Chapter Ninety-Two: Sewing a Wedding Robe for Another

The Primordial Thunder Lord appeared once more. It was only a single eye, yet it filled Xu Zhong with an unprecedented dread.

He could feel that the Thunder Lord was undergoing some kind of metamorphosis, one that seemed to be bringing him back from the dead bit by bit.

Xu Zhong at once gathered all the power in his body and poured it into his eyes, then focused his essence, qi, and spirit to a single point so that he could unleash the utmost power of his Underworld-Gazing Eye Technique.

After a moment, Xu Zhong saw the entire sealed realm shrouded in a wash of blood-red light. All the light within it seemed to be devoured and absorbed by that crimson hue, condensing into a single drop of essence blood.

That drop of essence blood hung high in the vault of heaven like a bright moon, eerie and majestic, bearing an irresistible and overwhelming power.

In this utterly bizarre state, Xu Zhong saw a river of time reflecting the Thunder Lord’s form.

The Thunder Lord stood in the past upon that river of time, at its very source. The past twisted and shifted behind him, countless accomplished alchemists of every race bowing in submission at his feet, while all manner of indescribable, wondrous and uncanny sights writhed and flowed about like swimming dragons and soaring fish.

Looking down from above, the Thunder Lord saw Wei Yan madly devouring the blood and life force of every alchemist in the entire palace.

That blood and life force gathered into one ferocious blood dragon after another, crossing and intertwining in dense profusion, clinging to Wei Yan’s body as though they had become the great veins within him.

With a mere exhalation, he swallowed the trembling beast into his belly.

All manner of divine radiance spread across the beast’s body.

Yet the beast was not afraid of Wei Yan. The divine light flickered and waned upon its body, and the nine tails behind it were like nine blades, stirring Wei Yan’s insides until they rasped and creaked. His still-imperfect flesh quivered violently as though it might split apart.

Helplessly, Wei Yan spat the beast back out again.

“Once my body is perfected, I will come for you again,” Wei Yan said. His eyes burst forth with rainbow streaks of blood and qi, his breathing rumbled like thunder, and every word he uttered made the entire sealed realm tremble.

The innate gods were far too powerful.

Wei Yan had only just set foot into the realm of the innate gods, yet he already possessed such terrifying might. Then just how powerful must alchemists such as the Thunder Lord, who had long since entered this domain and were even more formidable still, truly be?

Xu Zhong could not imagine it.

He watched Wei Yan press onward, point out a finger, and refine all the alchemists that fell from the Fire Radiance Secret Treasury, turning them into blood dragons that hung upon his body like ornaments.

The Fire Radiance Secret Treasury returned to its place, followed by the Metal Radiance Secret Treasury and the Wood Radiance Secret Treasury.

Somewhere in that stretch of time, Wei Yan finally and completely refined his fleshly body.

He looked at the blood dragons around him, swallowed them in a single mouthful, then glanced toward Feng Xun, the beast, the great monk, and the others in the distance who still had a breath left in them, and could not help licking his lips.

He strode toward them.

Yet strangely enough, no matter how far or how long he walked, he could not reach his destination. It seemed he had been pacing in place all along, and of this he was wholly unaware.

Xu Zhong kept urging the Underworld-Gazing Art, exhausting every ounce of his own wisdom, and at last he managed to glimpse a sliver of the mystery.

At that moment, Wei Yan was like a fish already caught in a jar, having stepped into the great round cauldron of his own accord.

Within the cauldron, the forces of space and time surged violently, stretching both without limit and transforming them into an eternal world with neither end nor boundary.

If Wei Yan had detected the trap, that would have been one thing. But he detected nothing at all, and simply kept walking forward in his own way.

With every step he took, time lengthened his shadow by another degree, gradually extending a vast and mighty river across his body, where every single instant of his journey could be recorded with perfect clarity.

That river stretched endlessly forward and backward in both directions, passing through his empty left chest and reflecting his past, present, and future.

“He has not reclaimed his heart. His escape path is incomplete.”

Xu Zhong was bleeding from every part of his body. Picking Moon hurriedly refined elixirs and sent their medicinal power into him, and only then was his life force barely sustained.

The more Xu Zhong saw, the greater the damage to himself became.

“The Thunder Lord!” Xu Zhong’s heart chilled.

He saw the Thunder Lord move. No longer merely watching, the being descended from the heavens and walked toward the great round cauldron.

At the same time, the image of the Thunder Lord appeared before and behind him upon that river.

He was like a fastidious gourmand, regarding the food before him with great disdain.

“Why would I think this?”

In the next moment, Xu Zhong abruptly asked himself this question.

This was a thought that flickered unmistakably in his mind.

“The Thunder Lord is devouring people.”

His thoughts flashed faster and faster, too fast for him to reflect on whether he had been influenced.

Just as Xu Zhong had said, the instant the Thunder Lord entered the round cauldron, he began to devour people.

He split into two, appearing in Wei Yan’s past and future, leaving only the present behind.

He ate slowly, seizing every moment of Wei Yan’s past and future. Starting from the head, like a giant python feeding, he opened his mouth to the absolute limit, until the entire head was nothing but a mouth, and bit by bit stuffed Wei Yan into it.

Once the head had been swallowed, the throat swelled by a third. But after Wei Yan’s entire being had been eaten, such phenomena vanished instead.

One Wei Yan was devoured, and so one more Thunder Lord came into being.

As the number of Thunder Lords grew greater and greater, the number of Wei Yans dwindled, and with that came Wei Yan’s increasingly feeble cultivation.

By then, he had already fallen from an innate god to an inner realm alchemist.

Even if he were a fool, even if he were dim beyond belief, he should have realized by now.

So he suddenly turned around.

But behind him there was only emptiness, nothing at all.

That pair of eyes remained covered by the Thunder Lord’s hand.

“Why have I grown weaker?” Wei Yan found nothing, and so asked himself and answered himself: “Is my own heart devouring my power?”

It was a wildly absurd, self-soothing excuse.

Yet at this moment Wei Yan’s thoughts were already in chaos, and he could not detect the flaw in it at all.

“Does it want to revive as well?” Wei Yan snorted coldly.

Then he looked toward the people in the distance and frowned.

“I have clearly been walking for a very long time. Why have I still not arrived?”

Thoughts may be deceived; time and space may be stretched. But a being’s perception of time and space cannot be altered.

There are supreme experts who can stretch the instant of a single thought into ten thousand years. Yet for an alchemist within that fleeting instant, the ten thousand years they traverse are not changed.

When they emerge from those ten thousand years, their faces are aged, their hair is white, while in the outside world only a single thought has passed.

This is an exceedingly terrifying and equally sinister art.

Wei Yan was advancing under such conditions.

He had already walked for a day and a night, yet still had not reached his destination.

Even after discovering the problem, he still could not think of a solution.

And so he could only grit his teeth and keep walking forward.

But the longer he walked, the more power leaked from within him, and the smaller the entire world became.

At last, Wei Yan reached the end of heaven and earth.

“Thunder Lord?” He looked upward and saw only a mouth vast beyond measure opening above him.

The upper lip had become thick layered clouds; the lower lip, heaped and surging magma. Countless teeth stood in rows like upright and inverted mountains, while the long tongue was a broad avenue, yet covered in savage barbs, and on each barb there hung one of his corpses.

The plot had reached its dead end, and the Thunder Lord no longer troubled to veil his thoughts. Thus Wei Yan saw it.

“So you have become this clever, and learned to use schemes and tricks,” Wei Yan said with a tragic smile. “If you had possessed such wit back then as you do now, you would not have met your end.”

The Thunder Lord made no reply. He merely kept his mouth open, waiting for Wei Yan to enter, or perhaps giving Wei Yan a chance to choose for himself whether to go in or not.

“Now that you understand schemes and tricks, now that you have even learned the art of planting a demonic seed within the Daoist heart, then even if I must die, what of it?”

Wei Yan laughed uproariously and walked into the Thunder Lord’s mouth.

“I hate that I was born a million years too early...”

The Thunder Lord closed his mouth, resumed his normal form, and then spat out Wei Yan’s golden core.

That was Wei Yan’s Dao.

Each person’s Dao is different.

Daos can coexist, but they cannot devour one another; they can only contaminate one another.

Thus a golden core must first be refined. Only once the refinement succeeds can it be swallowed and digested.

For an existence as powerful as the Thunder Lord, recklessly devouring another’s golden core would only contaminate his own grand Dao.

That would be a grave and fatal wound, and he would never leave himself such a hidden danger.

The golden core entered the round cauldron, and then the Thunder Lord put away the cauldron and cast a distant glance at Xu Zhong.

“You must be cautious. Otherwise, your fate will not be any better than Wei Yan’s.”

Having said this, he vanished from the sealed realm.

He was gone, but the storm he left behind never ceased.

Throughout the secret realm, round cauldrons rose one after another in every place.

These cauldrons were ritual vessels.

They had once been instruments for offering sacrifice to heaven and earth, and they were also the vessels in which the Thunder Lord cooked his food.

At that moment, the floating cauldrons trembled as the liquid within them roiled and surged. In an instant, a blood-colored river gushed forth, twisting in the air like blood dragons before flying toward the Thunder Lord.

The Thunder Lord extended his hand, seized the blood dragons, and crushed them into strands of blood like curling incense smoke.

These blood threads seemed to possess a will of their own as they fled back into the Thunder Lord himself.

Over a million years of accumulation—who knew how much of the essence of sun and moon had gathered in these ritual vessels?

And over those million years, alchemists had entered them from time to time and died within, their bodies sinking, their blood and life force smelting and settling until they became the cauldrons’ liquid contents.

As for their souls, they were forever denied rebirth within that liquid. Under the Thunder Lord’s control, they were refined with ease into undying spiritual radiance.

And so the Thunder Lord opened his mouth and swallowed that undying spiritual radiance whole.

He, like Wei Yan, was also waiting for a chance, waiting for the moment to rise from the dead.

After Wei Yan was revived, he absorbed massive amounts of blood and undying spiritual radiance, serving like a layer of filter cloth that separated the impurities for the Thunder Lord.

In the Thunder Lord’s eyes, Wei Yan was the finest of great medicines.

He struck at Wei Yan when Wei Yan was at his peak and still within his control, and devoured him with effortless ease.

After absorbing those blood dragons, the Thunder Lord looked downward once.

Beside the Dark Nine Abyss, Yun Yong’s elder sister let out a sigh. Her imprint was burning away, and a long zither gave off a soft chime.

The Thunder Lord blew downward once, and the imprint vanished together with the zither.

The Thunder Lord did not continue devouring people.

For him, only alchemists who had reached the realm of the innate gods were qualified to become his food.

Those in the Guarding Unity realm, the Preserving Truth realm, and even the inner realm were not even worthy of being an appetizer.

A moment later, the Thunder Lord disappeared.

The cauldrons likewise merged once more into the corners of the secret realm, waiting for the next harvest.

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Chapter Ninety-Two: Wedding Robes for Another. Free to read.