Chapter 131
I’d climb past Soren, past my uncle, past the Heaven Demon Ancestor, a genuine Upper-Tier Demon Ancestor.
Whatever grief she had left over the clone went out with that thought, and something much brighter took its place.
She knew better than anyone that she was celebrating early, Cecilia pulled her composure back into place and kept shadowing the Spirit Emperor, all the way to where he stopped at the desolate border of the black fire plain.
He threw a careful look behind him, nobody there.
He let out a long breath.
A cold smile pulled at his mouth. "That woman, Cecilia."
"Dreaming foolish dreams."
"She expects me to split this destiny with her?"
"In her dreams!"
"It’s mine, every drop of it is mine!"
The Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor threw his arms wide and clenched both fists, roaring into the empty air.
"My Eight-Headed White-Scaled Serpent Tribe has kept its head down for over a million years waiting for this day!"
"And today!"
"In this body!"
"A miracle is finally going to be unveiled!"
"Hahahaha!"
"What a stupid, trusting woman!"
"Did you truly believe This Emperor would honor our agreement?"
"Only an absolute idiot talks about integrity in a deal with no contract and no curse binding it!"
"You stepped in to intercept that Beast Emperor and buy me time on your own!"
"This Emperor never begged you for a thing!"
He was thoroughly pleased with himself, his luck had gone off the charts today, not only had he broken free of Soren’s demonic formation, he’d played Cecilia for a fool, with neither Arcturus nor Cecilia on his heels, he could go beneath the fire plain and draw the destiny out of the Nine-Headed Serpent skeleton in peace.
Never mind whether Cecilia was even alive, even if she was, and even if she found her way here, he’d have long since deployed the Mirror of Reflected Waters and gone into the vault beneath the center of the plain.
Tucked into a fold of the void, Cecilia let out a small amused breath.
Keep grinning like that all the way to the end, please.
A mocking curve touched her lips, she drifted closer without stirring a breath of air and settled in behind him like something attached to his heels.
She had already gathered the intelligence on this place, a million years of continuous burning had scorched an eerie, lethal distortion into the sky above the plain.
Look at those twisting shapes once and your sanity came apart, and you died screaming inside your own hallucinations.
From the moment she’d followed him to the border, Cecilia had been rigorously careful.
She hadn’t lifted her head once, she knew the plain was the manifestation of an Innate Ancestor Technique left by an ancient Ancestor of the Eight-Headed White-Scaled Serpent Tribe.
The black flames had burned a million years without going out, both the fire on the ground and the distortions in the sky were lethal to someone at the Upper-Tier Emperor Realm.
Her forbidden techniques could build convincing illusions, hide her breath, throw phantoms, spin off autonomous clones, against a real physical attack or environmental hazard they did nothing.
Soren cutting down her clone was the demonstration, the clone had seemed to dissolve into thin air, in truth it had only slipped past sight and spiritual sensing.
Its body was still occupying space, Soren understood that, found its exact coordinates, and pointed the tribulation lightning at it.
The same limitation was in force now, Cecilia had cloaked her visual form and suppressed her fluctuations, but physically she hovered right behind the Spirit Emperor, she couldn’t look up at the distortions, and she couldn’t let her hem brush the black fire underfoot.
Either one and she was finished.
"Mirror of Reflected Waters!"
An ancient, unadorned jade mirror took shape in the Spirit Emperor’s grip.
It spanned about two palms’ width, ground from some rare crystalline mineral, plain to look at, but the crystal was flawless, and mysterious liquid currents ran endlessly beneath its surface, however violently they surged, not a drop ever spilled, the thing clearly had properties worth having.
He raised the mirror over his head and turned its face toward the distortions above.
Pale white light burst off the surface, catching the hallucinogenic pressure and throwing it back.
"The deeper you go into the plain, the worse those distortions get! Eventually they stop staying in the sky, they start warping the space around you directly!"
"There’s no avoiding them at that point!"
"But with the Mirror of Reflected Waters, it’s no obstacle!"
"The liquid energy sealed inside cancels the distortions completely!"
"And it forms an insulating layer around me against the heat of the black flames!"
"Ancestor, I will take hold of every opportunity you laid down for our line!"
Delight was written all over his face, he gripped the mirror and charged headlong into the fire.
Inside the mirror’s barrier he passed through the flames without harm and bolted for the center.
A short while later, out at the perimeter, the void cracked open with a thunderclap.
Soren stepped out of the rift and swept his gaze across the burning expanse, there was no gravity in his expression, no caution, what there was, was a distinct hint of contempt.
"So this is the place." He clasped his hands behind his back and tilted his head up.
He looked straight into the twisting distortions overhead.
The next second his consciousness was dragged into a world drenched in red, enormous claws of congealed blood lashed out of the surrounding void and clamped around his limbs and torso.
Soren’s face stayed serene, his heart never moved, he gave no reaction and simply let the claws crush down on him.
He knew immediately what this was, a hallucinatory landscape generated inside his own mind.
It had triggered the moment his eyes met the distortions, and the physical sensations it produced were vicious in their realism, it felt exactly like being crushed by real claws.
An ordinary cultivator would have gone straight into the agony of organs rupturing and every bone powdering, and even after the mental projection was crushed and killed, consciousness would reset to the beginning.
The cycle would run again, and again.
It would keep running until sanity gave out and the victim simply surrendered to it.
To break the loop, most ended up strangling their own bodies to death in the real world.