Chapter 119
"The truth is... uh... I told my servant girl to pass orders down to the chieftains of every beast clan, they’re to pick out their finest beauties, feed them Shape-Shifting Pills to take human form, and send them through that node into my private pocket dimension."
Bruce stared at him.
Then he looked at Soren.
Soren’s expression hadn’t moved a hair, he clearly had no intention of saying anything.
So Bruce kept going on his own.
"Do you take me for a stupid pig?"
"You expect me to swallow a story like that?"
Arcturus’s face screwed up like a man three days constipated.
"Brother Bruce! Every word of it is true! Look into my eyes! You’ll see I’m an honest, straightforward man!"
An honest man?
Ordering chieftains to round up beautiful women, dosing them with pills to force them into human shape, then stashing them in your private pocket dimension, and you call that honest?
Old pervert through and through.
"Heh, Patriarch Arcturus, still plenty of vigor left at your age."
Bruce drawled it out.
Arcturus stole a glance at Soren, the Demon Ancestor still hadn’t reacted, so he pressed on.
"No, no, no! You’ve got it backwards!"
"This humble one hasn’t touched a woman in a very, very long time! Those women are a welcoming gift! Prepared specifically for Ancestor Soren!"
Bruce was speechless.
"You want to give them to my Master?"
"You’re serious?"
"Truer than gold!" Arcturus raised three fingers in a solemn oath.
Bruce’s mouth spread into a grin.
"Patriarch Arcturus, didn’t expect you to be so sensible."
"Hehehe! Now that I follow Ancestor Soren, how could this humble one lack judgment? Wouldn’t you agree, Brother Bruce?"
"Oh, right. If Brother Bruce has a taste for beast beauties himself, I can arrange a few top-shelf ones for you as well."
Bruce’s face went faintly red.
"Ahem. Patriarch Arcturus, we’re on our way to the Falling Cherry Spirit Domain on official business, hardly the time to discuss such things."
Arcturus nodded with a sly grin and shot him a look that said, say no more, brother, leave it all to me.
"Right, right, right! We’ll talk when we’re back! Business first!"
Soren hadn’t joined in.
His cold, aloof bearing made him look like the last man alive who would sit through that conversation.
But he had never tasted a beast beauty before.
His standards were simply high.
He wasn’t the type to sample any woman who threw herself at his feet.
Victoria, Lysara, Celeste, every woman who’d shared his bed was peerless.
Ordinary looks didn’t register.
If the ones Arcturus’s chieftains rounded up couldn’t stand next to Victoria, he wasn’t going to force himself out of some it’s-all-the-same-with-the-lights-off philosophy.
Whatever, he’d deal with that later.
The Falling Cherry Spirit Domain was an archipelago.
It sat close to the Great Desolate Beast Domain, which was only a dozen or so domains from Black Dragon Mountain.
The Exalted Continent spanned nearly ten thousand domains, Black Dragon Mountain and the Endless Demonic Domain, separated by the Violet Jade Immortal Domain, were already the far borderlands of that map.
The nearest island territory across the sea was the Falling Cherry Spirit Domain.
Soren tore the void with Ancestor Realm power and brought Bruce and Arcturus to its borders in short order.
The moment the three set foot on the island, Soren caught the faint pulse of an overarching protective formation.
Bruce sensed nothing. Neither did Arcturus.
An Ancestor Realm powerhouse had left this behind, and its workings were beyond ordinary cultivators.
But the Falling Cherry Spirit Domain’s strength was middling at best. Weaker than the Moonveil Human Domain, no Ancestor stationed here.
The barrier was a relic, something very old.
Soren didn’t think much of the Spirit cultivators here.
He summoned the Strategy Encyclopedia anyway, on instinct.
Passing through the barrier had already captured its structural data.
[An ancient forbidden formation inherited from the Immemorial Era.]
[A concealed barrier designed to devour cosmic destiny.]
[It operates unnoticed, siphoning the destiny of anyone who touches it. It also steals the overarching destiny of Exalted Continent and places it in storage.]
Stealing destiny?
And not only from those who brushed against it.
Soren searched the database for what the destiny was ultimately for.
What came back made a Demon Ancestor’s eye twitch.
[The stolen destiny is transferred and stored within a concealed vault.]
[Once enough has accumulated, it can be extracted and poured into a living body as a baptism of destiny.]
[The recipient’s cultivation will climb at blinding speed, and their odds of breaking through realm bottlenecks approach certainty.]
[The Falling Cherry Spirit Domain has been using this formation to siphon the destiny of heaven and earth without pause.]
[If the full store is ever poured into a single person, the consequences are difficult to calculate.]
[80% probability of forcibly elevating an Upper-Tier Spirit Emperor to the Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor realm.]
[30% probability of shattering the shackles of the Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor realm entirely and stepping into a higher tier.]
[If divided among several, 70% probability of elevating three Spirit Emperors to the Ancestor Realm at once. 50% probability for five.]
[The formation has been siphoning for one million years.]
[The vault is close to capacity.]
Soren snorted.
My trip here just paid for itself ten times over.
A speck of land like this, sitting on ambition that size.
A million years of quietly draining the destiny of the whole continent.
Of course nobody caught them, an Immemorial forbidden formation built by an Ancestor’s hand, even Arcturus walked straight through and felt nothing.
Beautiful concealment.
But so what?
Now that I know about it, it’s mine.
The corner of Soren’s mouth curved.
They flew deeper, and cities began rolling out beneath them.
The sudden arrival of three strangers set off panic in the streets below.
Panic was all the locals could manage.
Nobody could stop them.
Trailing behind, Arcturus laid it on thick.
"Demon Ancestor, you’ve torn the void several times over an enormous distance, that’s no small drain on your demonic energy, you must be tired."
"Shall we set down and rest somewhere comfortable?"
"I hear the female Spirits of the Falling Cherry Spirit Domain have a rather unique flavor to them."
"Hehehe, and as for pinning down the entrance coordinates, allow this humble one to search first."
"The moment I turn up a lead, I’ll report to you."