"It is merely that I feared Fellow Daoist would neglect your cultivation by drinking with me all day, which was why I intended to offer a word of advice earlier."
"However, I see you are an open-minded and sensible man who surely knows his own limits. So I shall say no more."
Having rested for a moment and recovered a bit of his vital energy, Sima Changkong spoke once again.
Li Fan's eyes flickered slightly, but he did not say much either.
He merely put on a chagrin-filled expression. "Hearing such heartfelt words from Brother Sima makes me thoroughly ashamed!"
"Haha, if Fellow Daoist continues to act like this, you truly treat me as an outsider!" Sima Changkong said, feigning anger.
Li Fan could only sigh and say no more.
After this heart-to-heart exchange, the bond between the two grew significantly deeper once more.
After roughly half the time it took to drink a cup of tea, Li Fan finally steered the conversation back to the Tianling Province battlefield.
"Brother Sima, what exactly did you see on the battlefield?" he asked with a frown. "You possess a panoramic view of the Xuanhuang Realm's history. For something to earn such extraordinary praise from you, it must be an utterly terrifying existence."
Sima Changkong let out a sigh. "Fellow Daoist flatters me. Still, the latter part of what you said is not wrong."
"What the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals brought out this time is truly an ultimate weapon."
With that, he channeled a drop of blood from within his body, intending to form a blood screen to show Li Fan just as he had done before.
Indeed, an image appeared upon the blood screen.
Yet immediately after, Sima Changkong's expression shifted drastically.
"How could this be?!" he cried out in shock, his face filled with utter bewilderment.
Li Fan fixed his gaze on the scene within the blood screen.
Densely packed cultivators of the Five Elders Association filled heaven and earth, arranged in a formation that completely encircled a group of Alliance cultivators in the center.
On the Alliance's side, though surrounded and numbering only around a hundred, there was not the slightest trace of fear on their faces. Every single one was incomparably valiant.
As if empowered by some blessing, they charged toward an enemy force outnumbering them by more than a hundredfold.
This battle, which seemingly held no suspense and whose outcome should have long been decided, suddenly underwent a drastic turn.
In the center of the crowd of Alliance cultivators, someone abruptly held something high aloft.
And then...
Masses upon masses of Five Elders Association cultivators plummeted from the sky without the slightest warning.
They crashed into mangled heaps of flesh and blood, groaning upon the ground, unable to move.
The Alliance cultivators seemed to have long anticipated this.
Swiftly and ruthlessly, they harvested their enemies' lives.
For a time, the phenomena of falling cultivators overlapped in the sky, blending into a bizarre, grotesque portrait.
"How could this happen?" Sima Changkong stared in disbelief at the scene recorded in the blood screen, his mind dazed.
Noticing Sima Changkong's peculiar reaction, a thought suddenly struck Li Fan, and he asked, "Could the scene recorded in this blood screen be different from what you witnessed with your own eyes, Brother Sima?"
"Precisely so!" Sima Changkong nodded immediately.
"What I saw was that cultivator clearly holding aloft a small, square mirror."
"And from the sky, tens of thousands of green threads draped down."
"It was precisely due to the presence of these mysterious green threads that the Five Elders Association cultivators instantly lost all ability to resist."
"But why..."
Even after explaining, Sima Changkong still found it difficult to accept.
For someone who took faithfully recording historical events as his solemn duty, encountering something that could not be recorded was evidently a severe blow.
*Cannot be recorded... green energy...* Li Fan's eyes narrowed slightly.
*Is it truly the Profound Net? I previously deduced that the Profound Net had already descended upon the world. Sure enough, once the war reached a boiling point, the Alliance could no longer hold back from deploying it.*
*Only, the Profound Net in this lifetime differs somewhat from the Heavenly Profound Spirit-Locking Formation I saw in my previous life.*
*To think it can be summoned merely with a portable square mirror.*
*Is it an incomplete prototype, or...*
Li Fan, too, sank into deep thought.
"No, I must find a way to record it," Sima Changkong muttered to himself, still unable to recover from the blow, looking somewhat possessed.
"Brother Sima, you are overthinking this. Even if it cannot be directly recorded through images or speech, you can still record its existence through indirect descriptions," Li Fan spoke up to remind him.
Sima Changkong froze.
Then, overjoyed, he exclaimed, "How foolish of me!"
He slapped his forehead and forced out several more drops of blood, fusing them into the blood screen.
They formed several lines of contorted script that merged into the blood screen:
"The Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals and the Five Elders Association clashed in the northeast of Tianling..."
"Green light like threads abruptly descended from the sky..."
"Those struck lost all immortal power and plummeted to the earth."
...
Seeing the characters gradually stabilize, on the verge of fusing completely with the blood screen...
Suddenly, a wisp of green thread emerged from the contorted bloody script.
"Not good!"
Sima Changkong turned deathly pale in an instant, shouting in alarm.
Before he could finish his words, the green thread had already surged into raging green light.
After churning the scenes recorded in the blood screen into utter ruin, it suddenly retracted, condensing into a single point of light.
A fraction of a second of silence followed.
The green point detonated violently.
"True—"
Long before Sima Changkong's warning could be shouted, the instant the green thread emerged, Li Fan had already pushed the Purple Empyrean Divine Thunder Escape to its limit.
At the same time, two skeletal wings jutted out from his back as he cast the art of Peng Flight upon himself.
Unleashing the fastest speed he had ever achieved since stepping into the cycles of the cultivation world, he fled into the distance.
Yet Li Fan clearly had not expected the Profound Net's reaction to be so violent this time.
It was several degrees more ferocious than when it had erupted in the Wanxian Island Martial Practice Hall back then.
The green point exploded, and a wave of light swept outward across the surroundings in the blink of an eye.
At the very instant the green light was about to touch his body, though feeling reluctant in his heart, Li Fan called out to True Reversion.
Yet soon, he swallowed the remaining word "Reversion" back down.
Because he discovered that the charge level used by True Reversion for bodily protection had not changed in the slightest.
"Hmm? Just a false alarm?"
Li Fan abruptly halted his flight and hovered in midair.
He waited for a moment, but nothing out of the ordinary occurred; all around him, the wind was gentle and the clouds were calm.
After pondering for a while, Li Fan decided to go back and take a look.
Inside the Crystal Palace, everything remained as before.
Only, it was frighteningly quiet.
Sima Changkong still stood where he had been, the terrified expression frozen on his face, his body entirely motionless.
"Brother Sima?" Li Fan called out from afar.
No response.
After a moment, Li Fan cautiously drew closer. "Brother Sima?"
Though he could still faintly sense the aura of life on the man, for some reason, Sima Changkong showed no reaction whatsoever.
Moreover...
That vitality also seemed frozen.
Li Fan sensed that something was amiss and slowly stepped backward.
*Splat!*
Right at that moment, Sima Changkong's entire body abruptly burst open from within.
What splattered in every direction was not crimson flesh and blood, but pool after pool of viscous green liquid.
It splashed all across the floor of the Crystal Palace.
Li Fan barely dodged the spray of green fluid.
Staring at the spot where Sima Changkong had been reduced to nothing, not even bones remaining, his face twitched.
Chapter 563