“This isn’t a tomb.” Lu Yun shook his head. He looked almost like a human torch with hellfire blazing all around him; the flames of the netherworld radiated great power in all directions to keep the corpsefire at bay.
Corpsefire guided the zombies. Without it, the giant zombies wandered about listlessly.
“The moat snake is the outer-coffin, and the Heaven Locus March the real tomb! We’re inside the tomb already. No wonder,” Lu Yun murmured, “No wonder a yang door would emerge outside the march as soon as we entered.”
“That… is…” The Venerated Sacrosanct Demon Sovereign and Ashu goggled at each other. Using the only connate earth-affiliated divine beast as an outer-coffin? That was more horrifying than shaping it as a tomb!
“Then… what should we do now?” The demon sovereign was at a loss. “Should we enter the snake coffin?”
“If my observations are correct, this should be the handiwork of the shamanic divines. Specifically, their corpse coffin method,” Lu Yun said with furrowed brows. “Whoever is buried here came with a powerful coffin, though. That’s why the shamanic divines turned the moat snake into an outer-coffin instead.”
He’d encountered corpse coffins twice before. Once under Myriad Formation Summit, where the shamanic divines had buried Ruyi with Yueshen’s corpse. Someone had plainly broken that layout at some point and collected Yueshen Jixiang’s soul for a resurrection layout in an attempt to resurrect her.
However, the resurrection layout was then adjusted twice: the first time to resurrect the little fox, and the second time for Aoxue. Meanwhile, Yueshen was refined into an immortal ghost, and Ruyi’s corpse sealed somewhere in the Abyss of Divine Burial. All the resentment and grudges from the endless divines she came in contact with turned her into a terrifying undead hag.
The other time he’d encountered corpse coffins was in the inner sea at the heart of Levitating Island. There were two corpse coffins within Su Xiaoxiao’s tomb that were refined from the corpses of two Exalted Divine holy girls.
Lu Yun still didn’t know what corpse coffins were for and had gleaned no new clues from his third encounter with them. Although it was an outer-coffin, it wasn’t all that different from the coffins he’d encountered before.
The Heaven Locus March was a tomb, and the moat snake an outer-coffin. To enter it, Lu Yun and his two companions would have to break through the yin door. Something “alive” was on the other side of the door, something that had been directing the corpsefire and giant zombies to stop them from entering.
With a flip of his hand, Lu Yun collected his luopan. “Come on, let’s go inside!” he declared.
The demon sovereign fidgeted. “Do we really have to?”
Lu Yun turned to him with a smile. “You awoke from your slumber in a tomb. Are you really afraid of entering an outer-coffin?”
The demon sovereign didn’t have an answer for that. Ashu didn’t mind either way. In his eyes, the inside of the coffin was much safer than the outside. Though corpsefire had filled the tomb to the brim, it couldn’t enter the snake coffin. Otherwise, the coffin would’ve already been destroyed.
“Grrrraawl!!” Sensing the approach of Lu Yun and his companions, the hundred-strong group of zombies defending the door into the coffin snarled and charged at them with reckless abandon.
However, the corpsefire surrounding them evaporated as soon as it came into the vicinity of Lu Yun’s hellfire. Confusion surfaced in the zombies’ eyes, but they followed their instincts and continued the charge.
The demon sovereign waved a hand and pushed out the Skyturning Seal, sending it right through the crowd of zombies with terrifying might. Anything it rammed went flying off into the distance.
Seizing the opening, Lu Yun attached a talisman each to the demon sovereign and Ashu. They quickly shrank down until they were the size of minute particles. At the same time, he diminished his own size with Size Manipulation. The hellfire surrounding him brought his two companions under its protection as well.
The three of them dashed at the strange tomb door as three thin lines.
Hum.
A small ripple emerged in the air and faded just as quickly. Everything outside disappeared the moment the three of them stepped through the door, including the corpsefire and giant zombies.
……
A great black river flowed quietly before them. Neither the sky nor the earth were in sight. There was only the river. Countless corpses bobbed on the water’s surface. Lurking underneath were zombies, monsters, corpsefish, and undead hags. An ominous prickle ran through Lu Yun’s scalp.
“What the heck?!” He stood on top of a particle in the air and scrambled backwards, almost falling off the particle.
“What’s wrong?” The demon sovereign turned around and quickly steadied him. In a surprised tone, he asked, “What is this place? Have you been here before?”
Lu Yun shook his head and stared unblinkingly at the black river below them, at a complete loss for words.
“This is the Dusk River,” Ashu said. “It used to run through half of Dusk Province from the ancient tomb at its heart… The river can be dated back to before the death of the primeval emperor, to an era before even his reign. It was a treasure of a powerful being whose identity has been lost in history.” Ashu sighed and continued, “I thought someone had taken away that Dusk River, but here it is!”
There had been a Dusk River in Dao City when the city was established, but the river had slowly run dry and left behind a waterless river bed. The spatial anomaly beneath it had, in turn, reverted back to normal.
Lu Yun had thought that someone had recalled the treasure, but no, the energy and grand influence of the waters here were identical to the Dusk River he knew!
“What’s happening? Why is the Dusk River here?” Lu Yun looked around in confusion. There was only an empty void beneath them, nothing else except for the river and the creatures within it.
“Maybe there are two Dusk Rivers,” muttered the demon sovereign. “Someone took the one in Dusk Province… and this is the other one.”
“Empress Myrtlestar once visited this place, and the map that Violetshade gave me doesn’t have a Dusk River or this space.” Regaining his composure, Lu Yun took out his luopan to determine the feng shui here.
“The door we came through may have been a fake one. It leads to this particular subspace and not the outer-coffin that is the moat snake’s body… This isn’t part of the Heaven Locus Marsh anymore, we’re in the Dusk River.” Lu Yun frowned. He’d checked with his luopan when they were outside, but failed to see the door for what it was.
“It may not be fake,” Ashu interjected. “Perhaps we’ll enter the snake coffin proper once we cross the river. It’s been more than two hundred thousand years since Empress Myrtlestar visited, so everything could’ve changed.”
“You’re right,” Lu Yun said. “But we have to take this Dusk River with us for now. It’s a great river of yin lodged firmly into this space and might give birth to something terrible. Xuanxi,” he called softly.
“Milord!” A blue-haired girl in blue dress appeared before Lu Yun and curtsied gracefully at him. It was Xuanxi, the Dusk river god.
