A living dead, or tomb keeper, referred to when a living soul was imprisoned inside a corpse or zombie. What Yin Yang Ghost Fostering accomplished was to transplant a dead soul into a living body.

Carmine Arbiter’s yang soul and Xuanyuan Xiaoyue’s yin soul weren’t their final forms. The hand in the shadows ultimately wanted to combine the yin yang ghosts and create an even more terrifying vicious ghost.

At the same time, the union between yin and yang would reverse heaven and earth as well as life itself. The owner of the tomb would thus be revived by this inverted power, but the newly born vicious ghost would devour Xuan Yuan’s sleeping soul and take up residence in his body before he came back to himself. This terrifying existence would then be able to walk both the yin and yang realms, and there’d be nothing in either world capable of restraining it.

“This seemed to belong to the shamanic divines in Xingzi’s memories, but this tomb existed far before the shamanic divines did!” Lu Yun was a bit lost at this discrepancy.

Shamanic divines stemmed from the era in which shamans ruled the immortal dao. Certain divines joined their tribe to learn the shamanic arts, which slowly gave rise to the tribe of shamanic divines. They were such a cruel, malevolent group that the arts they came up with were immediately listed as taboo arts during their time.

Even the divines themselves were highly contemptuous of the shamanic divines.

The immortal dao had already been established when the shamanic divines appeared on the scene, but arrangements here had appeared before the immortal dao and after Emperors Fall.

“The vicious ghost nurtured out of Yin Yang Ghost Fostering is meant to defy the hell of human dao!” Lu Yun sucked in a deep breath. “But the yang side of the method has been dismantled… probably by the fox that the torch dragon speaks of. I wonder who set all this up?”

For some reason, concern worried at Lu Yun’s mind.

“Let’s go take a look, we’ll have to face whatever it is.” Ashu spoke up when he saw Lu Yun’s expression.

The young man nodded and the group ventured deeper into the island, following the path beneath their feet. Xuanyuan Xiaoyue drifted far behind them, aping their every move.

The island was quite peculiar in that no matter which direction one approached from or made landfall, they would end up at the head of the kun fish. There was only the one path for travel around the island, and the environment began to change the further they went in. What was a vibrant, lush world of greenery harbored a land of snow and ice at its heart.

“Is that an ice sculpture?” The Venerated Sacrosanct Demon Sovereign stopped in his tracks to stare at a humanoid figure in front of him.

“It’s a man, a man sealed in ice.” Lu Yun sighed after sweeping the sculpture with a glance. “He’s dead, and his surname is Xuanyuan.” He fully opened the Spectral Eye to glean the person’s information. “He was frozen to death in an instant.”

Ashu sighed and murmured, “The legitimate line of succession to human dao before Emperors Fall, sovereigns of the multiverse. So this is where the Xuanyuan Clan met their end?”

“There are also legends of Xuan Yuan in my homeland,” Lu Yun suddenly said. “It’s said that Xuan Yuan was the holy emperor of humanity, the one who unified the land and led humans to conquer new territories…”

“Your homeland?” Ashu and the demon sovereign looked at Lu Yun with surprise, and even You Si tilted her head.

“The ancestor planet of the humans.” Lu Yun nodded. Or so I’m told.

“Hush, we speak no further of this topic!” Ashu snapped to solemn attention when he heard the words “ancestor planet”. He floundered around with an urgent need to change the topic. “Alright, let’s keep going. We need to find Xiaoyue’s body!”

Xuanyuan Xiaoyue’s face reddened with life when she heard the word “Xiaoyue”, and vitality gleamed anew in her stark-white eyes.

“Ling Weiyang… it’s Uncle Ling Weiyang…” she mumbled in a voice only she could hear. Thick frost then once again consumed her after a convulsive shudder.

The little path opened up until it was a large road of foggy white. An enormous snowy mountain could be found at its end, and the group encountered tens of thousands of frozen Xuanyuan clansmen along the way.

None of them seemed to have registered the advent of death. They were all caught in whatever expression and gesture they’d borne in life, with no encroaching fear of death in any of their vibrant faces.

All of them had died in a single moment at the same time.

The further they walked, the colder Lu Yun felt—not a coldness of the body, but of prickling horror.

“Human king, human king, that’s another human king…” He counted eighteen primeval human kings beside the road; none of them had been aware of their impending doom.

“I’m… I’m so c-cold—“ You Si suddenly spoke up, frost crystals chiming in her hair and clothes. She wanted to release the Fire Altar, but discovered with dismay that the altar and fire essence energy upon her body had been sealed at some unknown point in time.

Lu Yun stumbled to a halt when he heard her voice, only discovering now that the Tome of Life and Death had materialized at some point to protect him.

Ashu was a living dead unafraid of the cold, and the demon sovereign was already using Hadal Bonefire to warm himself.

“Write your name on the pages of this book.” Lu Yun handed over his precious treasure. Apart from the Ten Yama Kings, there were only a handful of other names on its pages. Ge Long, Canghai Chengfeng, Situ Zong, Xuanyu, Carmine Eternal, and Carmine Arbiter. You Si would be the seventh. Carmines Eternal and Arbiter had volunteered their names and received a faster recovery time in return.

You Si didn’t reject the proposal as she’d almost lost her sense of self in this terrain of extreme cold. After writing her name down, a black light beamed out of the book and enveloped her.

Newly fortified against the elements, her eyes widened and she clapped both hands over her mouth, looking incredulously at Lu Yun.

“The exit of the Embittered Sea is ahead of us.” Lu Yun paid her no heed and looked around. The island looked a thousand kilometers wide from the outside, but it was an entire world inside—likely the one manifested from Great Emperor Kunpeng.

A large snowy mountain towered in the middle of this world, and the path beneath their feet led to its interior, to a patch of unknown chaos.

“Over there, that’s Xiaoyue’s body!” Ashu pointed at the top of the mountain.

There laid a crystal coffin in which Xuanyuan Xiaoyue’s body lay peacefully, like she’d fallen asleep.