Lu Yun didn’t dare incur the wrath of a sovereign buried within an outer-coffin, which in turn was held in a regular coffin. If he accidentally let whoever she was out, she’d rip apart even sovereigns from the sacred palaces, much less Lu Yun and Ying Luo.

What a pity that the ten Yama Kings have all been filled. I could’ve tried taking her otherwise. Lu Yun sighed softly as he looked at the quietly resting corpse.

“We can’t touch the piece of the core here. Let’s go look for shards elsewhere,” he said to Ying Luo.

“Mm.” Ying Luo nodded. “Ah, have you noticed that no matter which realm monster corpse we enter, we’d always end up here in the end?”

Her attitude now bore no trace of the aloofness from earlier. She really was treating Lu Yun as a quest item, or rather, a mission goal. To her, the monarch was all-knowing and infallible, the source of her faith. Since the order to help bearers of cold black fire had come from the top, Ying Luo wouldn’t think twice about it.

Lu Yun also picked up the change in her mood. There wasn’t anything he could do about her misinterpretation of him, but it was better than viewing him with suspicion.

“That’s right… every realm monster is a coffin, and all of the coffins combined buried this palace outer-coffin.” He thought back to the dense crowd of realm monsters outside and hesitated before continuing, “A full one hundred and eight thousand realm monster corpses, to be exact.

“If it took one hundred and eight thousand coffins to barely manage to bury her… who was she when she was alive?” he murmured. “Sovereign realm was just her cultivation level. The layout of a tomb is determined by the owner’s identity in life.”

Strength was one matter, status and background was another. In the dao of burial, status and background were far more important than the physical strength one wielded.

“I don’t know.” Ying Luo shook her head. “I just know that she was a sovereign, but I don’t know who she was.”

Lu Yun gave up trying to probe the depths of this personage and didn’t inquire further.

His theory was correct—there were shattered core fragments littered throughout the area. They didn’t belong to the realm monster that they’d entered, but to an even stronger one. Plainly, all of the realm monsters outside were a doorway. No matter which one anyone set foot through, they would all end up here.

Lu Yun and Ying Luo departed from the premises of the outer-coffin as they were concerned with disturbing the being buried in it. Just the four ghost kings in front of it were inordinately terrifying enough.

“Isn’t it said that the ghost ancestor is the source of all ghostly entities in the chaos? Why are there ghosts here too?” Lu Yun thought of the ghost ancestor that he’d met before. It was dead, but its image was still embedded in the skies of Witherdew Major and quietly surveilling its celestial court.

“Ghost ancestor?” Ying Luo blinked, then snorted, “What good is the ghost ancestor for? It’s just a lowly minion in the chaos. Its reputation as the source of all ghostly entities is just something that those idiots in the sacred lands have made up for it.

“Who the heck knows where all the ghostly things in the chaos comes from? Not from the ghost ancestor, that’s for sure!”

Complete derision crossed her face at the mention of that entity. When rumors first appeared in the chaos that the ghost ancestor was the origin of all matters ghostly, the experts of the sacred palaces and elsewhere almost died of laughter.

A mere creator dared to call itself the source of something?

The title of ghost ancestor was an absolute joke in the chaos. But since the nine sacred lands possessed absolute authority in the realm apart from the six sacred palaces, no one dared openly laugh about this farce.

Thus, Lu Yun hadn’t been aware of the real situation with the ghost ancestor before.

“However, the ghost ancestor is undying,” Ying Luo added. “It’s destroyed dozens of worlds for the chaos and died each time doing so. It’s never long before it’s reborn from the wreckage of the world it died in.

“Those from the sacred palaces have tried killing the ghost ancestor before, but it always comes back to life in short order, and from the place it died in.”

Her words sent shivers of horror down Lu Yun’s back. No wonder its image remained in Witherdew Major after its death. It would probably be reborn there.

That’ll be a latent threat sooner or later, we need to get rid of it from the roots, Lu Yun thought darkly. The six paths of his nascent spirit in hell sent out replicas to bring word of this to the ten Yama Kings in the Dao Academy.

……

“Here!” Ying Luo cheered. “Fragments of the realm monster core!”

They were very far away from the palace outer-coffin, in a place where chunks of ice crystals floated in the air. The biggest of them were as large as a world, and the smallest tinier than a speck of dust. All of them exuded bone-piercing cold, the same from any realm monster.

“Can we really control the mosquitoes with these ice crystals?” Ying Luo looked at Lu Yun after carefully dislodging a crystal the size of a fist.

“Maybe, I’m not certain myself.” He picked up a piece the size of a human head and made certain calculations. “If this really is a test, then these crystals should be effective not only against the mosquitoes. They’ll be useful later on as well.”

“Useful later on?” Ying Luo’s eyes lit up and she waved a hand, collecting tens of thousands of icy shards around her in a streak of light.

“Better prepared than not, right?” She blushed when Lu Yun gaped at her. He shrugged without a response.

Hummm.

The void shook as a large door the color of the ice slowly swung open in the air. Lu Yun could see the scarlet depths of the Blood Sea beyond it.

The appearance of the door meant that they’d passed, a smooth attempt that’d been so easy only because Lu Yun had released hellfire earlier. There were certainly other ghosts and beings around them, but they didn’t dare show themselves after he scared off the four ghost kings.

If it’d been anyone else here, they would’ve commenced a struggle of life and death and possibly even died here.

The two passed through the great door of ice and arrived back at the banks of the Blood Sea. The door then began to swing close.

“To think that someone else would be able to make it here, apart from me.” A slightly arrogant voice sounded from the other side.

Lu Yun turned around to see a young man in long white robes with his chin upraised. He regarded Lu Yun and Ying Luo with a lofty bearing.

“You Huoran, secluded disciple of the Opposition Palace,” he offered his background. “You two must be disciples of the sacred palaces too, since you could make it here through the bloody path.