Chapter 2187.1: Jade Ice Lake

While Immortals Restriction was just an upper rank spirit weapon, it was made from the essence of li fire metal. As such, its speed was unparalleled, as was its keenness. Ordinary golden core cultivators wouldn’t even be able to catch a glimpse of its shadow.

Lu Yun waved it back to him as a streak of light.

“An upper spirit rank weapon!” shrieked some of the cultivators following him when they obtained a clearer look at the flying sword.

Upper spirit rank weapons were premier treasures in fourth rank empires. The ultimate treasure of the Nineheavens Pagoda, the foremost sect of Dark Orchid, was an upper rank spirit treasure. Just one alone was worth far more than three million paramount stones!

The cultivators following Lu Yun revealed themselves, looking at him with blatant greed. So this was why the Black Tortoises had listed a bounty of three million for a mere golden core cultivator!

“Hand over your weapon and I’ll spare your life!” roared a bulky initial nascent soul cultivator with a tanned face.

Boulder Rise cultivators had only heard snippets of what’d happened in Fallen Leaf. They didn’t know the complete story and many thought the stories were exaggerated. How strong could a golden core young man possibly be?

Lu Yun shook his head slightly at the group. “I don’t want to randomly kill people, so you have one chance. Leave, right now.”

Immortals Restriction flared with a foreboding red light and exploded with killing intent.

“He’s just relying on the power of his weapon! How much of it can you bring to bear when you’re just initial golden core??” The tanned man abruptly brought out a black blade and whipped up a black tornado, aiming it at Long Aotian.

The man was very astute as he discerned that the young man must be extraordinary if the Trading Company of the Four Seas was wary of him. But the man next to him was just a normal foundation establishment cultivator. Attacking him would force the young man to respond, which would give him an opportunity to take both out.

The remaining three hundred cultivators also shifted to action when the tanned man moved. They brought out their treasures and flung them at the duo.

“Stand back.” Lu Yun remained expressionless as light blossomed from his sword. It now more resembled a blazing sun. “Die!!”

The sword radiance burst to nine meters long. He struck with a backhand and decapitated the tanned man before he had a chance to draw near Long Aotian. His mid fine rank weapon was also smashed to smithereens.

“I gave you guys a chance,” he growled. The sword radiance split into several hundred rays that were nine meters long each and sealed off the void.

The Five Elements of Absolute Slaughter—Fire Slaughter!

He’d used this technique against the nascent soul Ouyang Shengtian when Lu Yun himself was only foundation establishment. He’d sent the Ouyang genius scurrying for cover then. Now that he was initial golden core, had formed his golden core of great dao, and wielded an upper rank spirit weapon, he was more than ten times stronger than before. This move had previously resulted in only a dozen rays of sword light, now it was capable of hundreds.

Pfft pfft pfft!

Some of the weaker cultivators didn’t even have time to react before the crimson light cut them down and burned them to ashes.

The sword light recombined into one and returned to Lu Yun’s hand after a dozen breaths. Only five nascent soul cultivators still remained standing. They stared at the young man with shock—he’d cut down more than three hundred cultivators in a few breaths! Most of them had been golden core and nascent soul powerhouses. Was this still a cultivator of initial golden core?

“Hmph!” Lu Yun took a deep look at the survivors and stalked off toward Boulder Rise City.

A few hundred? They might pose a threat if they were golden core and nascent soul cultivators from Great Xia. But from a world of cultivation and with such a crude grasp of utilizing true origin?

Never.

The outcome would be the same even if it was Mo Qiyue or Jiang Feng standing in his shoes.

“Young master, why didn’t you kill all of them?” Long Aotian had long grown numb to the sight of Lu Yun killing numerous heavyweights.

“All of them? If I did, who would tell the Black Tortoises that I’m still at Boulder Rise?” Lu Yun grinned and sent a talisman into the two of them. They disappeared from sight. “Let’s go!”

He grabbed Long Aotian, raised sword light, and flew toward Fallen Leaf Mountain. He wanted to direct the Black Tortoises to Boulder Rise while he made visited Jade Ice Lake. If there was Purplestar Silver in it, then there must be Starnet Stone.

Starnet Stone grew alongside Purplestar Silver. While it was rare, it wasn’t particularly important refinement material. Or rather, one could say that it couldn’t be used in refinement at all. It was no different from a stubborn rock by the side of the road.

But in Lu Yun’s eyes, it was a priceless treasure. Not just because of its rarity, but because these kinds of ore could be fashioned into Proxima Metal. Proxima Metal was a key material in fashioning the cross forges that powered the cross arks.

Lu Yun had in his possession a battered ark with a completely destroyed cross forge. He wasn’t able to repair it due to lack of Proxima Metal. Now that he knew where to find Starnet Stone, he naturally wouldn’t pass up a chance to collect it.

Cross arks were key weapons in battle that could transport a million cultivators. Even immortals kept out of their way when encountering them.

As for how to design a cross forge or repair a cross ark, Lu Yun was the one who’d invented them. It was an easy task for him to create a new cross ark so long as he had sufficient materials and time.

Inventing the cross ark had come from his instinctual memories, from a time when they were yet to be fully sealed away. A faint image had lingered, which became the blueprints for the cross ark. Lu Yun now could fully combine the memories and experience of three thousand lifetimes together—he could craft something much more amazing than the cross ark.

They landed on the main peak of Fallen Leaf Mountain after roughly an hour. Jade Ice Lake was located at the mountain’s foot to the northwest, close to the land forbidden to immortals. It was a modestly sized lake at approximately ninety meters across. Waters beautiful as jade, they were also forbiddingly cold. Dangers lurked beneath the surface and unknown spirit beasts called it home. Not even nascent soul cultivators could be guaranteed a safe return if they ventured in.

Even so, many low level cultivators often explored around it—Long Aotian being one of them.

Night had fallen and the dense canopy at the foot of Fallen Leaf Mountain blotted out the stars in the sky. There was a clearing roughly five kilometers wide to the north of the mountain. Nothing grew there, sand and rocks were exposed to the open air. It was there that Jade Ice Lake could be found.

Its waters rippled beneath the starry radiance and a faint layer of fog circled over its jade-green waters. All was unusually quiet. Some spirit beasts occasionally called from the forest around the lake. There were no signs of cultivators to be found.

A black shadow suddenly flashed by and deposited two people by the shore.

“So this is Jade Ice Lake, it is as its name indicates.” When Lu Yun probed the water, he subconsciously identified it according to the scales of his subconscious. It was fifty degrees below zero and the barren clearing around it was a result of the lake’s influence.

Oddly enough, the temperature immediately returned to normal when one exited the clearing. Nothing beyond five kilometers was affected by it.

“Fallen Leaf Mountain is definitely a strange place,” he sighed to himself. Jade Ruins Realm was no ordinary world of cultivation either. There was a massive formation of illusion to the north of the mountain and now this lake. Most terrifying of all were the things suppressed beneath the sword pagoda.

He looked into the waters with the Eye of Nullification.

“What?!” he sucked in a sharp breath. The Eye of Nullification had a range of fifty kilometers, but it couldn’t see to the bottom of the lake! This body of water that was just ninety meters wide was over fifty kilometers deep!

He quickly found what he was looking for on the walls of the lake. There was a modestly sized vein of Purplestar Silver approximately twenty-five kilometers down, interspersed with plenty of Starnet Stone.

Lu Yun avoided wading into Jade Ice Lake without further thought as he could see countless snake-shaped spirit beasts beneath the surface. They were thirty meters long and the thickness of a water bucket. Four underdeveloped claws extended beneath their bellies as they silently hung onto the walls of the lake.

He wouldn’t have discovered them if not for the Eye of Nullification.

“So they’re remnants of jiao with a hint of the jiao bloodlines.” Lu Yun looked at the unmoving creatures in the lake.

Most cultivators, even immortals, thought that the bloodline of dragons ran through jiao, that they could transform into dragons.

It was an erroneous notion. Jiao were an individual race that was on par with dragons. The king of the seas in the world of immortals had been a chaos jiao with ten pairs of wings. It was a chaos immortal hailed as the Chaos Sea Emperor. The patriarch of the dragons had only been an immortal king, so their difference in strength was apparent at a glance.

But since pureblood jiao were few and far in between, there were only a dozen of them in the world. Most of them were intermixed with the dragon bloodline, hence being called scaled-dragons. That was the source of most people’s misunderstanding of them.

The chaos jiao in the world of immortals had died for mysterious reasons not long after Lu Yun became the High Lord of the Northern Sky. The denizens of the world only saw the upper half of his long body that tens of thousands of kilometers fall from the sky. No one knew anything else.

The black spirit beasts beneath Jade Ice Lake were pureblood, not scaled-dragons. They would transform into monster spirits as soon as their bloodlines were activated.

“Jiao and dragons are from the same origins in the world of immortals. No wonder Long Aotian can come and go at will since he possesses a trace of the dragon bloodline.” Lu Yun understood why the man had been able to safely retrieve Purplestar Silver from the lake.

“Sir, there are terrifying spirit beasts beneath that are mostly third or fourth rank. Many nascent soul seniors have been swallowed by them in the past,” Long Aotian quickly said when he saw that Lu Yun seemed ready to go for a dip.