Chapter 118
"Serve obediently..."
"...and this Ancestor won’t treat you or the Sky Sparrow Tribe thinly."
Arcturus lit up, small sparks going in his pupils.
His grin ran all the way to his ears.
"Aye!"
"Understood!"
"Demon Ancestor, careful here!"
"There’s a wide fissure in the ground, let me lie down and be your bridge!"
"That won’t be necessary." Soren looked at the crack ahead, about the width of a forearm, which any ordinary mortal could have stepped over.
Did a Demon Ancestor need a human bridge? He turned Arcturus down.
They walked the cold damp corridor for a few incense sticks before it ended.
A semi-circular underground vault.
Near the middle stood the ancient stele Arcturus had described.
Sealed inside were the entrance coordinates to the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea.
Coordinates only.
The entrance itself wasn’t necessarily anywhere near here.
Arcturus cupped his hands and smiled his fawning smile.
"Demon Ancestor, this is it."
"The coordinates are sealed inside this monument."
"Opening it takes a specific set of procedures, though, one moment please, I’ll prepare the ritual at once!"
Soren watched him bustle around laying out ceremonial items and muttering incantations, and ran out of patience.
He walked over to the stele.
His fingertips touched the stone.
Everything about the monument poured into the Strategy Encyclopedia.
Mostly historical trivia he already had, nothing tactically useful.
There was an active sealing formation in the core, not a formidable one.
It didn’t even need a specialized reverse-dismantling technique.
Soren pushed a small pulse of force through his palm.
Crack.
The formation shattered, Arcturus stood there stupefied.
So all my preparation and incantations were pointless? A deep hum came up out of the stele’s core, aA pale purple beam shot into the air.
The projection unfolded slowly into a glowing scroll, mountains, rivers, terrain, dense across it.
The full sprawl of the Exalted Continent’s ten thousand domains.
One red dot pulsed on the map.
The Nether Sea entrance.
As Soren expected, it wasn’t in the Great Desolate Beast Domain.
It wasn’t in any of the domains he’d crossed on the way here either.
It pointed at an island chain off the Exalted Continent.
The mainland was vast and faced other continents across long, ugly stretches of ocean.
Twenty or thirty archipelago domains were scattered through the surrounding seas, one of those chains had a narrow, drawn-out landmass shaped like a crawling reptile.
The Falling Cherry Spirit Domain.
The red dot was blinking over it.
Per the data Soren pulled from the stele, the coordinates to the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea entrance moved constantly.
Every so often the entrance migrated somewhere else on the continent.
Pin down the exact coordinate, get close, and the Kun-Heaven Nether Pearl could trigger spatial resonance with it.
Which was why Arcturus had needed to bring him down here.
The current coordinates were nowhere near where they’d been the last time he activated the stele.
The entrance had gone from the far east to the far west.
Worried Soren might misread how it worked, Arcturus leaned in and explained.
"Demon Ancestor, the uncanny part of these coordinates is that they migrate at random, continuously!"
"This doesn’t mean the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea has anything to do with that little speck of an island."
"From my own long observation, it moves once every seven days."
"Look here..."
Arcturus bowed his way over to the projected scroll.
Under Soren’s eye, he pointed at the bottom-left corner of the screen.
A row of glowing numerals was ticking down.
"That’s the countdown until the coordinates shift again."
"Going by those numbers, three days have passed since the last migration."
"In four more days it updates and moves somewhere new."
"This humble one suggests waiting a few days, Demon Ancestor."
"The coordinate only gives a general region. It won’t point at a specific mountain or river."
"Searching the target area thoroughly will take considerable time."
"We’d only be able to work without rushing if we had a full window."
Soren’s tone stayed cool.
"No need for that."
"It’s not as though we’ve got four hours."
"Four days is plenty."
He turned and walked out.
He was leaving for this Falling Cherry Spirit Domain now.
Arcturus trotted after him, nodding along, not daring to push further.
He had never laid eyes on an Ancestor Realm expert other than Soren.
Even so, a conviction had rooted itself in him and refused to budge.
Soren was nothing like an ordinary Ancestor Realm powerhouse.
He was on a different level entirely.
Once clear of the vault, Arcturus rattled off instructions to his subordinates and left behind a sealed scroll.
Then he hurried after Soren and Bruce as they took to the sky.
Along the way, Bruce got curious, or rather, he didn’t trust Arcturus an inch, and he wanted to know what that suspicious scroll was doing back in the Imperial Palace.
Arcturus stammered through an explanation, the scroll held a sealed spatial node, linked to an independent pocket dimension he’d built himself.
Bruce’s face darkened.
"An independent pocket dimension might be small, but the tactical uses aren’t."
"You can store living things in one, you can hide in one to save your own skin when things go bad."
"But they come with limits, use it as a bolt-hole, and the moment an enemy locks down the coordinates around your entry node, whoever’s inside never comes out."
"Unless there’s more than one entry node."
"So I’d really like to ask you, what’s the point of leaving a scroll sealed with a spatial node back in your Imperial Palace?"
"Don’t tell me you’re planning to stab my Master in the back at the critical moment, hog every treasure for yourself, then slip out through that second node and vanish?"
Arcturus was sweating before Bruce finished.
His inner robes were soaked through.
He waved both hands, shaking his head so hard his beard whipped.
Flying out in front, Soren listened to the interrogation behind him, and the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
Bruce, the blockhead, thinking today.
To work out the tactical implications in that much detail.
Not bad, not bad at all.
Arcturus realized his denials were only digging the hole deeper, so he came clean.
"Ancestor Soren! You must believe me! I swear it!"
"This humble one did not leave that scroll to ambush you or hoard treasure! Never!"
"Give me ten thousand guts and I still wouldn’t dare think it!"