The human demon stood silently off to the side while Mo Yi alertly scanned the premises.
However, this area was simply too bizarre. Apart from where the golden light of the luopan touched, it was pitch black with not a shape to be discerned. Eerie noises traveled out of the dark, as if something was munching on a mouthful of food. Was it Ge Long devouring a big yum-yum, or was the yum-yum eating the old servant?
Lu Yun slowly sat down cross-legged, his complexion pale and haggard. A black flame gradually flared to life within his pupils, dispersing the strange power within his body.
That unknown thing earlier had not only interrupted his invocation, but also delivered a hefty blow. The attack hadn’t connected with his body or spirit, but his mind. Though he looked fine on the surface, his mind was on the verge of collapse. A strange power was barreling through it, seeking to shatter it to smithereens.
Any other cultivator or immortal might’ve immediately collapsed on the spot and turned into a drooling idiot, but thankfully, Lu Yun possessed hellfire. When the flames roared to life, they seeped through his mind to burn away that uncanny power.
Moments later, he breathed out a turbid breath of air intermixed with black smoke.
“This is a divine obsession.” It suddenly occurred to him where the strange attack had originated from. “There’s a divine obsession here, so we need to be careful.”
A divine obsession was a monster born after the death of a divine spirit, something akin to a fragment of memory. Lu Yun had once seen a divine obsession with a complete thought process of its own in the abyss of divines, but Wayfarer had captured it for further study.
Just now, a familiar sensation had come across Lu Yun when the hellfire consumed the strange power. It was that which sparked inspiration in identifying the source of the strange power.
A divine obsession was an entity of thought, so its method of attack was likewise via the mind. Some thought divine obsessions were a fixation on the desire to live on, so the only course of action these entities would take would be possessing the bodies of others.
Of course, divine obsessions lacked soul and spirit, so whatever they took possession of was doomed to die.
Wushen Ruyi was the incarnation of a divine obsession, but Lu Yun was the ultimate overlord of the netherworld. Her circumstances were unusual, due to Myriad Formation Summit, and she’d retained her complete memories. This was the only reason why Lu Yun had allowed her to dwell within the Divine Spymirror.
The divine obsessions here, however, were pure thought without sentience.
When he called upon his Spectral Eye, dense clusters of death information flooded his brain, sending him into a daze from the overload.
“But why would there be divine obsessions here? Did the divines once attempt to explore this tomb?” he murmured to himself. He’d overlooked the obsessions earlier, distracted as he was by the presence of so many strange things. It’d been easy for one to hide well enough that he’d failed to detect it.
…wait, is this divine obsession sentient??
There’d been some intelligence in the one at the bottom of the abyss, too. A few more sweeps of his Spectral Eye yielded nothing. There were no more divine obsessions to be found, just unending layers of soul fragments.
Dusk River lay not too far from them, its inky waters silently making their way to the outside world. The hair-raising crunching noises had ceased coming from the depths of the tomb, and it was now so silent that it made the heart quail.
“Let’s try again!” Lu Yun took a deep breath. “Stand guard for me.”
The feng shui compass in his hand floated up again. Mo Yi took a stance next to the youth, snowflakes drifting purposefully around her to clear away the roving ghosts and spirits. With the two humans as the center, nothing came near them within a thirty meter radius, other than the human demon.
“Waugh—” An ear-piercing shriek suddenly rang out, shaking Lu Yun’s body and instantly dimming the light from his luopan. Blood seeped out of his orifices and the trails of snowflakes in the air briefly paused as well, disturbed from their original trajectories.
A pair of scarlet eyes slowly opened in the darkness. There was a human height separating the eyeballs from each other, as if a large being had lain on the ground and opened its eyes to gaze upon them.
“Waugh!” Lu Yun vomited a mouthful of blood when the strident screech came again. His bones had almost been shattered by that terrifying screech this time!
“What the hell is that?!?” He quickly crushed a medicine vial and swallowed the liquid within to somewhat tend to his injuries. He’d suffered a tremendous blow, but Mo Yi hadn’t sensed any energy ripples from her position next to him. The power that’d disturbed her snowflakes was different from the one that’d attacked Lu Yun.
“The power to kill cultivators,” the human demon said ponderously. “Where I guard houses a restriction against immortals. It can kill immortals, while the power here can slay cultivators. Any who are not yet an immortal will be executed by it.
“As I have obtained two heavenly mandates, I can somewhat control the restriction against immortals, but I cannot yet affect this power that impacts cultivators.”
His appearance had undergone changes at some unknown point in time, shifting from the form of the Exalted Celestial Emperor to a miniature version of the form he’d taken when battling Scarlet Ape in Dusk.
Currently, severe gravity crossed his face. “I did not allow you into the tomb due to the presence of this mysterious power. It kills cultivators in an instant.”
“What if… what if this tomb was destroyed? What would happen then?” A sudden tremor overtook Lu Yun and his voice shook.
“If the tomb is destroyed, this power will encompass all of the land where the emperor fell. All cultivators caught within would be destroyed in an instant.” The human demon frowned.
“This ancient tomb has a very long history, and even the immortal emperor in the Primordial Era couldn’t do anything to it. Can the formation you mentioned really destroy it?” Mo Yi looked at Lu Yun.
“The feng shui can’t be wrong.” Lu Yun nodded. “If we don’t alter the feng shui here, the tomb will be set on the path of destruction. Perhaps it’ll cave in on itself, or some outside force will crush it into the ground…”
The enormous eyes of scarlet in the darkness were fixed unblinkingly on Lu Yun. This was a power that could easily snap cultivators out of existence, but it’d failed to destroy this young man. The energy either came from the eyes themselves, or their master, and its failure prompted a bit of wariness.
Setting the strange power aside, what Lu Yun needed to do was to bypass the blockade and enter where the tomb owner was buried so he could destroy the feng shui layout.
“Feinie, the Formation Orb,” he murmured. The complete yin-yang combination of the softly glowing Formation Orb landed in his hands in the next moment.
