Chapter 123
"Though I have to say..."
"...if it were me, I don’t think I could have held back."
"Hehehe."
Bruce looked at that sleazy old grin.
His mouth twitched, then pulled into a slow sneer.
"Patriarch, still plenty of vigor in you for an old man."
"At your age..."
"...you’ve still got that much appetite?"
Arcturus’s face went red, he raised a fist to his mouth and coughed twice.
"Ahem! Brother Bruce jokes, it was a passing remark, nothing more."
"Patriarch. I’d suggest putting your mind where it belongs."
"If those two slip away under our noses, my Master might backhand you into paste."
Arcturus’s breath caught.
A mountain-sized Soren rose up in his mind.
A colossal demonic claw swept down from the sky to crush him into meat.
He shuddered and scrubbed sweat off his forehead with his sleeve.
"Thank you for the reminder, Brother Bruce!"
"Quite right!"
"For subordinates like us, carrying out the Demon Ancestor’s tasks faithfully is the highest duty!"
Seeing the old man properly frightened, Bruce let it drop.
Meanwhile, the eyes of the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor and Mira brimmed with buried rage.
His especially, inside his wide sleeves his fists clenched until the knuckles cracked.
A glance passed between them, and they got to work on their next move.
To rule out eavesdropping, they wrapped their voices in Spirit energy and spoke mind to mind.
I never imagined that demon would show zero interest in you, makes no damned sense, the Spirit Emperor cursed.
Mira dropped the soft, gentle mask she’d worn for outsiders, her tone came out sour.
The blind, tasteless wretch.
"Husband, what do we do?"
The Spirit Emperor thought it over.
"The man’s behavior is erratic, Bizarre."
"I still can’t work out what he wants."
"But from beginning to end, he never asked a single question about the stolen destiny or the forbidden formation."
"I’m certain, he may have broken into the Lower-Tier Demon Ancestor realm, but he knows nothing about the formation or the hoard."
"So don’t panic yet."
Mira gave a small nod, "I’ll follow your lead, Husband."
"As long as we keep the destiny, everything else is worth losing."
"Mira, you know better than anyone, the vault is on the verge of full capacity."
"When it comes, if we draw that destiny out and take it into our bodies together, the odds we both break into Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor are very high."
"Once we’re there, why would we fear a Lower-Tier Demon Ancestor?"
A secret warmth spread through Mira. Husband’s words are wisdom itself.
"What matters now is adapting as things develop."
"We find an opening and get out from under their eyes."
Soren had walked a good distance away.
He was still perfectly visible.
Especially to Emperor and Venerable Realm eyes, a few miles was no different from arm’s length.
Under the stares of the entire city, Soren stopped.
A single lustrous sphere took shape in his palm.
The sight tore an involuntary shriek out of Arcturus.
In a silence where nobody dared breathe too loudly, that scream cut like a blade.
Nearly every Spirit cultivator in the sky turned to look at him.
He was staring at the orb, both lips shaking.
"That’s it! That’s really it!"
"That’s the Kun-Heaven Nether Pearl!"
Crack.
Before the crowd could wonder what a Kun-Heaven Nether Pearl was, Soren closed his fist and crushed it.
Energy burst out like a dam giving way, a thick roaring flood that swept across the sky and buried half the Falling Cherry Spirit Domain under its waves.
Nobody could speak.
The Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor and Mira stood stupefied.
Neither had witnessed a volume of energy remotely like it.
Even the monstrous demonic pressure coming off Soren was swallowed whole.
Not a trace of his aura could be sensed.
Soren didn’t move.
He stood at the eye of that vortex with arms folded and face composed.
Heaven and earth felt like uprooted trees on the verge of toppling.
He stood like a sovereign with everything in hand.
He didn’t sway an inch.
A deep hum rolled down out of the heavens, a runic seal materialized in midair, glazed and brilliant.
It spanned a hundred meters across, pulsing in resonance with the flood from the shattered pearl.
A whale’s suction erupted from the seal, and the ocean of energy drowning heaven and earth was swallowed clean in moments.
In front of Soren, a spatial portal swung open in seven colors of light.
The only entrance to the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea.
Even Soren’s composure cracked with excitement. If the pearl had held that much compressed energy, the sea itself had to hold something beyond calculation.
As the key that resonated with the entrance, the pearl was single-use.
The portal wouldn’t last, once someone passed through, the mechanism shifting the entrance coordinates would freeze.
It reset only when the person inside came out, and then the coordinates resumed wandering.
On the way out, you could pluck a fresh Nether Pearl from the water to serve as the next key.
A Nether Pearl was condensed energy of the sea, effectively a naturally formed pill.
Forget to take one before leaving, and the portal would never open for you again.
Rules applied inside too, gather and use as many pearls as you liked while in the sea, but only one could leave with you, try to carry more and the restriction triggered, sealing the exit.
Only one Nether Pearl existed outside the sea at any time.
Destroy that pearl, and its owner with it, and access to the Kun-Heaven Nether Sea was gone for good.
Soren finally understood why the Kunpeng Beast Clan had sealed a single pearl inside the Kun-Heaven Box before the Immemorial War.
A single-use key, and they were still terrified of losing it.
For a first trip in, he had no intention of bringing Bruce and Arcturus, he didn’t know the conditions inside, he’d scout it himself.
Before stepping through, Soren cut his eyes sideways.
His palm pulsed and threw off a dense knot of demonic energy.
It unfolded into a glowing array several dozen meters wide and dropped over Mira and the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor.
It sealed both in.
No accidents, the Spirit Emperor fought at the Upper-Tier Emperor Realm and was no weaker than Arcturus.
If the two got loose and drew on their hoarded destiny early, it would turn into a nuisance. Insurance was cheap.