The old woman watched for a long time, and her wrinkled lips slowly curved into an arc.
The Water Mirror changed perspective.
A white Sword Light was tearing through the air from the southeast at a speed difficult for the naked eye to catch, slicing straight into the outer ring of the top-down view.
About half a quarter-hour of travel behind the Sword Light, another streak of dark purple Demonic Qi pursued closely.
Farther away, a Flying Artifact was carrying three figures around the thunderstorm region at the Northern Border.
On the artifact’s gunwale stood a pale-faced but resolute-eyed woman – Su Wan’er.
Yin Su slowly raised a withered finger and pointed it at the mirror surface.
Silver Array Patterns spilled from her fingertip, slowly spreading along the terrain map of Myriad Beast Mountain in the mirror, like several slender silver snakes winding through the forest’s veins.
Her lips moved, and she uttered a few words too low to hear.
“…Time to move.”
The Water Mirror suddenly darkened, and the image disappeared.
In Myriad Beast Forest, Shen Mo suddenly opened his eyes.
There was no warning, no sound – it was too quiet.
That silver light pillar was still humming. Chu Yi sat motionless on a tree root three steps away, breathing evenly, temporarily in meditation.
Everything was normal.
Yet he could feel something, high above the sky dome, gazing at this forest through layer after layer of ancient tree canopy and the grand formation barrier.
Not a Demonic Beast.
Not a cultivator.
It was older, deeper, like the gaze of this land itself.
It was as if, ever since he entered this forest, everything had been converging toward some direction under the guidance of an invisible force.
The two moved forward under the silver light pillar’s shroud.
Soon they reached the cave where Yin Su lived –
It was a fissure split straight open from the ground, over ten zhang wide and bottomless.
The rock at the fissure’s edge was scorched black, its surface covered with a layer of ash left after vegetation burned.
Stepping on it still left a lingering warmth that had not dispersed for hundreds of years.
Shen Mo stood at the edge of the fissure and looked down – bottomless.
Chu Yi put the map into her sleeve, pressed her hand on the stone tablet at the entrance, and injected Spiritual Power.
The words on the stone tablet suddenly lit up, and a narrow stone stair appeared from the rock wall of the fissure, spiraling downward.
The stair was only wide enough for one person, with no handrail, and on the other side was an abyss.
“Follow me.” Chu Yi was first to step onto the stone stair.
Shen Mo followed behind her, hands braced on protruding rocks in the wall, walking down step by step.
The stone stair trembled slightly underfoot, gravel rolled off the edge, and a long time passed before the sound of landing was heard.
The Corpse Puppet followed silently behind, its eyes like a string of underworld lamps suspended in the abyss.
The deeper they went, the higher the temperature.
It was not warm heat – it was muggy heat, mixed with a strong smell of sulfur and singed hair. Every breath was like licking a red-hot iron plate.
Shen Mo’s hair was soaked with sweat and stuck to his cheeks, and most of the back of his robe was wet.
He gritted his teeth and did not stop, because the end of the stone stair was already visible – an arched doorway, with dark red light shining from behind it.
Yin Su’s training grounds had no door.
Only a Water Mirror.
At the end of the stone stair was a circular stone chamber, its four walls carved densely with Array Patterns, each slowly glowing like countless silver blood vessels attached to the stone.
In the center of the stone chamber hung a Water Mirror, its surface shimmering with waves, reflecting the mountains and rivers within a thousand-li radius of Myriad Beast Mountain.
Below the Water Mirror was a huge seat pieced together from countless white beast bones.
The backrest was the complete spine of some giant beast, and two petrified python bones coiled around the armrests.
The chair hung in midair, slowly descended, and stopped three chi above the ground beneath the torn tree canopy.
On the seat sat an old woman.
White hair dragged to her knees, her face withered like the bark of a thousand-year-old tree.
Her fingers were crossed on her knees, and every knuckle bulged slightly from excessive cultivation.
The pupils sunken in her eye sockets shone astonishingly bright, silver Array Patterns flowing deep within them, like two deep wells reflecting a sky full of stars.
Array Emperor Yin Su.
Behind her stood a coffin.
“Granny Yin.” Chu Yi spoke, her voice pressed very flat, but Shen Mo could hear the thin, almost unsustainable trembling beneath it. “Father, he… how is his condition?”
Yin Su slowly raised her eyelids.
“His Spirit Soul is still there, more intact than expected.” Her voice was hoarse and low, like a stone mill grinding over gravel.
“Yun He delivered him last night. I examined him – the Extreme Yin Energy of the thousand-year Cold Pool preserved his soul and his body. The Qie Tian Pill you nurtured for twenty-three years can be used now.”
Chu Yi took out the Soul-Locking Bottle and the Pill Embryo of the Qie Tian Pill from her sleeve.
“The Pill Embryo of the Qie Tian Pill has been nurtured enough,” Chu Yi said.
“The medicinal guide, the True Yang of a Pure Yin Constitution, has also been obtained. Granny Yin, the final step requires your Reverse Yin-Yang Array to fuse my father’s soul and body together again.”
Yin Su said hoarsely, “But this stone chamber itself is the formation eye. The formation base was carved three hundred years ago. On the night you first knelt before me and begged me, I had already drawn the first Array Pattern for you.”
Chu Yi’s eyes reddened slightly.
“Granny Yin’s great kindness -“
“If you want to repay me,” Yin Su raised a hand as thin as firewood and cut her words off in midair, “say it after the matter is done.”
She took out a Formation Plate the size of a copper coin from her sleeve and held it in her palm.
Dense silver light on the plate rolled and surged like boiling mercury.
“The Qie Tian Pill is a heaven-defying thing that can revive the dead and regrow flesh. To reverse life and death, one must pay an equal amount of vitality.”
“Your purest Yang direct-line bloodline, your vitality shares the same source as his. Use your blood as the guide, Shen Mo’s Essence as fuel, and Chu Yang’s Pill Embryo as the furnace. At Pill Formation, your father will open his eyes.”
Chu Yi pushed the Soul-Locking Bottle containing the Qie Tian Pill Embryo toward Yin Su.
“The Pill Embryo’s activity can only be maintained for another twelve double-hours.”
Yin Su brought the bottle mouth close to her nose and sniffed.
Her silver pupils constricted slightly, then she tightened the bottle cap again.
She turned and walked to the Jade Coffin.
The joint between the coffin lid and body was sealed with a thin ice membrane, a natural Spiritual Seal formed by thousand-year cold air at the bottom of the Cold Pool.
Yin Su slowly pressed her withered palm onto the coffin lid, her five fingers sinking into the ice membrane.
An extremely cold energy suddenly erupted from the coffin lid, dropping the temperature in the stone chamber by several degrees.
The breaths of Chu Yi and Shen Mo condensed into white mist in the cold.
But Yin Su did not move at all. Her white hair fluttered in the cold, and not a single frost flower formed on her withered arm.
“Open the coffin,” she said.
The coffin lid slowly slid open, and an extreme cold energy accumulated for a thousand years surged out from the coffin, instantly plating the four walls of the stone chamber with a layer of white frost.
Chu Yang in the coffin was wrapped in cold air, his face as peaceful as when seen through the coffin lid earlier.
But now he was closer, close enough for Shen Mo to see the thousand-year frost flowers condensed on his eyelashes, and the barely visible, half-smiling curve at the corner of his mouth.
Chu Yi took a step forward.
Then she stopped.
Shen Mo saw her hand rise and reach toward the face in the coffin, stopping when it was still three cun away.
Her fingers trembled slightly. That trembling was not fear, but the trembling of someone who had waited twenty-three years and finally received a reply, yet did not dare open the envelope.
“Father.” She called once, her voice very light, as light as saying good morning to a sleeping person.
The person in the coffin did not respond.
He still did not know his daughter had grown so big, did not know she had spent twenty-three years for his Resurrection, did not know she had traveled ten thousand li between the Southern Wilderness and Northern Border, using every available means, taking an innocent man’s True Yang just to make him open his eyes again.
Shen Mo turned his head away and stopped watching this scene.
His gaze landed on Yin Su.
Yin Su stood by the coffin, her withered hands flipping through a string of formation hand seals Shen Mo could not understand.
Her lips moved silently, reciting some incantation so ancient that it had no written record.
The Array Patterns on the four walls of the stone chamber lit up one after another, ring after ring, like silver vines injected with life, spreading from the walls to the floor, from the floor to the base of the Jade Coffin.
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