Daoist Baihua turned her head away, trembling so violently that she dared not answer.
Li Ping waited for a long time, but still Baihua did not change her mind. He let out a soft sigh and stored away the three True Immortal seal characters beside him.
"Very well. If you are unwilling, Fellow Daoist, I shall not force you.
"After all, not everyone possesses the courage to leverage the power of a True Immortal...
"Regarding the relocation of the Five Elements Great Grotto-Heaven, do you foresee any difficulties?" Li Ping asked, returning to the main topic.
Only when she felt that terrifying aura vanish did Daoist Baihua briefly recover from her panic.
Sacred Emperor Li Ping's inquiring tone had subtly shifted from before. Baihua knew that if she refused again, she would truly enrage this madman. She had no choice but to force herself to agree.
"Please set out as soon as possible, Fellow Daoist. By the way, since the territory ahead is unfamiliar to you, I shall dispatch a disciple to accompany you for safety's sake," Li Ping remarked offhandedly.
When Daoist Baihua laid eyes on Li Ping's so-called disciple, her scalp went numb, and her body shuddered anew.
"This is..."
Even with Baihua's extraordinary breadth of experience—having witnessed the ruin of entire realms with her own eyes—she still found it difficult to process what she saw: what appeared to be an ordinary human body was, on the inside, composed of hundreds of millions of squirming, unknown little worms. Each worm was an individual with its own independent thoughts, yet together they formed the collective whole of a single "human."
Daoist Baihua's skin crawled not simply out of terror at the unending swarm of hideous worms, but from an instinctive physical reaction.
Those worms seemed to possess a natural restraint against bodies composed purely of energy.
Even though she was in the Longevity realm, and even though some distance still separated her from these worms, Baihua felt a sudden surge of restless dread within herself. Her instincts warned her unceasingly to keep away from this insect-man.
"You may call him Dao Yi," Li Ping said, deliberately ignoring her reaction.
"Rest assured, although Dao Yi's strength is somewhat modest, he possesses quite peculiar abilities. With his assistance, relocating the Five Elements Great Grotto-Heaven should be significantly easier for you."
Seeing this, Daoist Baihua had no choice but to brace herself and give a slight nod. Led by Dao Yi, she set off directly toward Tianling Province.
Watching their receding figures, Li Ping did not feel much joy at having intimidated a Longevity realm expert in just a few words.
"My own strength is still lacking in the end. I can only rely on external objects to intimidate others. If I could deploy Source Power Essence, why would I ever need to go to such trouble?"
Dao Yi was a special variant of the Dao One Worms preserved within the Ten Thousand Beasts Condensed Crystal.
No matter how much the swarm's numbers expanded, they always maintained a unified collective consciousness. More importantly, this variant of Dao One Worm did not merely produce spiritual energy.
Instead, they seemed capable of inhabiting spiritual energy itself, reproducing by feeding on it, and gradually transforming themselves into an existence indistinguishable from spiritual energy.
Given sufficient external conditions for reproduction, Dao Yi would need only about a year to replace all the spiritual energy of an entire pocket world with "itself."
The entire process took place in utter silence, without even affecting the countless living beings that relied on spiritual energy to survive.
Weaker cultivators would not notice a thing.
Only upon reaching the Nascent Soul realm, when one formed an independent grotto-heaven within one's body, could one sense this mutated spiritual energy.
Li Fan had dispatched this Dao Yi—nurtured with a wisp of his own consciousness—to the Five Elements Great Grotto-Heaven precisely so that it could achieve a leap in its metamorphosis there.
By drawing upon the vast scale of spiritual energy in the Five Elements Great Grotto-Heaven, it would cultivate a massive reserve of mutated spiritual energy capable of shaking the entire Xuanhuang Realm.
Under normal circumstances, it would be impossible for Dao Yi to develop within the Xuanhuang Realm.
Once the mutation of spiritual energy exceeded a certain threshold, it would inevitably alert cultivators and be reported to the Alliance.
While dealing with them might be somewhat troublesome, exterminating such worms was hardly a difficult task for the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals.
However, from discovery to countermeasures, a certain amount of response time was always required.
If there were a sufficiently massive initial population, a complete transfusion of Xuanhuang's spiritual energy could be accomplished before the cultivators of the Xuanhuang Realm had time to react.
This strategy of pulling the rug from beneath the enemy's feet was a deadly move Li Ping had prepared for his counteroffensive against the Xuanhuang Realm.
Once the spiritual energy possessed self-awareness and could distinguish friend from foe, the cultivators of the Myriad Realms Association would hold an overwhelming advantage when fighting against the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals.
"Dare to make sun and moon forge a new realm.
"The atmosphere of this Xuanhuang Realm is far too rotten. It is time to teach them a harsh lesson."
As Li Fan's clone, Sacred Emperor Li Ping had been stripped of all memories regarding True Reversion.
In his own self-perception, he was the serendipitous product of the Xuanhuang Realm's will attempting to save itself in the face of the World Extinction crisis: the so-called Destined Sage.
He knew the vast majority of the Xuanhuang Realm's deepest secrets like the back of his hand.
He had even foreseen countless futures of his own destruction.
And his ultimate ambition was to overturn heaven and earth, liberating the Xuanhuang Realm from the decadent rule of the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals.
Sacred Emperor Li Ping firmly believed that he was not far from achieving this goal.
***
The finals of the First Great Qi Fishing Tournament officially commenced.
A total of ten standouts would demonstrate their angling arts in person before the Sacred Emperor.
Originally, all three of the Sacred Emperor's disciples had entered the competition, but in the end, only the simpleminded Wang Xuanba had advanced to the finals.
This undoubtedly proved the fairness of the tournament all the more.
Passing through a circular portal of light, the ten contestants experienced a brief bout of dizziness before arriving in a seemingly ordinary garden.
Not far away, beside a small pond, sat the great Faceless Sacred Emperor, his eyes closed as he fished.
Most of the ten contestants were beholding the sacred visage for the very first time. Not daring to disturb him, they kept their heads bowed and waited with bated breath.
After a long while, the Sacred Emperor pulled up his rod with a sudden jerk.
To everyone's surprise, what rose from the pond was not a fish of any kind, but an orb of white light.
Casually stowing the orb away, the Sacred Emperor looked toward the ten outstanding anglers and explained the rules of the competition.
"Countless treasures have been placed into this pool by my hand.
"One rod per person, and one chance.
"The higher the quality of the treasure you haul up, the better your ranking shall be."
...
Hearing these words, everyone felt an immense surge of excitement.
For the Sacred Emperor had promised that regardless of their final ranking, whatever treasures they fished up would belong to them!
Amid the eager anticipation of the crowd, the Sacred Emperor's disciple, Wang Xuanba, was the first to step forward.
Wang Xuanba had never been to the fishing pond before either.
He sat down, stared blankly for a long while, and then reeled in his rod.
In the end, his hands were completely empty.
An empty hook!
This left Wang Xuanba thoroughly dejected.
The others, witnessing this, were utterly shaken. They realized that the Sacred Emperor's fishing trial was far from ordinary angling. Instantly, each of them grew tense and focused.
As they stepped up to the fishing pond one after another, one purple, three blue, and five white light orbs were hauled from the waters.
Chapter 1164