Chapter 1861: All Crown Princes
“How did you know I was here?” The Dao King looked at the proffered Imperial Seal with surprise. He’d taken pains to hide himself and carefully avoided revealing any hint of his presence. But somehow, Lu Yun had accurately pinpointed where he was.
“Mo Yi is here, so you must be here too. Is there a need to look around? You usually stand one meter and three centimeters behind her, to the right,” Lu Yun responded matter-of-factly.
Mo Yi whipped her head around with a glare and the Dao King blushed hotly.
“Go with Yun Yi and get us something good for your time!” she huffed.
“Alright, alright, I will,” the Dao King quickly agreed apologetically. He turned around and waved the seal at Yun Yi. “This is yours again, and your karmic ties with these three youngsters are severed from this moment forth!”
“Nothing else matters if you’re willing to help me,” Yun Yi nodded readily.
“Who is the Dao King?” Lu Yun sidled up to Mo Yi and asked in a small voice when he heard Yun Yi’s response.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Mo Yi chuckled.
“There’s no way he’s telling me. Is Yun Yi seriously going to give up all of his intricately crafted plots just because the Dao King says so?” Lu Yun couldn’t believe it.
Chu Xingran and Xie Tianxun looked blankly at each other. Yun Yi could suppress the dragons and Moran Clan—not even the ultimate powerhouse of the Autumn Realm daunted him! That’s who he was!
“You stay here after I leave, you’re not allowed to go anywhere!” the Dao King said sharply to Mo Yi.
“I know, I know, I don’t want to die yet.” Mo Yi nodded docilely.
“Then let us be on our way.” The Dao King vanished with a turn of his body, much to Yun Yi’s delight.
Lu Yun could sense an overwhelming exuberance from Yun Yi, so strong that it imparted a hint of life to the lifeless hell. The man followed the Dao King out.
“That’s… it? That’s all it took?” Chu Xingran plopped on the ground and gasped for air. He never imagined that the danger that’d plagued him for so long would be so easily resolved like this!
“No,” Yun Yi’s voice drifted back on the wind. “Part of the heavenly court’s legacy is still on you. I won’t do anything to you, but the old courtiers of court will come for you.
“The Imperial Seal is a token of the heavenly emperor. They would have sworn allegiance to you if you still bore it. But since you bear it no longer, they will kill you for the heritage.”
“That’s still better than being enemies with you,” grumbled Chu Xingran. He wasn’t afraid of some old courtiers, he was afraid of Yun Yi.
“So Yun Yi’s really giving up just like this?” Xie Tianxun looked around wildly.
Although Yun Yi’s plots targeted Chu Xingran and not him, he’d personally experienced many of the heavyweight’s schemes after all this time. They were complicated to the extreme and involved even the Land of Reincarnation.
More important was that Xie Tianxun now speculated Yun Yi was also behind the Nebula Supreme inviting him to enter the land. He’d clearly sensed for a split second how much the man yearned for his legacy.
That hadn’t been an act.
“What else?” Chu Xingran extended his limbs in a mighty stretch and continued lazily, “Do you think that Yun Yi won’t possibly give up this scheme just because he spent so much time and effort crafting it?”
Xie Tianxun nodded.
“Think of it this way—how exalted is someone like Yun Yi? Something that is impossible to us ants is an afterthought for someone like him. Endless time is just the snap of a finger.” Chu Xingran sprawled on the ground and mumbled, “What we view as precious beyond belief is no different from dirt to powerhouses of that caliber. Lu Yun is right, we don’t have the qualifications to be enemies with Yun Yi. We are so far beneath him.
“And what if his original plot was a success? Then no matter what choice Lu Yun made in the Firmament Prison, all was still within his purview.
“Either he comes here with Lu Yun and meets those two great ones, or we remain in the prison and are sacrificed to the realm monster. There is no third option—we’d never make it out of his grasp.
“But!!” He bounced upright. “Yun Yi is the crown prince of the primeval heavenly court! His first victim—the Huangpang Supreme—was the princess of the yellow dragons. I am the crown prince of Darklake… so what does he want?”
The group blinked with surprise at this new line of thought.
“Er… are you a princess or a prince?” Xie Tianxun murmured.
“I. am. A. MAN!!” Chu Xingran flew into a rage. “I’ll have the head of whoever doubts my gender next!!”
Chu Xingran was the most handsome man in Darklake and renowned for his beauty throughout the chief worlds. He put many women to shame, so certain individuals spread rumors that he was actually a woman who sought to usurp a man’s rightful position in a household. After a while, he gained the reputation of being a sissy. When he fled into the Land of Reincarnation to escape his betrothal, to the eyes of many, that became the actions of protecting his female identity.
Therefore, he was particularly sensitive when it came to his gender.
Xie Tianxun fell sheepishly silent.
“Actually… actually, I’m a crown prince too. But my country is gone,” he laughed ruefully after a while. “It’s been gone a very, very long time. I crawled out of a tomb—my coffin, rather.”
Chu Xingran blinked.
“I wander in and out of the great tombs in the chief worlds because I’m searching for my old home. I reached an agreement with the Nebula Supreme because I found traces of my country’s presence in the Land of Reincarnation,” Xie Tianxun chuckled wryly. “Do you guys know that my home was flooded out? Everyone in my country drowned to death, hah! How ludicrous is that?? A divine nation and all of its citizens drowned to death in a massive flood?
“I don’t know why I survived… it’s just weird. I crawled out of a coffin and know very well who I am and where I come from.”
“A nation that was flooded out of existence?” Lu Yun and Chu Xingran looked at each other.
“Grovehill… Kingdom?” Lu Yun frowned.
“Yes,” Xie Tianxun nodded. “My original surname is Lin and I was named something else. I changed it to Xie Tianxun later on. But I think Grovehill is still out there somewhere, so I keep searching for it.”
Lu Yun looked at Mo Yi.
“Don’t look at me, I don’t know anything. I’ve forgotten it all,” Mo Yi spread out her hands. “But I’m certain that Yun Yi’s goal isn’t me or Che. It’s also not the heritage of the so-called Heaven and Earth Supreme on him. It’s Ruina.”
Mazu oversaw Ruina and was Princess Lin Mo of Grovehill. If Xie Tianxun was the crown prince of Grovehill, he was sure to meet Lin Mo if he came to the Land of Reincarnation. However, he’d been confined to the Disordered Hell during his entire stay and hadn’t had a chance to encounter Lin Mo.
Or that was Lu Yun’s current guess. The plan seemed to have fallen through when Xie Tianxun and Lin Mo didn’t meet, but who knew how many other eventualities Yun Yi had set up within it?
“Go find Lin Mo,” he said to Xie Tianxun. “Grovehill being flooded out is probably not as straightforward as it seems…”
A thought struck him—Lu Yun trembled and he looked at Mo Yi. He was no longer the bumbling boy of yesteryear, completely ignorant of the chief worlds. He’d paid a visit and learned of Ruina’s legends from Lu Feng. He also knew some of the outside realm’s history.
Ruina’s stories came from the same era as the primeval heavenly court. But he hadn’t found any record of Grovehill. Plainly, that nation hailed from an even older eon that Lu Yun couldn’t verify.
Xie Tianxun had been excavating tombs to locate traces of Grovehill because he knew that the current chief worlds held no record of his home. Chu Xingran knew of Grovehill and Lin Mo because he’d once gone to Myriad Sea World, the one formed from a realm monster, and found certain clues there.
But who was Mo Yi? How did she know? Was she a spacetime traveler as well? But Lu Yun didn’t see any traces of time on her.
“Lin Mo! The eldest princess!” Xie Tianxun lit up when he heard the name.
“Lin Mo has left,” Mo Yi shook her head. “She’s in the chief worlds now, investigating why Grovehill perished.”
Xie Tianxun fell silent.
