Lu Yun, Ashu, and the Venerated Sacrosanct Demon Sovereign had penetrated deep into the depths of the Haven Locus Marsh and were outside the Xuan Yuan Tomb.
They’d opened the tomb doors, but had then run into trouble. An enormous being five kilometers tall had barreled out the entrance—the enormous zombie that the three had battled outside the marsh.
The titan race!
Extinct prior to the Primordial Era, here they were as zombies. Their presence was strong and powerful, and gray fire burned all over them. Hundreds of them charged out of the tomb, each more berserk than the one the trio had met outside.
A sea of gray fire sealed off the area the moment they rushed out. Being corpsefire, it burned only the dead and didn’t harm the living. But since it’d ignited on zombies and become one with its fuel, it was starting to reach beyond those limitations and truly display its might.
At the sight, the demon sovereign called upon his Hadal Bonefire and simultaneously crashed the extremities of hot and cold into the corpsefire. He grunted at the impact and brought out the Skyturning Seal, warily looking at the zombies just out of sight in the sea of gray.
“Be careful, each of these zombies possesses the strength of primordial arcane dao immortals!” Ashu made his move as he spoke, flinging back a zombie that’d crept up for an ambush. Though he suffered no backlash, the presence of death upon him deepened by a hair.
Aghast, he quickly circulated the breathing method and stirred his heart and lungs into action. He needed to maintain a pulsating vitality; otherwise, if the presence of death on him grew so great that it replaced the signs of life, he’d attract the boundless corpsefire within the marsh and be burned to death.
Or his soul would, at the very least.
Lu Yun had been busily etching formations and drawing talismans that could counter zombies and dead spirits. Formations flew from his rapidly flicking fingers, forcing the corpsefire back.
However, the hundred-strong zombies were already halfway through a charge.
Hulking masses that ran five kilometers tall, Lu Yun and the others weren’t even ants to them. Despite that, their senses were extraordinarily keen and they located the trio with unerring accuracy. It didn’t make any sense at all.
Zombies were neither dead nor alive, not part of the three realms and strangers to the five elements. Abandoned by heaven and earth alike, their souls were forever trapped in their bodies to suffer the torment of being caught between life and death.
They possessed no intelligence and their senses had almost completely devolved. Their eyes couldn’t see, ears couldn’t hear, nose couldn’t smell, mouth couldn’t taste, and skin didn’t register sensation. They felt no pain and followed only their instincts to search out any bit of yang energy. They didn’t even have a consciousness to locate the existence of living people.
Given that Lu Yun had used the sword formation to completely obliterate the yang energy and life force emanating from the three of them, it really made no sense that the zombies could find them so accurately. Though Ashu kept releasing vitality to prove to the corpsefire that he was alive, he was still within the formation. The zombies wouldn’t be able to detect him as long as they didn’t make it inside the formation.
“These things… seem to be tomb keepers!” A startled Ashu suddenly yelled. “That’s impossible! The souls inside these zombies are dead and not alive, so how can they be tomb keepers??”
Tomb keepers by definition had to be the living dead! Only when the soul of a living was trapped within a zombie or a corpse would they retain their lucidity and protect the tomb. Otherwise, they might be the very ones disturbing the tomb owner’s final rest instead of safeguarding it from outsiders.
Those in front of them were pure zombies without any ripples of life. However, since Ashu had once been a mausoleum keeper himself, he could sense a slight trace of a similar presence from the dead titans.
An enormous axe suddenly descended from the skies and aimed to bisect Ashu.
Shhhick!
It sliced through the multiple layers of formations and talismans that Lu Yun had created, and even through the demon sovereign’s Hadal Bonefire. With that, corpsefire and zombies churned furiously toward them in a renewed charge.
“Back off, you guys!” Lu Yun waved a hand to materialize the Sugato Sword. Curtains of hazy sword light trailed down from the sword and enveloped him. Following that, Lu Yun spread his arms open and let loose with a barrage of hellfire.
The corpsefire screeched to a halt and frantically retreated like it’d met its bane. Seemingly sensing the fear in the gray flames, the zombies stopped as well.
Ashu and the demon sovereign both heaved sighs of relief at the same time.
“We can’t relax just yet, someone’s controlling the zombies. There’s something alive in the tomb!” Sugato Sword hovering over his head, Lu Yun combusted an endless stream of immortal crystals within himself and fed them to the weapon as currents of milky-white air. Each additional stream heightened the iridescence of the sword’s light curtains.
Hearing his words, the demon sovereign quickly brought up the Skyturning Seal again and sent it over his head as well. Ashu took out a black short sword and scanned the premises warily.
Lu Yun manifested his luopan with a flip of his hand.
“To seek a dragon of mountains coiled, those deathly cliffs with mysteries roiled.
“Danger shies if mountains hide, earthen coils and in heaven does danger bide!”
Boom!
As the Dragonshift Method circulated, the shadowy form of a world appeared over the feng shui compass. No longer the simple prototype of a world, this projection was now a bonafide realm. If one looked closely at it, there seemed to be a blurry figure fast asleep in it.
The spirit fragment of the immortal emperor.
He’d set foot on the path to becoming the compass’ treasure spirit, but Lu Yun had prevented the luopan from melding with the immortal emperor. Instead, he’d used his treasure to project a real world in which the emperor could rest and recover. The immortal emperor’s spirit fragment was too weak to enter hell and utilize a Hell Flower, so he could only recover in the feng shui compass.
The demon sovereign fidgeted uncomfortably when he saw the immortal emperor. “Wait, what is that?!” He’d glimpsed the true form of this tomb as projected by Lu Yun’s luopan.
It was the corpse of an enormous corpse coiled around a large mountain. Five hundred thousand kilometers long, it was a mountain range in and of itself. However, its flesh and blood had long rotted away, leaving behind only a stark-white skeleton.
There was a coffin resting on its head.
An orange mist obscured the coffin’s precise outline, something that Lu Yun’s compass couldn’t penetrate. Instead, his eyes were locked onto the enormous altar floating beneath the head instead.
The Earth Altar!
There was a man in a yellowish-brown Daoist robe sitting on top of it, his eyes closed in meditation.
“It’s the body of the moat snake.” Ashu frowned. “The strongest and the only connate earth-affiliated divine beast… died here?? And someone turned its body into a tomb?! Just how great is the person in the coffin?”
