Baoyun's Outer Demon Great Tribulation was, in truth, an unnamable extraterrestrial demon contending with her for control over her entire mind-manifested world. This was also the price of cultivating the Heavenly Demon Wondrous Idol: from now on, demon tribulations would replace heavenly tribulations, becoming the primary obstacle on her path of Dao.
Whenever the outer demon gained the upper hand, Baoyun would gradually lose control over her mind-manifested world. As her control waned, things within it would shatter and explode. Whatever burst apart—whether branches, leaves, or stones—would turn into demonic qi, becoming part of the extraterrestrial demon.
If Baoyun failed her tribulation, her mind-manifested world would become the physical body of the extraterrestrial demon, which could use this foothold to descend into their realm and unleash a reign of terror and carnage.
Once everything was clear, Wei Yuan devised a countermeasure. Qingming currently possessed tens of thousands of cultivators and abundant material wealth; if they did not wish to face the demon tribulation head-on through brute force, there were plenty of methods. Entering the Heaven of Joy and Bliss to suppress it with Buddhist power was merely one of them—it could delay the demon tribulation, but not eradicate it. Right now, Qingming had an even better option: the World-Refining Grand Array.
Upon leaving the Heaven of Joy and Bliss, Wei Yuan took Baoyun to the Lu Clan Ancestral Mountain, intending to borrow the power of the World-Refining Grand Array to suppress the tribulation. After entering the grand array's core nexus, Wei Yuan personally taught Baoyun how to control the formation and mobilize the power of the hundred thousand Dao foundations within it. After seven days of instruction, Baoyun had mastered the grand array completely and successfully left her imprint upon the control hub.
At the center of the grand array, a space of primal chaos unfolded. Baoyun sat cross-legged at its heart, wisps of demonic qi rising from her body. The array's power extracted them, slowly dispersing them into the surrounding chaos before refining them away.
Wei Yuan sat cross-legged opposite her. Whenever a surge of demonic qi grew too ferocious for the array to handle, he would intervene, using his own strength to guide it into the formation to be refined.
From the chaotic vault above, plumes of mist formed from immortal power drifted down constantly into Baoyun's sea of consciousness, gently nourishing her mind-manifested world while feeding the little one nestled in the heart of the tree.
Wei Yuan absorbed the immortal mist as well. However, the Splendor of the Many Realms was simply too vast; even the immortal power extracted by the World-Refining Grand Array was merely a trickling stream to the Wei Yuan of today. It took quite a while for the progress bar to shave off even a single year.
In this manner, the World-Refining Grand Array continuously drew the demonic qi out of Baoyun's body by force and refined it completely. The power of a single template cultivator might be negligible, but the combined might of a hundred thousand templates could move mountains and overturn seas. Forget that this outer demon was merely a Scenery Command tribulation; even if it were an immortal tribulation, Wei Yuan could crush it just the same simply by adding a few hundred thousand more templates.
Thus, in the struggle over the mind-manifested world, the extraterrestrial demon was never able to expand. Baoyun steadily gained the upper hand, and her mind-manifested world continuously expanded, gradually intertwining the illusory and the real as myriad transformations arose within.
Baoyun's mind-manifested world had originally been blue waters and immortal peaks, but now it shifted—at times an infernal desert, at others a humid rainforest, and then suddenly towering peaks reaching ten thousand fathoms. Each newly emergent world merged into her original mind-manifested world, bringing forth boundless variety.
From autumn into winter, Wei Yuan's cultivation progress advanced by more than nine hundred years, while Baoyun's entire body began to glow with fine rays of light. The outer demon was mostly eradicated. Just then, Wei Yuan suddenly sensed a change in his native world. By now, Baoyun's condition had stabilized; completely expelling the outer demon and overcoming the tribulation was only a matter of time, and more than half of the underground immortal remains were still left, so there was nothing to worry about. Wei Yuan gave Baoyun a few brief instructions, left the World-Refining Grand Array, and traveled to his native world.
Every time he entered this deathly silent world, Wei Yuan had to endure a sensation as though his entire body was disintegrating into countless microscopic particles. The tier of this dissociative power was exceptionally high, far exceeding Wei Yuan's own. Had he not been the last seed of this realm and blessed by his mother, he would have dissolved into countless particles the moment he set foot in this domain.
At this moment, within this vast, colorless world, a speck of brightness had appeared. Above the desolate earth, the fathomless vault of heaven seemed poised to swallow all existence. The mountains remained the same mountains, the stones the same stones, but beneath the slowly twisting horizon, a translucent drop seemed to have fallen and welled up upon the boundless earth. This speck of light was the nascent world seed. After Wei Yuan had continuously invested over a hundred million mortal karmic luck and enlightened it with Liao destiny and Shaman destiny, a spark of vitality had finally coalesced. The expanse of fertile soil had also expanded to several li in radius.
The first step was the hardest, equivalent to striking a spark. Once a tinder was alight, everything became far easier.
Yet now, another figure stood in this utterly desolate domain, lingering beside the restrictive immortal array Wei Yuan had set up, quietly admiring that flickering spark of vitality within.
Wei Yuan's expression darkened, then softened into a smile universal across the many realms. He walked over and sent an enthusiastic greeting through divine sense. The figure slowly turned around, revealing a face resembling a human's, but its eyes were solid, dark silver, with neither eyeballs nor pupils. A strange ripple radiated from its body and washed over Wei Yuan.
A message surfaced in Wei Yuan's consciousness: "Where do you come from? Why are you upon the Land of Sin?"
Thoughts racing, Wei Yuan replied, "I am hunting an enemy—a fugitive who slipped through the net on the Land of Sin. My duty is to find it and kill it."
Without caring whether it could truly understand, Wei Yuan sent the message over in a single breath.
The figure was clad in strange armor. Wei Yuan's reply seemed to confuse it; scales suddenly flared open across its body, heaving rapidly, leaving it unclear what it intended to do.
Right at that moment, the Scarlet Night Immortal-Slaying Sword suddenly appeared in Wei Yuan's hand. He drove it straight through a gap between its scales, running it clean through the other side of its body!
Having landed the strike, Wei Yuan did not pause for an instant. His various cave-heavens deployed in turn, and in a flash, seven or eight high-tier powers slammed into the figure! The creature seemed enveloped in a layer of transparent armor, as if encased in amber. All of Wei Yuan's powers proved ineffective against this amber layer—even the initial thrust of the Scarlet Night Immortal-Slaying Sword, though appearing to pierce its body, had merely passed right through it.
The creature's scales vibrated as it constantly emitted those strange ripples, seemingly roaring at Wei Yuan and demanding to know why he had attacked. But Wei Yuan had no intention of stopping. In the blink of an eye, he channeled the enduring power of the green-backed azure dragon, and suddenly felt a strike connect with something solid. Under this blow, the transparent shell shattered abruptly, releasing billowing plumes of smoke from within. Beneath that outer shell, there seemed to be no physical substance at all—only illusory smoke.
As the smoke dispersed into the world, it was instantly dissociated and slowly vanished. Deprived of support, the transparent shell developed countless fractures before disappearing piece by piece.
Quick of eye and hand, Wei Yuan snatched a fragment and stowed it away. After that, no trace of the mysterious being remained in this world.
Wei Yuan repeatedly swept the surroundings with his divine sense, and only sighed in relief after confirming that not a trace of karmic cause remained.
The origin of this mysterious creature was unknown, but one thing was certain: it was extraordinarily powerful, posing a level of threat comparable to Immortal Zhao Li. To Wei Yuan, the seed for restarting the world was paramount. He could not permit any entity to harm it; every danger had to be nipped in the bud. Moreover, before the restart was accomplished, Wei Yuan did not want anyone to learn the secrets of this world.
Therefore, the moment he laid eyes on the bizarre being, murder had already taken root in his heart. He needed no other justification; knowing too much was reason enough for it to die. Even if the creature had greeted him with utter friendliness, Wei Yuan would still have struck—let alone after it had uttered the words "Land of Sin."
Ever since establishing Qingming, Wei Yuan had survived countless life-or-death battles; decisive ruthlessness had become second nature. When faced with a suspicious threat, he would rather kill by mistake than let danger slip away.
Looking at the seed breathing slowly within the immortal array, Wei Yuan felt a heavy weight settle on his heart. If one creature could find this place, a second and a third would surely follow. The path to restarting the world was destined to be paved with battle and bloodshed.
Chapter 1319