Chapter 132
Soren gave his shoulders a small shake.
The blood claws clamped around him blew apart with a boom.
The entire hallucinatory world, brittle as a house of mirrors, came apart inch by inch, fragment by fragment, and dissolved into nothing.
A shift in his thoughts opened the Strategy Encyclopedia.
It slid into the operational interface of the Six Paths Form Diagram.
In one sector of the diagram, a bewitching woman in a form-fitting black demonic dress, half-concealed and half not, slowly opened her blood-red eyes.
The Hungry Ghost Path Demonic Form.
Soren had raised it to a conversion degree of 59 a long time ago.
By drawing on her power, he could both induce hallucinations and dissolve them.
What had just happened was the proof.
He didn’t stop there.
Leaning on the Hungry Ghost Path Demonic Form, Soren fired a reverse hallucinogenic projection into the distortions above the plain.
In roughly ten seconds he rewrote a phenomenon that had stood for over a million years.
He brought his consciousness back to his body.
Then he looked up again.
The distortions looked exactly as they had.
Underneath, the properties were entirely his.
Using the distortions as the carrier, Soren had poured the hallucinogenic power of the Hungry Ghost Path Demonic Form into them.
From now on, any cultivator who looked up at those twisting shapes dropped straight into a hallucination of Soren’s making.
Considerably more brutal than the original.
He wasn’t certain whether Cecilia had sent word of the formation and the destiny back to the Heavenly Demon Alliance.
The Alliance still had two Ancestor Realm powerhouses.
An extra layer of insurance never hurt.
This way, when he rebuilt a body around the Nine-Headed Serpent skeleton, nobody would be interrupting.
Besides, he’d decided to have some fun with this Cecilia.
A young Upper-Tier Demon Emperor with skin like that.
A beauty besides, built along lines a man could lose his footing over.
And in command of several forbidden techniques out of the Immemorial Era.
If he could conquer her and turn her into a loyal subordinate, she’d be worth a great deal down the road.
Soren rubbed the bridge of his nose, grinning.
"This Cecilia holds real rank in the Heavenly Demon Alliance."
"I wonder whether she has any experience in that department."
"If she does, forget it."
"I don’t collect other men’s leftovers."
"If she doesn’t..."
"...then I don’t care what faction she belongs to, what her name is, how strong she is, or where she comes from, a little warmth and she’s mine."
With the Strategy Encyclopedia in hand, obstacles like that didn’t worry him.
He let out a low, wicked laugh and stepped onto the plain of black fire.
The flames reacted as he crossed the line, as though something in them could think, condensing fast into roaring fireballs and coiling chains of fire.
They came at him hard.
Soren blinked his right eye.
The pattern flashed in the depths of his pupil.
Black tribulation lightning blasted out.
Everything in the path of those arcs went with them, the thunderclap rolled across the sky loud enough to tip the plain over.
The lightning outclassed the black fire by a full grade.
The fireballs and chains came apart into scattered wisps.
The weakened flames sagged back onto the scorched ground.
A moment later they started gathering again.
Soren was done playing, he blinked his left eye, the pattern surfaced.
Under his control the black lightning contracted hard, arc fusing into arc, and inside a second it had taken the shape of a beast.
A ten-thousand-meter Lightning Elephant.
Its four feet came down on the earth, and the rumble rolled out like rolling thunder.
Then it opened its jaws and started eating the black flames.
Under that suction, fire across the plain thinned at a ferocious rate, exposing bare ground glowing red from a million years of burning.
In less than the time it takes half an incense stick to burn, the plain had been eaten clean.
Crimson light flashed through Soren’s left eye, then his right.
The Lightning Elephant came apart, it reverted to arcs of black lightning.
Now a visible layer of flame ran across every arc.
Eating the black flames had done the tribulation lightning a great deal of good.
Its destructive intensity had climbed toward the caliber of tribulation lightning encountered at the Upper-Tier Ancestor breakthrough.
The thunder and fire were drawn back into the pattern in his right eye.
What had been an inferno was now empty ground, throwing off waves of residual heat and boiling steam.
Flat, ordinary land again, Soren walked deeper in, unhurried, meanwhile, the Falling Cherry Spirit Emperor, who had already opened the portal into the vault, felt an enormous suction pass over the area.
He stumbled and nearly went down.
When he’d steadied himself, he looked around, every black flame in sight was gone, his mind went blank, he had nothing to explain it with.
Then, through the shock, he caught a coercion coming in fast from the horizon.
"Heavens."
"Heavens!"
The Spirit Emperor ground his teeth and cursed.
A dignified Emperor Realm powerhouse.
Also very close to losing his mind.
That coercion was Soren’s, no question.
Compared to what he’d felt earlier, it had gone up a hundredfold.
His scalp felt ready to come off his skull.
The conclusion arrived on its own.
Soren had broken through.
Lower-Tier Demon Ancestor to Middle-Tier Demon Ancestor.
Never mind the speed, where did the man get the destiny?
Does the Exalted Continent of today even hold enough ambient destiny to carry a Lower-Tier Demon Ancestor into the Middle Tier?
This is damned devilish, he wavered hard, his face twisted with it.
Sweat the size of soybeans rolled off his forehead and hit the scorched ground, where residual heat took them up in white wisps.
Drip, drop.
Sizzle.
Inside a few moments his robes were soaked through.
Do I go down or not?
Go down, and he was a guide leading Soren straight to the prize.
Get cornered down there, and it was a dead end with no door.
Don’t go down, and there was still every chance Soren found the entrance himself and walked into the vault where the forbidden formation and the skeleton were kept.
A million years of stealing, gone in a second.