“Is that really you, Uncle Feng?” Dumbstruck, Yuchi Tianhuang stared at the man with widened eyes.
Lu Yun looked between them, confounded.
“You’ve finally come, Tianhuang.” Fengbo’s lips curved into a gentle smile. “I’ve been waiting for you for the past hundred and fifty thousand years.”
With a wave of his hand, an elegant and exquisite palace replaced the surrounding darkness.
“Uncle Feng’s Wind God Palace...” murmured Yuchi Tianhuang.
“Please, take a seat.” Fengbo waved two chairs into existence and made a gesture of invitation.
“What’s going on? What happened?” Yuchi Tianhuang looked at Fengbo, dazed. “Are you not dead, Uncle Feng?”
“No, I am indeed dead.” Fengbo shook his head. “Leigong, Yushi, Fengbo… Both of my peers have turned into corpse divines and await resurrection. I alone am truly dead.”
Fengbo was a corpse divine as well, but Lu Yun could see a difference between him and the others. Those were possessed by lingering obsessions and retained only a shred of their sanity.
The Earl of Wind, on the other hand, couldn’t come back to life or find a scapegoat. His soul had scattered, leaving behind only part of his spirit. It preserved his entire consciousness and enabled him to ‘live’ in the body of a corpse divine, but forever barred him from entering the cycle of reincarnation.
When he said Leigong, he meant Kui. Leigong, God of Thunder, was Kui’s title.
“How can this be? Why have things turned out like this?” Yuchi Tianhuang clutched his head with distress. He’d once travelled back a hundred and fifty thousand years to the Primordial Era and met many people, Fengbo being one of them.
At the time, he hadn’t realized that he’d travelled back in time. He’d thought he’d merely stumbled upon an ancient secret realm that was isolated from the outside world.
“Ai…” Fengbo sighed, casting his eyes toward Lu Yun. “I have always been here, and I knew of your existence as soon as you set foot into the tomb. You are the king of the netherworld who walks the world of immortals.”
Lu Yun nodded. Ghosts were yin spirits of the dead. They could naturally sense Lu Yun, and the terrifying presence radiating from him. Weak ghosts wouldn’t dare approach him, while powerful ghosts wouldn’t find him worthy of any attention, given the pitiful amount of strength he wielded at the moment.
Fengbo was the single most powerful ghost Lu Yun had encountered since arriving in the world of immortals. His mind and thoughts were as clear as those of a living being. It would be more apt to call him a ghost king—a ghostly counterpart of zombie kings.
Moreover, Fengbo’s yin spirit was trapped in the body of a corpse divine. Being both at the same time granted him greater strength than regular corpse divines and ghost kings. He could sense an energy on Lu Yun that was both oppressive and fatally alluring to ghosts.
Incidentally, his knowledge and experience allowed him to easily determine what Lu Yun was. Fengbo was too powerful, and Lu Yun too weak to tap into much of the power of the Tome of Life and Death. It would be impossible for the youth to defeat a ghost king like him.
Fortunately, Fengbo didn’t seem hostile.
……
Fengbo fell silent when Lu Yun confirmed his speculations, his face inscrutable.
“What’s going on here, Uncle Feng?” Yuchi Tianhuang shifted impatiently. He knew Lu Yun wanted to ask the same question, but didn’t know how, so he had to be the one to ask it.
“It was because of you,” Fengbo sighed. “We thought we’d be able to at least preserve the status quo even if we lost the war, but then you came to us from a hundred and fifty thousand years in the future and took from us all hope. Thus, the tomb was built.”
Yuchi Tianhuang fell silent.
Fengbo and the others had realized early on that Yuchi Tianhuang was from the future, and they’d obliquely gathered information from him about the impending war. Unfortunately for them, the answer came that there would be nothing left of the Primordial Era, and that the immortal dao itself would be severed!
There was no hope at all if even the immortal dao was broken. Adding further horror to the heap was that the world of immortals would be shattered into twenty-four facets!
Therefore, the immortal court began executing their plans before war broke out. If it would be impossible to survive the war alive, then they would make it through dead, preserving some of the court’s fortunes.
Not even all of the emperor-level heavyweights acting in concert would be enough to break apart the world of immortals and sever the immortal dao. That alone told them how powerful their unknown enemies were.
Thud!
Yuchi Tianhuang fell to his knees before Lu Yun and entreated in a trembling voice, “Milord, milord, please resurrect Uncle Feng!”
He could feel Fengbo’s pain. Being a yin spirit trapped in the body of a corpse divine resulted in an endless torment that constantly pushed him into a bottomless abyss. He could never come back to life, but he couldn’t die, either. Death was a luxury he would never possess, and he had no hope of reincarnation.
Lu Yun turned to Fengbo.
“No need.” Fengbo shook his head. “I will be your servant once you resurrect me, and I will no longer serve the immortal emperor.” He rose and put his hands behind his back, looking up at the void over his head. “Tianhuang, Sir Lu Yun, I have materialized to request a favor.”
“Please go ahead, senior.” Lu Yun nodded. To each their own. Fengbo had convictions and principles he wouldn’t give up, and Lu Yun wasn’t going to force him to change his mind.
“Stop Yushi and Leigong from coming back to life,” said Fengbo, his tone turning serious. “Yushi, Leigong, and I weren’t really buried here. We count as tomb keepers at the very most.”
Tomb keepers! Lu Yun shook.
They were living souls trapped in dead bodies to guard a tomb forever and ever. Huangqing’s tomb had also been guarded by such a group of tomb keepers.
So this was why Fengbo had retained his mental faculties after his soul turned into a ghost, and his body into a corpse divine after his death. He was a tomb keeper. There was still an oddity here, though. A tomb keeper’s soul should be alive, while Fengbo’s soul had died and become a ghost king.
“Leigong and Yushi have betrayed the immortal emperor. They have been corrupted by our enemies.” Fengbo shook his head with a sigh.
“Enemies? Who were they? The great war of immortals wasn’t a war between immortals like the legends say, was it? Who were you fighting?” Lu Yun honed in on the word ‘enemies’. If they had destroyed the primordial world and severed the immortal dao once, they could do the same thing again.
He had to be prepared.
“I was buried here fifty thousand years before the great war.” Fenbgo gave Lu Yun a half-smile. “Do you think I would know the answer?”
“Were there any signs beforehand?” Lu Yun didn’t care about the corruption of Leigong and Yushi; the unknown enemies were far more concerning.
“There were.” Fengbo nodded. “Both Empress Myrtlestar and Zhenwu died, and Emperor Polaris was gravely injured. The four divine kings—Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, and Black Tortoise—went missing. The patriarch of the water qilin was killed...
“In only the short span of ten thousand years, over half of the most powerful immortals in the world had either gone missing or died.
“Thus marked the beginning of the end.”