Appearing alongside the countless mirror surfaces were Mo Rubin's faces, each bearing a vastly different expression.
Hiding behind the murky, shadowed mirrors, they peered out together at the Faceless Sacred Emperor in their midst.
With Li Ping at the center, the mirrors stood paired directly opposite one another.
Points of light shot from one mirror and cast themselves onto the one across from it.
The bright lines formed in this manner acted like tangible shackles binding Li Ping.
Ray after ray materialized within the mirrored world, behaving like heavy chains that accelerated the process of dragging Li Ping into the "real" world.
Having fully revealed his form and found himself enclosed by layers of mirrors, the Faceless Sacred Emperor showed little sign of panic.
He looked down at the "lines" on his body that were both intangible and tangible, reaching out a hand to touch them.
Yet like an illusory phantom, they passed straight through his palm and wrapped tightly around his frame once more.
"Foolish beyond measure!"
For some reason, the gesture seemed to irritate Mo Rubin.
With an angry shout, the lines that had resembled bright light abruptly turned pitch-black.
Rustling whispers emanated from these black chains. One could even faintly see faces identical to Mo Rubin's drifting and wailing across their surfaces.
*Hiss, hiss, hiss...*
The black chains possessed an inherent corrosive gloom. In the blink of an eye, the clothes on Li Ping's body were dissolved completely away. Just as they were about to touch his skin, a dazzling burst of golden radiance suddenly erupted.
Sharp-edged golden armor materialized out of thin air, completely encasing the Sacred Emperor's towering thirty-three-foot frame.
Beneath the surface of the armor, a golden shimmer flowed ceaselessly, as though possessed of its own sentience.
The golden protection shut out all the black chains' corrosion.
Li Ping extended his right hand, gripped the chains wrapped around him, and yanked violently.
The sound of shattering mirrors rang out continuously.
A vortex suddenly formed at his chest.
Li Ping shoved the torn black chains into the vortex.
*Boom! Boom!*
Like a roaring blaze fed with abundant fuel, the vortex flared with soul-stirring brilliance. And upon the incinerated black chains, countless faces of Mo Rubin shrieked venomous curses in unison.
"So they are the cultivator personas you devoured."
As the vortex at his chest continued to swallow the black chains, images flooded the Sacred Emperor's mind, revealing the origins of these spiteful faces.
"Instead of properly cultivating the Nine Revolutions Immortal Soul, you turned to such crooked and depraved arts!" Li Ping shook his head with some regret.
These words seemed to strike Mo Rubin's sore spot. In an instant, his figure truly seemed tainted with thick black ink, turning murky and profound.
A rift opened between him and Li Ping.
It was a mirror reflecting reality and illusion.
Mo Rubin and Li Ping stood facing each other from opposite sides of the mirror.
The instant the rift appeared, an intuition abruptly sprang up in Li Ping's mind: the Mo Rubin on "that side" seemed to have vanished. The image before him was merely a projection cast on the other side of the mirror based on Li Ping's own presence.
With a single thought, Li Ping—protected by his golden armor—instantly appeared a hundred li away, outside the bounds of the Zixiao Sect ruins.
Yet the Sacred Emperor soon noticed an exceedingly bizarre sight.
The rift before him had teleported along with him, its position relative to him completely unchanged.
And Mo Rubin was sneering continuously on the other side of the mirror, watching him coldly.
It was as though an extraordinarily arcane force had locked Li Ping and Mo Rubin together, making it impossible to shake off no matter how he shifted his position.
What was even more chilling was that Li Ping faintly sensed that Mo Rubin's appearance and aura on the opposite side of the mirror were quietly shifting.
His body was slowly swelling, and his facial features were growing blurrier and blurrier.
Mo Rubin was transforming into the Faceless Sacred Emperor.
"Crooked and depraved? Truly ignorant and fearless!"
"What is evil? What is righteous? Right and wrong are fleeting; only the immortal is eternal!"
"Who are you to judge the Myriad Tribulations Imperishable Demon Heart Immortal Art?!"
Mo Rubin laughed wildly, dripping with derision. "Allow yourself to become me!"
The things on either side of the mirror grew more and more identical.
The distance between the Sacred Emperor and Mo Rubin was steadily closing.
Just as he was about to slide completely toward the other side of the mirror, Li Ping abruptly stripped off his golden armor.
He stared coldly at Mo Rubin not far away. "Become me?"
"With just you?"
"I am the Destined Holy Emperor."
Purple-gold destiny emerged from nothingness, weaving itself into an auspicious cloud-patterned dragon robe like a dreamlike veil, draping itself naturally over Li Ping.
The Faceless Sacred Emperor's voice echoed across his side of the mirror like thunder from the highest heavens.
The rumbling reverberations stirred ripples across the very rift dividing reality from illusion.
"I am also the Xuanhuang Heavenly Dao!"
"The pillar upon which the survival of countless beings rests, the source of revival for the Pitch-Black Star Sea!"
"You wish to become me?"
With every word the Sacred Emperor uttered, a towering wave battered violently against the mirrored rift.
Creaking sounds of overwhelming strain faintly groaned, and fractures webbed across the world on the far side of the mirror.
It seemed ready to shatter at any second.
"Can you bear such weight?!" Li Ping asked coldly.
Like a single stone raising a thousand ripples, Mo Rubin's expression truly changed for the first time, snapping him out of his mimicry of the Faceless Sacred Emperor.
Behind Li Ping, he seemed to see a miniature image of the entire Xuanhuang Realm.
And behind that dim Xuanhuang glow, there even seemed to lurk an even more dazzling galaxy of stars!
In the span of a thought, heaven and earth overturned.
The weight of a world bore down upon him.
*Clink!*
The mirrored rift shattered. In a chain reaction, the countless mirrors locking the surrounding space blew apart into tens of thousands of shards in an instant.
Mo Rubin spat out a mouthful of blood, but his reactions were remarkably swift.
Taking advantage of the disturbance caused by the shattered mirrors, his form blurred into an illusion, and in a flash, he appeared a thousand li away.
"The Xuanhuang Heavenly Dao?"
"How is that possible?"
Mo Rubin wore an expression of sheer disbelief.
His face abruptly shifted again. "Damn Xuanhuang Heavenly Dao—unreliable as expected. I need to hurry."
As he muttered to himself, a tall silhouette quietly stepped out to block his path ahead.
"You wish to leave before answering my question?"
A flicker of wariness flashed in Mo Rubin's eyes. He sneered, "What Destined Holy Emperor, what Avatar of the Heavenly Dao—you're nothing more than a pawn!"
"If you don't want to die, why don't the two of us cooperate? How about it?"
"You may be strong, but you're still a bit short compared to Brother Xuanyuan. Even he was ambushed and met with misfortune; you certainly won't escape either..."
Mo Rubin's words stirred Li Ping's thoughts, causing him to stay his hand.
Yet the moment Mo Rubin finished speaking, Li Ping's expression changed abruptly.
He reached out to seize the Mo Rubin before him, but the figure burst apart like a bubble and scattered into the air.
It was clearly an illusion. Right under Li Ping's nose, the real Mo Rubin had slipped away to who knew where.
The Sacred Emperor was not angered by the deception.
"A genuine immortal art is truly extraordinary."
"The Myriad Tribulations Imperishable Demon Heart Immortal Art..."
"No, wait."
After pondering for a moment, Li Ping looked toward Cat Treasure sleeping on his shoulder.
During the brief clash with Mo Rubin just now, his opponent had seemingly failed to detect Cat Treasure's presence.
Furthermore, the lethal technique capable of copying and supplanting him had not reflected Cat Treasure's existence either.
"It failed to pique Cat Treasure's interest. It seems this so-called immortal art doesn't quite live up to its name."
Although Mo Rubin had escaped for now, he had not truly slipped from Li Ping's grasp.
While Mo Rubin had been trying to replace Li Ping, Li Ping had also been slowly drawing him into a web of source power essence.
Even if he had broken free for the moment, one could follow the fractured golden gossamer still lingering in the air like following vines to melons and trace his whereabouts.
In his perception, Mo Rubin was still fleeing rapidly.
Li Ping was in no hurry to give chase; he planned to cast a long line to catch a big fish.
"What he said just now was a mix of truth and falsehood, difficult to distinguish. But one thing is certain: he will inevitably search for King Xuantian."
"Or perhaps things related to the Xuantian Sect of the past."
"I need only wait."
Li Ping knew that dealing with a being like Mo Rubin, who had survived since antiquity, demanded ample patience.
Moreover, the brief engagement had given the Sacred Emperor a concrete understanding of the Xuantian Sect's bizarre techniques.
Once prepared, he would not let him escape so easily next time.
The ripples from their clash seemed to have drawn the attention of other powerful figures.
Members of the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals would likely arrive to investigate shortly, so Li Ping prepared to leave.
*To think Mo Rubin was hiding inside the Zixiao Sect ruins.*
*According to the stone slab's records, after the Ten Sects of the Immortal Dao annihilated the Xuantian Sect, they turned the whole world upside down to eliminate future troubles, scouring sects great and small. The Zixiao Sect was searched thoroughly back then, yet he still managed to evade them.*
*Setting aside the raw power of the Xuantian Sect's arts, they are exceedingly bizarre and difficult to guard against...*
*Hardly resembling the orthodox Immortal Dao.*
Li Ping appraised internally.
His divine sense swept across the Zixiao Sect ruins a thousand li away, and the Faceless Sacred Emperor's figure slowly faded from the air.
Yet in the very next instant, Li Ping reappeared.
"Hm?"
For in the brief moment of contemplation just now, Li Ping had noticed something peculiar.
His perspective surged upward, presenting a miniature panoramic map of the Xuanhuang Realm before his eyes.
"This is Linlang Province of the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals. A thousand years ago, it was part of the Primordial Xuanhuang Realm."
"When the Xuanhuang Realm was dismembered and reconstructed, Linlang Province was formed by merging it with other cultivation realms."
"However..."
Li Ping's expression gradually grew solemn.
"A piece of the Primordial Xuanhuang Realm's puzzle is missing."
Having mastered the information from the Genesis Stone Slab and sharing a tight link with the Xuanhuang Heavenly Dao, Li Ping, in the course of reconstructing how the Primordial Xuanhuang Realm had been broken up and reassembled, faintly realized that a large region of the former Zixiao Sect's territory had vanished from the new Xuanhuang Realm's map.
Or rather, it hadn't vanished.
It still existed in some corner of today's Xuanhuang Realm.
"Yet I was influenced by some force that caused me to unconsciously overlook its existence."
Having reached this conclusion, Li Ping's aura abruptly turned solemn and grim.
The maps of the primordial and contemporary Xuanhuang Realms constantly separated, reassembled, and compared against each other within his sea of consciousness.
After a long while, he finally located that other region of the former Zixiao Sect.
It was the area around Mount Taixu in present-day Taihua Province.
"What is there...?"
Li Ping did not rashly investigate. Instead, he pondered the force capable of influencing him.
Scenes of the past flashed through his mind one after another.
The Sacred Emperor had a faint intuition.
Yet Li Ping hesitated, a rare occurrence for him.
He stood motionless in midair for quite some time before finally resolving his mind.
"If I lack the courage to face whatever truth lies ahead..."
"How can I hope to save the Xuanhuang Realm?"
The Sacred Emperor shook his head slightly, and his figure blurred into motion.
Before long, he arrived at Mount Taixu.
However, the secret discovered here differed somewhat from his expectations.
In a deep valley beneath Mount Taixu, Li Ping found an underground secret chamber buried in silt.
The aura leaking from the chamber caused even him, an Avatar of the Heavenly Dao, to feel a faint sense of discomfort.
What caught his attention even more was that Cat Treasure, who had been fast asleep on his shoulder, suddenly woke up and looked around.
As if finding some delicious food, Li Ping could sense an overwhelming excitement from it.
Yet once it locked onto the target, Cat Treasure abruptly deflated like a punctured balloon, all its drive vanishing.
It lazily drifted back to sleep.
Yet Li Ping's focus never shifted from the target.
"What is this...?"
A statue.
Like him, it was faceless.
Though it appeared ordinary, devoid of any spiritual energy fluctuations, Li Ping felt unprecedented pressure from the stone statue.
Even when facing the lingering calamities in the Pitch-Black Star Sea before, he had never felt like this.
The faceless statue seemed to hold a wondrous, uncanny magic.
Li Ping paced forward slowly, drawing closer.
Two empty, featureless faces confronted each other across the space.
For some reason, an impulse suddenly surged in Li Ping's heart.
He wanted to communicate with this statue.
...
Within the Yanfa Jue chamber.
Li Fan's breath hitched slightly.
The scenes he could sense from the Sacred Emperor avatar had already grown exceedingly faint.
Yet after the Sacred Emperor, by a strange stroke of chance, rediscovered the stone statue of the Faceless True Immortal buried beneath Mount Taixu, the connection sharpened once more under the instinctual sense of mortal peril.
Li Fan closed his eyes and focused his mind, attempting to sway his avatar's intentions.
Although he could escape the True Immortal's Web a second time if he could escape it once, having to go through multiple reincarnations to shake it off completely was a nuisance after all. Better to avoid it if possible.
However, the Sacred Emperor's will was unexpectedly resolute.
Perhaps he had sensed something in that equally featureless face.
He continued to walk steadily toward the stone statue of the Faceless True Immortal.
He came to a standstill before the statue, remaining perfectly motionless.
At this moment, even though the Sacred Emperor was his avatar, Li Fan could not fathom what the Sacred Emperor was thinking.
"So this is the Xuantian Immortal."
After a long time, Li Ping found the origin of this statue in the records of the Genesis Stone Slab.
The Faceless True Immortal worshipped by the Xuantian Sect.
Li Ping stroked his own blank face, the aura around him undulating.
"Interesting."
Li Ping could not determine whether there was any genuine connection between himself and this Faceless True Immortal.
Still, he could faintly sense the statue's extraordinary nature.
Exercising great caution, he chose not to touch it himself.
Li Ping deployed an ordinary Sacred Army puppet to move the statue into the dark void outside the Daqi pocket world.
He laid down layers of formations to seal the statue away, stopping only when the sense of crisis in his heart gradually faded.
The reason he was so prudent was the definite sense of familiarity that had taken root during his contact with the statue.
And the source of that familiarity went beyond the uncanny fact that the statue, like him, was faceless.
More than that, it came from an image.
A scene he had sensed in the center of the Pitch-Black Star Sea, from the vast consciousness within the Star Sea's origin.
*"What has that to do with me?! What has that to do with me?!"*
The figure gradually fading amidst unbridled, mocking laughter felt strikingly similar to this statue.
"Are they the same person? Or not?"
It had been merely a fleeting glimpse, making it impossible for Li Ping to be sure.
*If I have the opportunity to visit the center of the Star Sea again, and that vast Star Sea consciousness inspects it in person, I should be able to find out.*
The thought flashed through Li Ping's mind.
"Perhaps I could try again. But the reserves of Void Clarity Flowing Crystal were mostly depleted during the last operation. Furthermore..."
Li Ping looked once more at the faceless stone statue locked behind layers of formations in the void.
Though it had no eyes, it seemed to be gazing at him.
"If the culprit back then truly was this Faceless True Immortal, and I am implicated by an enraged Star Sea consciousness, even if only a puppet went there, my main body here might suffer collateral damage."
"Compared to the entire Pitch-Black Star Sea, the Xuanhuang Realm is truly like a drop in the ocean..."
A vision of the Xuanhuang Realm torn apart in an instant by violent energies flashed before Li Ping's eyes, prompting him to suppress his earlier thought.
After a long silence, the Sacred Emperor vanished. When he reappeared, he placed another object beside the stone statue of the Faceless True Immortal.
It was none other than the Yishi Sect ruins he had retrieved and sealed from beneath the Great Rift of Fuguang Province.
The ruins themselves were ordinary, but the remains of Archmage Tiandu within, along with the concealed obliteration wind calamity, forced even the Sacred Emperor to treat them with utmost gravity.
The Yishi Sect ruins and the Faceless True Immortal stone statue faced each other from afar in the void.
A premonition flickered in Li Ping's heart.
If there were no sealing formations separating the two, an unimaginably terrifying calamity would probably erupt on the spot.
"Immortal..."
The wild laughter of *"What has that to do with me?!"* echoed faintly in Li Ping's ears.
He gave a cold snort in his heart and cast several thousand more formation seals, reinforcing the cages of both.
He would not feel at ease leaving these unstable factors buried in the Xuanhuang Realm anywhere else. Only guarding them personally was truly safe.
Thinking this, Li Ping continued tirelessly reinforcing the sealing formations.
Meanwhile, upon his shoulder, Cat Treasure had awoken at some point.
Its clear eyes stared into the void ahead as it raised a paw to its mouth and licked it.
...
Over on the side of Li Fan's true body, he could not help but breathe a sigh of relief.
With the Faceless True Immortal stone statue sealed, the connection between him and his avatar blurred once more.
In fact, it was slightly weaker than before.
*Has the Sacred Emperor avatar grown more vigilant?*
Li Fan shook his head slightly, not minding too much.
*Still, this serves as a reminder.*
*Though I am hiding here and can calmly observe the great upheavals in the Xuanhuang world, the Sacred Emperor, as the protagonist of this lifetime, is bound to clash with those transcendent beings.*
*He might not be exempt from someone tracing the link between avatar and true body to find me, just like the True Immortal of the Immortal Ruins did before.*
*Mm... I must make preparations.*
However, being in a vital stronghold of the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals restricted his movements; he needed to plan carefully.
"Big dummy!" While he was pondering, he faintly sensed the little girl Yanfa Jue calling out repeatedly to his simulated persona.
With a shift of his mind, he took its place once more, appearing inside the glowing orb of characters.
"Honestly, I've been calling you for so long, and you only respond now!" Yanfa Jue pouted, looking completely disgruntled.
"You're done sleeping already?" Li Fan asked with some surprise, not answering her complaint directly.
Yanfa Jue put her hands on her hips. "How long has it even been? How could it be enough?!"
"But while dreaming, I remembered a few things from before."
"See if this helps you!"
The little girl clapped her hands, and the scene inside the orb transformed instantly.
Upon a boundless grassland stood a solitary stone.
Suddenly, the earth began to tremor.
Vast expanses of green grass began to grow wildly, as if stimulated by something.
In the blink of an eye, they grew taller than a person, even lifting the solitary stone off the ground.
An arc of light suddenly flashed across the sky.
The arc shimmered in seven colors, faintly revealing visions of lightning, thunder, and gathering storms within.
Around the rainbow arc, space warped bizarrely from time to time, as though invisible, transparent entities were gathering there.
More and more unseen beings converged, circling the arc of light as if waiting for something.
The wind and thunder grew increasingly violent, the roiling black clouds threatening to punch through the arc of light.
Though the storm already looked terrifying from outside the arc, its true horror only became apparent once it spilled beyond it.
A bolt of pitch-black lightning struck down violently from the arc toward the earth.
*Boom! Boom! Boom!*
The world was split in two by the blow, deep rifts torn into space that refused to heal for a long time. Across the grassland, the endless green grass was set ablaze, roaring fires spreading rapidly.
Yet right after, an even stranger scene unfolded.
The falling cinders turned into nourishment for green leaves. The grass surged once more, its growth rate offsetting the rate at which it burned.
The plains trembled; beneath the raging fire, something seemed to be waking.
High in the sky, the unseen figures around the light arc paid no mind to the events below.
They only crowded closer toward the interior of the arc, even clashing over positioning.
Colossal booms and collisions sounded continuously.
The storm brewed to its climax before falling into an abrupt standstill. The roiling black clouds vanished without a trace in an instant.
Within the rainbow arc of light, beneath ten thousand li of clear skies, an unimaginably arcane character stood proudly revealed!
The moment the character appeared, the supreme, profound resonance of the Great Dao seemed to ring throughout heaven and earth.
Auspicious colored clouds continually drifted from the horizon, converging toward the character.
A patter of raindrops fell from the sky.
Like the auspicious clouds above, the rain shone in breathtaking seven-colored hues.
The rifts tearing through heaven and earth were mended.
The flames across the grassland were extinguished by the falling drops.
The endless green grass greedily absorbed the sweet dew from heaven, yet their blades began to shrink.
Rainbow lights glowed, and silhouettes of various shapes were nurtured within them.
Meanwhile, the roaring clashes high in the sky seemed to grow even louder.
However, Yanfa Jue's memory was drawing to a close.
The surrounding scene grew blurry and indistinct, leaving only the solitary stone on the grassland dissolving under the rain.
...
As the vision faded, Li Fan found himself back inside the glowing orb of characters, yet he remained deeply immersed in the scenes he had just witnessed, unable to pull himself away.
"Well? Any clues?" Yanfa Jue asked full of anticipation.
After savoring the vision for a long time, Li Fan finally asked, "Those raindrops—could they be the Immortal Sound Jade Dew you mentioned?"
Yanfa Jue raised her chin and put her hands on her hips, saying with complete confidence, "That must be it. I've had this memory in my head ever since I was born, but as I grew up, I forgot about it."
"Good thing I caught up on so much sleep earlier, or who knows when I would've remembered!"
"I have a feeling that if I could get some more of that stuff..."
Li Fan cut off her daydreaming.
"What about the character inside the rainbow arc of light?"
"Why was it completely illegible?"
Yanfa Jue pouted. "I told you it was from a dream! It was hard enough just to remember this much; how could I remember the character clearly?!"
Li Fan stared at Yanfa Jue, trying to discern the truth in her words.
"You actually don't believe me?" Yanfa Jue said, looking thoroughly wronged.
Li Fan chuckled softly. "You're not stupid. I don't believe for a second that you failed to realize the scene you just showed is very likely a glimpse of the legendary Immortal Realm."
"A character that even immortals fought over..."
"It's only natural that you'd hold something back."
Upon hearing this, Yanfa Jue looked even more aggrieved. "I really can't remember! You said it yourself, it's an immortal character—how could it be easy to remember? Besides, I was so small back then..."
Yanfa Jue gestured with her hands, tears welling in her eyes.
"How can you remember it?" Li Fan didn't buy the little girl's nonsense for a second, cutting straight to the conditions.
Yanfa Jue's tears vanished instantly.
Her large eyes darted about, as if thinking.
After a moment, she whispered, "Well, maybe if I eat until I'm full, I might remember a bit more."
She licked her lips and stared at Li Fan.
"Eat?"
Li Fan looked down. "You can eat food?"
Yanfa Jue puffed up angrily. "What kind of question is that? I'm basically human too, you know!"
"It's been thousands of years since I've tasted delicious food."
"I tasted it again in my dream, and the craving woke me up..."
With a wave of his hand, Li Fan conjured a fragrant, crispy roast squab. "Would this work?"
Yanfa Jue rolled her eyes. "I want real food, not fake ones! I can have as much of this kind as I want."
With that, the little girl waved her hand, and the surrounding space was instantly filled with all manner of gourmet delicacies.
"No matter how realistic it is, fake is fake after all; it can never become real..."
Yanfa Jue shook her head, full of regret.
"Oh?"
For some reason, Yanfa Jue suddenly felt Li Fan's expression shift subtly.
"Then take a look at this dish. How about it?"
What appeared in Li Fan's hand was an ordinary plate of fried rice.
Yanfa Jue was inclined to dismiss it at first, but under the prompt of Li Fan's gaze, she took it anyway and tasted it.
Chapter 1275