Chapter 1363: The Ancient Place & The Young Dragon!

Before Phei had crossed the final distance to the penthouse, he drew in a deep breath and let Paradise Island fill his lungs again.

The island’s cold nght wind threaded through his long white hair, lifting the smooth strands from around his face and streaming them behind him while the city lights below painted faint gold across the edges. The longer hair suited him in an almost irritating way, framing his features that were unfairly handsome.

His jaw looked cleaner and sharper and the relaxed expression upon his face carried the confidence of someone who had spent far longer than two weeks learning exactly how difficult he was to kill.

Something inside him loosened almost immediately.

He had missed this place far more than he realized.

The Primordial Frozen Zone had possessed Essence of terrifying depth and potency, especially within its oldest regions where frozen power had accumulated for ages without disturbance, but Paradise Island carried something entirely different. Its mana felt ancient in a way mere density could not explain, carrying an age and heaviness that seemed woven through the island itself.

Even its scent was different.

The air tasted richer against his senses, touched by old mana, elemental energies and whatever had slept beneath this island long before any of the people currently living upon it were born.

Phei closed his eyes briefly and allowed himself to enjoy it.

The Frozen Zone had become home in its own strange way, especially after he and his little sister transformed that beautiful glacial hollow beneath the auroras into somewhere they could actually live, but Paradise Island carried memories in every breath.

There were traces here he recognized without consciously searching for them, energies belonging to people he loved, familiar formations buried beneath buildings and land of the legacy families, ancient power sleeping deeper inside the island he couldn’t quite touch really and the peculiar mixture of Mana and Essence that had once overwhelmed Phei’s senses whenever he tried looking too deeply.

Now it felt different.

Or perhaps Phei was the one who had become different enough to finally notice what had always been there.

The instant he stopped deliberately containing himself and suppressing his cultivation and his whole being, Paradise Island reacted.

Invisible waves of some kind of essence; his very essence and his Element’s Elemental Essence rolled away from his body and sank into the reality around him spreading farther than Phei expected before disappearing into the ancient foundation of the island.

The Void Essence had moved first, silent and almost impossible to distinguish from empty space as it touched reality and the already existing residue of the Void that had never completely left the island now it all became some kind of domain as it rolled with into the island. Void-Ice had followed through the air as an unseen deathly cold that never actually lowered the temperature, while Primordial Blood Essence carried its own deep living weight beneath both of them, something ancient and predatory enough that nearby mana seemed to hesitate before rushing toward him!

And rush it did.

Phei opened his eyes slowly as Mana from the surrounding island began flowing toward him in endless invisible tides than it usually did.

It came from everywhere—

From the atmosphere above Paradise Island, from the ancient ground beneath, from the forests and gardens, from the water surrounding the island and from deeper currents of power his old senses would never have noticed.

The movement was subtle enough that ordinary people would continue their lives without realizing anything had changed, but to Phei it felt as though the entire island had taken one enormous breath and somehow decided he was where that breath should end.

If he had not learned how to hide his presence properly, any cultivator sufficiently powerful on Hell’s Paradise Island could have located him from that reaction alone. They would not even have needed to search for Phei himself:

All they would have needed was to follow the immense streams of Mana bending in tides toward one point in the sky.

This had never happened to this extent before.

Once before the Void awakening and before left, Phei could barely interact with Mana naturally at all. His body belonged too deeply to other forms of power, and without an appropriate method he could absorb Mana as its own independent energy and to manipulate certain manifestations of it and exist within places saturated by it, but simply absorbing environmental Mana into himself had been another matter entirely.

No matter how Phei wanted, he couldn’t, and no matter how the mana brought itself to him, it always bounced off.

But Sienna’s elixir had changed that too.

The brutal cleansing and refinement from the World Essence had opened and widened his meridians so drastically that his body had developed a primitive natural ability to accept Mana even though Phei had never properly learned any Energy Absorption Method for mana or other energies he didn’t possess yet, or what some cultivators preferred calling aBreathing Technique.

So after that his body simply drank a fraction of what touched it because the pathways were open enough and his foundation had become absurdly receptive.

A fraction was the important part.

The amount of Mana flowing toward him was enormous, but almost all of it failed to enter.

Perhaps only 2% percent actually slipped into his meridians and was accepted before being drawn deeper into his body, while the remaining ninety-eight percent struck his existence and simply rolled away again, unable to become part of him. Phei could almost feel the rejected Mana washing around his body like an invisible river splitting against a mountain before continuing past him.

Two percent sounded pathetic until one considered how much mana Paradise Island was currently throwing at him.

Phei smiled faintly.

He had spent almost an entire year learning how to squeeze progress from situations that looked impossible. Two percent without a cultivation method was more than enough to make him curious about what would happen once he actually bothered learning one.

His little sister shifted comfortably in his arms as Phei looked through the towering glass ahead and saw the people waiting inside.

For one brief moment, everything else became background.

Then he stepped forward, allowed space and matter to stop being inconveniences, and passed through the glass as though it had never existed.

Soraya’s voice reached him almost immediately after everyone had gotten a proper look at him: "So freaking hot!"

Phei laughed, the familiar shameless warmth in her voice struck something inside him that he had missed almost as much as the island itself. He adjusted the small silver-white Dragon resting comfortably in his arms and looked directly toward Soraya with a smile.

"Thank you, my love. I was aiming to please!"

That did very little to help anyone recover from staring at him.

If anything, hearing the exact same ridiculous Phei come out of the person floating before them only made the difference more noticeable.