Chapter 244: The Mantis Stalks the Cicada, Unaware of the Oriole Behind…
Tianyi watched with apprehensive eyes at the distorted world. The dimensional boundaries resembled a spherical realm but with no stability. Continents floated inside with no clear pattern. One moment they were at the left, but they suddenly teleported to another part the next moment. Hell, there was no clear up or down, and each chunk seemed to have its own gravitational force. Day and night intermixed so that it could appear day and night simultaneously. For some continents, it seemed to be clad in eternal darkness, but at other points, the day never ended.
It went against everything Tianyi had learned on Earth and the spacetime concepts he comprehended.
“Once you enter the boundary of the Broken Primordial World, you will be teleported to a random spot. If you want to leave, you must travel to the boundary and exit. Don’t worry. Once you do, the pendant will shield you from the Vast Void until I can pick you up.”
“Is Grand Elder Zhang not going to enter?” Xia Yushan asked.
Grand Elder Zhang shook her head. “The danger in the Broken Primordial World increases with one’s strength. If I entered, it’s possible for me to lose a limb or be fatally injured. And there are certain locations that only those below certain cultivation can enter, so you should grasp that chance. Enough delaying. All of you, go.”
Tianyi rubbed the pouch attached to his waist. After taking a deep breath, he jumped off Ink Poem Palace towards the Broken Primordial World. With his actions, Xia Yushan entered next, followed by several disciples. The Immortal Realm elders waited by, waiting for the right moment or instance.
As Tianyi entered the Broken Primordial World, he discovered he was free-falling towards the center of the Broken Primordial World. He looked behind him to see that his fellow disciples had already disappeared, teleported by the rules of the Broken Primordial World.
“Why wasn’t I teleported?”
Tianyi had no time to ponder as he realized the speed of his descent started to increase to a terrifying speed, far faster than anything he had experienced before. Luckily, there wasn’t any atmosphere or air, so he didn’t turn into a flaming meteor.
Upon realizing that he was rocketing towards one of the smaller landmasses, a speck compared to the continents, Tianyi covered his head with his arms and braced for the impact. Only the impact never came. Certainly, he felt something crash into him, but his body didn’t halt to a stop.
Confused, Tianyi lowered his arms and looked around him, only to see the remains of a landmass. He had crashed and shattered the tiny landmass with his body.
Ground – 0
Tianyi – 1
After ruining seven more landmasses, either by shattering them into debris or creating a giant hole through them, Tianyi finally crash-landed onto one of the continents closer to the center of the Broken Primordial World.
Tianyi wiped the dust off his clothes and looked around the crater he had created from impact. Before moving to escape, Tianyi excavated the metal that stopped his fall, which now had a Tianyi-shaped imprint on it. He would have crashed deeper had it not been for the unknown stopping his momentum.
Since it could stop and withstand the impact of his fall, the metal shouldn’t be an ordinary material. Holding the giant hunk of metal a thousand times larger than himself, Tianyi tried to rip it apart with his hands but only succeeded in slightly warping it. “I’ll take it.”
He couldn’t use his qi to operate spatial rings, so Mengfei had given him a shrinking pouch that didn’t need qi to be used. The pouch’s opening stretched unnaturally wide, allowing Tianyi to place the whole metal ore into it.
With a powerful leap, Tianyi jumped out of the crater he had created. In the air, his third eye opened and scanned the continent.
Tianyi held his chin and pondered which direction he should travel. He had memorized as much information concerning extinct herbs and materials that could only be found in the primordial era, and he needed the Devil Submerging Flower for Xi Ri. Even if he couldn’t get it, he could also trade other materials to exchange for pills that suppressed Xi Ri’s inner devil infection.
In the end, Tianyi chose the direction with the most prosperous land. It was much safer to gather extinct materials to exchange for inner devil suppressing treasures with the Buzhou Immortal Sect instead of blindly searching for the Devil Submerging Flower.
The continent Tianyi was on had extreme greenery on the east side and a vast desert expanse on the west side. Tianyi didn’t know much about geography and climates, but spiritual herbs should exist in greater quantity and quality in lusher environments, right?
Along the way, he was stopped by a pack of monsters. The monsters resembled dire wolves, only ten times larger, with electric currents snaking around them and two antlers growing atop their heads.
Tianyi’s eyes opened and analyzed them. Most of the lupine monsters had power around the Unity Realm, but the leader was solidly at the level of a transcending mortality stage. They hadn’t opened their spirituality and transformed into demons, so their eyes exuded bestial instincts.
Tianyi cracked his neck. He had been surprised by the monster’s presence, but he quickly reorganized himself. He wouldn’t even be afraid of immortals, much less these monsters that hadn’t even reached the Immortal Realm in power.
The monsters whined with confusion when Tianyi’s figure suddenly disappeared. The leader started sniffing the air, but before he could capture any scent, Tianyi appeared beside it and twisted his neck off with his bare hands.
The other monsters howled in fear as their leader’s head plopped onto the floor. They began to retreat slowly with their backs facing away from Tianyi, but it was too late for them. Tianyi killed the monsters one by one by twisting their necks off.
After killing them, Tianyi stored their corpses in his spatial pouch. Since these monsters appeared in the Broken Primordial World, then it meant that they could be species that only existed in the primordial era, so their corpse should fetch a nice price.
The only thing Tianyi was disappointed in was his combat abilities. Not his inability to cast spells and use qi, he was more than enough to face an immortal with his body alone, but he couldn’t fight numerous opponents simultaneously. Instead, he could only focus on one thing at a time. He had almost allowed one of the monsters to escape because of this.
Although he hadn’t noticed, the suppression on the continent in the Broken Primordial World was a hundred times greater than in the Huang Realm. It meant that Tianyi’s brute power would no longer shatter the world around him at the slightest touch, but it also meant that he could no longer create air cannons by punching the air, greatly diminishing his long-range capabilities too.
“Hm?”
Tianyi looked down to see Dandan crawl out of his robes and onto the ground. His forked tongue poked in and out continuously. After it a moment, it made a strange cry and started dashing off, forcing Tianyi to follow him.
After running for around ten kilometers, Dandan stopped and began to dig into the ground. Seeing how little progress his spiritual beast was making, Tianyi helped out, literally ripping the ground away to reveal a long serpentine skeleton hundreds of meters long.
‘This is?’ Tianyi wondered.
Opening his third eye, Tianyi sensed the faint dragonic qi emanating from the skeleton. He turned to Dandan. “Not bad, you found a dragon skeleton.”
His eyes nearly popped out when he saw Dandan unhinge his jaw and swallow a large sphere larger than its body. His eye sensed the dragonic essence within and immediately ascertained that it was a dragon pearl, albeit one almost exhausted of its essence. In another thousand years, it would have turned into an ordinary, if highly durable, pearl.
Strangely, Dandan’s body didn’t balloon from swallowing the dragon pearl, although it did bulge a bit. The pill qilin releases a content burp before making his back into Tianyi’s robes.
‘Selfish as always,’ Tianyi thought. He moved his shoulders and prepared to store the dragon skeleton. Even if all the dragonic essence had been exhausted, it was still the corpse of a True Demon Realm dragon. If nothing else, he could allow his second clone, Donghai Longzi, to absorb the marrow and enhance his cultivation or refine the bones into artifacts.
…as soon as he became an immortal and regained the use of qi.
Over the next few days, Tianyi discovered several rare herbs and materials. During this time, Tianyi had to wrap his spiritual beast around his neck like some scaly version of a ferret scarf. While Dandan hibernated, his size had started to increase, from its former palm-size to nearly a quarter of a meter, not including its long bushy tail.
When Dandan’s body grew a little more, he opened his eyes again. With a low cry that unmistakenly carried the might of a dragon, he began to search for more dragon-related materials. Sometimes it was an herb doused in dragonic qi or a spirit spring mutated from dragon blood.
Tianyi happily allowed Dandan to evolve by absorbing dragon essence, although he would like his spiritual pet to have left the second dragon pearl. He could already see the day Dandan grew large enough for him to ride. Tianyi wasn’t greedy. Having Dandan grow to the size of a horse was enough.
As Tianyi traveled farther and farther, he discovered a pillar connecting the sky to the land. With its size, he should have noticed it earlier, but he didn’t, which Tianyi attributed to the weird rules of the Broken Primordial World.
His eyes shimmered with interest when he saw that the pillar was actually a purple bamboo over kilometers tall and tens of meters wide at the base.
The Violet World Bamboo was a legendary plant that was said to be one of the materials Nuwa used to refine the pillars to keep heaven and earth from collapsing onto each other. Its closest equivalent in other mythology was the world trees such as Yggdrasil.
Tianyi circled the Violet World Bamboo, figuring out how to move it into his spatial bag. He had already tried pulling it out, but that didn’t work even with his enormous strength, which only strengthened Tianyi’s resolve.
Next, Tianyi tried to cut down the Violet World Bamboo, but as soon as he broke the trunk, the wounds immediately healed, leaving Tianyi with purple bamboo scraps. He stored them away since they still came from a precious spiritual plant.
Not one to give up easily, especially with Xi Ri’s life on the line, Tianyi continued to attack the trunk of the bamboo, discovering no other options except to persist in his action. After a day of chopping bamboo—Tianyi couldn’t tell since the east side was always day—Tianyi was just about to give up.
It was not like he was not without gains. The sheer amount of bamboo scraps he picked should be worth something. As Tianyi decided to give up, day turned to night, and a beam of light erupted from the west side.
Tianyi snapped his eyes to the source. He recognized the light. It was extremely similar to the Sovereign Nine Yin Lotus’s birth back in the Northern Region of the Heaven Continent. Not wasting any time, Tianyi abandoned the Violet World Bamboo and chased after the light source.
The closer he got to the west side, the more excited Tianyi became. He could feel the amount of energy decrease due to his inner cosmos’s absorption slowing down. Simultaneously, a pleasant lotus scent entered his nose, like with the Sovereign Nine Yin Lotus.
After nearly a week of rush travel, Tianyi finally laid eyes on the source of the pillar of light, a golden, nine-leaf lotus.
“Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus,” Tianyi couldn’t help but utter.
It was just as famous as the Sovereign Nine Yin Lotus and perhaps had even more fame due to a single fact. It was one of the critical ingredients for the Nine Yang Revolution Pill concocted by the Taishan Laojun, a clone of the Heavenly Lord of Dao and Virtue. Ingesting the pill would allow an ordinary mortal to reach the Origin Immortal Realm, becoming an immortal sovereign.
Even if Tianyi only brought the Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus back, it would be enough for the sect to cure Xi Ri and then some. Tianyi didn’t wait any longer and ran up to extract it, but the moment his hands were about to touch the lotus, something slammed into him and sent him to the ground, causing the sand to explode into the air.
After Tianyi spat out the sand in his mouth, he glared at his assaulter, a monster over a hundred meters tall with the head of a lion, a deer’s body, front claws of an eagle, deer antlers, hind hooves of a cow, and a serpentine tail. Dandan started to move from Tianyi’s neck, wanting to fight the new monster, but Tianyi didn’t wait.
It would be best to store the Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus before attracting any more monster’s attention. Even if the monster didn’t even have the thought capabilities of a human child, they still recognized what was good for them.
Tianyi leaped towards the monster and delivered a devastating punch that sent it flying. He frowned when he realized that the monster hadn’t been pulverized by his punch, a first. He opened his third eye and saw that the monster’s body was almost as powerful as a true demon.
Still, Tianyi didn’t need to defeat the monster. He just needed to take the Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus and flee. He turned around to grab the lotus, but the monster appeared behind him and tried to swallow him whole.
Tianyi increased his weight, preventing the monster from picking him up, and unleashed a series of punches inside its mouth, causing it to release Tianyi and yelp in pain. Tianyi, once again, tried to make a grab for the Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus, but a tail out of the corner of his eyes knocked him off balance.
He glared at the qilin-shaped monster as Dandan slithered off his neck and hissed threateningly at the monster. Without holding anything back, Tianyi attacked the monster with Dandan aiding him. The pill qilin didn’t have the same brute strength his master possessed nor the size to utilize it, but it could unleash a breath attack made of chaos qi, causing the monster immense pain.
Under the combined assault of Tianyi and Dandan, the monster soon suffered numerous injuries, and it was only a matter of time before it would be defeated. It could run, but it stared unwillingly at the Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus.
As the battle between the two sides reached a climax, the pillar of light disappeared, causing both sides to snap their gaze towards the Sovereign Nine Yang Lotus, only to see a human figure wearing gray robes running off into the distance.
