Beneath the high-suspended sacrificial temple, within the abyss, darkness boiled.
The temple, whose magnificent scale was already enough to leave anyone dumbstruck, now seemed utterly dwarfed against the backdrop of this colossal silhouette.
That boundless expanse of darkness was almost entirely covered by a gigantic serpent, its scale even more staggering than when the Nether Sea Worm had appeared.
The sea of clouds shuddered, tossing up wild surges. Beneath the pale cloud bank, the bizarre, titanic serpentine body in the dark writhed and coiled unceasingly.
As if struggling, it gathered strength, striving time and again to break through the temple's restraints.
Bitterness, hatred, and venomous malice turned into a viscous black tide, churning within the abyss and surging so violently it almost spilled over the rim.
Yet no matter how violently it raged, it always seemed to crash into an invisible ceiling, falling back in vain.
After repeated struggles, the thunderous rumbling subsided momentarily.
As though it were exhausted.
Immediately after, a spine-chilling rustling echoed from the bottom of the abyss. The massive serpentine body writhing in the dark suddenly ballooned outward.
It swelled rapidly like putrefying flesh.
Amid the flutter of countless wings, a deluge of moths hatched from the darkness, burrowing out from the flesh one after another to coalesce into a single mass, spreading a sky-blanketing ash-black shroud.
Gushing upward like a geyser!
Moths as large as grown men unfurled bizarre, scaled wings. The patterns on their wings squirmed eerily, tracing out totems resembling bloodshot eyes that seemed to blink as the wings beat, weeping tears of blood.
As countless moths ascended into the firmament, dancing and spreading with wild abandon, they formed a tide that blotted out the sky and sun.
Until the final chime of the sacrificial temple's bell tolled.
The world abruptly froze; heaven and earth fell completely silent.
A distant, fierce resonance rose from the very bottom of the abyss, permeating the entire Border Realm, expanding with near-tangible weight, penetrating into iron, stone, wreckage, flesh, and soul alike without leaving the slightest gap.
The sounds of cracking and rupturing rang out continuously.
Behind Duke Wuyou, the corrupted wolves brought by Shehri suddenly howled in agony as wounds materialized out of thin air across their flesh, as though hacked by a flurry of blades.
Shehri's body convulsed as well; beneath his filthy, yellowed bandages, dark-green blood quietly seeped outward.
The others fared little better, their minds completely blank, their consciousness hazy.
Yet, strangely enough, an involuntary surge of excitement and exhilaration seized Ji Jue.
Chunjun within his soul suddenly shuddered, responding to this resounding cadence preserved from distant antiquity.
Resonance—all at once, Ji Jue's consciousness and perception expanded along with the humming blade, sensing the terrifying aura conveyed in that sword resonance.
Holding sway over the universe, commanding all phenomena!
There was no killing intent, no malice—only a contemptuous glance cast upon the myriad abominations before the gaze was disinterestedly withdrawn.
And so, stagnant time seemed to resume its flow once more.
Yet the countless moths hatched from resentment remained frozen midair. Only trickles of phosphorescent fire ignited outward from their bodies, spreading wildly until they were completely reduced to ashes!
In that momentary daze, a corner of the great curtain of darkness seemed briefly pulled back before his eyes.
In that fleeting glimpse, the phantom of the serpentine body filling the Border Realm was gone.
At the very bottom of the boundless abyss, only the desiccated, deathly still skeleton of a giant serpent lay coiled, completely devoid of any breath of life.
Even though it had been dead for so many years, the coiled serpent bones remained inconceivably colossal, winding endlessly around the mountain. No—it looked more like the metallic mountain had been directly driven into and cast through the giant serpent's skeleton to suppress it, like a nail pinning it in eternal bondage.
Even up to the moment of its demise, the giant serpent had maintained its posture of gaping toward the sky, poised to devour anyone in its path.
Yet compared to that skull, which was larger than the city of the sacrificial temple itself, what stood out even more was the deep, straight sword wound cleft into the giant serpent's skull.
Even now, a straight, flame-red sword scar remained branded into the void, piercing clean through the giant serpent's skull!
A single strike had ended the great serpent that once ravaged the present world. Even the remnant sword scar, after a thousand years, had not faded in the slightest, seemingly preserved forever in reality.
With just that one look, Ji Jue's heart began to thud wildly and uncontrollably.
He widened his eyes, staring intently, searing this sight into his soul.
*Chixiao!*
In the entire world, aside from Ye Xian, who could understand this aura better than him? With traces of the Nine Forms right before his eyes, how could he fail to recognize it?
This was undeniably the Sword of Tianyuan among the Nine Forms!
Yet even for the Nine Forms, even for the Sword of Tianyuan, how could it possibly reach such an absurd degree?
A single sword scar, centuries or millennia later, still possessed such terrifying divine might, even piercing and pinning the great serpent's posthumous resentment in this darkness, unable to find release!
In a fleeting instant, the clear image completely dispersed. Darkness swept back, drowning everything, rendering it indistinct once more.
Ji Jue stood dumbfounded, unable to recover his senses for a long time.
Before that vision vanished back into the dark, he had finally seen clearly—
Right beneath that magnificent sword scar, etched into the fissures on the serpent bones.
As if after a great victory long ago, exhilarated and triumphant, someone had casually flourished their sword, leaving a line of graffiti carved deeply into the bone of the giant serpent's skull:
*Ye Chen slew the serpent here!*
Finally, it was over...
In the dead silence following the end of the bell tolls and sword resonance, the entire expedition remained hushed, even their breathing suppressed deep within their chests.
Everyone was drenched in sweat.
Beneath the Shadow of the Tower, the rampant Law of Tianyuan surged and suppressed everything indiscriminately. Just the aftershocks alone made it difficult for any intruder to breathe.
As for the Sin-Bearers pursuing wolf blood, their souls wavered even more violently, barely able to keep control.
A genuine vile fiend like Shehri and the sin-corrupted wolves fared slightly better. But the rest of the White Stag abominations who had not received the favor of the wolf blood now had vacant eyes, slipping into delirium.
Only after a long while, when they were certain there were no further anomalies, did everyone finally breathe a sigh of relief.
And then, they saw at the head of the expedition, beside Duke Wuyou—the thing that had been crushed to pieces by the immense pressure of the Shadow of the Tower squirmed.
It reconstituted itself.
Yellowed bandages intertwined, binding flesh and knitting together beneath the robes to restore the silhouette of a body. As if reborn, Shehri returned to his original state.
Intact and unharmed.
At most, he merely coughed twice to expel the Law of Tianyuan that had invaded his body.
Yet when he turned around, he found that everyone had instantly backed away, eyeing him with deep wariness.
The name of Rotten Scale had become renowned across the world following the collapse of the White Nation.
That seemingly intact body, once stripped of its bandage restraints, God only knew what it would turn into. Countless microscopic pathogens and virulent poisons flowed like blood through the wolf's body, sinister and deadly to the extreme.
God knew when a single careless moment might get someone infected!
"Please rest assured, everyone. The sacrificial temple is blanketed by the Shadow of the Tower; the poison of the wolf blood has long been suppressed and cannot spread at all."
Shehri explained with what looked like a smile, which only made everyone's expressions turn even uglier.
It failed completely to reassure anyone; instead, the tension among them skyrocketed.
"Enough. Stop wasting time."
Duke Wuyou lowered his eyes. Sensing the power within the sacrificial temple for a moment, he was overjoyed.
Although he had no idea what had caused this surge of anomalies, after that eruption, the temple's power had clearly fallen into decline.
Even the residual silhouettes on the streets had grown faint and ephemeral.
A golden opportunity—they had to seize the moment!
At this critical juncture, he no longer cared to lament parting with treasures accumulated over generations. Taking item after item from the open box, he led the expedition in a swift, direct advance.
In just a few short minutes, they had almost scaled their way near the mountain summit, where the true body of the sacrificial temple stood.
The losses amounted to nothing more than a few expendables used as pathfinders.
Yet the path ahead...
There was no way forward.
Hemmed in by a cluster of surrounding structures, the towering wall of the sacrificial temple seemed to pierce straight into the heavens. From a distance, it had appeared only several meters high, something one could easily vault with a light leap; but standing before it, one felt as though they had merely reached the absolute base of an endless precipice.
Neither end nor summit could be seen.
Nor was there any door to be found.
Left, right, up, down—every path was entirely blocked.
All that could be felt was a chilling aura. The closer one drew, the more an inexplicable dread seized the viscera and soul.
As though death were right before their eyes.
Inescapable.
More importantly, not the slightest wisp of an aura could be sensed beyond the wall.
Yet looking from afar, one could see that the Shadow of the Tower completely enveloped everything behind the wall, sealing and freezing it like an insect preserved in amber.
It had been totally locked down.
The master from Wulou Temple lowered his gaze, suppressing the surging unease within his heart, returning once more to a serene, deathly stillness. He simply asked, "Duke Wuyou, how do we resolve this?"
Duke Wuyou reached out and touched the wall, the excitement in his expression nearly impossible to restrain.
When he withdrew his hand, a wisp of pitch-black abruptly surfaced on his fingertips.
The blackness spread uncontrollably, swallowing him in an instant. Yet the lethal curse and imperial edict suddenly lost their target.
"[Forbidden Domain]—"
Duke Wuyou returned to normal in a flash, his eyes burning with intense fervor:
"It really is the [Forbidden Domain]!"
The absolute barrier posited by the Eternal Empire of old—a wall of despair constructed after commanding all phenomena through the power of Tianyuan, inverting life and death, with countless deaths as its foundation.
Strictly speaking, this barrier was not a wall at all.
It was death itself.
Under the transformation of the Law of Tianyuan, intangible death had been reified into substance and merged into the wall, turning it into an impassable boundary of mortality.
Getting past it was actually quite simple.
One only had to die.
Unfortunately, after undergoing such absolute death and obliteration, even a Celestial-Human of the Vortex path would likely fail to revive, only to be swallowed by death and turned into another cornerstone.
Duke Wuyou reached into the brocade box in his breast and carefully retrieved a bell covered in rust and cracks, looking as though it could shatter at any moment.
Calling it a bell was generous praise.
Even the bell's body was rotted through with rust, with only a pathetic sliver holding its fragments together.
The patterns carved upon it were entirely blurred, blanketed in verdigris.
Yet the moment that bell stand—only about a person's height, resembling an ornament—was taken out, it actually resonated with the wall of the Forbidden Domain...
"Next, it is time to fulfill our contract, everyone."
Duke Wuyou looked back expressionlessly. At the mention of the contract, everyone immediately straightened in solemn attention.
Chapter 444