Murky gray fog filled the surroundings.
A realm monster’s body looked crystalline and translucent from the outside, easily seen through with a single glance. But once Lu Yun entered, he found that everything here was hazy and indistinct, just like the zone of pollution in the chaos.
What set it apart was that there was no energy of the worlds here, just a dense weighty, stagnant power.
“It’s so cold.” Ying Luo’s voice suddenly sounded behind Lu Yun.
He smiled ruefully, he hadn’t thought the girl would follow him inside. If she was with him, he wouldn’t be able to use a lot of his methods. It wasn’t like he could kill the girl to keep his secrets now, could he?
When Wei Yuan appeared on the scene earlier, Ying Luo’s first instinct had been to protect Lu Yun, even at the cost of fabricating a ridiculous lie. Now that she’d followed him into the realm monster, he really didn’t know how to handle the situation.
“But you’re fine in here?” Looking at the nonchalant Lu Yun, Ying Luo realized that she’d too impulsively followed the wanderer.
“It’s fine once you get used to it.” Lu Yun shifted around as his internal energy caused changes within his body every second. It constantly adjusted his physical form so he could acclimate to the surroundings.
This was an instinctive reaction at this point of his life. Lu Yun’s old trade was tomb raiding, something he’d pursued when he was still a mortal. Modifying behavior, mannerisms, and habits in his line of work was a necessity. Now that he cultivated the immortal dao, he still retained the habit of frequently adjusting his body so as to adapt to a new environment as soon as possible.
“Okay.” Ying Luo nodded and looked around, asking hesitantly, “Why do all of these corpses look kind of strange? They don’t seem like regular bodies…”
“Oh?” Lu Yun blinked.
“They seem like coffins,” Ying Luo mused. “You can’t tell from the outside, but when you’re inside, this feels like a coffin.”
“Coffin… a corpse coffin!” Lu Yun’s expression changed drastically and he looked wildly around him, operating formula dao at the same time.
Since the inside of the realm monster was suffused with opaque air currents, he couldn’t see through to the heart of anything. He could only use formula dao to calculate the truth of the situation.
The dao of burial had long died out in the worlds, but it’d never been broken in the chaos. As a genius disciple of a sacred palace, Ying Luo’s knowledge was far richer than Lu Yun’s.
“Coffins that have endured a chaos tribulation are all filled with cloudy currents like these.” Ying Luo ignored Lu Yun’s motions and reached out to gently close her hand around a ball of murky air. “It’s very similar to the patch of chaos affected by the energy of the worlds, but different at the same time.”
Lu Yun retracted his formula dao and looked at Ying Luo.
“I wonder who’s buried here.” Still ignoring Lu Yun, Ying Luo murmured to herself as she looked around.
Lu Yun’s eyes suddenly widened and he grabbed the girl, hauling her to his side.
“What is it?” Shuddering, she surreptitiously freed her hand from Lu Yun’s grasp.
“Remember the mental illusion that bewitched all of the beings that entered the tomb before the bloody path appeared?” Lu Yun asked with a frown. “I’d been searching for the source of that illusion, and it looks like it originates from these realm monster corpses.”
Ying Luo shuddered once more. She had indeed been in a strange mental state just now. If Lu Yun hadn’t shaken her awake, she would’ve followed her impulses and probed further inside.
“The mental illusions are dispersed from here, but they don’t come from here.” Lu Yun forced his mind to calm down and refrain from racing with random thoughts. The more one had on their mind, the more easily they’d be affected by this mental attack.
“Since we’re here, we should try to make the best of things.” He strode forward and headed into the depths of the realm monster. Ying Luo followed close on his heels as she didn’t want to be left behind.
The gray currents grew ever more concentrated until they mostly obscured Lu Yun’s vision. He could only see three meters around him, anything further than that was out of sight.
This place was very similar to where the energy of the worlds stretched into the chaos. There was no sense of space or dimension. In the absence of anything for scale or comparison, the two didn’t feel like they were moving at all, despite walking forward.
“There’s something there!” Ying Luo suddenly grabbed onto Lu Yun’s sleeve with some nervousness.
“I see it.” He came to a halt as well.
Calm gray currents were agitating not too far ahead of them, and faint echoes of some kind of crooning could be heard from that position. There… seemed to be an enormous shadow swimming through the space.
Lu Yun couldn’t make it out clearly, but he could see some sort of indistinct shadow. It seemed to be a large fish swimming through the area.
“What the, why is it this?!” His eyes shot wide open as he saw something very familiar… a kun!
Or more specifically, a rotting kun.
This could only be found in the underworld.
When cultivators in the world of immortals weathered their tribulation, most of them met rotting kuns. Lu Yun had never imagined that he’d find one here!
Kuns were peculiar creatures. When human dao reigned in the Primeval Era, there had been an extraordinarily strong great emperor named the Kunpeng Emperor. Also in that age existed someone who wished to peek into the secrets of creators, so he split the great emperor into two as a kun fish and peng roc.
The peng rocs lived on and formed their own race, but the kun fish didn’t and ultimately entered the underworld as rotting versions of themselves.
When Lu Yun met the kun version of the great emperor in Xuan Yuan’s tomb, that locale had become the final sanctuary for the Xuanyuan Clan.
……
“Aoooouuu!” An enormous roar ripped through the air as the rotting kun picked up speed, barreling down toward Lu Yun and Ying Luo. Its decaying mouth was wide open and blasted forth with a festering stench.
As a treasured disciple of a noble sacred palace, Ying Luo had never encountered anything like this before. She almost fainted dead away when the awful smell washed over her.
“Piss off!” Lu Yun roared back and lifted his sword. An enormous golden dragon rushed out of it and crashed into the giant kun.
This kun was roughly thirty meters long and brimmed with energy ripples corresponding to second level mortal realm. Lu Yun’s slash sent it reeling back more than five hundred kilometers into the distance, forcing away all of the murky currents around them.
“Wake up!” Lu Yun grabbed Ying Luo and frantically shot backward for several hundreds of kilometers.
“Urp!” Ying Luo started heaving when she recovered her senses.
“You could tell this is a coffin, but can’t stand this smell?” Lu Yun frowned at the vomiting Ying Luo.
“I… urp!” After emptying the contents of her stomach, Ying Luo dry heaved some more. “I, I’ve seen coffins before, but never smelled this… This kind of smell doesn’t exist in the chaos!
“That thing just now doesn’t come from the chaos either!” she concluded firmly.
