Frost crept over Xuanyuan Xiaoyue’s body without warning, and green light shone out of her eyes when she next looked at Lu Yun and the others. It was as if a starving wolf had seen a flock of baby lambs.
“No, she’s getting out of control again!” Ashu’s expression shifted as the shadow of a tree appeared behind him. An opaque emerald light blossomed from his body to flood into Xiaoyue’s form, seeking to return her to normality.
In response, the cold air over Xuanyuan Xiaoyue thickened and furiously fought the emerald radiance. At the same time, the temperature in their surroundings descended a few more degrees. This time, the Venerated Sacrosanct Demon Sovereign’s Hadal Bonefire started to flicker—their surroundings had exceeded the limits of his fire’s tolerance.
“Lu Yun…” The demon sovereign groaned helplessly and looked piteously at the young man.
Lu Yun waved a hand and sent a blossom of hellfire to the guttering fire, melding the two together and propelling it on an evolutionary path to a different kind of existence.
Hellfire repelled the frigid air while Lu Yun turned around to look at where the ice coffin sat at the peak of the mountain. It was open and Xuanyuan Xiaoyue’s corpse floated in midair, her ice-like eyes stared unblinkingly at Lu Yun’s group.
“Do none of you see her?” Lu Yun’s eyes narrowed slightly. He hadn’t called upon the Spectral Eye yet, but her corpse was right there in front of him.
The demon sovereign and former priest of flame were in a bit of a daze. They peered closely again at the mountain top, but still saw nothing other than a coffin of ice.
Ashu didn’t have attention to spare for anything else; he was calling upon his full strength to vie with the frosty air exuding from Xuanyuan Xiaoyue. By now, the giant tree was almost a tangible, towering tree that really existed.
It completely resembled the zombie tree that Lu Yun had once seen!
……
Somewhere deep in the depths of the underworld, an enormous, coal-black tree emitting gray fog suddenly trembled violently. Minor ripples percolated through the gray fog around it—which was actually countless yin spirits drawn to it from the various corners of the underworld.
It uprooted itself in the next second and formed two large feet out of its roots. Plodding forward with purpose, it headed for an unknown destination and vanished at some point along the way.
“Thank goodness it’s finally left!” The holy lord in charge of this part of the underworld heaved a long sigh of relief.
The zombie tree was too horrifying—more than a dozen tremendously strong holy lords had died in its hands after it took up residence here. Unsatiated after devouring them, the zombie tree attracted countless hordes of yin spirits to itself and consumed endless mausoleum keepers on a daily basis.
Thus, it was a great relief to all that it’d left. The five holy kings gathered on the premises and looked gravely in the direction to where the zombie had disappeared in.
“It’s gone to find Ashu,” Holy King Desolation said gravely. “Do not let it consume Ashu, or the world of immortals will meet its end.”
“Ashu is currently in the Xuan Yuan Tomb and using a special power to save Xuanyuan Xiaoyue…” Xing Chen said. “I will head to the tomb in a moment. I should be able to hold off the tree after I obtain the spleen.”
Now that he’d received the heritage of the holy kings, he would be at least on par with his three seniors after refining the spleen of the world into himself.
“I’ll go with you,” Violetshade, the former corpse puppet contained in Violetgrave, offered. “I have a bit of karma to resolve in that tomb.”
……
Ashu had turned a pure jade green by now and let loose with an aura as mighty as the heavens themselves. It bore down on the frigid air plaguing Xuanyuan Xiaoyue and slowly beat it into dispersal.
Just when victory was within grasp, Ashu’s expression changed drastically and he sprang up like he’d been scalded, instantly withdrawing the emerald power.
A second Xuanyuan Xiaoyue had appeared behind the first one, but the eyes of the new one was layers of thick frost, like she’d been carved from a block of ice.
“Is she who you mean by Xiaoyue’s body? She really is a corpse, but she’s still breathing!” Ashu retreated to Lu Yun’s side with great dismay.
Lu Yun looked in Xiaoyue’s direction, but shook his head. “I don’t see anything…”
He called upon the Spectral Eye, but only saw the vicious ghost that the girl had turned into. In his eyes, her corpse was still floating over the peak of the mountain, above the opened ice coffin.
“Is this a mirage or is something else at play here?!” The surreal situation abruptly felt incredibly horrific. Whatever it was, a corpse that breathed bore no good intentions. His Spectral Eye couldn’t see through to her core essence.
“Let’s go, we’re getting out of here!” He immediately made up his mind to leave; this level of existence wasn’t something he could handle.
However, they turned around to discover that the path behind them had been replaced by a void of white nothingness. Corpse upon corpse walked out of the emptiness—all of them the Xuanyuan clan members the group had passed by on their way here.
The Xuanyuan had died a long time ago, and were well and truly dead as there wasn’t the slightest hint of life force on them. They radiated such dreadful chill that they seemed to be one with the environment.
What was most shocking of all was that… they were breathing. More corpses that breathed! The cold that the corpses released was so powerful that it drifted through the air as a layer of haze.
“They’re not zombies, just corpses! They’re corpses without a soul, is something controlling them?” Ashu rapidly backed up, at a loss of what to do in a situation like this. In his eyes, the Xuanyuan Xiaoyue that’d suddenly appeared led her vicious ghost form back to the ice coffin.
But in the eyes of the others, the vicious ghost had left of her own accord.
“That’s right, there must be something else here that we haven’t seen, something controlling everything here. None of this makes sense.” Lu Yun summoned his luopan with a flip of his wrist.
A sparkling golden radiance burst out of the compass, enveloping the group protectively. He silently called upon formula dao to theorize everything that was taking place on the island. The indicators of the compass pointed to the peak of the mountain, and a bloody character for “great danger” formed on top of the luopan.
“There’s more malicious ghosts at work here alright!” Lu Yun muttered quietly. “There’s another ghost present other than Xuanyuan Xiaoyue. It’s controlled her and all the corpses here!”
