Volume 1, Chapter 335 – Awakening

“Detected a soul entity. It meets the conditions for capture.”

As the notification from the All-Heavens Samsara System rang out, the yin spirit that had appeared so suddenly melted away like snow in an instant and was drawn into Shi Lan’s body without causing the slightest ripple.

Shi Lan lowered her head and glanced at the depression below, strewn with bones, corpses, and flesh. She raised a hand and drew over great chunks of earth and stone, burying the place, then carved array patterns into it to suppress the baleful aura there and prevent evil beings from arising again.

This yin spirit had not actually been weak. Judging from those shattered corpses, even Nascent Soul Realm cultivators had died here before. Without the system, it would have been hard to say who would have won.

“Let’s go.”

Shi Lan called out to Tianbai and continued onward on foot.

Tianbai answered, but her mood seemed somewhat low. She had wanted to revert to her true form and spare Shi Lan the strain of traveling, but Shi Lan had refused.

Ever since taking human form, she always felt that the distance between her and Exalted One had instead grown farther.

Things clearly had not been like this before. Exalted One had even held her from time to time…

Tianbai was filled with a sense of crisis, as though she were hovering at the edge of losing her value at any moment.

…

This desolate land was simply too vast. Shi Lan had traveled tens of thousands of li without yet seeing its edge. Along the way she encountered several more yin spirits, each more terrifying than the last.

One of them looked like a little girl no older than six. When Shi Lan first saw her, her eyes were tightly shut. The moment Shi Lan drew just a little closer, the girl’s eyes opened, revealing only pitch-black sockets, and within an instant everything for several hundred li around was transformed into a ghost domain.

Shi Lan stayed in that ghost domain for only a few breaths, yet quite a bit of the yang qi in her body had already been drained away. Tianbai lost nearly half her vital essence in an instant and had almost died on the spot.

If that little girl had not seemed wary of something and refrained from pursuing them, the outcome would likely have been disastrous.

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…

Because she had lost more than half her vital essence, Tianbai’s face was frightfully pale, even whiter than her snow-white hair by several degrees, almost translucent, with the tiny blood vessels beneath her skin faintly visible. Her strength was also failing. After traveling only a few hundred li, she had to stop and rest for a moment.

Even Shi Lan felt somewhat weak, her body short on yang qi. It felt as though she were walking on clouds, her head heavy and her feet light.

This wasteland was far too dangerous. Ordinary people had no hope of surviving here. It could almost be called a peerless killing ground. It did not resemble a legacy left behind by a Sovereign at all.

If this truly was a legacy left by a Sovereign, then such a trial was far too cruel.

Perhaps this place had always been a forbidden land, and the people outside had merely assumed things on their own.

The two of them crossed the wasteland all the way until the terrain at the end of the horizon finally changed. A pitch-black forest appeared, its ancient trees towering into the sky and gathering a sinister baleful aura.

Boom!

Thunderclouds gathered above the black forest. Blazing bolts of lightning exploded again and again in the void. Within the sea of thunder, several figures could be seen faintly as they raced out of the forest at high speed.

A dense mass of yin spirits pursued them close behind. At a glance, there were no fewer than several thousand of them, with wildly varying strength.

Shi Lan halted at once and began retreating without hesitation.

Suddenly, her expression changed slightly.

The surrounding space was utterly empty. There were no spatial rifts to be seen at all.

It was impossible to tear space open here and use instantaneous movement.

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Before this, since the situation had still been unclear, she had been traveling on foot to avoid blindly teleporting herself into some deadly place, so she had never discovered this anomaly.

The several figures in the distant sea of thunder were moving extremely fast. Several Nascent Soul Realm great cultivators were protecting the youth from Purple Lightning Manor they had seen earlier, fighting as they retreated. Blazing bolts of lightning rained down one after another, destroying quite a few yin spirits, but compared to their overwhelming numbers, it was clearly only a drop in the bucket.

As the distance narrowed, the people from Purple Lightning Manor also noticed Shi Lan and Tianbai.

The instant their gazes met, the people from Purple Lightning Manor immediately shifted course slightly and charged straight toward Shi Lan, clearly intending to find a few scapegoats to buy themselves some time.

An unreadable look flashed across Shi Lan’s face, and she stopped retreating.

In the blink of an eye, the group from Purple Lightning Manor swept overhead. The yin spirits pursuing them noticed Shi Lan and split off a small portion, rushing toward the two of them.

Accompanied by booming thunder, the sea of lightning sped away and soon vanished beyond the horizon.

Facing the sky full of yin spirits, Shi Lan spread her blood and qi to protect her crown and nine apertures, shielding Tianbai behind her. Her lips parted slightly, and she swallowed several yin spirits directly into her belly.

“Detected a soul entity. It meets the conditions for capture…”

“Detected a soul entity. It meets the conditions for capture…”

…

A string of notifications rang in Shi Lan’s ears. The several hundred yin spirits that had come shrieking at them disappeared completely in no more than a few finger snaps. The cold stimulation made Shi Lan’s brow throb.

The strength of these yin spirits lay in their sheer numbers. Their cultivation was not especially terrifying. At the very least, they had not gone beyond the Nascent Soul Realm. That was why Shi Lan had not chosen to flee at once.

Had that not been the case, then even if space could not be traversed here through instantaneous movement, with the extreme speed of Divine Phoenix Wings, the group from Purple Lightning Manor would not even have glimpsed her back.

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Lightly rubbing her brow, Shi Lan gazed at the forest in the distance and found herself wanting to explore it. At worst, she could at least replenish some energy for the system.

“Shi Lan…”

After only two steps, a familiar voice sounded from the depths of her mind.

“Samsara?”

Shi Lan’s steps halted, and delight overflowed in her eyes.

“Your sleep this time wasn’t all that long…”

After pulling up part of the system’s records, Samsara quickly understood everything that had happened while it was asleep.

Not much time had passed, but there had been no shortage of stories.

“It’s good that you woke up. While you were asleep, it seemed as though someone was still controlling the All-Heavens Samsara System?”

“That was the system’s autonomous operating program. It has no intelligence.”

Now that it had awakened again, Samsara’s voice seemed somewhat different from before, though Shi Lan could not quite put her finger on how.

“The system’s functions have recovered quite a bit. Perhaps it briefly made contact with headquarters.”

“Why would the system automatically devour the souls of yin spirits?”

Shi Lan was somewhat puzzled. Until she killed Zheng Tianlun on Yunyan Star, she had thought it was Samsara acting behind the scenes.

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“The primary purpose of the All-Heavens Samsara System is to plunder source power from the myriad worlds for headquarters. Of all things, the closest to source power is soul power.”

Samsara’s voice lacked strength, like someone just recovering from a major injury. In that battle against the Demon Emperor, it had overdrawn itself even more than Shi Lan had and had nearly been drained dry on the spot.

“To avoid missing certain energy sources, every system is equipped with lethal methods specifically aimed at spirit entities.”

“At the same time, this also prevents the host from being possessed, which could lead to uncontrollable accidents. It is similar to the self-protection program of the Empress-raising System.”

“I see…”

Shi Lan nodded thoughtfully.

“After the last world-travel ended, there should have been resource points issued, but the system swallowed them on its own because the energy deficit was too high.”

Samsara added another sentence.

Recalling what she had gone through in the small world, Shi Lan asked,

“Do you have any clue about those people from ‘Cube’?”

“From the descriptions of those few, Cube may be an organization similar to Samsara Hall. But for such a large force, after wandering the myriad worlds for so long, I have never once heard of it.”

Samsara also found it somewhat strange. There were quite a few factions competing to seize world-source power, but only a handful were famous by name, and not a single one of them resembled Cube.

“Forget it.”

Shi Lan shook her head and cut off the topic. That could be left aside for now. Figuring out how to leave this place was the urgent priority.