Zhao Er shuddered, his instinct urging him to resist.
Yet when he considered the other's unfathomable strength, he submitted after all.
Feeling the icy gaze roaming over him, Zhao Er pulled a crestfallen face and said, "Right away, Senior!"
He then formed a hand seal.
Rumbling, the stone pillar rose from the seabed. Zhao Er slouched dejectedly. "Senior, please!"
With that, he walked inside, following the stairs in the center of the stone pillar.
Li Fan swept his divine sense around.
Having studied the jade slip for over a year, he was no longer utterly ignorant of formations.
Inside this stone pillar were only a few simple Water-Repelling and Dust-Cleansing Formations; there was no trace of any offensive formations.
Even so, Li Fan did not let down his guard. He still activated a protective talisman before following him inside.
Evidently, Li Fan had overthought things.
The interior of this stone pillar could be considered quite crude.
Most of it consisted of storerooms used to hold collected curios.
Zhao Er led Li Fan into a relatively spacious room.
In the center stood a large table, atop which rested what appeared to be a miniature model of the Congyun Sea.
"Senior, please sit," Zhao Er mumbled, speaking with difficulty.
Li Fan sat down leisurely, looking at the ashen-faced Zhao Er, and said, "Shall I ask you question by question, or will you confess honestly on your own?"
Zhao Er opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but managed only a smile that looked uglier than crying. "Senior, I don't know what you want me to confess!"
Li Fan gave a cold snort and reactivated the Insect Binding divine ability.
Zhao Er was instantly restrained once more.
Controlling his Blue Flame phantom spirit, Li Fan sent a visible chill spreading across the floor like an ice-blue venomous serpent, slowly slithering up Zhao Er's body.
In an instant, Zhao Er's lower limbs were frozen solid in blue ice crystals.
"I wonder," Li Fan mused aloud with mild curiosity, "with your cultivation, if your body shatters into shards of ice, whether you will still be able to recover."
Zhao Er's eyes showed a flicker of terror, but he swiftly forced it down.
There was not the slightest sign of begging for mercy—he looked rather determined to die before yielding.
Li Fan could see that Zhao Er indeed did not seem to be faking it.
"Interesting," Li Fan chuckled. Capturing Zhao Er, he brought him along into the neighboring storeroom.
Zhao Er's gaze suddenly turned panicked and terrified.
"My, the things here really look quite fine. Collecting them must have cost you quite a bit of effort, hasn't it?" Li Fan brushed his hand lightly across the aged-looking items.
Crash!
While caressing a porcelain bowl, he cast it onto the floor.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. My apologies. A slip of the hand, and it broke," Li Fan said with apparent regret.
Crash!
Another piece of porcelain shattered.
A towering fury welled up in Zhao Er's eyes as he glared fixedly at Li Fan, as if wishing to slice him into a thousand pieces.
However, as the fragile antiques in the room were destroyed one by one, Zhao Er's expression gradually shifted from fierce hatred to heartache, from heartache to panic, and from panic to pleading for mercy.
Yet Li Fan showed no intention of stopping.
Taking him through every room within the stone pillar, Li Fan utterly obliterated years of his collection in mere moments, right before Zhao Er's eyes.
Staring at the floor full of fragments, Zhao Er's eyes were filled with despair.
His body suddenly relaxed, and upon regaining control of himself, Zhao Er threw himself forward and wept uncontrollably.
His wails shook the room, and his heartbroken misery was truly too painful to watch.
Yet as Zhao Er sobbed and wailed, he suddenly realized that the shards in his hands had vanished.
He was still bound, still standing in the original room.
It turned out that everything that had just occurred was nothing more than an illusion!
Tossed violently between extremes of sorrow and joy, Zhao Er almost choked on his own breath.
When the binding around his body truly vanished, he collapsed onto the floor.
He felt weak all over, yet he scrambled to his feet and dashed into the adjacent storeroom. Seeing his beloved collection still entirely intact, he couldn't help weeping tears of joy, crying even more miserably than before.
To Zhao Er, the illusion just now was ten thousand times more terrifying than the worst nightmare imaginable.
He never wanted to experience it again!
"Do you know what to confess now?" That nightmarish voice sounded beside his ear. Zhao Er shuddered from head to toe, feeling that this man's ability to manipulate the human heart was far too terrifying!
"I'll talk! I'll tell you everything!" he blurted out with a shiver, terrified that Li Fan might actually destroy all of his collection for real.
The two returned one after the other. Li Fan sat while Zhao Er stood obediently at his side.
Zhao Er parted his lips, hesitating.
After a long while, Zhao Er finally spoke in trepidation: "Junior is Zhao Erbao, a native cultivator of the Congyun Sea. Sixty-eight years old this year..."
Li Fan's face darkened, and he hurriedly cut him off: "Who asked you for that? I am asking what use these things you collect have."
"Where is that place you mentioned?"
"Why don't you use a storage ring to transport them, and instead insist on hauling them up and down yourself with a flying boat?"
With every question, Zhao Erbao's body gave a violent flinch.
When Li Fan finished, Zhao Erbao said with a bitter grimace, "Senior truly possesses vast divine powers; nothing can be hidden from you."
He paused, seemingly organizing his thoughts.
After a moment, he stammered, "The reason Junior spent his entire life collecting these antiquities is because of a secret I discovered back when I was still an ordinary mortal."
"A secret?" Li Fan looked at Zhao Erbao with keen interest, waiting for him to continue.
Zhao Erbao nodded. "Junior's family has been in the antique business for generations. Immersed in it since childhood, I have always had a deep fascination with these relics dredged from the deep sea."
"Perhaps due to natural talent, I could always easily distinguish genuine antiquities from imitations."
"Thus, my family gradually had me take over all appraisal work, allowing me to handle large quantities of ancient objects every day."
"It was through this that I vaguely uncovered a secret buried beneath the dust of history."
"The Congyun Sea once seemed to host a lost civilization."
Zhao Erbao's expression turned solemn, his eyes narrowing slightly as though recalling something from memory.
"The antiquities belonging to this civilization possess an exceptionally distinct style, clearly separated from the other eras of the Congyun Sea."
"The antiquities stored here in Junior's base all belong to this civilization."
Li Fan nodded slowly. "What is so special about this civilization? From what I see, although these things have age to them, they appear to be mere mortal objects. To a Qi Condensation cultivator like you, they shouldn't be of any use."
"In and of themselves, these objects are indeed of little value. What is truly precious is what is attached to them," Zhao Erbao said.
"Senior, do you know that ruins of buildings can be found everywhere across the bed of the Congyun Sea?"
Zhao Erbao shifted the topic, asking abruptly.
Chapter 129