The sight made everyone’s scalp nearly split apart, an icy breath seeping up through the crown of every skull. It was simply beyond comprehension. What manner of person could be so powerful — to be locked in a direct confrontation on the immortal path itself?

The Mountain Phoenix was immensely powerful — a Quasi-Emperor at the third tier — and yet without even drawing close, it had been sent flying backwards. Blood dripped from the corner of its mouth, its face white as ash. It had suffered a severe blow.

It fell to the ground, its expression utterly drained of color, its eyes filled with nothing but terror. A mere presence could injure it. Did beings of such power truly still exist in this world?

In the past, it had been proud and unyielding, never believing that a single person could look down upon a Quasi-Emperor from such a height — not even the ancient supreme-level existences, it had thought.

Yet today it had seen exactly that. Neither of those two figures had moved at all — it was simply that by drawing too near, it had been crushed by the terrifying presence bearing down upon it, nearly shattering its bones completely.

The long-since-should-have-closed immortal path had not yet shut entirely because of these two figures — though it was barely held open, a stretch of only a hundred zhang, and the two sat at the far end of that hundred zhang, barely visible and indistinct.

Ye Fan helped the Mountain Phoenix to its feet and channeled divine power, employing the “Zhe” word secret to treat its injuries and allow it to stabilize — the vital energy in its blood flowed freely again at last, and the injuries of the Great Dao dispersed.

The thirteen great demonic creatures were utterly silent, still as crickets sensing danger. In their time, they had moved across heaven and earth with contempt, looking down upon entire regions — each of them had been the most powerful living being in their respective stellar systems. Otherwise, what confidence would they have had to set out alone in those old days, coming here to seek immortal treasure? Yet now, they felt the crushing weight of their own smallness. Before supreme-level existences, they amounted to nothing at all.

Ye Fan told everyone to stand back. He stood at the entrance of the rift and looked within, holding the Chaos Green Lotus crosswise before him, without activating any divine power — only his Genesis Sky Eye to observe.

“They are not real.” When these words left his lips, though they allowed a collective exhalation of relief, they struck the group with an even greater blow. What manner of beings were these? So powerful as to be beyond the real, bordering on the illusory, the boundary of the fictitious.

These were two shadows, sitting quietly at the end of chaos, formed entirely from laws. Each of them was as deep and unfathomable as an ocean — impossible to see through to the bottom.

“In the past, two people sat here facing one another. This is a re-manifestation of that real scene. They left behind indestructible imprints — even after ten thousand years, the Dao and its laws have not dispersed.”

When this conclusion was spoken aloud, a chill seeped into every person’s bones. There were no words for those two figures — only “peerless across all eras” and “unparalleled beneath all heaven” could begin to describe them.

What manner of people were they, to have stood in confrontation on the immortal path? This was clearly not something so simple as a striving to become immortal. This was a supreme and absolute opposition.

A battle fought all the way onto the immortal path itself — a contest at the absolute pinnacle of human existence!

Ye Fan retreated and then employed the great divine ability to trace origins — after all, what lay here were spectral shadows of the Dao and laws, not living people. He felt that the attempt was worth making without fear of rebound.

But the moment he began, this place immediately rang with rolling thunder. Heaven and earth seemed on the verge of collapse, and imperial Dao laws floated to the surface.

Ye Fan swept the Chaos Green Lotus in a wide arc and retreated with maximum speed, halting this action immediately. He drew a sharp breath inward. Those two were too powerful — no one of later generations could probe their secrets.

He closed his eyes. Though he had failed, in that brief fragment of a moment he had still gained something — he had caught a splinter of time’s light. He focused his heart to decipher it.

And then his body shook violently. Two people had sat in this place for two thousand years, locked in opposition.

This was truly not merely a striving for immortality. How could they do this — mutually restraining one another, neither storming the immortal path, simply for the sake of contesting supremacy?

“One of them is that lump of flesh!” Ye Fan said.

If that was so, then the other — could it be Wushi? The heavens — how utterly overturning this was. Were they still engaged in this other form of contest even now?

That great bell was trying to drag the lump of flesh into another world — and the two were mutually restraining one another, leaving people speechless. How long had this battle persisted?

A person had once lived on the immortal path — this may have been the most terrifying battle in all of ancient history.

Ye Fan breathed out a long sigh. He thought of things he had heard in the past, and now found them proven true.

More than three hundred years ago, when the darkness and upheaval had erupted, the Wushi Bell and the stone scriptures had both offered warnings. Wushi the Great Emperor, in his later years, had devoted himself to suppressing the immortal path, with no strength left for anything else — and who could have expected that this turned out to be the truth?

The dark upheaval — that terrible catastrophe, that world of such hopelessness and despair — and yet Wushi the Great Emperor had not been able to do much in response. Even his Chaos Bell had flown away and not participated, driven instead into the immortal path to act as a seal.

At the time, many had felt regret over this. Now, everything was clear.

Wushi the Great Emperor had not merely been suppressing the immortal path — he had been suppressing a person. Someone who may have been the most powerful individual in all of history.

The years are blades that cut down even the greatest of heroes. One did not know whether the undefeatable Great Emperor of those days had survived. Now only a great bell stood in his place, suppressing that lump of flesh — a sight that moved the heart to sorrow.

The two spectral shadows within the chaos passage before them — one was Wushi, the other was the former true body of the lump of flesh, from many tens of thousands of years ago. One was gone; the other had undergone nirvana. Was this truly the case?

“Wushi the Great Emperor — one of the most powerful figures in all of history. Are the figures here truly him?!”

The thirteen great demonic creatures trembled with agitation, one by one. Though they came from different races and different stellar systems, before that supreme being who had shaken the ancient and the present alike — who in life had swept across the nine heavens and ten earths — they could not help but feel reverence and awe, and a deep and genuine respect.

“He was one of a kind — he created a glory that can never be replicated!”

“At the end of the immortal path, who stands at the peak? One glimpse of Wushi, and the Dao turns to emptiness — these words are the finest expression of what that Great Emperor represented in those days!”

Even the Mountain Phoenix was moved with emotion, paying heartfelt admiration to that ancient supreme being it could never hope to meet, yet who had long been revered in its heart. Even having reached the Quasi-Emperor realm, it still looked up at that figure.

Ye Fan sighed. He did not know what had ultimately become of Wushi the Great Emperor. For a figure as supremely dominant as him to have uttered the words “without the strength to attend to anything else” — one could only imagine how arduous those years must have been.

Consider: this was a man who had entered his later years, and yet had still sat in this confrontation for two thousand more years. What kind of legend did that make him?

The enemy had clearly mastered methods of metamorphosis and immortality to a heaven-defying degree — abilities that were developed long before this point. For Wushi in his later years, this was deeply unfavorable.

And the evidence bore it out: that adversary had survived, reborn within the lump of flesh, not extinguished.

The years are blades that cut away too much, leaving one helpless. Ye Fan truly hoped that Wushi had also survived — yet now only the Chaos Bell remained to fight in his place, making it all too easy to harbor an ominous premonition.

“Do not touch those two figures. In those days they were evenly matched — both deployed their most supreme laws and order. The imprints they left behind exist in a state of balance. Should that balance be broken, this place will surely shatter, and all things within it will be swept to annihilation,” Ye Fan said.

At last, he fixed his gaze upon the Immortal Bell — though formed from chains of ordered law rather than the true physical body, it still contained within it the marvels that steal the generative power of heaven and earth.

Setting aside himself and the Mountain Phoenix, the others could only observe from a distance, with no means of drawing close.

Even Ye Fan proceeded with great caution and care. He opened his mouth and breathed out the All-Matter Mother Qi Cauldron — it rapidly expanded, then slowly began to absorb those imprints of order and laws.

“What a cauldron!” All were shaken. They silently marveled at Ye Fan’s heaven-defying nature — to have condensed the primordial source of all matter’s mother qi into a cauldron. That had been the dream of how many across the ages, never to be achieved.

“It is the finest vessel for this purpose. It may be able to hold and carry these laws and rules of order — these were sketched out by an imperial-level cultivator, and their divine might is boundless,” the Mountain Phoenix nodded in agreement.

The runes and divine chains forming this divine bell — the profundity of their Dao-imprints might even surpass those of an imperial weapon. For this was the internal tracery of the Immortal Bell that even a paramount existence had desired to obtain.

Such things — never mind others — even imperial-level cultivators had wanted to sketch out. If understood completely, there would be boundless and wondrous applications.

“It has been locked in place!”

Ye Fan was startled. Upon the form sketched from runes, there was the power of the sole secret art he had ever learned from the Wushi scripture — that supreme law, whose name was: Wushi.

This great bell had originally been on the verge of exploding — clearly designed as a killing blow aimed at Wushi. Yet it had been driven back to its origin point and halted here.

The Mountain Phoenix also sensed it, and its scalp immediately crawled. This was a great killing device, primed to detonate at any moment. One misstep and an entire star river could be annihilated.

“This… its power, when it detonates, should be roughly equivalent to an imperial weapon detonating — it was originally a killing technique intended to be used against Wushi the Great Emperor.”

Ye Fan nodded. “It seems that person was also pushed to a certain degree of desperation. Otherwise, why would they destroy the Immortal Bell imprints they had labored so painstakingly to sketch — truly, the person they faced in opposition was too powerful, leaving them with no means of escape.”

This was a heaven-defying killing device, capable of annihilating all stars and rivers.

Never before had Ye Fan been so tense and so focused in his attentiveness. One misstep, and not only they — the entire solar system and the vast stellar domains surrounding it would be obliterated.

Fortunately, that world-transcending secret art — Wushi — exceeding the bounds of all ordinary forces in the world, had locked those immortal Dao-runes in place and driven them back to their origin point. Under ordinary circumstances, they would not detonate.

The All-Matter Mother Qi Cauldron successfully absorbed them, as the lines of tracery sank one by one into the cauldron’s walls.

Ye Fan drew the cauldron back into his body. He had penetrated and understood that Wushi secret art — yet to cultivate it to such a level as to fix these runes in place, there was still a long path ahead. That would require cultivation at the imperial Dao level.

The greatest gain of this entire journey was this — to have taken away a great killing device. What power it might ultimately contain, no one could say with certainty. But one did not expect it would disappoint.

Once more they came before the vast and imposing palace hall. The lump of flesh and the Wushi Bell were locked in a standoff, the two of them trapped at the threshold of the spatial rift, neither able to advance nor retreat.

“Is there any way to drive that lump of flesh into the other world? As I see it now, the Wushi Bell wishes to drag it in — I ought to find some way to help.” Ye Fan murmured to himself.

“Do not act rashly!” All thirteen great demonic creatures were alarmed. This was a being that had gone toe to toe with Wushi the Great Emperor, locked in confrontation on the immortal path for many long years. For them to approach would be suicide.

“It is in the midst of nirvana — in its most weakened state. This is the best possible opportunity.” A flash of light crossed Ye Fan’s palm as the All-Matter Mother Qi Cauldron appeared in his hand. He truly wished to hurl it forward — yet he was also concerned that the Wushi secret art had not been unsealed, making it impossible to trigger the killing mechanism. Were he to rouse the lump of flesh from its nirvana instead, it would be a pointless death.

“Is there some way?” In his other hand, Ye Fan held the Chaos Green Lotus. He could not help asking aloud, and he swept it lightly — he greatly wanted to try using this weapon to send the lump of flesh into the other world.

Suddenly, the Chaos Green Lotus swayed. Droplets of radiance scattered like stars, forming one after another mysterious symbol in the void, imprinting a field of characters that could not be read or recognized.

“What?!”

Ye Fan’s eyes flew wide open with astonishment. This was the first time the Green Lotus had manifested such a peculiar phenomenon. What was happening — had the artifacts and objects connected to the ancient Great Emperors all awakened?

First the Wushi Bell, and now the Chaos Green Lotus — two such terrifying changes occurring within a single day.

Those runes, vivid and dripping green, pervaded by chaos breath, brilliant and dazzling — flowed outward like rivers into the outside world, sinking into the expanse of the star-filled void.

Upon an ancient star, across a vast ocean, green lotuses bloomed everywhere — connecting sky and earth — until the entire sea had turned a vivid, jade-green hue. At the very center stood a single exceptional Chaos Green Lotus, towering into the clouds, and cradled within its flower was a crimson-red heart.

And upon a broad leaf of chaos lotus, a young woman sat in meditation. At this moment she opened her eyes in astonishment, watching as the runes one by one blazed and imprinted themselves upon the void.

The Chaos Green Lotus within the sea suddenly swayed — and then rang out with a thunderous sound, its roots and stem pulling free from the sea, tearing open the void directly and vanishing from that place.

This was the Green Emperor’s true body. After the Green Emperor had transformed into human form, he had refined this lotus into an imperial weapon.

Within the burial ground of Yinghou, before the vast and majestic palace hall, the void split open — and an enormous green lotus appeared, startling Ye Fan utterly. It had arrived with such sudden, complete unexpectedness.