Chapter 927
Chapter 927
The once ethereal, dreamlike, azure ice crystal palace is now mostly collapsed, reduced to ruins, appearing particularly desolate in the eternal darkness. The surrounding labyrinth of ice peaks is also crooked and scattered, with many parts even razed to the ground. A thick, lingering evil aura permeates the air, along with a faint, despairing Daoist chant.
Xing Yanzi was already waiting there. Upon seeing Fu Shaoping, he quickly went to greet him.
"Junior Brother Lu, you've arrived." Xing Yanzi looked exhausted. "We've conducted a preliminary survey of the outer perimeter and discovered some things."
He led Fu Shaoping into the ruins.
Where the main hall of the Xuan Palace once stood, only a huge pit remains. At the bottom of the pit, a hidden compartment, violently destroyed, is faintly visible. Around the compartment, extremely strong fluctuations of evil energy remain, along with... several broken jade slip fragments engraved with ancient contract runes.
“This is what we found in the ruins.” Xing Yanzi carefully handed the largest fragments to Fu Shaoping. “We can only decipher a small part of the runes on them. They seem to mention words such as ‘Root of the Contract,’ ‘Ancient Taboo,’ and ‘Primordial Darkness.’”
Fu Shaoping took the fragment and focused his attention on sensing it.
Although incomplete, the contractual Daoist aura remaining in the jade slip was indeed completely different from the pure origin he had sensed in the Source Stream Space. Instead, it carried an extremely ancient and profound... "dark" aura. It wasn't evil energy, but rather a kind of "chaotic" or "unknown" aspect that accompanied the Dao of Contracts at its inception.
“The darkness of the beginning…” Fu Shaoping murmured.
He attempted to probe the fragments deeper with his contracted spiritual sense, but the fragments were too fragmented to reconstruct complete information. However, he keenly noticed a blurry directional mark engraved on one of the fragments. The mark pointed to... the northernmost point of the endless ice plains, the legendary "Eternal Night Ice Abyss," a place never before set foot in the north.
“They went there,” Fu Shaoping said to Xingyanzi and Guanxingzi, pointing to the directional markers.
The two exchanged a glance, both seeing the shock in each other's eyes. The Eternal Night Ice Abyss was an even more terrifying forbidden zone than the Endless Ice Plains; legend had it that even those in the late Nascent Soul stage never returned.
"Junior Brother Lu, what are you planning to do..." Xing Yanzi asked hesitantly.
Fu Shaoping gazed at the eternal darkness to the north, his eyes resolute: "I must go. Not to hunt them down, but to find out what the 'Seed of Evil Contract' is after, and... whether there is an even greater secret hidden behind it."
"It's too dangerous!" Guan Xingzi exclaimed urgently, "You've just recovered from your injuries, and the strength of that monstrous creature is unknown..."
“That’s precisely why we can’t let it develop unchecked.” Fu Shaoping interrupted him. “Don’t worry, I won’t act rashly. If things become unmanageable, I will retreat. Besides, the Qiyuan Stone space is still there, and I can borrow its power if necessary.”
Seeing that Fu Shaoping was determined, the two stopped trying to persuade him. Xing Yanzi took out a specially made ice-blue talisman: "This is the 'Extreme Cold Escape Talisman' newly developed by the Northern Alliance. It can be used to escape in extremely cold environments. Take it with you."
Guan Xingzi also took out several top-grade pills for healing and recovery, as well as an emergency rescue talisman from the Tianji Pavilion.
Fu Shaoping did not refuse and carefully accepted them.
"Take care!" the two said solemnly.
Fu Shaoping nodded, and without further delay, his figure transformed into a pale golden streak of light, shooting swiftly towards the eternal darkness in the north.
Behind them, the ruins of the Ice Soul Palace lay silent in the darkness.
Ahead lies the desolate northern wilderness, the direction from which the "Seed of Evil Pact" fled, and also... the place where the "Primordial Darkness," hidden for countless years, might finally be unveiled.
Fu Shaoping's figure quickly disappeared into the vast ice field and darkness.
What awaits him is the deepest and most dangerous secret of the Way of Contract.
But a true decisive battle concerning the survival of the entire cultivation world's contractual order may have only just begun.
Eternal Night Ice Abyss
In the far north, eternal night reigns.
Fu Shaoping had been flying across the endless ice plains for a full half month.
Since crossing the ruins of the Frost Soul Palace and continuing north, the world has been plunged into eternal darkness. There is no sunrise or sunset, no starlight or moonlight, only howling winds, countless ice crystals, and an endless, suffocating loneliness.
The further north you go, the lower the temperature gets. Later on, even the protective true essence of a Nascent Soul cultivator needs to be constantly circulated to resist the extreme cold that can freeze the soul. Fu Shaoping's contracted protective light shield takes on a faint icy blue color in the extreme cold environment, and with each breath, one can feel the spiritual energy in the air seemingly solidifying into ice crystals.
But what alarmed him most was not the environment, but the traces he found along the way.
Every few hundred miles, he could find some residual evil energy on the ice plains. Sometimes it was the frozen corpse of a demon beast after being corroded by evil energy, sometimes it was the charred marks on the ice surface caused by corrosion, and sometimes it was the unique, distorted contract fluctuations in the air that had not completely dissipated.
The "Seed of Evil Pact" did indeed traverse this path. Moreover, it didn't seem to be in a hurry to travel; rather, it seemed to be... searching for something?
"Is it chasing something? Or is it following some kind of guidance?" Fu Shaoping's doubts deepened.
He pushed his Magic-Breaking Eyes to their limit, carefully observing every detail of the remaining evil energy, trying to decipher more information from them.
On the seventeenth day, things finally changed.
The endless ice field suddenly breaks apart here.
It was a colossal, suffocating abyss stretching between heaven and earth. Hundreds of miles wide and tens of thousands of miles long, it cleaved the entire far northern ice plain in two. At the edge of the abyss, jagged ice cliffs rose steeply, and looking down, there was only endless darkness and the faint, muffled sound of wind, like the breathing of a giant beast.
This is the Eternal Night Ice Abyss.
Standing at the edge of the abyss, Fu Shaoping experienced for the first time what it meant to feel the "power of heaven and earth." Even with his Nascent Soul cultivation, he appeared as insignificant as an ant before this abyss that seemed to connect to the deepest hell.
But what concerned him more was that the lingering evil energy at the edge of the abyss had suddenly become extremely dense. Not only had the "Seed of Evil Contract" arrived here, but it also seemed to have stayed here for quite some time, and might even have performed some kind of ritual.
He examined the ice cliff carefully and discovered some deliberately carved marks. These were twisted contract runes, forcibly corroded into the millennia-old ice by evil energy. The runes were densely packed, covering an area of several dozen feet in radius, forming an extremely complex array. "This is... some kind of summoning array? No, it's more like... a positioning array." Fu Shaoping sensed it carefully with his contracted spiritual sense, becoming increasingly alarmed as he looked.
The core of this formation does not point to the abyss itself, but to a very distant location deep within the abyss. Even more strangely, within this formation, there remains a trace of an aura that is extremely similar to, yet completely opposite to, the origin of the Origin Stone... the aura of "Dark Origin".
“The darkness of the beginning…” Fu Shaoping recalled the records in the broken jade slip.
He finally realized that the "Seed of Evil Contract" had not come here simply to escape. It was seeking some ancient existence related to its origin. Deep within this eternal night abyss, the dark, chaotic, and unknown aspect of the Path of Contract at its inception might very well be sealed or dormant.
He has to go down.
Fu Shaoping took a deep breath, adjusted himself to his best condition, and then leaped into the Eternal Night Ice Abyss!
Falling, a long fall.
Unlike his previous entry into the Heavenly Abyss Rift, this Eternal Night Ice Abyss was devoid of gales and spatial turbulence, filled only with pure darkness and silence. The silence was so profound that it made one doubt their hearing. Only the faint hissing sound of his protective aura rubbing against the darkness proved that he was still moving.
After falling for an unknown amount of time—perhaps several hours, perhaps several days (time is distorted here)—a faint light finally appeared below.
It was an extremely eerie, hazy, ghostly light, like the last rays of countless dead stars, falling on a vast expanse of land composed of unknown gray-black rocks.
Fu Shaoping landed on the surface of this underground world.
The place was vast and expansive. Looking up, there was only eternal darkness above, and the entrance to the abyss from which they had come was nowhere to be seen. All around were endless gray-black plains, dotted with a few oddly shaped, equally gray-black rocks. The air was filled with an ancient, decaying, deathly stillness, as if countless years had been frozen in time.
But in this deathly silence, Fu Shaoping keenly sensed two extremely peculiar contractual fluctuations.
A force, that familiar, evil, twisted "Seed of Evil Pact." Its aura was not far ahead, and it seemed to be moving.
The other was more obscure, more vast, and more… ancient. It was omnipresent, seemingly permeating every inch of this underground world, every rock, and every breath of air. The feeling was like facing a sleeping, indescribable behemoth.
"The Primordial Darkness... is indeed here." Fu Shaoping felt a chill run down his spine.
He concealed his aura and cautiously crept towards the direction of the "seed of evil pact".
After traveling for several hundred miles, the terrain suddenly changed. On the gray-black plains, the skeletons of some enormous, unidentified creatures began to appear. Some of these skeletons were hundreds of feet long, some resembled humanoid figures but had several pairs of bony wings, and some were simply unidentifiable as to what kind of creature they belonged to. What they all had in common was that their bones were covered with extremely ancient, now faded, contract runes.
"Are these all beings from ancient times who followed the 'Primordial Darkness'?" Fu Shaoping wondered to himself.
Beyond this desolate wasteland of skeletons, a massive mountain range, entirely composed of greyish-black rock, came into view. At its center, a towering peak pierced the clouds like a sword against the dark dome. At its foot, a magnificent yet eerily ancient and unsettling complex of buildings was faintly visible.
It was the ruins of a temple.
Unlike the pure, icy blue of the Frost Soul Palace and the solemn, dark gold of the Contract Temple, the ruins of this temple were entirely a somber, grayish-black. The architectural style was extremely primitive and rugged, yet it exuded an indescribable eeriness and majesty. Every stone in the temple was covered with densely packed, extremely ancient contract runes. These runes were older than any contract text Fu Shaoping had ever seen, seemingly inherited directly from the very beginning of the contract's creation.
At this moment, in the center of the temple ruins, in front of the tallest main hall, a scene was unfolding... Fu Shaoping didn't know how to describe it.
The "Seed of Evil Contract" hovered in mid-air, its body having expanded even further, emanating an even more intense evil aura. But opposite it, before the dilapidated gates of the main hall, lurked an even larger phantom, composed of pure darkness and the rules of the contract.
The phantom had no fixed form; sometimes it resembled a cloud of countless twisted contract runes, sometimes a coiled black dragon, and sometimes a giant phantom with an indistinct face, radiating boundless pressure. It seemed to exist between existence and non-existence, between awakening and slumber.
This is the source of that ancient contractual fluctuation in this underground world—the "Primordial Darkness"! Or rather, it is its lingering will or projection that has not yet completely dissipated!
The "Seed of Evil Pact" faced the phantom and whispered with longing and reverence:
“Great… Primordial… I am your… purest… descendant… I beg you… to accept me… to let me… merge with you… to recreate… the… completeness of the ancient… covenant…”
Its voice was intermittent, but Fu Shaoping understood it clearly. This wretched creature actually wanted to merge with this "Primordial Darkness"!
The phantom remained silent for a long time before uttering an ancient, vast voice, as if from the very beginning of creation:
“Descendant…you…are too weak…too mixed…tainted…by too much…filth…of those who came after you…you are unworthy…to merge with me…”
The "Seed of Evil Pact" trembled violently, seemingly struck by a great blow. But it did not give up; instead, it emitted an even stronger aura of evil, attempting to prove itself:
“I…devoured…countless…living beings…absorbed…all…power…of the corrupted…source pool…and soon…I will…grow…to…enough…to…bear…you…”
"The Fallen... Source Pool..." The phantom's voice seemed to carry a slight tremor, "That was... a trace of... filthy blood... that flowed out when I was sealed... back then... that's all... You... devoured it... no wonder... it's so... mixed..."
"Great Origin, please give me a chance!" The Seed of Evil moved forward eagerly.
However, at this moment—
"boom!"
A dazzling golden beam of light shot out from the main hall behind the phantom, striking the "Seed of Evil Contract" squarely!
"Roar—!" The "Seed of Evil Pact" let out a shrill scream, blasted hundreds of feet away by the pillar of light, and crashed heavily into the mountain wall! The golden pillar of light contained an extremely pure purifying power that was of the same origin as the Pact Source Stone!
"Who is it?!" Fu Shaoping was startled.
The phantom trembled slightly and slowly turned towards the main hall.
The dilapidated gate of the main hall suddenly swung open!
An elderly man, dressed in an ancient contract robe, with white hair and beard, and a gaunt face, slowly emerged from the hall. His body was enveloped in a dazzling, pure contract light remarkably similar to the essence of the Contract Source Stone; his aura was vast and boundless, reaching… the level of a half-step Nascent Soul cultivator! (End of Chapter)