Chapter 729 – Black Buddha Realm, First Encounter with Yan Yu - Part 1

With the World Destroying Finger maxed out, Li Yuan instinctively glanced at his stats again.

Just one look and his combat power had spiked dramatically. From the original 2.7mil~41mil, it jumped straight to 2.7mil~53mil.

On reflection, it wasn’t all that surprising.

Before, when he had just reached the peak of the second rank, Li Yuan was like a robust and vigorous man. He was strong, yes, but basically a brute. Now, with the World Destroying Finger mastered, it was as if that same man had trained in martial arts and become a grandmaster. His strength had leveled up across the board.

It wasn’t just a boost in raw power. This was refinement on every level. His control over spatial power felt increasingly natural, as if the universe itself bent a little more willingly to his will.

If a

domain

was the hallmark of a fourth rank cultivator, creating a

realm

defined a third rank Human Soul, and birthing a

world

marked the second rank, then

mastering the creation and destruction of worlds

was the pinnacle of the second rank’s destiny.

But thinking carefully, Li Yuan realized he hadn’t exactly broken through the boundaries of the second rank’s Heavenly Will Realm. At best, he just had a few things that made him stand out.

For example, he had a voidship, which most others didn’t possess. It was a kind of power that was, at least theoretically, more stable and longer-lasting than what one would find in a typical second rank cultivator.

So strictly speaking, if he stopped caring about the world and just let humanity develop on its own, then maybe someone might come along someday who could surpass him.

Even if one person couldn’t manage it, a well-organized group just might.

As his thoughts wandered, he recalled the starry sky stretching endlessly above. Somehow, he had a hunch that even a fully-formed small world couldn’t compare to those vast celestial bodies.

To test this intuition, he returned to the voidship and gazed deep into the voidveil. Then he shifted his attention to the cosmic sea of stars and pushed out a

bubble

of power into space.

This time, he deliberately let the bubble drift far out. But as it moved farther away, it suddenly exploded in the voidveil.

Less than a full day had passed, and the bubble had already disintegrated.

“Just as I thought,” Li Yuan murmured. “Even at the second rank Heavenly Will Realm, I can’t act with absolute impunity. At the very least, I can’t create true stars that are completely detached from a fabricated world.

“That makes sense... The essence of a star lies in a second rank Heaven Soul. How could a Human Soul of the same rank ever give birth to a true Heaven Soul creation?”

With that realization, Li Yuan ran a series of further tests.

Once finished, he turned his attention back to the task at hand, locating the dark realm of the Ghost Sealing Pagoda.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

That search took more than a month.

Early winter arrived, and snow began to drift across the Eastern Sea.

At last, Li Yuan found the entrance buried deep beneath the sea.

Without hesitation, he stepped through.

So many years had passed, and yet the dark realm of the Ghost Sealing Pagoda still endured.

Li Yuan looked down at the ground.

The pagoda he had destroyed long ago was now nothing more than a crumbled ruin. The wood that once made up its structure had decayed into something brittle and lifeless.

𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

He blew lightly on the surface. And to his surprise, a cloud of dusty, grayish insects scattered into the air.

But the bugs were just ordinary insects, like the kind you’d find in long-sealed, decaying palaces back in the mortal world.

Li Yuan glanced around.

“There’s air here, enough to support life. These little bugs were probably born from the rotting wood that remains of the ruins. But...there’s no Yin or Yang energy.”

He returned to the voidveil again and sat at the edge of that deep, endless space.

The boundless vista before him brought a strange emptiness to his heart. It felt like dragging over a tiny stool and sitting alone in the vast cosmos. If one didn’t possess the cold detachment of a god, the only thing they’d feel in a place like this was an overwhelming sense of loneliness.

And Li Yuan wasn’t just looking at the cosmos. He was gazing into the voidveil.

The void was deeper and more formless than the universe itself. It was pure emptiness, a kind of nothingness that pulled at the soul.

Li Yuan let his gaze drift into the distance, then gradually began to sense the faint traces of Yin and Yang energy. It was distant, but still present.

The Sun and Moon's energies resided in the Ancestral Land, and miniature worlds like the one of the Ghost Sealing Pagoda were like vassal states. They shared its lifeblood. When the Ancestral Land lost access to Yin and Yang energy, the same fate befell its dependent worlds.

So the idea that a second rank cultivator could escape the spiritual decline of the mortal world by hiding away in a world of their own making was nothing but a pipe dream.

But Li Yuan’s voidship was different.

While all the stars in the sky followed fixed orbits, his ark alone drifted freely, unbound by celestial mechanics.

“So that’s how it is,” he murmured.

Back in the Ghost Sealing Pagoda, Li Yuan waved his hand, stirring up thick clouds of dust.

Amid the rotting wood and powdery debris, he spotted a black buddha statue radiating a deathly stillness.

He reached out and summoned it to his palm.

This was the same statue that had once sealed the tower, held in place by the brilliance of the Radiant Treasure Buddha.

Li Yuan walked the area with the statue in hand. As expected, no more ghosts lingered, further proof that the ghost who had possessed Sheng’er had escaped from here.

Now that he had the Black Buddha, he didn’t hesitate. With a flick of his hand, he sent it into the six-day world that connected the voidship and Deathless Tomb.

The moment the statue entered that world, Li Yuan could see the edges of the world visibly thicken. A sense of solid, reassuring stability settled over it.

Before, that six-day world might’ve lasted 200 years at most. But with the Black Buddha anchoring it, it seemed it could now endure for thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years. To be dramatic, it was like the world had been fixed, as if it would never collapse again.

Even so, this little world had now become a vassal of the voidship.

The Yin and Yang energy that the voidship could bear would naturally

descend

into this world, effectively birthing an entirely independent world.

Understanding this, a quiet surge of joy rose in Li Yuan’s chest.

What did this mean? It meant he could start from scratch, create a new world, one that was connected to the Ancestral Land, but wholly independent from it.

Even if the Ancestral Land lost all of its spiritual energy, Li Yuan's own world would remain completely unaffected.

In a way, what he had created was a fully independent, self-contained, and entirely controllable miniature world of his own.

And if someone of the same cultivation realm dared to enter his voidship, Li Yuan could seal it off entirely, cutting off the flow of Yin and Yang energy from the outside world.

With that, he could simulate an artificial Great Upheaval of Heaven and Earth and wipe out that second rank opponent on the spot.

Of course, any world connected to the voidship would suffer the same fate under such conditions.

He considered this for a moment, and then dismissed the fleeting thought of relocating people into this artificial world of his. The idea had come and gone like a breeze, too reckless and too soon.

His gaze flicked to the statue, and he decided to give this newly anchored world a proper name, Black Buddha Realm.

Its newfound stability proved one thing definitively, a world-securing artifact did in fact exist, and it worked.

At this point, Li Yuan had not only solidified his current cultivation realm but had also gained full control over the powers it offered. He was, in every sense, ready for the next step.

Now came the real challenge, figuring out how to break into the Deathless Tomb, release it from its sealed state, and somehow force the second rank ghost out of Sheng'er's body.

But there were problems, big ones.

First, Sheng'er couldn’t leave the Deathless Tomb. That place was the only reason she could coexist with the ghost inside her. It was a delicate balance. One step outside, and the ghost would immediately consume her.

Second, Li Yuan couldn’t go in. The moment he entered the Deathless Tomb, all his powers would be stripped away. What could he possibly do to help her then?

Third and worst of all, even if he somehow got her out, he had no idea how to extract the ghost on a

soul

level. It wasn’t something brute force could solve.

Some things, as the saying goes, were best left to the professionals.

And who were the experts when it came to souls? The ghosts themselves.

And who was the ghost Li Yuan knew best? His wife.

As he thought through all this, everything looped back again to the Underworld.

Originally, he’d planned to deal with the Deathless Tomb first, then head to the Underworld afterward. But it looked like that plan needed to change. The Underworld came first now.

Still, before making his move, Li Yuan turned his attention toward the imperial capital.