Chapter 133
He agonized over it.
Then he went down anyway.
He knew with certainty that he no longer had time to extract the destiny from the Ancestor skeleton.
Soren was closing faster than he’d allowed for, at this rate the man would reach the entrance in less than half an incense stick, and that was Soren simply flying. Not tearing the void at all.
If he used spatial jumps he’d arrive inside a second, the only reason he wasn’t was confidence, he saw no reason to hurry.
The corners of the Spirit Emperor’s mouth twitched, his face went an ugly green, his eyes filled with something bitter.
"Heavens above."
"How did my Eight-Headed White-Scaled Serpent Tribe ever offend you?"
"Generation after generation, over a million years of work."
"And now, with the hoard on the verge of full, Soren appears out of nowhere to ruin all of it."
"Is my tribe simply not worthy of holding this destiny?"
He let out a long, hateful sigh, he threw the portal open and dived, he’d sooner destroy the Nine-Headed Serpent skeleton the hoard was stored in, he’d scatter every drop of that destiny back into the heaven and earth of Exalted Continent, he would not let Soren pick it up cheap.
Hidden in the void, Cecilia glanced back toward the horizon, where black apocalyptic anomalies churned across the sky.
She knew whose work that was.
Every step Soren took set off upheaval in heaven and earth, throwing up chaotic anomalies that made the sky look ready to fall back into Primordial Chaos.
Terrifying was the plain word for it.
Watching from a distance was enough to put fear into the soul.
He was nothing like the Heaven Demon Ancestor or the Earth Demon Ancestor, he didn’t hide any of it. He didn’t hold back an inch.
The purpose of that display was direct, he was telling the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor one thing.
I am here.
She’d watched the man’s face a moment ago.
His Dao heart was standing on the edge of collapse.
"Oh my."
"I’d better hurry."
Cecilia leapt and dropped into the portal after him.
Underground.
The shaft went down a hundred thousand meter.
The deeper it went, the thinner the air.
Both sat at the Upper-Tier Emperor Realm, fortunately.
In an environment like this, with no hostile energies and no restrictions working against them, either could hold their breath for a thousand years without trouble.
The Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor came down hard on flat stone at the bottom and immediately ran for the corridor.
Cecilia kept close behind.
They moved through twisting passages.
At the end they came into a vast square vault.
A massive formation hung in the air, pulsing with a faint white glow.
Under it lay the skeleton of a nine-headed beast several hundred meters long.
The bones carried an aura that took up all the room in the chamber, the nine necks and serpentine body were edged like blades, and the bone itself had the look of flawless white jade, through the half-transparent marrow, a thick, unusual energy could be seen moving slowly inside.
Cecilia registered an enormous volume of cosmic destiny coming off it.
All sealed within the marrow.
Or rather, held strictly inside a fixed perimeter.
One step past that line and not a trace of its fluctuations could be detected.
The formation floating above was doing that.
So that’s the forbidden formation, working in resonance with the barrier outside to strip Exalted Continent of its destiny.
Truly devilish.
The Spirit Emperor worked the controls.
The forbidden formation slowed to a stop, and the pale white light around it thinned and died.
He looked at the Nine-Headed Serpent skeleton with real pain on his face, then let out a heavy breath, most of Exalted Continent’s cosmic destiny, a million years of it, sat inside those bones.
He could see it, he couldn’t have it.
To keep the skeleton out of Soren’s hands, he hardened himself with tears in his eyes.
He would destroy it.
He laid a palm against the warm old bone and released a Spirit technique, the energy rolled across the vault and wrapped the skeleton whole.
Grinding, crushing sounds filled the chamber.
His Spirit energy turned into a storm of wind blades and hacked at the ancient bones.
Hidden in the void, Cecilia watched him thrash around in desperation and let out an amused snort, she folded her arms, settled in, and started editorializing.
"If it can hold that much cosmic destiny, it obviously isn’t an ordinary Ancestor skeleton, odds are excellent it belonged to an Upper-Tier Spirit Ancestor."
"And a nobody Upper-Tier Spirit Emperor is going to break it?"
Right on cue, the technique screeched and came straight back at him, it twisted in the air and dispersed.
The rebound threw the Spirit Emperor eighty meters backward.
Cecilia smiled and got ready to step out and take the skeleton.
But the Spirit Emperor reached the same conclusion at the same moment, his technique couldn’t destroy it, so he opened his spatial storage.
An Emperor Realm powerhouse’s spatial storage had room enough to swallow a skeleton several hundred meters long without straining.
Spatial storage was its own kind of independent pocket dimension, every Emperor carried a unique energy frequency, no matter how well imitated, no two were ever identical.
Which made forcing open another person’s storage practically impossible.
Stashing the skeleton was still the worse option compared to destroying it, practically impossible wasn’t the same as impossible, it was a fallback and nothing more.
He opened the storage and pulled the skeleton in, and irritation flashed across Cecilia’s face behind the veil.
Damn it, I played around too long.
She was furious, she’d assumed he would try a second Spirit technique first, one second earlier and she’d have had him.
With the skeleton put away, she was out of moves, kill him now in temper and nobody would ever open that storage again.
There was still time, she flipped her hand and produced a pitch-black pill, dropped out of the void, and shot toward him.
She’d pair the forbidden pill with one of her secret techniques, take his mind, and make him open the storage himself.
Then something happened that she hadn’t planned for.
The Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor drove a palm into his own dantian.