The indistinct sound of bubbles bursting echoed through the darkness and more immortals fell into silence. When they stood back up again, they were no more than human skins, wandering among their living peers on the hunt for their flesh and blood.
In this void, an inscrutable force exerted its influence upon the immortals’ senses. Their consciousnesses couldn’t leave their body, and even Lu Yun’s Spectral Eye was prevented from seeing his surroundings clearly.
Many immortals carefully stumbled along in the lightless expanse, projecting their consciousnesses over their bodies to guard against sneak attacks. Alas, the mystery in the darkness transformed them into skins all the same.
“There’s light here?” Lu Yun’s heart skipped a beat. There was a white dot in front of him. It didn’t look too bright, but it lit up a circle about three meters wide. Those who saw it felt a glimmer of hope dawn in their hearts. Quite a few immortals sped up their footsteps toward it.
“Don’t go, it’s a trap!” Lu Yun gasped when he sensed the flurry of air currents denoting movement. His voice was muffled by the mysterious power lingering in the air, so no one heard him at all.
Thirty or so of the stronger immortals were the first to reach it; there were even two aether dao immortals among them.
Fwoosh!
When they drew near, the light suddenly burst into a sinister, stark-white flame.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
It exploded several times with deafening noise, igniting something with the energy it gave off.
A pillar of flame surged into the sky, lighting up everything within several hundred meters and showing the thirty-odd immortals that they were ensnared in a misty formation. Soon, they shrieked in pain and anguish.
“The Corpse Refinement Formation and Hadal Bonefire. ...Jiangchen Xie!” Lu Yun blitzed backward, dragging the Scaled-Dragon King, Zou Longxiu, and the two cocoons floating in the air with him.
The ashen firelight of the Corpse Refinement Formation lit up the endless darkness, illuminating everything as far as the eye could see. Jiangchen Xie’s form appeared atop it. His cultivation had reached peak returned void, and the presence he emanated was as terrifyingly impenetrable as an ocean.
His zombie king body was no more. Instead, he was covered head to toe by pure bone arts—the Hadal Bonefire had fused entirely into him.
The vessel that had previously contained it—the gargantuan bone monstrosity—had been turned into a Corpse Refinement Formation. Hadal Bonefire seemed to have the power to drive back the darkness, as its burning flames weakened the intense malice in the air.
The immortals’ senses gradually returned to them.
“Junior sister… what happened to you?!” a shrill cry filled with incredulous fear rang out.
One unfortunate immortal was aghast to find the junior sister about to become his dao partner no more than a sheet of human skin. Her bones, flesh, nascent spirit, and organs were nowhere to be found.
“Have you seen my flesh… senior brother?” came the creepy question from the hollow mouth in her pretty skin. It slowly expanded, then wrapped her senior brother within. With a soft pop, he turned into a skin as well.
“Junior sister, my flesh is missing too.” The senior brother’s skin slowly puffed up. Its blank, sunken sockets focused on its ‘junior sister’.
“Let’s go find our flesh together, senior brother.” The bizarre pair ‘glanced’ at the nearby immortals with their eyeless cavities. “Look… so much flesh…”
The onlookers trembled. More human skins were mixed in among their number, and they now opened boneless arms to pounce upon their former comrades.
“Die!” someone screamed. Blades began flashing in resistance against the strange human skins.
The immortals couldn’t deal with the amplified Corpse Refinement Formation right now; they were too busy defending themselves against these skin horrors. In addition to all their strength in life, the skins had a newfound durability that prevented the immortals’ swords from leaving much more than light scratches.
The immortals began to be overwhelmed and converted to skins as well.
……
“What a bunch of fools.” Atop the Corpse Refinement Formation, Jiangchen Xie twisted his mouth into a sadistic sneer as he looked down on the chaos. “Those human skins are now part of this formation. The formation is the one killing people, not the skins.
“If you want to live, be good and come into my formation willingly. I shall leave your wills intact.”
The genius’ voice was filled with malicious cajoling and incited some of the immortals to recklessly dash headlong into the formation, only to be instantly turned into zombies.
Jiangchen Xie cackled with great satisfaction and turned his gaze toward Lu Yun in the opposite corner.
A black glimmer shimmered around Lu Yun’s body, shielding the Scaled-Dragon King and the others inside. The human skins swarmed around him, but all of them passed his group by. It was as if they didn’t exist.
……
“Disgusting wretch!”
A blazing pillar of light erupted from the thief’s tunnel that they’d entered through. Any human skins caught in its path were instantaneously disintegrated as the light blasted toward Jiangchen Xie’s Corpse Refinement Formation.
Boom!
The incredibly durable Corpse Refinement Formation convulsed, and a number of recently refined zombies were destroyed on the spot.
A sword-wielding youth in blue robes floated in from the tunnel.
“Corpse Refiner scum, prepare to die!” He pushed off again when his toes touched the ground, propelling himself airborne toward the formation. The sword in his hands flared with the same indescribably keen light that had comprised the light pillar, and it sliced into the formation with a vicious vengeance.
Jiangchen Xie’s face turned several shades of purple.
“Fangyang Xing of the Fangyang Clan! How are you still alive?!” he choked.
Just like Jiangchen Xie, Fangyang Xing was an unparalleled genius of his clan. They hailed from the same era of thirty thousand years ago.
However, Fangyang Xing was technically a generation older than Jiangchen Xie. He’d comprehended the void realm before Jiangchen Xie had, and communicated with the blood-soaked path forcibly through his own strength.
More importantly, he’d publicly and resolutely stepped onto the path in the face of the black long-haired monsters. No one had seen him since then.
It was only after Jiangchen Xie had noticed the void realm himself that he understood where Fangyang Xing had gone.
What did Fangyang Xing’s reappearance now mean?
The pillar-thick sword light was his combat art, and a single strike was enough to destroy Jiangchen Xie’s formation.