Chapter 3879: Instinct

As for the Cheng family’s treasury, Baisha Tiancheng had not put much thought into what it contained as there was nothing that would mean much to Lu Yin. Besides that, if Lu Yin wiped out the Cheng family and took the contents of their treasury, that would be even better, as it would only worsen his reputation.

But no matter how much the old man had schemed or how thorough he had been, he could have never imagined the actual outcome. Lu Yin had reached across two domains to kill Cheng Gong, and then he had used the power of Word Manifestation to force Baisha Tiancheng to commit suicide. Nothing sordid could be blamed on Lu Yin.

As for the method of carving sourcebox arrays, that was truly gone from existence with both Baisha Tiancheng and Cheng Gong dead. After all, aside from those two, every member of the Cheng family who had known the secret method had already been killed by Cheng Gong. Even so, Lu Yin had a lead.

Before Baisha Tiancheng died, Lu Yin had caught a glimpse of things with the power of karma.

What was referred to as the method of carving sourcebox arrays was tied to an item known as the Void Wall. As long as the Void Wall was found, the carving method could be restored.

The problem was, where had the Void Wall gone?

Lu Yin had not seen the item’s location when reviewing Baisha Tiancheng’s karma. There were certain details that could not be seen, as long as Baisha Tiancheng himself had never experienced them.

What Lu Yin did know was that the Void Wall had not been left in the Cheng family’s treasury.

Baisha Tiancheng would have never left it there.

Could it be... with Cheng Gong?

Questions swirled through his thoughts as Lu Yin swept up all of the resources that he had found in the Cheng family’s treasury. There were three karmic buds, 100 trillion spirit seeds, and seventy-five cultivated spirit seeds that could be used for Seed Transfusions. Also, there was the Cheng family’s secret manual.

Finding karmic buds and cultivated spirit seeds was no surprise. Seventy-five cultivated spirit seeds was far fewer than what the Autumnspring Slip had amassed, and it was still considered a normal amount.

The Cheng family had been an ancient clan, and it was expected for them to gather about that many cultivated spirit seeds for Seed Transfusions. It was highly likely that all of these cultivated spirit seeds were at least at the sequence powerhouse level.

As for the other materials and resources that had been left in the treasury, Lu Yin took absolutely everything. There was a very good chance that anything that the Cheng family had bothered to store in their fault was extraordinary.

Finally, Lu Yin picked up the Cheng family’s secret manual and started reading it.

As soon as he opened the scroll, a display appeared in the air above it, showing the scene of someone lockbreaking.

Several days later, Lu Yin rubbed his temples in exhaustion. The Cheng family’s secret manual was over a hundred pages long, and he had only studied half of it within just a few days. The scroll only contained scenes of people lockbreaking. These scenes were not intended to teach people how to lockbreak, but rather to show what strange things had been found within unlocked sourceboxes.

There were countless sourceboxes within the West Domain’s yellow sands. Many came from the Nine Odysseys Megaverse itself, but quite a few were from foreign megaverses that had been destroyed or the Aevum Inch itself.

Most sourceboxes would not cause any stir when their contents were revealed. Even when Lu Yin had been traveling between Senluo City and Skyveil City, he had seen several people in the middle of lockbreaking. Such activities were quite normal in the West Domain, and there were plenty of Lockbreakers throughout the other three domains and even the rest of the Nine Odysseys Megaverse.

However, the secret manual only recorded the contents of sourceboxes that had created a commotion. Some had shaken the entire West Domain, though most had been discreetly unlocked within the Cheng family’s domain and secretly recorded.

Lu Yin saw one strange item after another appear from the opened sourceboxes. Almost all of these items came from other megaverses, and most of them had either been destroyed, either accidentally in the middle of the Cheng family’s research, or deliberately. The latter suggested that the family knew what they had found. A few, however, had been stored within the treasury.

A few of those strange items had still been present when Lu Yin cleaned out the contents of the treasury.

He had sensed the aura of foreign megaverses on those items, but he had not paid any attention to them. There were too many things in the Nine Odysseys Megaverse that carried foreign auras.

What weighed heavily on Lu Yin’s heart was the discovery of a Nest’s remains.

Sure enough, one of the records within the Cheng family’s secret manual was of a lockbreaking session that revealed a Nest. It was perfectly identical to the ones in the Tianyuan Megaverse, though it had lost all functionality and become nothing more than a shell.

Even so, seeing a Nest made Lu Yin realize that, no matter how vast and infinite the Aevum Inch might seem, it was not nearly that large in reality.

If it was possible for the Nest civilization to come into contact with the Nine Odysseys Megaverse in this manner, then it meant that the two civilizations could interact more directly.

The fact that the Nests had already entered the Tianyuan indicated that their civilization had been hovering around the Nine Odysseys and the three megaverses for a long time.

If that was true, then why had the Nine Odysseys Megaverse not exterminated the Nest civilization? Were they unable to find the Nest civilization, or were they incapable of destroying it?

Lu Yin crushed the Nest’s desiccated husk. The Cheng family may have kept it, but they clearly had not understood what it was.

He took a breath and then continued going through the secret manual.

The fact that the Cheng family had kept recordings of these specific lockbreaking sessions meant that whatever was inside these recorded sourceboxes had been mysteries even to their family. Naturally, most of the items were also unknown to Lu Yin.

He examined each one, and he occasionally even pulled out the items that he had plundered from the Cheng family’s treasury to compare them to the recordings. All the while, he was thinking about the Yu and Jue families.

Of the three great clans that ruled Skyveil City, the Cheng family had been the least skilled at standard lockbreaking, whereas the Yu family focused on exactly that.

Lu Yin was absolutely confident that the Yu family had something similar to the Cheng family’s secret manual.

Soon enough, once he reached the last page of the Cheng family secret manual, he found that he could not turn to it. Lu Yin frowned and then noticed an exceptionally miniscule sourcebox array.

Since a sourcebox array was sealing off the final page, it clearly had something very important recorded.

Lu Yin easily crushed the array and revealed the final page.

An image rose into the air of a bright courtyard. Once again, it was a recording of someone unlocking a sourcebox.

Unlike the other recordings in the secret manual, this final one was in a much brighter location. Indistinct figures could be seen moving about, and there were even laughing children in the background. It was clear that this lockbreaking session had not been performed in a secret location.

The sourcebox being opened was roughly two meters long and half a meter wide, and it looked like a simple slab of stone.

The Lockbreaker was a middle-aged man, and the image showed him smiling as he spoke to someone behind him.

The recording only had images without any sound.

Still, it appeared that the Lockbreaker had been teaching.

The lockbreaking session soon started. The middle-aged man worked quickly, and the sourcebox was not very very large. Its danger zone was practically nonexistent, which might have been the reason why it had been chosen for the man’s lesson.

The recording was not accelerated at all, unlike the previous recordings, which had focused solely on what had emerged from the unlocked sourceboxes.

The final scene showed the entire process from beginning to end.

Over the course of two days, the middle-aged man opened the sourcebox, and he eventually reached the final step.

At that moment, the sourcebox resembled a human skeleton with a layer of grime coating its surface. It looked like a set of white bones.

A bleached skeleton might be a rather disturbing sight to an ordinary human, but such things were nothing unusual to cultivators.

The sun was bright, and the weather was beautiful. The image showed white clouds lazily drifting across the sky. The background was beautiful enough to look like a painting.

When the lockbreaking session finished, the sealing energies had been removed, revealing the true form of what had been contained within the sourcebox. It was a genuine human skeleton, nothing more.

The middle-aged man smiled and continued teaching.

As he did so, the bones behind him... moved.

Lu Yin’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the image. The bones moved? Those bones were sealed within a sourcebox!

At that moment, Lu Yin was suddenly reminded of Yong Heng and the bone grafters.

First, a finger twitched. Then, a toe moved. The Lockbreaker’s expression froze in shock, and he reacted as if he had just heard something. Confused, he turned around, just as the skeleton raised a hand and brought it back down. The man went stiff and stopped moving. The skeleton stood up... and then simply vanished.

The sky remained as beautiful as ever, the scenery as picturesque as ever, though the beauty had become marred by blood-colored petals... and a skeleton.

The skeleton could be seen again, and it was in the process of laying the middle-aged man out flat. Only then did Lu Yin see that the man’s skin had been split open and separated into two pieces, and yet no blood had been spilled.

He watched as the skeleton unzipped the man’s skin as though unclothing him, before putting the skin on itself. It used a thread to stitch the skin up and then proceeded to slowly walk out of the courtyard and leave.

That was where the recording ended.

Lu Yin felt a chill. The recording that he had just seen had left him feeling deeply unsettled.

Killing and death was all too normal in the world of cultivators, but the events in the recording had been too calm. The skeleton seemed to have been prepared in its actions, or even acting on instinct.

On pure instinct, it had killed the Lockbreaker, put on the man’s skin, and then left.

Every action had been instinctive.

It was those instincts that chilled Lu Yin to his very core.

The recording was not enough for him to judge the skeleton’s strength, but its aura was clear.

How had the Cheng family obtained that recording?

Lu Yin thought for a moment and then returned to the final page of the secret manual to watch the recording again. He wanted to see it clearly; could the skeleton be the same as Yong Heng’s bone grafters?

Even when rewatching it, that chill was still present.

He watched the recording for a third time.

Suddenly, the image changed before Lu Yin’s eyes. He saw not just one skeleton, but a vast field of them, all standing atop a black square. Dark clouds filled the sky, completely blocking the sun. He saw an enormous bone finger descend, piercing a hole through the universe. Past that hole stretched an endless darkness without a single star. It looked like it opened to the Aevum Inch.

He staggered back a few steps and waved a hand, but there was nothing there.

The secret manual was still showing the same recording as before, so where had the other image come from?

Sweat poured from Lu Yin’s forehead. That vision left him feeling both dazed and unsettled. It was a feeling that he had not experienced in a very long time; it was the feeling of facing a mortal crisis, and it came solely from the inexplicable vision. That vision...?

Manifested thought. It was from the manifested thought.

Lu Yin realized that the vision had come from his manifested thought, the manifested thought that he had devoured from Yue Ya. Had Yue Ya seen that image? No... the original possessor of the manifested thought was the one who had seen it.

That being had seen that black square, as well as the enormous bone finger.

It had been the manifested thought. There was not even the slightest doubt about it.

Greater Sancte Green Lotus had mentioned that Yue Ya’s manifested thought had come from an Immortal who had died long ago, and they had intended to use Yue Ya to resurrect themselves. After the manifested thought merged with him, Lu Yin had thought that all the original memories of the manifested thought had completely vanished, only for this memory to suddenly surface.

The recording from the secret manual had triggered the manifested thought’s repressed memory.

The skeleton in the recording and the skeletons in the manifested thought’s memory were the exact same.

Lu Yin swallowed hard. The stunned, dazed feelings that he sensed from the manifested thought’s memory;had that come from its original owner? The dead Immortal?

If that was the case, then had that Immortal been dazed and unsettled by the sight... before dying at the hands of those skeletons?

A chill ran down Lu Yin’s back. His palms had become slick with sweat. He strongly suspected that the memory that he had seen was something absolutely incredible.

He put the Cheng family’s secret manual away and then stepped out of their vault. His consciousness spread across Skyveil City and found the person he was searching for.

In one corner of the city, an old man was breathing heavily as he forced himself to calm down while stepping out of an alley. One of his hands clenched the hilt of a sword, while the other was held open with dozens of faint images that were being projected. They were images of goods that he had for sale.

There was nothing unusual about this scene in Skyveil City, nor in any of the cultivator cities of the Nine Odysseys Megaverse. Cultivators who sold goods and resources from foreign megaverses always displayed them as illusions to avoid being robbed.

As the old man walked along the street, behind him loomed a tall mountain that continued to rise up.

While it was a mountain, in Skyveil City, it was nothing more than a steeper slope, an undulation that did not even spread to the next street. Skyveil City was absolutely enormous, to the point where even a powerful organization like the Spirit Treasure Guild might have a single shop that was large enough to occupy an entire mountain range or vast enough to hide a whole ocean.

Ordinary humans were incapable of walking down even a single street throughout their entire lifetime. But it was different for cultivators, especially the powerful ones. It was easy for them to look across the city and see down other streets.

Even the weak cultivators in Skyveil City had access to vehicles and transportation tools, allowing for convenient movement about the city.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.