Chapter 730 – Black Buddha Realm, First Encounter with Yan Yu - Part 2

Winter, the 38th year of Everlasting Harmony.

Xie Yu, Lady Yu, and Tang Nian were all close to stepping into the Greater Insight Realm. At the moment, they were deep in secluded cultivation.

In the imperial palace, the courtyards were quiet and shaded. Though it was bitterly cold outside, inside the palace halls the underfloor heating blazed, laughter and whispers echoed, and the atmosphere was warm and lively.

A group of beautifully dressed young women with unfamiliar faces were gathered in the inner palace, greeting the Empress Dowager and keeping her company with idle chatter.

Li Yuan watched these unfamiliar figures for a moment, then took a closer look at the surroundings. Understanding dawned. These were Emperor Li Dao’s daughters-in-law. His granddaughters-in-law, in other words.

Li Dao had been quite the family man. Not yet 50 years old, and already the father of six.

His children had all grown up, gotten married, and started families of their own.

Now that winter had set in, all the daughters-in-law had come to the palace to spend time with the Empress Dowager.

The atmosphere was warm, harmonious, far more so than Li Yuan had expected of royal family dynamics.

But then he paused and thought again. It was

too

harmonious, in fact.

How close could granddaughters-in-law and the Empress Dowager really be?

Clearly, this was all performance.

Beneath the surface of civility was a battlefield of quiet warfare. Each one of those polished, well-mannered young women was a general in her own right, fighting in the silent, scent-filled trenches of the inner palace. It was a battleground without smoke or blood, but just as deadly. Every smile, every word, every gesture, a weapon used in the name of her husband.

Li Yuan watched for a while. Seeing that the Empress Dowager was in good spirits, and genuinely enjoying herself, he withdrew his gaze. Only after the granddaughters-in-law had finished today’s round of the

Palace Royale Free-for-All

did he head to her personal chambers.

The Empress Dowager was lying in bed. Her once-jet hair had turned a snowy white, spilling down both sides of her pillow. Waves of fatigue washed over her, making her drowsy and sluggish.

“Youning,” Li Yuan called softly.

The old woman stirred at the sound of his voice. Her cloudy eyes blinked open slowly, landing on the young man standing at her bedside.

She blinked again, confused at first, then clarity returned.

“Your Majesty...you’ve come back,” she murmured.

She wasn’t entirely lucid. Calling him

Your Majesty

made her laugh at herself, a tired little chuckle. She made an effort to sit up, but Li Yuan gently pressed her back down.

And so the white-haired Empress Dowager lay back quietly, obedient as a child.

“The children are doing well,” Li Yuan said with a smile.

“They are,” she replied with a tired but proud grin. “The Crown Prince’s been saying he wants to meet his grandfather. The Princess Consort too. She says...even though His Majesty is the Lord of Light, she and the Prince still feel guilty for not fulfilling their filial duties. They want to stay by your side and listen to your wisdom.”

She chuckled again. “And the Second Prince’s wife, now

she

was funny. She came across a rare, fragrant incense, but didn’t know whether you’d like it. So she brought it to me first. But I couldn’t exactly tell her you don’t care for incense offerings. I just watched her fumble around, all nervous, trying to decide whether to give it to you.

“And the youngest prince, he...”

Li Yuan reached out and gently ran his fingers through her soft white hair, listening patiently as she rambled on about all the minor happenings in the palace, the little family tales she had stored up for him.

A long while passed before she grew tired of talking.

“Youning,” Li Yuan said quietly, “I need to leave on a long journey. But I’ll return as soon as I can. Promise me...try to wait for me.”

Her voice was barely audible, worn and soft: “Alright...I’ll wait for you. Always.”

Li Yuan stayed with her until she fell asleep. Only then did he rise, and with a flick of his sleeve, he vanished from the palace.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Li Yuan reappeared atop the peak of Mount Tai.

Black mist blanketed the mountain, chilling the very air.

For over three years now, he hadn’t heard a single word from the Underworld.

Li Yuan decided he would wait no longer. If the Underworld remained silent...then he would go to it himself.

He stepped aboard the voidship and gazed ahead, where the gates of the Underworld loomed, just within reach.

It was a strange, black world, tethered to the Ancestral Land like a parasite. And in the distance, strands of red Yang energy were being drawn in, reconstituting the balance of Yin and Yang across the land’s surface.

A new cycle was beginning.

Li Yuan watched the swirling shadows for a while, then turned to the crow at his side and said, “Come on. Let’s go see your mother.”

The crow gave a solemn nod.

By now, the Yin and Yang energy within Li Yuan’s body had merged into perfect harmony. With just a thought, he concealed the Yang and revealed the Yin. A 12-petal black lotus bloomed beneath him, each petal harboring dormant, sinister ghosts.

He seated himself on the lotus. The voidship stirred, gliding through the depths of the void, heading straight for the Underworld.

When the connection point emerged, he didn’t hesitate. He entered.

The path ahead twisted and wound like a sheep’s intestine, narrow and cramped. There was no sound. When he looked back, the road had vanished. It was a one-way path, and there was no turning back.

Yet through Li Yuan’s eyes, he could still see the layers of void stretched above this so-called path of no return.

The void existed beyond the universe, while the Underworld still lay within it.

The universe had no doors, but the void did.

For others at the second rank, this road was a death trap with no exit. But for Li Yuan, he could leave whenever he pleased.

As he went deeper, the silence gradually gave way to faint sounds, soft shuffling footsteps and the distant roar of water.

Then came a rush of color, gray, yellow, and red.

He saw gray earth, a yellow river, and blood-red flowers.

“The Eternal Demon Bloom...” Li Yuan looked at the blinding, eerie blossoms. A strange, inexplicable sense of romance crept over him.

These were the flowers he had given to Yan Yu.

And now, arriving in the Underworld, he found them blooming before his eyes.

It was such a familiar scene that his mind couldn’t help but leap to the associations, Yellow Springs, the Underworld, the Flowers of the Other Shore...

This moment felt like something straight out of the myths he’d read back on Earth before his reincarnation.

No...it wasn’t just similar.

More and more images rushed to his mind, scenes, symbols, stories from his old world, all echoing this one.

It was as if the Ancestral Land and Earth were connected in some strange, ancient way.

In the distance, an endless tide of ghosts trudged slowly in line, shuffling forward. The Yin energy clinging to them was no joke. If any of them were dropped into the mortal world, they’d be on par with that early carpenter ghost he’d once faced.

But even so, compared to Li Yuan, they were weak and insignificant.

Seated atop the black lotus, Li Yuan passed through their ranks unimpeded.

To these ghosts, he was no human. He was a titan of darkness, a true great ghost.

He followed the current upriver. To his right rose a pitch-black mountain, and even at its peak, shadowy humanoid figures could be seen.

Li Yuan flew up on his lotus and looked down from above.

What he saw left him momentarily stunned.

There were still many

normal

souls within the Underworld.

They were the spirits, not ghosts.

There was a difference.

Spirits retained fragments of their human memories. But here, soaked in the heavy Yin energy of the Underworld, those memories had been sealed away. They wandered like hollow puppets, blank and numb like walking corpses.

Ghosts, on the other hand, had undergone total mutation. Their souls had twisted into something no longer human.

“Is this your doing, Yan Yu?” Li Yuan murmured to himself.

He knew the truth. No ordinary spirits could preserve their form in this place, nor avoid being devoured by the wandering ghosts.

Only one being could ensure that, the ruler of the Underworld.

But really, what kind of god would care so much about ordinary spirits?

As Li Yuan pondered this, a sudden gust of cold wind howled through the sky. He looked up, only to hear a strange, shrill tune echoing from the north. It was a sharp, reedy sound, monotonous and haunting, and the main instrument appeared to be a

suona

.

A wave of thick Yin energy followed in its wake. The music wasn’t just eerie. It felt like a dirge, a soul-quelling anthem. The moment it floated into the air, the whole world seemed to freeze. When the sound touched Li Yuan, even the petals of the black lotus beneath him began to wither at the edges.

Each ghostly face on the petals slowly shut its eyes.

Li Yuan remained still, watching.

The music continued, and then flowers bloomed across the sky.

They were black flowers.

Another wave of powerful Yin energy crashed down, and for a moment, his head buzzed with pressure. The black lotus beneath him began to wither even faster.

Still, he kept his eyes on the horizon.

And finally, he saw it.

A flying palanquin, deathly pale, floated into view.

On either side of it were two ghosts playing their suona horns, one with a smiling face, the other with a face twisted in mourning. A pair of little ghost girls flanked them, scattering petals from flower baskets, one dressed in red, the other in blue. The palanquin itself was pulled by a boar and a serpent, the boar snorting heavily, the serpent coiling dreamlike through the air.

Suona. Black flowers. White palanquin. Boar and serpent pulling the carriage.

This was a scene pulled straight from the

underworld

, so eerie it chilled the bones. And along with it came an overwhelming wave of Yin energy.

Li Yuan’s black lotus nearly withered away completely in an instant.

It was clear now. They had marked him as an intruder.

He shouted, “Yan Yu! It’s me, Li Yuan!”

No response.

Frustrated, Li Yuan reached into his palm and tore at the Yin energy surrounding him, ripping it loose and flinging it outward.

In a flash, the black lotus returned to full bloom, petals vibrant once again.

But that gesture...seemed to be taken as a provocation.

A surge of eerie power descended instantly.

This wasn’t just pressure. It was a strange, unpredictable, deeply disturbing energy. The kind of force that made even someone like Li Yuan feel a flicker of dread.

He couldn’t afford to take this lightly.

And yet...if that white palanquin really did carry Yan Yu, after all she’d endured in this place for so many years, wasn’t it natural that she might not recognize him right away?

He couldn’t just go nuclear and throw out a World Destroying Finger over a misunderstanding. What if they really ended up locked in a life-or-death battle?