The word sank into the realm like a stone into deep water. Overhead, fragments of incomplete grand dao flickered in response, as though the realm itself was listening in.
Ling Feng rolled his shoulders once, loosened his neck, then flashed a lazy smile.
"Alright," he said, "here come the fun times."
A few of the girls twitched at his phrasing. Dao Land was a place where ancient monsters had come to die and bury their obsessions. Calling it "fun times" was the kind of thing only Ling Feng could say with a straight face.
He lifted his hand.
Chaos Sense spread out—silent, formless, eclipsing ordinary divine sense. His perception threaded through frozen waves, dove beneath plates of glassy "sea," brushed across ruins and jagged ridges. Treasure points, murderous zones, dormant wills… they all lit up in his mind's eye like stars, each carrying a flavor of dao, of history, of obsession.
He sifted through them the way another man might scroll through a menu.
Not you. Too violent. Not yet. Too deep. That one… that one's perfect.
A slow, satisfied grin curved his lips.
"Wanxue," he called.
Qiurong Wanxue straightened at once.
"Yes, Ling Feng," she replied softly.
He walked over, stopping close enough that his presence wrapped around her like a quiet, living curtain. His voice dropped, gentle in a way he didn't use for anyone else.
"There's a stump ahead," he said, eyes glinting. "What's left of a Ghost Ancestral Tree. Your people should have lit incense to this thing ten eras ago."
Her pupils shrank slightly. "Ghost… Ancestral Tree?"
"Roots that once drank the river between life and death," he said. "Branches that used to carry Ghost Immortals' wishes like lanterns. Now only the stump's left, buried in this place, sulking."
He lifted his chin toward the left, where Dao Land's frozen waves rose in uneven ridges.
"I'll open a path to its shadow. Past that," he smiled, "you go alone."
She held his gaze for a breath. The proud chief of the Snow-Shadow Tribe, who had guided her people through Nightsea and Necropolis, bowed—just slightly.
"…I understand."
He chuckled. "You always do."
He took a single step. Under his heel, Dao Land shivered.
Chaos Force spread into the "ground," brushing past layers of frozen dao like fingers through tangled hair. A narrow line brightened ahead, carving a hidden corridor through broken laws and dormant killing intents. To others, it would remain invisible. To Wanxue, it now shimmered like a pale ghost-road.
"Follow that thread," Ling Feng said. "At the end, you'll find a stump that still remembers all the ghosts this place swallowed. Sit on it. Make it admit you're prettier than its old masters."
Wanxue's lips curved, the faintest, almost invisible smile. "Such… instructions."
"Go," he said, voice warm. "I'm watching. If something tries to cheat, I'll smack it."
She cupped her fists toward him with Ghost Immortal formality, then stepped onto the invisible road.
The others watched her slip away into Dao Land's strange distance until the shimmer of her white figure dissolved among frozen waves.
...
Qiurong Wanxue walked.
Here, every step left no footprint, yet echoed faintly in the tapestry of incomplete dao overhead. The path Ling Feng had drawn cut through invisible currents and lingering wills, a slim artery of safety in a realm where even the air could cut.
Eventually, the frozen ocean dipped.
The ground ahead opened into a hollow—an ancient basin where the "sea" had once risen and fallen. Now, its center was dominated by a stump.
It didn't look like wood anymore.
It was a circular plateau of bone-white matter, veined with faint ghostly runes. Once, it must have been unimaginably vast, a tree whose crown brushed the firmament. Now only this cross-section remained—thirty zhang across, cracked, yet still exuding a solemn, suffocating aura.
As Wanxue approached, a low whisper rose in the basin.
Not wind.
Memory.
Shadows stirred around the stump's edges—vague silhouettes in ancient Ghost Immortal armor, robes fluttering in a wind that wasn't there. They had no faces, only empty sockets where obsessions used to burn.
Snow-Shadow's ancestral light flared faintly behind Wanxue.
She inhaled slowly, the chill in her chest turning sharp and bright. Frost blossomed at her bare feet, spreading outward in thin, crystalline petals.
"I am Qiurong Wanxue," she said quietly, each word carrying the dignity of a tribe chief. "Current generation Snow-Shadow. Ghost Immortal."
The shadows shivered. Some recoiled. One stepped forward.
It was taller than the rest, its outline steadier—perhaps an ancient chief, perhaps a general buried under Necropolis long before her era. It raised a hand, pointing silently at the stump's surface.
Come. Prove it.
Wanxue climbed.
As her foot touched the stump, the world lurched.
The basin vanished.
She stood on a boundless plain of roots—endless white-roots twisting through dark space, each one carrying the breath of Nether Border, of ghost fire, of death that had refused to rot. The sky overhead was a swirl of grey, where countless Ghost Immortal prayers had once risen like smoke.
A pressure slammed down—immeasurable, ancient, like the collective gaze of every Ghost Ancestral Tree that had ever drunk from death's river.
Her knees wanted to buckle.
Snow-Shadow's phantom stepped fully behind her, wrapping her thin shoulders.
Wanxue set her jaw.
She lifted her hands.
Ghostly snow fluttered from her fingertips—late-autumn flakes that fell soundlessly. Each flake carried a faint rune, a mark of Ghost Immortal dao refined through her path, through her tribe's suffering, through Nightsea's wind and Necropolis' shadow.
The roots surged.
They lashed toward her like pale, skeletal serpents, trying to root through her body, to measure her worth against a ledger written before her birth.
Wanxue's eyes turned as clear as ice on a winter lake.
"The ghosts of the past," she whispered, voice steady, "do not decide the ghosts of today."
Her ghost snow thickened.
Each flake that landed on a root did not melt—it sank in, freezing a segment, then blossoming into a pattern of snow-marked sigils. Old runes cracked. New ones rose.
For a brief instant, between breaths, this ancient, stubborn fragment of Dao Land became Snow-Shadow's territory.
The pressure turned from hostility to weight, from rejection to… trial.
High overhead, between clouds of drifting grey, something shifted.
Inside her chest, Wanxue felt it—a hollow space in her Fate Palace system, one more door that had always stayed closed, not for lack of talent, but for lack of a proper key.
Now, the key wrapped around her ankles in the form of ghost roots and snow.
She sat cross-legged on the stump, hands forming ghostly seals handed down from eras of Snow-Shadow chiefs. Ghost flame rose behind her in the shape of a bare, leafless tree—its crown a halo of frost, its roots sinking through layers of unseen worlds.
On Dao Land's fragmented sky, a new palace flickered into existence behind her Niwan Palace's curtain—a translucent palace of ghost-wood and snow, floors paved in late-autumn frost, doors sculpted from solidified soul-light.
...
Ling Feng pointed Su Yonghunag towards a powerful armor.
It was a suit of armor knelt half-buried in the solidified ocean.
It was enormous.
Even collapsed, it stood thirty zhang tall, plates of golden metal layered over each other like overlapping suns. Cracks marred its surface, but within those cracks, runes still crawled like living things—miniature suns igniting and extinguishing in silence.
Su Yonghuang's eyes narrowed.
"That armor…" she murmured.
She inhaled slowly.
For a moment, her Solar Immortal Physique stirred, the sun-seed within her body flaring with golden light. Chaos Energy threaded through it, acting as a cool, steady buffer, keeping her from burning herself out even at her current terrifying level.
Su Yonghuang stepped forward.
As her foot touched the rise, the armor woke.
Two hollow eye-slits flared, vomiting golden flames. A wave of heat rolled out, so intense that nearby "sea glass" plates cracked, streaming molten light down theirtraight up the slope, her robe fluttering in the unnaturally hot wind.
Within the armor, ancient sun dao roused like a wounded beast. Runes flared, forming swirling halos of condensed sunlight. The sky above them dimmed as lines of golden law surged upward, trying to reclaim the dome of Dao Land itself.
Su Yonghuang's Solar Immortal Physique blazed.
Her skin turned radiant, her hair shimmering like strands of molten gold. Each breath she took pulled in stray sun fragments from the air, feeding them into the incomplete wheel of her eleventh Fate Palace—and into the blank space waiting beyond.
The armor roared.
A pillar of blazing light crashed down, a sun-lance thick as a tower, aiming to erase her entirely.
She didn't dodge.
She lifted her hands, fingers forming a seal of the Solar Grand Dao, and met the lance head-on. The impact made the frozen ocean beneath them groan; cracks shot outward, racing for miles.
Within that storm of light, she was a silhouette carved from gold.
The incomplete sun dao of the armor burned into her meridians, threatening to scorch them black.
Chaos-cooled Solar Physique drank it instead.
She drew the wild yang in, refined it, and brandished it back at its origin. Her eleventh Fate Palace trembled and steadied, while behind it—behind her Niwan Palace's curtain—a nascent, twelfth palace began to stir.
...
For Lan Yunzhu he pointed her towards
a slope where the frozen ocean had melted into a basin.
Here, the "ground" fell away into a lake.
At first glance, it was small—only a few dozen zhang across. But the moment Lan Yunzhu's eyes fell upon it, her breath caught.
The water wasn't water.
Each droplet, each ripple, held a miniature river—tiny, complete, flowing with its own dao. They overlapped, threaded through each other, layered into a shimmering body that defied common sense. Some currents flowed forward, some backward, some in circles; some ran upwards into the sky, then returned as rain. It was like a scholar's madness: a hundred river daos studied, broken down, recombined into something greater.
Heaven-Study Peerless Water.
Lan Yunzhu's heart trembled.
She swallowed.
Then she kicked off her shoes.
Barefoot, she stepped into the water.
It was neither cold nor hot. It simply was—like touching liquid dao.
The moment her toes broke the surface, countless miniature rivers swarmed upward. They coiled around her ankles like curious snakes, rushed into her meridians with greedy eagerness.
Her heart jumped. For a terrifying instant, she felt herself drowning from the inside—so many currents, so many different directions, threatening to tear her apart.
She gritted her teeth.
"Thousand Carp," she whispered, invoking the name of her lineage, "swim upstream."
Her Fate Palaces flared.
Within her inner world, her existing river palace roared, rising as a massive current that flowed against the pull of all others. It surged through her meridians, seizing rebellious streams, forcing them to bend, to merge.
The Heaven-Study Water protested. Its rivers writhed, shifting patterns, testing her.
Lan Yunzhu closed her eyes.
She let go of conscious technique.
Instead, she remembered standing by the river at home as a child, watching carp leap against the waves. She remembered laughing, falling in, being dragged, then finding her balance and letting the current support rather than drown her.
Her body swayed in the lake.
She looked like a slender willow in a strange storm—water rising and falling around her, never quite touching her higher than her knees, no matter how it thrashed.
High within her Niwan Palace, behind her existing Fate Palaces, another space opened.
A palace formed, not of stone, but of flowing water.
Its walls were riverbanks that shifted with the seasons, its roof a canopy of mist and rain. Within, countless miniature rivers flowed—clear, ordered, harmonious, all feeding into a central, larger current that carried her name.
...
For Xu Pei, he told her, "There's a valley ahead," he said. "Full of Myriad Immortals Source Grass. Each blade remembers a different Merit Law. Most people who step in get chopped into conceptual sashimi."
Xu Pei blinked once. "Conceptual…?"
"Don't worry about the word," he waved it away. "Point is, it'll try to dissect your path. Your job is to convince it you already did that yourself."
She dipped her head. "I will not shame you."
He reached out and gently flicked her forehead. "You couldn't if you tried"
She smiled, cheeks pink, and jogged off.
...
The valley of Myriad Immortals Source Grass was deceptively quiet.
No wind. No birds. Just a sea of knee-high grass—the normal green of plants, at first glance.
Xu Pei stepped to the edge.
Her Violent Cloud Chant stirred, energy in her body rotating in compressed spirals—no longer wasteful explosions, but precise bursts, refined under Ling Feng's training and Chaos adjustments.
She took her first step into the valley.
The grass moved.
Every blade rose.
Lines of light extended from their tips—faint, razor-thin threads of dao. One carried sword intent, another fist intent, another flame, another frost. Some radiated Buddhist compassion, others demonic mania. It was as if every major path through Dao Land had left a hair-thin echo here.
They all turned toward her at once.
In her inner vision, countless immortal shadows appeared.
They shouted their Merit Laws, hurled their techniques, tried to dissect her—showing her flaws, pointing out inefficiencies, trying to overwrite her violent path with their own "perfect" daos.
Xu Pei's face flushed, not with shame, but with anger.
"I know I'm rough," she said under her breath. "But my path is mine."
Her Fate Palaces spun.
The Modified Heavenly Dao Academy Merit Law she cultivated roared to life, taking those attacking insights and reorganizing them, using its nature to digest complex daos into her own framework.
Her Violent Cloud Chant erupted—not as mindless fury, but as storm systems.
Clouds of energy unfolded above the valley, each a tightly wound, rotating mass. Lightning and flame danced within them, not lashing out randomly, but striking precisely where the grass's dao-lines were thickest.
Each bolt that fell shattered a blade's attempt to override her path and stole a thread of its dao, weaving it into her own violent storms.
Grass burned. Grass regrew. The valley howled silently as countless Merit Law echoes were either accepted or annihilated.
At the center of this storm, Xu Pei walked forward with measured steps, back straight, eyes clear.
Slowly, her Fate Palace system reshaped.
Behind her existing palaces, a new one condensed—a towering hall of storm-cloud stone, its pillars formed from rotating cyclones, its roof a sky forever on the verge of lightning.
...
"Baojiao," Ling Feng said, turning.
Chen Baojiao was already tapping her foot, blood in her Tyrannical Valley Immortal Spring Physique boiling with anticipation.
"Finally," she grinned. "If you send me to talk to flowers, I'll revolt."
"Relax," he smirked. "No flowers. Just blood."
Her grin widened. "Better."
He pointed toward a jagged depression in Dao Land's landscape.
"Hundred Dao Eager Blood," he said. "An old battlefield's resentment and ambition melted down into killing something. Or become something."
She exhaled, eyes heating.
"Sounds perfect."
...
The pit was exactly that—a gouge in Dao Land's frozen ocean, its walls slick with dried, dark-red stains.
At its bottom, a pool of blood churned.
It wasn't physical blood. It was dao made liquid—each swirl carrying the echo of a battle fought here, each bubble a fragment of unwillingness, of fury, of deviation from the Heaven's Will.
Chen Baojiao didn't bother tiptoeing.
She jumped.
The moment her body plunged into the blood, the pool went mad.
Spears of coagulated dao shot upward, trying to pierce her. Faces formed in the blood, screaming without sound, hurling themselves at her. Hundreds of different grand daos slammed into her flesh and Fate Palaces, eager to either devour her or use her as a vessel to crawl back into the world.
She laughed.
Deep, wild, delighted.
"Come on!" she roared, arms spreading. "If you're so eager, line up!"
Her Tyrannical Valley Immortal Spring Physique erupted. The Chaos-enhanced springs within her body opened like bottomless wells. Strikes that hit her didn't stop—they fell in. Impacts that should have crushed her bones sank into those springs, were broken down, and rose again as fuel.
Within her inner void, her existing Fate Palaces shook as streams of blood-dao crashed into them. Some were rejected outright, melted, and spat back. Others found resonance and were absorbed, given new names and colors under her control.
Behind her, a new Fate Palace began to ignite.
...
"Shangyuan," Ling Feng said, turning toward the girl with the Pure Jade Physique.
Li Shangyuan stepped forward, her movements graceful, every line of her posture clean. Her power was not flashy; it was deep, like carefully polished jade that had survived a thousand years of storms.
"There's a crack in Dao Land's belly," Ling Feng told her. "Inside, the dao veins crystallized into jade icicles. They're stubborn—if your heart isn't still, they'll shatter you instead of helping."
She nodded, eyes growing more serious. "I will go."
He regarded her for a moment, then stepped closer, brushing a kher jaw.
"You're already very clean," he said softly. "This place will just cut away the last dust."
Color touched her cheeks, but she simply bowed and departed.
...
The crevice was slender, barely wide enough for a person to slip through.
Within, the air changed.
Sound vanished.
Li Shangyuan stepped into a world of shining cold.
The cavern opened up under Dao Land's skin, its ceiling hung with thousands of jade icicles—each a dao vein that had condensed over countless eras. They glimmered with internal light, faint lines of runes flowing through them like frozen streams.
As she walked forward, the first icicle chimed.
The note went straight through her chest.
She stopped, hand pressed unconsciously over her heart.
The Pure Jade Sacred Heart Art in her Fate Palaces stirred, responding. It felt as if her heart itself was carved from jade and someone had just tapped it lightly with a hammer.
More icicles chimed.
Li Shangyuan sat down, legs folded neatly beneath her, hands resting on her knees.
She let the sounds strike.
Cracks spread—not in the jade icicles, but in the unnecessary layers she'd wrapped around her own heart. The expectations, the fears of losing control, the habit of putting others' paths above her own.
A hairline fracture appeared in the image of her inner self.
Instead of panicking, she smiled.
"Good," she whispered.
Her Pure Jade Physique responded to honest damage as it always had—it didn't crumble; it refined. The crack lines became patterns, like deliberate carvings on jade, enhancing its beauty and depth instead of ruining it.
High within her Niwan Palace, a new Fate Palace began to form.
...
"Yuxia."
The descendant of Ice Feather Palace straightened, arms crossed over her chest, trying to look aloof.
She met Ling Feng's eyes and huffed, trying to mask the way her heart sped up whenever he called her name.
"You finally remembered this princess?" she sniffed.
He walked right up, leaned in, and shamelessly brushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
"How could I ever forget you?" he said, voice low and teasing. "Come on. I found you a cliff that looks like your temper."
...
The cliff rose out of Dao Land like a sword planted in the ground.
Its face was covered in scars.
Some were hair-fine, some as wide as rivers. None followed a simple line. They intersected, overlapped, cut one another apart. Yet there was a pattern—if one stared too long, it felt as if the cliff itself would slice one's gaze into pieces.
Every scar pulsed with leftover severing dao.
Bing Yuxia swallowed once.
"This place…" she breathed.
She exhaled, some tension easing from her shoulders.
She stepped toward the cliff.
Each pace she took, the scars brightened.
By the time she stood at its base, the entire face of the rock was glowing—lines of cold, silver-white light, each one a different severing experience carved into Dao Land by some unknown monster.
Bing Yuxia drew the Heaven Cutting Tablet.
The moment it appeared, the world flinched.
The cliff's scars flared, reacting to a familiar yet alien breath.
Sword chant rose—not from a single throat, but from countless invisible blades.
She lifted the Tablet.
Its weight wasn't physical; it was conceptual. Holding it felt like holding the ability to erase anything—yet also the responsibility of deciding what deserved to vanish.
"Let's see," she murmured, "if I can cut my own shackles before I try for others'."
The first scar moved.
It tore free of the cliff as a beam of light, arcing down toward her like a merciless guillotine.
Bing Yuxia didn't retreat.
She swung the Heaven Cutting Tablet.
There was no fancy flourish.
Just a single, clean, decisive motion.
Tablet and scar met.
The impact was silent.
Then the scar split into two, its severing dao absorbed into the Tablet, which flashed once like a satisfied predator.
Another scar leapt.
Then another. And another.
Sword rain fell from the cliff face, each beam carrying a different "cut": severing karma, severing fate, severing love, severing fear. They tried to carve her meridians, slice her convictions, nip at her bond with Ling Feng and the others.
Bing Yuxia felt each attempt.
Her chest tightened once when a scar tried to cut her feelings for him. She saw, in a razor's width of illusion, a path where she walked away, where she chose solitude, sword above all.
Her fingers tightened on the Tablet.
"No," she said aloud, voice steady.
She cut that scar in half.
In that instant, the Heaven Cutting Tablet felt lighter in her hands—not because its power diminished, but because she had decided what it would never cut.
Her Fate Palaces roared.
A new one began to form.