Chapter 199 - The Returnees and the Sealed Source
Su Bai remained inside the solid Ashen-Blood Miasma for two days.
He circulated the Binary Void-Sun Supreme Method again and again.
After several cycles, Su Bai’s flesh, blood, bones, meridians, and organs were tempered again and again.
By his own rough judgment, the breakthrough he had experienced after entering the solid miasma should have been his fourth major breakthrough in body cultivation.
As for what that stage should be called, Su Bai still did not know.
Calling it "the fourth time my body refused to die and became stronger" was accurate, but not elegant.
So he left it unnamed for now.
More importantly, his Qi cultivation also moved.
When there were only three days left before the assumed opening of the exit portal, Su Bai finally stopped his circulation and opened his eyes inside the red-black darkness.
He finally reached Golden Core Fourth Stage.
The breakthrough was quiet.
His aura rose, stabilized, and was immediately pressed back beneath the tenth tribulation mark’s suppression. From the outside, there would have been almost no difference.
Inside, however, Su Bai could feel it clearly.
His Golden Core had become heavier. The golden Yang inside the black ice burned more steadily, and the nine Qi reservoirs answered its rotation with greater ease. The pressure from the solid miasma that had once felt sharp now felt slightly more manageable, though still far from harmless.
Su Bai exhaled slowly.
It was tempting to continue.
The fifth body breakthrough already felt near. With more Blood-Rot Pills and this perfect miasma environment, he might be able to push further. If he buried himself here for another few days, his body would probably improve by another level.
But there was no time.
Only three days remained before the portal was expected to open.
The others had already begun returning. If Su Bai continued cultivating like this and missed the exit, then no matter how good the opportunity was, it would become a disaster.
He had not come here to become a naked ancient miasma hermit trapped behind a barrier for the next opening cycle.
He still wanted to leave, preferably alive and preferably clothed.
Su Bai looked into the deeper darkness.
He still needed to see what lay at the end.
If it became too dangerous, he would turn back immediately and fly toward the nearest safe zone with everything he had. With his current body, Golden Core Fourth Stage cultivation, and resistance to miasma, he could afford a fast retreat better than anyone else.
The important thing was to know when to stop.
Su Bai put on his robe again.
The dark corrosion-resistant cloth settled over his body, and the Glacier-Lung Bone Mask returned to his face. He also restored the external items he judged necessary, while the rest remained in the system inventory.
This was no longer the time to enjoy full-body tempering. He was about to approach the deepest unknown region of the Fallen-Star Sanctuary.
Su Bai moved forward.
The solid miasma flowed around him like red-black water. His spiritual sense could spread farther than that of ordinary cultivators here, but he still kept it restrained. This place was not only dense with miasma. It carried something heavier.
The deeper he walked, the more the mist seemed to contain old gazes, broken commands, and sleeping malice.
After traveling for some time, Su Bai suddenly stopped.
Figures were moving ahead.
Soul-Bloom Returnees. There were five of them, walking deeper through the solid miasma in a loose formation. Their robes were intact, though Su Bai quickly realized those robes were not ordinary cloth.
The Soul-Bloom Bud inside his Dantian pulsed faintly.
The five Returnees noticed him almost at the same time.
They turned.
Su Bai did not move.
The Returnees stared at him through the red mist. Their eyes were too human.
One looked like a middle-aged sword cultivator. Another looked like a young woman with half her hair turned white. A third carried prayer beads around his wrist, though the beads had grown into his flesh.
Their gazes swept over Su Bai, then paused.
One Returnee tilted his head slightly.
"Late return?"
His voice was hoarse but clear.
Su Bai’s thoughts moved quickly.
"Not fully settled."
The five Returnees became quiet.
One of them, the young woman with white hair, looked him up and down.
"Your shell is strange."
Su Bai said calmly, "It opened wrong."
That answer was vague enough to be dangerous and familiar enough to be acceptable.
The middle-aged sword cultivator Returnee stared at him for a few breaths, then turned away.
"Then follow. The next batch is being called."
Su Bai’s heart moved.
’The next batch...’
He nodded and joined them.
Just like that, Su Bai gained guides.
The Soul-Bloom Returnees did not know that they were leading the enemy deeper into their own gathering place. They walked through the solid miasma with familiarity, avoiding certain currents, passing around invisible pressure zones, and stepping across places where the miasma sank like a pit.
Su Bai followed quietly, committing every turn to memory.
At first, the Returnees spoke among themselves.
That surprised him.
They were not mindless. They had personalities, habits, preferences, and fragments of old human behavior wrapped around something no longer human.
For a brief moment, Su Bai understood why these things were so dangerous. If one looked only at their speech, their faces, and their movements, it was easy to think that the stolen identities had simply continued living in another form.
But Su Bai knew better.
A shell that could talk was still a shell if the thing blooming inside it had already eaten the owner.
He decided not to waste his emotion on them.
...
The deeper they went, the quieter the Returnees became.
The casual conversation disappeared first. Then the complaints stopped. Even their footsteps became slower and more careful.
The solid miasma around them began to loosen little by little, not because it became weaker, but because it was being drawn toward something ahead.
Su Bai felt it too.
A pressure.
It was the sensation of approaching something that should not be looked at directly. A chill rose faintly inside him, somewhere deeper than flesh and meridians.
Su Bai rarely felt cold. This time, he did.
The Returnees passed through the last layer of thick miasma.
The world opened.
Su Bai stepped out after them and stopped.
A vast clearing lay before him.
Calling it a clearing was almost wrong. It was too large, too heavy, and too deliberate. The solid miasma formed a circular boundary around the entire space, like an ocean held back by invisible walls.
Above, the sky was still red-black. It churned slowly, with strands of Ashen-Blood Miasma hanging downward like roots from a dead heaven.
The ground beneath his feet was not natural stone.
It was an altar. A battlefield altar so vast that ordinary eyes could not easily judge its full size. Ancient formation lines covered the ground in layers.
Channels carved into the ground carried slow streams of red-black miasma, all flowing toward the center.
And there were many enemies here.
False bodies stood in rows, unmoving like soldiers awaiting orders. Soul-Bloom Returnees moved between them with purpose.
Su Bai had killed many false bodies and Returnees along the way.
He had even begun to think he had reduced their numbers greatly.
Now he realized that what he had killed outside might only be patrols, carriers, and outer pieces.
This place was the gathering ground.
Su Bai kept his breathing steady.
Several presences in the clearing made his skin tighten beneath the robe. Their pressure far exceeded Golden Core and Nascent Soul. It carried a weight that seemed capable of cracking void itself. Su Bai had never personally fought such beings, but the sensation was unmistakable.
Void-Shattering pressure.
There were Soul-Bloom Returnees here with Void-Shattering-level pressure.
Su Bai did not dare make any suspicious movement.
His only advantage was that the Returnees beside him treated him as familiar enough not to question immediately. In this place, that thin misunderstanding was more valuable than a defensive treasure.
A tall Returnee standing near one of the side altars turned toward Su Bai’s group.
Its face belonged to an elderly cultivator, but its eyes were completely red. Behind it, nine half-opened black-red petals floated like a crown. Its pressure made the nearby false bodies lower their heads.
The Void-Shattering Returnee pointed toward a line of flesh-wrapped bundles near the altar.
"You are next. Take the prepared flesh and fulfill your duty."
The five Returnees beside Su Bai lowered their heads.
Su Bai lowered his too.
No one questioned him.
The group moved toward the side altar.
Su Bai followed.
His heart beat slightly faster.
Every step forward made the pressure heavier. The channels on the ground pulsed. The red-black streams inside them did not look like ordinary miasma anymore. They looked like diluted blood mixed with soul ash.
Su Bai wanted to turn back.
This was not a joke.
This was not a place where he could casually test how much his Reversal Body could handle. There were too many enemies, too many unknown formations, and too many presences capable of killing him before he understood what happened.
He had already begun preparing his retreat in his mind.
If anything reacted to him wrongly, he would run.
Just then, he reached the side altar and finally saw what stood at the center of the vast platform.
Su Bai froze.
At first, he thought they were statues.
Giant figures stood around the deepest center of the altar. Each one was towering like a mountain carved into human form.
Some wore armor. Some had flowing robes. Some held swords, spears, halberds, bells, mirrors, chains, and pagodas. Their faces were blurred by time and miasma, but their posture had not collapsed.
They stood in a circle, silent and unmoving. Their weapons were all pointed downward.
No.
They were piercing downward.
The giant figures were not merely holding their weapons against the ground. Their weapons had been driven deep into something beneath them. The swords, spears, chains, and pagodas acted like sealing nails, pinning vast shapes to the altar.
Su Bai’s breath caught.
The things beneath the weapons were difficult to describe.
They were not beasts. They were not humans. They were not demons in any form Su Bai recognized.
They looked like fragments of enormous bodies that had never agreed on what shape they should possess.
A stretch of flesh the size of a palace wall pulsed beneath one spear. A mass of overlapping mouths had been sealed under a bronze pagoda, each mouth sewn shut by golden light. A black-red limb, too long and too jointless to belong to any ordinary creature, was pinned by three swords at once. Beneath a chain-wrapped bell, something like an eye opened and closed under layers of cracked sealing light.
They were enormous. They were broken. And... they were still alive.
Su Bai did not come to that conclusion immediately.
He saw the pulsing first, then the twitching, then the way the miasma streams in the altar channels flowed outward from the sealed things instead of toward them.
Only after that did he feel the familiar aura.
They have the same aura as the flesh fragments he had sealed in jade boxes. The same aura, but no longer weak, sliced off, or isolated.
This was the source.
The flesh fragments carried outward by enemies were not independent treasures, and not simple pieces of old monsters.
They were cut from these things. From the sealed bodies beneath the giant figures.
Su Bai’s gaze slowly moved upward again.
The so-called statues. Were they statues?
He was no longer sure.
The aura coming from them was too ancient. They did not feel like ordinary stone. They felt like beings that had stood there until their flesh, robes, armor, and weapons had all become part of the seal.
Immortals.
The word rose in Su Bai’s mind before he could suppress it.
The records had mentioned immortal descent.
No one had known whether those words referred to titles, realms, or myths exaggerated by time.
Now Su Bai looked at the giant figures and felt a chill crawl through him.
Perhaps the immortals had not simply descended and left.
Perhaps they had descended, fought, sealed the enemy with their own bodies, and never walked away again.
The Ashen-Blood Miasma thickened around the altar.
Su Bai watched the miasma flow from the pinned things, spread through the channels, rise into the air, and gather into the red-black sky above. From there, it drifted outward, feeding the solid barrier, then Layer Two, then the rest of the Fallen-Star Sanctuary.
His earlier doubts finally connected.
Why had the Fallen-Star Sanctuary remained filled with miasma after countless years?
Why did flesh fragments still carry awareness?
Why did the enemies keep bringing flesh outward?
It’s because the enemy had never fully died.
They had only been pinned down.
The miasma was not residue. It was leakage.
The Ashen-Blood Miasma was coming from them.
Su Bai stood motionless.
For the first time since entering the deeper region, getting stronger no longer felt like the most important thing.
At the center of the altar, beneath a spear held by one of the giant immortal figures, a pulsing mass of flesh shifted.
A slit opened across its surface.
It was not a mouth, but it spoke anyway.
The voice did not enter the air. It entered Su Bai’s bones.
"You... looked familiar..."
Every Soul-Bloom Returnee nearby lowered its head.
Su Bai’s body went cold.
The Soul-Bloom Bud inside his Dantian gave a faint pulse.
The thing beneath the spear turned its awareness toward him.
"Come... closer."