Chapter 106
The Heaven Demon Ancestor nodded hard. "Exactly."
"But right now..."
"...the objective is waking the Spirit race powerhouse in that glacial jade coffin, fast."
"We bind it as a weapon, then the Heavenly Demon Alliance has the combat power to crush Soren and take everything."
The two dropped the daydreaming and got back to work, pouring demonic energy in to erode the white chains and the coffin, loosening that last layer.
Seven or eight hours in, both were nearly empty again.
Neither could believe it.
Their dantians were scraped dry and the coffin hadn’t so much as shifted, worse, the entrance to the independent space was shrinking fast, ten meters across down to two.
If they couldn’t wake whatever slept in that coffin, they’d be watching the portal seal itself.
A closed entrance meant total failure.
To lay eyes on the Glacial Jade Coffin again, they’d have to repeat the whole grind of breaking the first layer from scratch.
Time and effort gone.
"Ahhh! Damn it, break!" The Heaven Demon Ancestor roared it, the entrance was down to a meter when he shoved one last desperate surge of demonic energy through.
That surge did it, cracks went spidering across the Glacial Jade Coffin.
Too late, though.
The entrance kept closing, down past the width of two palms.
Staring at that pinhole, they were out of options.
They gave up.
Right then, a bang came from behind the closing gap.
A berserk flood of Spirit energy poured through after it.
Then the entrance snapped shut.
They’d both heard the coffin break, they’d both felt the aura of an Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor, unmistakable, neither caught a glimpse of whatever was throwing off that much Spirit energy.
They staggered to the ruined altar, propped themselves against it and sat down, another pill each.
Working on their empty dantians, they were shouting with excitement anyway.
"There’s no mistake!" the Heaven Demon Ancestor said.
"The final layer actually broke!"
"But it didn’t tear the space open and run, what does that tell you?"
"It tells you that fresh out of the seal, it isn’t strong enough to take the two of us together!"
"Right now is the perfect window to contract it!"
"Earth Demon Ancestor, one more push, we reopen that entrance!"
The stakes needed no explaining. "Good!"
They were gathering themselves when snow started coming down.
Every flake the size of a human head, falling in thick suffocating sheets, filling the sky in moments.
Both men’s pupils shrank.
Their heads went up, eyes raking the white horizon, searching without blinking, terrified of missing something.
Whatever exhaustion the Heaven Demon Ancestor had been carrying was gone, he looked razor sharp, or rather, his nerves had been pulled to the edge of snapping.
"What is this? That’s no ordinary snowfall, that’s a phenomenon."
"Natural phenomena only trigger when someone breaks through to the Ancestor Realm, or when a top-tier spiritual treasure comes into the world!"
"Could it be that surge of Spirit energy?" the Earth Demon Ancestor asked.
"No, unlikely."
"We burned an enormous volume of demonic energy here and triggered nothing."
"What leaked out was far too thin."
"Nowhere near enough for a phenomenon."
Not being able to explain it made them warier, they scanned the ground with something ugly rising in their chests.
The Earth Demon Ancestor spread his demonic sense wide. "Heaven Demon Ancestor, do you feel Spirit energy gathering directly above us?"
"Same feeling, and the eye catches nothing."
"My perception gets that vague Spirit energy and nothing else."
Far off in the void, a frost-colored cold current twisted through the air and drifted away toward somewhere unknown.
As it went, both men’s nerves came down. "It dispersed before it could take shape."
"We were overthinking it."
"Recover, and reopen the entrance."
They waited a short while, then forced the white dimension open again.
They’d laid all the groundwork for the blood contract too, what met them was eighty-one severed white chains hanging limp and pieces of jade coffin scattered across the floor.
A terrifying residue of Spirit energy still hung in there, nothing else at all.
Both went numb at the scalp.
They scrambled into the space and searched every inch, corner by corner.
Once they’d confirmed it was empty, the disbelief on both faces was total.
A second later they slumped where they stood.
They climbed back out and leaned against the altar in silence.
The Heaven Demon Ancestor didn’t speak until the entrance sealed again, then he shook his head through his teeth.
"This shouldn’t be."
"This shouldn’t be happening."
"Where is the Ancestor Realm powerhouse that was sealed in there?"
The Earth Demon Ancestor let out a long, turbid breath. "Do you think it slipped out while we weren’t watching?"
The Heaven Demon Ancestor wouldn’t have it. "We’re at the Ancestor Realm ourselves, same major realm, different tiers, unequal combat strength, fine."
"But even at absolute peak the second it broke free, slipping under our noses without a sound is impossible."
"And if it had that kind of terrifying strength, why slip away at all?"
"Wouldn’t killing us both be simpler?"
The Earth Demon Ancestor couldn’t fault the logic.
If something like that had been under the seal, the naked eye would have caught something, and if the eye missed it, the spiritual fluctuations wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.
Start to finish, all they’d sensed was a vague trace of Spirit energy, unformed, scattered wide.
The Heaven Demon Ancestor sat with it a while and came around to the idea that they’d been played. "Eighty percent, all that was sealed in here was a mass of Spirit energy."
"Which means..."
"...the real seal was never here."
"We found the wrong place."
The Earth Demon Ancestor shook his head and sighed, every hour of it, wasted.
"Heh, what kind of thing gets sealed away and needs a fake site built just to fool the people who come looking?"
The Heaven Demon Ancestor had no answer, what he did have was a plan in pieces.
"Let’s go back."
"Six precious pills burned in this place."
"And nothing to show for it."
"The way I see it, even if we find the real site, the price will be worse than what today cost us."