Chapter 986: Eventuality P10: Aim to Obtain the Devil’s Den Formation

A few days later.

The vast expanse of the Orveth Sea stretched endlessly beneath the group as Rumaal, Kanis, and the Swordfall cultivators continued their journey toward Emerald Cove Island.

After spending so much time traveling across the sea, even the most patient cultivators among them were beginning to grow restless.

However, Kanis remained composed, occasionally consulting the information he had gathered before changing their route. Rumaal, on the other hand, was more interested in reaching their destination as quickly as possible. The sooner they found Aksai Everwood, the sooner he could recover the jade slips Kalina had taken with her.

Fortunately, their journey didn’t take much longer.

A faint gray haze appeared on the distant horizon. At first, it looked like an ordinary bank of fog hovering above the sea, but as the group approached, the haze gradually grew denser and spread across a vast area of water.

Soon, the outline of an island emerged from within the mist.

Emerald Cove Island.

Yet the imperial cultivators couldn’t see much of the island itself. A thick blanket of rolling gray fog surrounded the entire landmass, rising from the sea like an enormous curtain. The fog extended high into the sky, eventually converging above the island to form a massive dome that completely concealed everything within.

The scene looked less like an island surrounded by ordinary mist and more like a small world sealed away from the outside.

Rumaal slowed down almost immediately. His eyes narrowed as he examined the enormous formation barrier, and the relaxed expression he had maintained throughout the journey gradually disappeared.

"What’s this?"

Kanis also stopped, his sharp eyes fixed on the gray dome. The Swordfall cultivators following behind him quickly came to a halt, spreading out across the sky as they waited for their leader’s instructions.

For several moments, nobody spoke.

The formation surrounding Emerald Cove Island wasn’t particularly extravagant in appearance. There were no dazzling runes floating in the air, no enormous pillars supporting the heavens, and no visible streams of Spirit Essence flowing through intricate patterns. It was simply a vast expanse of rolling gray fog that concealed the island from view.

And yet, the more Rumaal examined it, the more uncomfortable he became.

He couldn’t sense the formation’s boundaries with any certainty, let alone determine where its energy originated. The gray fog seemed to exist everywhere and nowhere at once, giving him the peculiar impression that the entire island had been swallowed by something far greater than a conventional defensive formation.

"Friend Kanis, what do you make of this?" Rumaal asked, turning toward the younger cultivator.

Kanis didn’t answer immediately. He raised one hand, and a faint ripple of sword intent spread from his body. It wasn’t an attack. He was merely using his Sword Intent to probe the formation’s outer boundary, hoping to discern its structure through the slightest fluctuations in the surrounding energy.

However, the moment his sword intent approached the gray fog, it disappeared without producing any noticeable reaction.

Kanis’s expression grew serious. He then released his Spirit Sense.

As a Half-step Nascent Soul cultivator and a True Sword Cultivator, his spiritual perception was considerably stronger than that of ordinary Lord-level cultivators. Even when confronted with complex defensive arrays, he could usually detect at least some traces of their underlying structure.

Given enough time, he might not be able to decipher an entire formation, but he could generally determine its approximate range, identify its energy fluctuations, and locate potential weaknesses.

This time, however, his Spirit Sense encountered an invisible barrier almost immediately.

It couldn’t penetrate even an inch beyond the formation’s outer boundary.

Kanis withdrew his Spirit Sense and stared at the gray dome with undisguised surprise.

"Interesting."

Rumaal glanced at him. "You found something?"

"Nothing at all." Kanis shook his head. "That’s precisely what’s interesting."

He extended his hand toward the formation, although he remained several dozen miles away from the gray fog.

"Ordinary defensive formations, no matter how sophisticated, must follow certain principles. They draw upon Spirit Essence, manipulate the surrounding environment, or use a combination of formations, artifacts, and natural terrain to establish their defensive structures. Even when their designs are unfamiliar, their underlying principles usually leave behind some recognizable traces."

Kanis paused, his gaze growing more contemplative.

"But this Emerald Cove Island’s formation is different. I can’t identify its energy circulation, determine how it maintains its structure, or even tell whether the gray fog is the formation itself or merely a manifestation of something hidden beneath it."

Rumaal’s brows furrowed.

"Are you saying that it doesn’t follow the principles of conventional array formations?"

"I’m saying that I can’t find any evidence that it does. And one shouldn’t take this formation lightly even if it looks a bit shoddy at first glance. The more one knows about the formation, the more cautious they’d become seeing this formation. This thing... it... it feels like it did not originate in the Dadangar World at all."

Kanis’s answer caused several nearby Swordfall cultivators to exchange glances.

Array formations were an essential part of Spirit cultivation. They could defend sects, conceal secret realms, suppress powerful enemies, and even alter the natural environment within a certain area.

The Shinayin Empire possessed countless formation inheritances, some of which had been passed down for thousands of years. Its major factions maintained specialized experts capable of studying and dismantling unfamiliar formations.

Naturally, Orveth also possessed its own formation traditions, although its inheritance had suffered greatly over the centuries.

However, even the most unusual formations generally shared some fundamental characteristics. Their creators might use different methods, but the underlying principles remained recognizable to experienced cultivators.

The formation surrounding Emerald Cove Island seemed to defy that expectation.

Rumaal slowly circulated his Spirit Essence, allowing his spiritual perception to spread across the gray fog. He examined the formation from several different angles, attempting to identify its weaknesses or discover a trace of its energy source.

The result was no better than Kanis’s.

He couldn’t even determine whether the formation was drawing energy from the island’s Spirit Veins, the surrounding sea, or some other source entirely.

"Could this be an ancient formation inheritance from Orveth?" Rumaal asked after a while. "Perhaps something left behind by a powerful cultivator from the distant past?"

"It’s possible." Kanis nodded thoughtfully. "Orveth’s cultivation inheritance is far more fragmented than that of the Shinayin Empire. There are bound to be ancient techniques and formation principles that have been lost to history. We shouldn’t assume that everything unfamiliar to us must be beyond the scope of Dadangar’s cultivation system."

He paused before adding, "Still, this formation is strange even by those standards."

Rumaal couldn’t help but agree.

They were both experienced Lord-level cultivators, and neither had reached their current realm through luck alone.

They had encountered countless formations throughout their cultivation journeys, including some that were deliberately designed to mislead spiritual perception.

Yet neither could find a familiar starting point from which to analyze the formation surrounding Emerald Cove Island.

"Or perhaps the deviation lies in Orveth’s Spirit Essence concepts," Rumaal suggested. "We’ve already heard that the release of the Dao Paths has changed the cultivation environment here. The native cultivators might have access to peculiar Spirit Essence principles that aren’t commonly used in the Empire since the Mad Immortal’s departure.

"After all, the Mad Immortal didn’t cross the Duya Forest because of the joint intervention of the Eternal Sea’s forces. If the deviation in concepts dates back to that time, it would all make sense."

"That would explain some of the irregularities," Kanis replied.

Neither of them had any reason to suspect that the formation might originate from a cultivation system entirely different from the one they knew.

After all, the Devil’s Den Formation wasn’t an inheritance from Dadangar. Its principles didn’t belong to the formation traditions of Orveth or the Shinayin Empire. It belonged to a world full of corrupted druids. Thus, even most Spirit cultivators from the Eternal Sea might not be able to decipher this formation.

Without knowing what it was called, how it had been constructed, or what kind of energy governed its operation, even the most experienced formation master in the Empire would struggle to make sense of it.

Moreover, because of his paranoid nature, Aksai had never revealed those secrets to anyone, not even his subordinates. He had only taught them how to use the formation in his absence without explaining how it worked.

The formation had protected Emerald Cove Island for decades, concealing its inner workings from outsiders while turning the island’s surroundings into dangerous territory for intruders.

That being said, "difficult to decipher" didn’t necessarily mean "impossible to breach."

To Rumaal and Kanis, it was simply an inexplicable defensive formation that had appeared in an isolated corner of Orveth. They couldn’t name it, much less decipher it. But that didn’t mean they were wary of it.

In fact, the peculiar nature of the formation only fueled the greed in Kanis’s eyes. His Sword Intent stirred as he examined it with the eyes of a robber and the expression of someone eager to conquer something precious. That was usually how True Sword Cultivators behaved.

"Heh! I came here with you to return a favour, but it seems I may have to demand this array formation as a reward for my efforts, my friend. It’s fine if you don’t consider my debt repaid this time, but I must get my hands on this formation at all costs."

Kanis eventually withdrew his hand and looked at the gray dome with a thoughtful expression.

"And since we can’t decipher the formation, we can only brute-force our way in."

He turned toward Rumaal, a faint smile appearing on his face.

"Friend Rumaal, would you like to try first?"