The master of the Purple Smoke Holy Master had been an emperor in two lifetis. He was an emperor in life, and after death, his very corpse beca an emperor.
Among the Emperor Realm powerhouses related to the Netherworld, the only one known was the Great Emperor Youming, who was rumored to have achieved his emperorship within the Netherworld thirty-six epochs ago.
Xu Lai didn’t seem too concerned. He said nonchalantly, "Whatever demons or ghosts are in there, we’ll find out once we go inside."
"But this Netherworld..." Taotie grew anxious.
Though he was a brute, he wasn’t a fool. If they rashly entered the Teleportation Array in the Netherworld, heaven only knew where they would be sent. No one had ever known what lay on the other side of the Netherworld. This Netherworld waterfall may have been incomplete, but it was still terrifying enough.
Xu Lai retrieved a segnt of the Netherworld from his Storage Space. He had forcibly taken this segnt during his last battle with the old ferryman in the Netherworld. It could have been used to refine Soul Settling Pills, but after much deliberation, Xu Lai had decided to preserve it.
He sat cross-legged beside the segnt of the Netherworld.
Blood-red flas ignited in his hand as he began to forcibly refine it, intending to forge it into a defensive Magical Treasure.
Ti passed steadily.
About two hours later, Xu Lai opened his eyes, a sharp gleam flickering within. He bellowed, "Condense!"
A small, deep blue boat appeared before them, streams of brilliance flowing across its surface. It was a Magical Treasure comparable to an Immortal Artifact.
"What a pity, ti was too tight. If I had half a day more, a Quasi-Emperor Artifact might have been possible," Xu Lai said with a hint of regret.
The two Quasi-Emperors and the Immortal Venerable looked at him with complex expressions. A Quasi-Emperor Artifact, which he could refine with such ease, was the very pinnacle they sought to reach.
"Board this boat to pass through the light curtain," Xu Lai instructed as the four of them climbed aboard. "It can temporarily shield us from the laws of life and death and from causality."
At that mont, the fog in the Mass Burial Mound thickened once again, making it difficult to see even a few ters ahead.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
A series of heavy heartbeats suddenly echoed across the sky.
Aboard the boat, everyone except Xu Lai—Baize, Taotie, and Yu Guiwan—turned deathly pale as they felt a terrifying pressure bear down on them.
"As expected, the heartbeat and pressure of the Emperor Realm," Xu Lai remarked. He flicked his sleeve, and the crushing pressure from the heartbeats vanished.
A trickle of fresh blood spilled from the corner of Baize’s mouth. He stared intently at the Netherworld waterfall; the heartbeats seed to be coming from there.
The small boat, refined from a segnt of the Netherworld, glided calmly towards the waterfall.
SWOOSH—
The boat disappeared.
Their vision darkened for a mont. When it cleared, the four of them were all utterly shocked.
This was a small Barrier that had been ravaged by war, a scene of complete devastation. Split mountains, a shattered landscape, and the countless skeletons littering the ground would make anyone believe this was Hell. There were no signs of life anywhere.
In the very center of the Barrier, two giants knelt on the ground. Both reached with outstretched hands, as if trying to grasp a blood-red heart that was still beating in mid-air. However, a sword was thrust into the left giant’s chest, and a long spear had pierced the right giant’s skull.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
The gigantic heart pulsed slowly, filled with endless vitality, a stark contrast to the field of corpses surrounding it.
"Could that be the heart of a Great Emperor?"
Taotie, Baize, and Yu Guiwan stared fixedly at the beating heart, a hint of greed flickering in all three pairs of eyes.
At the sa ti, a bewitching voice resounded in their minds.
"Eat it."
"Eat it."
The three of them began to move with a strange rigidity. Like the kneeling giants, they reached out as if to pluck the heart from the air.
"Snap out of it!" Xu Lai shouted sharply.
RUMBLE!
Thunderclaps exploded in their minds, and the bewitching voice dissipated.
Divine General Taotie bit his tongue hard. The greed vanished from his eyes, replaced by caution. "The Supre Emperor, what just happened to ? I suddenly lost consciousness and only rember a voice urging to devour that heart..."
"We were beguiled," Baize said, quickly regaining his composure and assessing the situation. "There’s a formation here that confuses the mind. It’s likely the work of an Emperor Realm expert."
Xu Lai nodded. "You’ll be fine as long as you don’t stare at the heart. The formation is likely on the heart itself."
Knowing not to look at the heart, their gazes shifted back to the two giants kneeling beneath it. Their colossal stature was sothing unseen even in the Immortal Domain. Their boundaries were formidable. With just a glance, the others could tell that the giants’ physical strength alone was comparable to a Quasi-Emperor’s.
"Qingfeng, what clan from the Immortal Domain do they belong to?" Yu Guiwan asked with a frown.
"I’ve never seen them before." Xu Lai shook his head. In his one hundred thousand years, while he hadn’t traveled the entire Immortal Domain, he had still explored vast regions of it, yet he had never encountered beings with such formidable bodies.
The Primordial Giant race, ranked thirty-third for their innate talent, was a perfect example of a race that took the path of physical cultivation to its absolute limit; a single punch from them could shatter stars. With brute strength alone, they stood at the pinnacle of the Universe, and their clan had even produced a Quasi-Emperor.
Yet even a powerful race like them had bodies only about a hundred zhang tall, unlike these two giants, who were likely ten thousand zhang high. Before these two, the Primordial Giants would seem like toddlers—utterly dwarfed.
As for their appearance, the Primordial Giant race had four arms and a single horn, but these two ten-thousand-zhang giants simply looked like humans, rely magnified to an enormous scale.
"Their physical strength is likely on par with the Nine Heavens of the Quasi-Emperor..." Xu Lai’s brows furrowed deeply.
He said calmly, "You all wait here. I’m going to get a closer look."
"Qingfeng, this place is very dangerous! I think we should leave!" Yu Guiwan said, worried.
"It’s fine. Senior Sister, you all just wait here for ."
Confident in his own strength, Xu Lai tapped his toe lightly. His figure vanished from the boat, reappearing on the shoulder of one of the ten-thousand-zhang giants.
Only upon getting closer did Xu Lai discover that the skin of these two giants was etched with nurous strange symbols. They appeared to be a form of writing, but he didn’t recognize a single character; it was a script completely alien to the Immortal Domain.
His gaze drifted downward.
The giants’ feet were shackled with rusted fetters. Xu Lai’s pupils constricted slightly. They were made of Chaotic Refined Gold.
Xu Lai had once managed to knock off a piece of Chaos Cloudstone from the Green Sect, which was a material for forging Supre-grade Immortal Artifacts. Chaotic Refined Gold was even more precious—it was a material for forging Emperor Artifacts.
But here... the Chaotic Refined Gold shackling these two giants’ ankles probably weighed dozens of tons, and it seed to have been used for the sole purpose of imprisoning them. But after the passage of untold ages, this supre treasure, once desperately sought even by Emperor Realm beings, had corroded into re Scrap Iron, crumbling into countless fragnts.
"What extravagance."
Xu Lai drew a sharp breath; his own Emperor Artifact contained less than half a pound of Chaotic Refined Gold.
While pained by the wasted Chaotic Refined Gold, Xu Lai grew even more baffled by the origins of these two giants. They weren’t just shackled; they had been impaled by a sword and a spear.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Above Xu Lai’s head, the blood-red heart began to beat again. Xu Lai hastily suppressed the impulse to look up at it. The closer he got, the more he felt the heart’s sinister aura.
He silently recited a mind-clearing mantra several tis to dispel the strange feeling. He then lowered his head and resud examining the giant, trying to morize the symbols on its skin.
But then, sothing unexpected happened.
The ten-thousand-zhang giant, which should have been dead for countless eons, abruptly turned its head. Its empty eye sockets stared eerily toward Xu Lai.
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