hall of Life itself, sculpt it into a Buddha statue, and use it to seal that ghost?

And why had he hidden the map to the palace inside the Ghost Sealing Pagoda?

Was it really the Radiant Treasure Buddha who hid it?

Or had some monk in a later dynasty, seduced by the ghost, become a demonic monk and secretly slipped the map into the Hall of Life? So that anyone who wished to obtain the Radiant Treasure Buddha’s map would first have no choice but to break the seal of the Ghost Sealing Pagoda?

The truth had long since been buried by time.

Even the carefully laid schemes had gone past their expiration date and begun to rot.

No one remembered what had really happened back then.

And no one truly understood just how catastrophic that ghost once was.

And yet, this ancient catastrophe, born from hundreds of thousands of years ago, had fully merged into Sheng'er’s body.

That was why, despite having a wealth of Heavenly Fire Spirit Stones, resources others would kill for, she had never managed to break through the barrier of the fifth stage of the Heaven Soul Realm.

That was why later, even when she rallied 26 second stage avatars and two formidable fourth stage Tree’ers just to push a single Tree’er forward, they still failed.

Because the Yin energy in her soul had grown too deep.

A little Yang energy couldn’t possibly hold back a raging river of Yin.

The normally quiet, composed girl with long, straight black hair was now clawing at her own scalp in agony, locked in a battle with the mysterious ghost inside her.

But clearly, she was losing.

And yet, this was the Deathless Tomb, a place capable of erasing all things, of obliterating even the intangible.

During the struggle, Sheng'er’s body rolled just slightly back across the invisible threshold of the tomb.

And in that moment, the tides turned.

Where she had been utterly overpowered, now the suppressive aura of the Deathless Tomb returned in full force, enveloping her again. Sheng'er lay on the ground, barely breathing.

She had been unconscious for a long time.

The crows surrounding her true body cawed anxiously, their cries echoing through the hollow tomb.

The ancient monsters from the Great Xia had once again fallen into deep slumber, adding to the stillness of the place.

Slowly, very slowly...Sheng'er’s body began to change in strange and unnatural ways.

The ancient ghost, its resistance crushed, was now being forcibly absorbed into her.

Her once straight and glossy hair turned wild and unkempt. Her pristine white teeth began to sharpen into fangs, like a tiger’s. Her spine elongated, inch by inch, until it stretched out into something resembling a leopard’s tail.

The quiet, beautiful young woman was now something else entirely.

Still human in form, but with a beast’s tail, a predator’s fangs, a mane of unruly hair...

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Hall of Life.

Cast adrift to who knew how far, the ancient hall remained like a battered leaf-boat in a storm, trembling as it clung to the rim of the Soul Furnace, suspended only by strands as thin as spider silk.

And this fragile connection, no single person could be holding it together.

By now, everyone who might’ve once anchored it was gone.

The former Sect Master, once the mightiest in the Eastern Sea’s Immortal Domain, the third rank cultivators, even Ying Xiang, the Prince of Stars who had stirred up storms in Central Capital, were all dead.

They had gotten too close to the Soul Furnace.

Their souls had been pulled straight into its depths. But rather than be instantly consumed by the immense power within, they drifted toward an unknown, far-off place.

A strange place.

A place where souls stood in line.

Curiously, many of those souls were still wrapped in traces of Yin and Yang. Even the ones that weren’t retained flickers of the power they had held in life.

Yet the souls themselves seemed to lack all awareness. They simply floated forward in a daze, driven by some unseen force.

In the past, such a

queue

would never have existed.

But now, with the Soul Furnace choked and reality itself breaking down...anything was possible.

Ping'an had no idea what kind of scene was unfolding.

By this point, he had almost completely lost consciousness. In his mind, only a single thought remained, simple, urgent, unrelenting.

Clone. Clone. Keep cloning!

Meanwhile, the souls of the powerful beings trapped in the reincarnation passage were driven by a single, primal instinct of their own.

Get out. Escape. Get out of here!

This fragile balance, Ping'an endlessly cloning himself, the souls relentlessly trying to break free, was the only thing holding the situation together.

But now, something was changing.

It was like a sudden drop of blood hitting the ocean depths.

At first, only a few sharks appeared.

But as time passed, as Ping'an’s mindless persistence continued, more and more clones emerged. More and more

sharks

gathered.

Ping'an had become a spillway gate, a breach.

And on the other side of that breach? The shredded and reassembled remnants of ancient powerhouses, cobbled-together beings, desperate to claw their way back into the world of the living.

Each of Ping'an’s clones began to mutate into something grotesque, monstrous, bloated lumps of flesh and muscle, misshapen and wrong.

Every eyeball in every clone’s face was packed with spinning, twitching pupils of all shapes and colors.

Beneath their skin, grotesque clusters formed, blistering out like sesame blooms, like meat gourds, like mountains of tumors stacked one atop the other.

If Li Yuan were here to see it, he’d witness something unimaginable, the combat power for each of his son’s clones skyrocketing into the millions, tens of millions.

Ping'an had become a bridge.

But the true force keeping that bridge from collapsing wasn’t him.

It was the remnants, the fragments of power, that not even the Soul Furnace had managed to fully grind down. The Radiant Treasure Buddha had been one such remnant, but there were countless others.

Ping'an couldn’t stop now. He didn’t even know what stopping meant anymore.

These ancient fragments, these broken shards of once-mighty beings, they had hijacked his body. They were the ones pushing his body into overdrive, forcing him into a relentless loop of creation, of replication, of splitting again and again.

There was no question. His body was exponentially more useful than anything the Ghost Gate King or Black Ram King had ever wielded.

In this world where no one could hear their cries, the patchwork remnants of dead powerhouses howled in agony. Old men, children, men and women, their voices all erupted within Ping'an’s body.

His clones were shredded, torn apart over and over, but more kept forming, endlessly.

Finally, one of those patchwork strongmen made it out.

He escaped the reincarnation passage and landed in the Hall of Life.

He ran,

elated

, if such a thing could be said of something so broken. But in the hall, there was only a blood fiend..

The blood fiend heard the commotion and rushed to intercept.

The mangled remnant, still packed inside one of Ping'an’s distorted clones, sensed the presence of fresh blood and flesh and lunged. The mass began to split, to swarm, attempting to burrow into the blood fiend’s body.

But the blood fiend was already a corpse, only animated by some lingering power.

A dead thing could not house a soul.

So the remnants turned back, crawling once more into the clone's body, and began devouring the blood fiend from the outside.

BAM! THUD! BOOM!

The Hall of Life shook with a cacophony of grotesque noises.