Lu Yun plucked the little fox off his head while Bai Zhaoju looked dumbly at the furry creature.

“It speaks? It’s not actually that troublemaker, is... she?” He’d find it absolutely ludicrous if so.

“Do you know what’s guarding this place?” Lu Yun had long picked up on its presence, but he hadn’t been able to place the relationship between the guardian and tomb owner. 

“Yinglong! Taiyi’s empress.” The little fox burrowed back into Lu Yun’s clothes and left only her face exposed to the air. She said carefully, “This mountain is formed from her corpse!”

“Yinglong… Taiyi’s empress?” Lu Yun blinked and he thought for a moment. “If that’s the case, that’s just as well. We’ll head on in.”

The little fox immediately ducked into his robes.

“She’s that Tushan troublemaker alright,” grumbled Bai Zhaoju. “Rumors have it that that bad news of a woman has been heavily injured and fallen into mundanity from being a peak chaos realm expert. But Qingqiu Mountain is too close to Mount Buzhou—with Fuzhou there, no one dares verify all the hearsay. To think those rumors would be true!”

The little fox spoke no more.

“Are there a lot of chaos realm cultivators around?” Lu Yun asked curiously.

“Connate demon gods are born as chaos realm powerhouses! There’s also connate masters of combat arts who don’t need to cultivate. They are born with a grasp of the heavenly dao and dominance over all life.” Bai Zhaoju thought a bit further; he wasn’t revealing any big secrets, so he could go on. “Children of connate great gods are born a bit weaker as empyrean cultivators, but that also makes them great masters of combat arts.

“Once the children of connate demon gods procreate, their children are born as divine kings, so on and so forth until their bloodline is so diluted they’re born as ordinary beings. These offspring aren’t even initiates into the connate great dao, so the label ‘connate’ can no longer be applied to them.

“Though these latter-day beings are also descendants of connate demon gods, the blood is so watered down that it’s almost nonexistent. Some of the most tyrannical connate demon gods don’t even acknowledge them… mm, us.” Bai Zhaoju changed the reference after a moment of thought.

He, too, was one of the later descendants that he was talking about. He hadn’t been born with a cultivation realm, and his current level of strength was a result of his own efforts.

“In the eyes of many of those demon gods, though we are their descendants, we’re no better than food for the partaking whenever they wish. Of course, there are still a few who acknowledge us no matter what, and in turn we revere them as connate great gods,” Bai Zhaoju sighed.

“But there are still a few races with extremely domineering bloodlines that are born into the connate great dao or the true divinity realm. Some are even stronger than that. The Bi Fang we met before, for instance, are born into true divinity.

“However, most of those races aren’t suitable to cultivate, so they remain in the same cultivation realm for their entire lives. It’s actually lowborn beings like us who can steadily improve from the cultivation methods we learn from the tribute spirits. Bad News Tushan is a classic example, and she’s one of the few descendants who reached chaos realm.”

Lu Yun finally had a more thorough view of the great wilderness, and the little fox leaned halfway out of his robes to wave her fists at Bai Zhaoju to express great dissatisfaction.

Lu Yun stuffed her back in.

……

The entrance to the great tomb was beneath the mountain; Lu Yun didn’t have to expend too much energy to find it.

Yinglong was a connate great god and occupied the center point of the five directions. As the priest of earth in the five elements, she was a goddess of earth. Taiyi was one of the sky, so a marriage between heaven and earth made them quite the perfect match.

However, Yinglong could also create rivers by simply drawing a line in the ground, so somewhere along the line in the future, she was mistaken to be a goddess of water.

Now that she’d died, the great mountain over her body had been formed by the power of earth to protect her.

Tomb of the Great Yi!

Five bloody characters were carved into the enormous tombstone stuck into the mountain. The Great Yi was Hou Yi, another connate great god and once a protector of the Dongyi in the plains, so that they wouldn’t be preyed upon by the demon gods. Lu Yun had never thought he’d find this tomb here.

“Someone created this tombstone!” Lu Yun’s eyes darted around rapidly. “It doesn’t seem to have formed naturally, someone crafted it at a later date and combined it with the grand influence over heaven and earth… this is a hero’s barrow!

“Hou Yi’s body isn’t here, it should be his ultimate treasure that’s buried here!” Shock jolted his gaze. “Hou Yi… the Great Yi is dead and left without even a body?”

He stared fixedly at the tombstone looming increasingly larger in his vision. There seemed to be a hint of demonic nature to it!

“A hero’s barrow shouldn’t be a place of danger, there’s something wrong with this tomb!”

“Shh, don’t say it out loud,” a soft voice suddenly rang by his ears.

The little fox in his arms had disappeared, as had Bai Zhaoju by his side. Small ripples oscillated through the air in front of him as a middle-aged woman in white court attire slowly paced out of the void.

A benevolent air exuded from her, as comforting and refreshing as the spring breeze. However, Lu Yun still sensed the thick presence of death from her.

“Taiyi’s empress, Yinglong?” he asked subconsciously as he looked at the woman.

“Don’t talk, you’re too weak to avoid the eyes and ears of the realm monsters,” the woman murmured to herself without answering.

“Realm monsters!” Lu Yun snapped his mouth shut without another word.

Realm monsters were an extraordinarily terrifying existence—monsters formed by the resentment of dead worlds. Even Ashu paled in fright when he heard their name.

“I can sense a trace of my daughters’ presence on you, but they haven’t been born yet… So it looks like the four celestial masters succeeded in going to the future and bringing you here.” Yinglong was exceedingly beautiful and in fact looked like a young lady, but her looks were offset by a mature charm. Her voice was soft and ethereal, and she was currently in human form.

Well, that was because Lu Yun was human, so he perceived her as human. If it’d been the little fox looking at Yinglong, then she’d be a fox.

“These are my daughters with Taiyi—Eternal and Arbiter.” Yinglong waved two eggs into Lu Yun’s hands. “I’d like to ask you a favor. Can you send Arbiter to Mount Buzhou? She can draw on the mountain’s strength and inherit my power to become the goddess of earth.

“Send Eternal to the boundless Blood Sea of the netherdark, where she can absorb the sea’s strength and be the future guardian of the kingdom of hell.

“Nod if you accept, shake your head if you decline.” Pleading colored her gaze, which was replaced by delight when Lu Yun nodded. “I humbly thank my little friend.”

Yinglong curtsied to Lu Yun. “Great Yi’s body is no more and Taiyi’s corpse is beneath this great tomb. He can be found in the depths of the cosmos, sealing off the gap in chaos and preventing realm monsters from attacking.

“Dead spirits abound in the skies above… if my friend wishes to reach the skies through Yi’s tomb, please accept this star map.”

Yinglong sent a circle of light into Lu Yun’s consciousness.

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