Reconstruction efforts began in Dusk Province in a bid to restore the cities, mountains, and rivers ravaged by the fires of war. The province that’d formerly been on its way to prosperity was now a land of ruin and desolation, more than sixty percent of its inhabitants dead.
Moreover, the world had witnessed firsthand how fearsome the monkey was. It’d gone against the restriction and gotten the better of its opponent! Though it had fled back to the North Sea for now, its eyes were still set on Dusk Province.
Immortals of the world had never been afraid of Lu Yun.
True, his meteoric rise was paved with blood. He’d killed too many immortals to count, but the path he walked was an upright one, fair and aboveboard. Unless provoked, he didn’t commence a slaughter for no reason.
No, they were afraid of that big monkey.
Dusk City itself would likely be destroyed when the beast came again. Everyone had seen the Divine Glory almost destroyed in the wake of the final attack launched in its cannon form. Out of the nineteen cannons aboard, only the main cannon had survived. All of the auxiliary cannons had been destroyed, along with the physical manifestation of the province restriction itself.
A victory it might have been, but one with a bitter price. If the giant monkey recovered and came back even stronger, the outcome would be impossible to predict.
Dusk Province was now a shattered land, a taboo territory that various faction leaders ordered their members to avoid. Most of the inhabitants left belonged to the Lu and Chen Clans, the Star Demon Sect, or Skandha Range.
The latter was the one silver lining in the great battle that’d just rampaged through the province. Both Scarlet Ape and the human demon had instinctively been afraid of the place and avoided it during combat.
As for the monster immortals of the East Sea, and the other human immortals who’d come to help, they left after the invaders withdrew. They had no desire to go a second round against the monkey that defied common sense.
……
Hell.
A giant palace towered somewhere in the netherworld. The Yin and Yang Formation Orbs hovered in the sky above, casting rays of formation light that illuminated a palace that was almost five thousand kilometers wide.
Known as the North Sea Palace, it was the true abode of the previous rulers of the northern waters. After entering the netherworld, Lu Yun had manipulated the power of hell to release all of the spatial folds in the palace.
This was the ancient dragon palace, after all, the lair of ancient dragons. After their disappearance, the palace’s true nature had been thoroughly concealed. Even the dragons ruling over the North Sea ten thousand years ago had been unaware of its true form.
Now, thanks to the energy of the netherworld, Lu Yun had returned it to its original self.
“Wha….” Lu Yun trembled violently at the sight of the giant edifice, his eyes filled with disbelief. He wasn’t the only one; his envoys were likewise given a scare.
“This was modified from the corpse of a Black Tortoise… A true Black Tortoise, a natural-born divine!” Yuchi Tianhuang, one of Lu Yun’s ghostly subordinates, murmured from the side.
His dao partner’s body had contained the bloodline of the Black Tortoise and had been a powerhouse of the tribe, so he was intimately familiar with this presence. Furthermore, the Black Tortoise in front of them was a divine beast born from nature itself, rather than one that inherited the bloodline of the tribe.
“This divine beast was killed three hundred million years ago by a dragon expert and then refined into the Dragon Palace!” Thanks to the Spectral Eye, Lu Yun could see straight through to the palace’s past.
He hadn’t obtained a new death art after breaking through to the void realm, but an unexpected energy had emanated from the Tome of Life and Death, strengthening his already-existing death arts.
As a result, the Spectral Eye he now used was an enhanced version. Thanks to that, even creatures dead for three hundred million years couldn’t escape its detection, and that wasn’t all. Once only useful for garnering information about the dead and living, it now possessed a certain offensive potential. At the same time, an attack from the Spectral Eye’s pupil art was only useful against those around Lu Yun’s own level.
In addition, he’d also discovered that he could deploy some of the death arts through the Spectral Eye. The Judgment of Life and Death, for one, or the art of Resurrection.
“Wait a second!” He frowned and took a closer look at the palace with the Spectral Eye. “It’s not just a Black Tortoise. I feel the presence of another unknown divine beast inside its body… The dragon expert killed at least two different kinds of divine beasts and used their flesh and bones as building blocks for the palace!” Lu Yun’s mind buzzed with the ramifications.
As it turned out, even the power of the Tome of Life and Death couldn’t revive these two divine beasts and turn them into his envoys. The dragon expert had used a power akin to creation itself to distill their dead bodies into pure materials and avoid the cycle of life and death entirely.
“How powerful was the one who created this palace?” Lu Yun breathed in deeply. “Then the real treasure vaults inside….” An intense glint flashed in his eyes. “They must be the divine vaults of the beasts making up the palace!”
Divine vaults!
Immortals who’d transcended the dao immortal realm could create a world within themselves. This major realm above the dao immortal realm was called the divine dharma realm and consisted of three subrealms: ingress, primordial, and principal. As for the so-called immortal emperor realm, it was the realm above the divine dharma realm.
Upon becoming a blood qilin and surmounting the time barrier, Cangyin had imparted her memories and some understanding of the ancient secrets to Lu Yun, as well as the classification of the age-old immortal dao.
As a matriarch of the water qilin tribe, Cangyin’s knowledge was even more comprehensive than peers at her level.
“Refining divine vaults into treasuries, to do something like that….” Lu Yun hissed in surprise. How strong exactly had the dragons been three hundred million years ago? To casually prey upon divine beasts born from the power of the cosmos like the Black Tortoises….
“But gaining entry into a divine vault won’t be so easy.” He took out his luopan and silently chanted the Dragonsearch Invocation. The treasure vaults hidden within the dragon palace should be located at its lifepoints. He couldn’t perceive them with his naked eyes, but the compass could pinpoint their locations.
“What the… there are nine divine vaults here!” Lu Yun’s pupils dilated with shock. In other words, this place had been refined from the bodies of nine formidable natural-born divine beasts!
Nine!
He’d only seen two of them, but the luopan couldn’t lie. The palace had been crafted from the bodies of nine divine beasts.
“Too bad. If only I could resurrect them all…. Hmm, then again, they’d probably come back as only peerless immortals. They wouldn’t be all that useful.”
He recalled Xingzi. Once a powerhouse who could singlehandedly kill a blood qilin, she was merely a peerless immortal after becoming his envoy. Lu Yun shook his head and dismissed the random thoughts; then, guided by the compass, moved toward one of the vaults.
