Chapter 1817 912: Secret Realm Maze (Part 2)

He was staring at a residual thought of a guard who had been cut down by a curved blade.

That residual thought fell, scattered into black mist, then reformed on the spot and continued to brace his spear against the enemy.

For a hundred-odd years, he repeated the instant of death every single day.

"Torment for thousands of years?"

Li Yan's voice grew slightly cold. "Even if they are but residual thoughts, what crime have they committed?"

The Five Dao General turned his head to the side in surprise. "You are not one to be soft-hearted."

"That was slaying evil."

Li Yan shook his head. "These residual thoughts, in life were only soldiers who obeyed orders and marched to war. In death, their obsession doesn't disperse, and they're trapped here repeating the state of their death—that alone is an extreme punishment. If they are further refined into Magic Artifacts, never to transcend for all eternity…"

"If I treat all beings as ants to be toyed with at will, then I am no longer myself."

The Five Dao General fell silent for three breaths.

The chest beneath his armor rose and fell once, like he was sighing.

"No wonder."

He spoke slowly. "Immortal Master Erlang holds you in such high regard. His temperament… is much the same."

He said no more. With a sweep of his long spear, he said, "Let's go. If you truly wish to free them, then break the fundamental source of this Nine Gates Yin Ruins. Once the Array is broken, the residual thoughts will disperse on their own."

The two of them continued forward.

With no outsiders interfering, this avatar of the Five Dao General could exert his full power.

He walked ahead, his long spear occasionally tracing out a half arc. Wherever the Spear Tip passed, those twisted, overlapping spatial scenes were like a painted canvas being cut by a knife, ripping open with a tearing sound and revealing the relatively stable passage behind.

"This place uses the Nine Gates of the Capital as a base for the Array layout."

The Five Dao General explained as he broke the way. "The positions of the Nine Gates secretly accord with the Luoshu Nine Palaces. But the one who laid this Array tampered with it—In an ordinary Nine Palace Formation, as complex as the palace shifts may be, they never stray from the principles of Yin Yang deduction. Yet here…"

He suddenly thrust his long spear into a patch of twisted gray mist to the left front.

With a muffled "puff," sparks actually spurted out from within the mist.

The mist dispersed, revealing a completely different scene behind: a bluestone official road, with severely weathered stone beasts standing along the sides. Judging by their style, they were at least from the Tang and Song.

"Look." The Five Dao General drew back his spear. "That patch of mist just now, according to Nine Palace deduction, should have corresponded to the position of Fucheng Gate and ought to have revealed the street scene of the West Market. But in reality, it's an official road from a previous Dynasty. What does that tell you?"

Following behind him, Li Yan's mind raced with calculations. "Someone added an extra variable into the changes of the Nine Palaces?"

"More than one."

The Five Dao General's tone was grave. "On the way here I've broken through seventeen spatial folds, and in every case, the deduction result and the reality fail to match. The added variables have no pattern—sometimes they follow the Innate Eight Diagrams, sometimes the Acquired Five Elements, and sometimes they're simply piled up randomly."

"It's like a lock with seventeen tumblers added, each tumbler's teeth are different, and they change on their own every single day."

He halted and turned to look at Li Yan. "The way of Mathematics is nothing more than cycling deductions between Two Forms, Three Powers, Four Images, Five Elements, and Eight Trigrams. Ten thousand changes never leave their root. But here…"

The long spear struck the ground heavily.

"Someone has tampered with the 'root.'"

Li Yan's heart suddenly tightened.

A lock.

He abruptly recalled the metaphor Chen Yuanlu had mentioned—the Nine Gates Yin Ruins was like a Secret Realm vault locked up with heavy locks. Back then he had thought it merely described how strict the Seal was. Now, hearing the Five Dao General…

"This place," Li Yan said slowly, "is it truly meant to trap something?"

He looked around.

Deep within the gray mist, light and shadow faintly turned—at times the flying eaves of palaces flashed past, at times a desolate village and withered trees were reflected.

These scenes spanned a thousand years, yet all were confined here, played out again and again.

"If it were merely the Evil Qi accumulated by the Capital, the Mystical Sect could hold a few rounds of the Luotian Grand Sacrifice, and with the Dynasty's Qi Fortune washing over it, it would disperse in at most three years. Yet this place has existed for nearly a hundred years. Successive generations of State Preceptors and Heavenly Masters have suppressed it in turn, and instead of dissolving it, they've sealed it tighter and tighter…"

Li Yan's speech grew faster and faster. "The Golden Tent Wolf Country did indeed detonate the Earth Vein Evil Qi when they left, but with the methods of those Shaman Evil Cultivators, could they really lay down an Array that even Huo Yin and Heavenly Master Zhang cannot see through?"

The Five Dao General did not answer immediately.

He stood where he was, the body under his armor tensing slightly.

The string of severed heads in his hand stirred of its own accord despite the still air. One of the heads suddenly opened its eyelids, revealing hollow eye sockets that stared fixedly into the darkness to the right front.

"Your guess is not wrong." The Five Dao General finally spoke, his voice pressed extremely low. "Even a cultivator in the Earth Immortal realm among ordinary Cultivators could not accomplish this. This is not an Array of the Human World."

He raised his left hand, fingers spread, and from his palm slowly seeped a strand of dark golden Divine Dao Incense.

The incense was as fine as silk, probing into the gray mist ahead, yet at three meters it suddenly twisted and snapped, as though shredded by something invisible.

"Did you see that?" The Five Dao General withdrew his hand. The incense in his palm had been completely extinguished. "The rules here… are off. It's not a matter of Yin Yang losing balance, nor of Evil Qi congestion, but of the very foundation being rewritten. It's as if someone took a landscape painting and forcibly added a river that was never meant to exist within it."

Li Yan took a deep breath. "Could it be that back then, the Golden Tent Wolf Country wasn't laying an Array, but accidentally detonated something that had existed long before?"

"I fear so." The Five Dao General nodded.

The two spoke no further and continued deeper.

As they advanced, the surrounding space grew ever stranger.

At times, though they were clearly walking forward, out of the corner of his eye he saw his own back appear on the left; at times, when he took a step, the ground beneath his foot was solid, yet it felt like he had stepped into a bottomless abyss and had to immediately circulate Gang Qi just to stabilize his stance.

The Five Dao General's pace in breaking the way also slowed.

Each time his long spear swept out, it had to pause for an instant in midair, as if the Spear Tip had struck some invisible gelatin.

Finally, after breaking through the twenty-third spatial fold, the scene before their eyes suddenly changed.

The gray mist scattered completely.