Mo Li passed away three days later. His departure was calm—without a word. But Fengyun Wujian knew: everything that needed to be said had already been spoken.
Carrying Mo Li's body, Fengyun Wujian once again stepped into the vast underground tomb. Perhaps only there could his remains truly find peace.
"You've come," a voice called out as soon as Fengyun Wujian entered the eerie, green-lit cavern and laid Mo Li's body down.
Looking up, he saw a middle-aged man in a green robe sitting cross-legged at the center of the tomb, surrounded by flickering ghostly flames.
"How did you get in here?" Fengyun Wujian asked.
The man gestured around him. "There are many ways in and out of this place. Otherwise, where do you think all these corpses came from?"
"…Have you also practiced demonic arts?"
The man didn't answer directly. Instead, he asked, "Are you ready? If you want to return to the Primordial Era, you must become one with this world."
Fengyun Wujian nodded and stepped through the scattered bones to sit beside the man.
"Which demonic art do you intend to cultivate? I might be able to offer some guidance."
"No need." Fengyun Wujian shook his head and closed his eyes. Of the 360,000 demonic techniques, not one was what he sought. The mutations they caused were too horrifying.
Here, the second trait of his Mind-Sword Body manifested. Fengyun Wujian began simulating the unique effects of each demonic technique in his mind. With this experiential understanding, he was able to identify the strengths of each method. His goal was simple: analyze how the various energy paths created different outcomes, then combine the best aspects into a new, original technique.
But processing hundreds of thousands of cultivation methods was mentally exhausting. Even with his pre-ascension ability to simultaneously practice two arts at once, this was not a task that could be completed in a short time.
"You shouldn't have brought him in here," the man suddenly said, pointing at Mo Li's corpse.
Fengyun Wujian opened his eyes. By now, he no longer needed to close them to concentrate. His multi-focus mental technique had matured. While simulating multiple arts in his mind, he asked, "Why not?"
The man was silent for a moment, then replied, "If they were still alive, they'd never want to set foot in this place."
"Why?"
"Different ideals," the man said, his voice rising with emotion. "In their eyes, we're traitors. They always believed that to protect our people, we had to sacrifice everything." His voice turned into a hoarse shout. "But I want to know—if we sacrifice even ourselves, can we really achieve lasting peace?"
Fengyun Wujian was shaken to his core. He stared at the man, stunned. In his mind, everyone had long been numb—numbly surviving, numb to existence.
"And you? Have you thought it through?" the man pressed. "Even if you master the demonic arts, what then? What do you plan to do? Be captured again?"
Fengyun Wujian sighed. He gently cradled Mo Li's body and placed it at the mouth of a passage. Then he turned back and said, "Maybe this really isn't the place for him… I don't know what I'm going to do. I feel the same as you, but if it's just the few of us… then we'll end up like that elder. Maybe I'm still burning with youthful passion, but as for the future… even I don't know. Maybe I'll end up like him."
Letting out a long sigh, Fengyun Wujian felt a deep bitterness rise in his chest. What can I really do? A single person's power was too small. A sense of helplessness and despair overwhelmed him.
Unknowingly, Fengyun Wujian found himself back in Mo Li's old water prison.
"When the day comes that you're no longer lost and have truly made up your mind, come find us," the middle-aged man's voice echoed directly in Fengyun Wujian's mind.
Days passed.
Each day, Fengyun Wujian sat silently in the water prison—practicing demonic techniques, eyes wide open, lost in thought. In the beginning, he meditated with his eyes closed for long stretches, only broken by the monthly siphoning of his true energy when the demons would awaken him with a strange whip.
Eventually, he barely needed to close his eyes. He would sit, eyes open, silently reflecting—thinking of his ascension, the Demon Realm, the skeletal remains in the tomb, and Mo Li.
For those who had ascended, time seemed to lose meaning. Gradually, Fengyun Wujian entered a state where he simply stared into space, his mind blank, no thoughts at all.
"Hey, young man. Wake up. Come on, wake up!" A kindly, gentle voice echoed in Fengyun Wujian's mind. It had an inexplicable power, and for some reason, it pulled him back to awareness—back to his own sense of being.
He moved his limbs, and a thick layer of dust fell from his shoulders. Even more dust rained from his hair. He coughed a few times, then slowly stood up and brushed himself off.
"So much dust… Feels like a long time has passed. But it didn't feel long at all," Fengyun Wujian murmured. His prolonged stupor had dulled his thoughts, and his mind struggled to catch up.
"I've been watching you for over two hundred years," the voice said again in his mind. "You've been dazed like this the whole time. I couldn't bear it anymore, so I woke you."
"Two hundred years? That long?! ...How do you know what I'm thinking?"
The voice belonged not to a person, but a surge of spiritual consciousness. Yet the sheer power of this consciousness dwarfed even the peak-level spiritual energy of Fengyun Wujian's Mind-Sword Body, Third Heaven. Compared to it, Fengyun Wujian felt like a stream before the sea—completely insignificant.
"Spiritual awareness is far more mysterious than you imagine," the voice said. "You've underestimated its power. If I hadn't seen that you, too, had trained your mind, I wouldn't have spoken to you even once."
"Senior… are you in this prison as well?" Fengyun Wujian projected his own consciousness outward.
"Of course. How else do you think I found you?"
"But… no matter how strong one's spirit is, it can't break us out of here."
"Who told you that?" the old voice replied. "This water prison may be heavily guarded, but if I truly wished it, not a single demon here would leave alive. I could walk out of this place and return to the Primordial Era at any time."
"What?! Then why are you still here?" Fengyun Wujian was stunned. He had never realized there was such a formidable master hidden here all along.
"If I leave, what will happen to our people?" the elder said with a long sigh. "To prevent the demons from exterminating everyone here, I've endured this place… for over a hundred million years."