Chapter 1185: The Dark Gold Three-Eyed Skull
Chapter 1185: The Dark Gold Three-Eyed Skull
The three cultivators froze, momentarily taken aback by the old man's demand.
"Elder Gou, this is against regula—"
"Hmph?" The elder's sharp, cold gaze swept over them, silencing the protest.
The three men had no choice but to swallow their words.
Circumstances left them no choice. The eldest of the trio gave a respectful nod, secured the relic once more, and led the way out of the valley.
On the path.
"Brother Zhao, the laws of the Immortal Boat are explicit," one of the younger cultivators complained. "All World Extinguishing Relics must be turned over to the Immortal Pivot Academy upon collection. Violating this law is considered treason. And now he wants us to take it to the Broken Immortal Tower?"
"Exactly! Everyone on this boat knows the Broken Immortal Tower and the Immortal Pivot Academy are at each other's throats. That old geezer wants to curry favor, but he won't get his own hands dirty. He just orders us around. When this blows up, you can bet we'll be the ones taking the fall."
He then sent a quiet, private message, and the other two fell silent, their grumbling ceased.
Instead of flying, the trio walked, following the narrow path step by step out of the valley's confines.
The view before them opened up abruptly, as if they had stepped back into the vast, empty expanse of the star sea.
But this particular void was different. It lacked the chilling, deathly silence of the Darkest Star Sea that lay beyond.
A current, like a warm and gentle breeze, drifted through the emptiness, carrying with it an aura of vibrant life.
In the distance, faint, seven-colored points of light flickered in and out of existence, like fleeting stars in a dream.
This peaceful, almost serene scene was dominated by a sight of profound strangeness: a colossal giant, tall enough to touch the heavens, stood motionless in the void.
Its eyes were sealed shut, its body withered and desiccated, like a corpse that had been dead for ages.
Yet, its chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, each breath stirring the void and sending a warm current of air washing out in all directions.
A dying giant would have been strange enough, but what made the sight truly horrifying was the thick, gnarled tree branch protruding from its mouth.
It grew tenaciously upward, fanning out into a dense, leafy crown.
A closer look revealed an even more grotesque symbiosis: smaller branches pierced the giant's body from every angle. Its entire lower half had dissolved into a dense, tangled mass of filament-like roots.
They swayed gently with the unseen currents, moving as if they were alive.
It was an unsettling tableau, making it impossible to tell whether a tree was feeding on a giant, or a giant was becoming a tree.
The three cultivators were long past being shocked by the sight. One of them merely sighed, "It looks like this Zhudao giant is on its last legs. I wonder what the Immortal Pivot Academy will pull out next."
"The Broken Immortal Tower makes grand promises, singing a sweet song about completely solving the boat's energy crisis. But for all their talk, we've yet to see a single tangible result."
"We'll see. Rumor has it they've made a revolutionary breakthrough this time. Otherwise, that damn Elder Gou wouldn't be so quick to suck up to them."
...
The men continued their idle chatter, tossing comments back and forth.
As they left the valley and stepped into the void, a ribbon of green light materialized beneath their feet, forming an ethereal walkway that stretched toward a distant point.
There was no need for them to fly; the green path itself moved, carrying them swiftly through space.
Out in the open void, the true scale of the Immortal Boat finally came into view.
Countless floating continents, like a man-made constellation, were scattered throughout the expanse.
There was the giant, host to the bizarre, life-giving tree.
And from that central tree, innumerable threads of green light extended like a web, flickering in and out of sight as they connected one landmass to another.
Li Fan, his consciousness hidden within the World Extinguishing Relic, observed it all from the shadows.
This civilization, so utterly alien to the ways of the Xuanhuang Realm, fascinated him.
"An Immortal Boat..."
"The ancestor of the Medicine King Sect, Sun Piao Miao, once roamed beyond the heavens in spirit form," Li Fan recalled. "He recorded the coordinates of twelve cultivation realms. One of them was a colossal vessel that wandered the void, plying its trade between worlds. It was a self-contained realm called the Xuan Shang."
"I wonder if this is the same one."
His attention returned to the giant, its life force continuously siphoned away and radiated outwards. "The Zhudao clan?"
The ethereal green path traveled at incredible speed. Before long, Zhao and his companions arrived at their destination: the Broken Immortal Tower.
It was a massive, spherical structure, glowing with a dark, metallic gold light.
Upon closer inspection, Li Fan realized it too was built upon the remains of a giant.
This time, however, it wasn't a complete body—only a single, gargantuan skull.
What sent a jolt through Li Fan's consciousness was the object set in the center of its forehead: a third eye, still intact!
The eye had not lost its vitality with the death of its owner.
Though its lid was closed, the orb beneath shifted and turned, as if scanning its surroundings.
A profound sense of danger washed over him, and without a moment's hesitation, Li Fan's consciousness fled from the relic.
He remained suspended in the void, not daring to follow the three men into the Broken Immortal Tower.
His intuition had been correct.
The massive eye suddenly snapped open, its gaze sweeping the area. Finding nothing amiss, the lid slowly closed once more.
Only then were Zhao and his companions permitted to enter the Broken Immortal Tower.
Li Fan's consciousness averted its focus from the three-eyed skull, waiting patiently in the void outside for the men to return.
"A dark gold skull with three eyes."
"It's just like the one where I discovered the 'Submerge' Character. Except, this one..."
"It seems weaker somehow."
Size was not always an indicator of strength.
The dark gold, three-eyed skull he had previously encountered—the one whose third eye was long gone, having become nothing more than a vessel for the gray mold of the 'Submerge' Character—still radiated an aura of extreme peril. It felt as though it could reanimate at any moment. For that reason, Li Fan had kept it sealed away with the Seven-Colored Divine Light, not daring to risk studying it.
This skull before him was far larger, and its third eye was even still alive.
And yet, Li Fan sensed that it was well and truly dead, with no possibility of returning to life.
It was a deep, mysterious intuition.
"I've seen few things from beyond the Xuanhuang Realm during my cycles, yet in the short time I've been here, I've encountered almost all of them."
"It seems this Immortal Boat is more intriguing than I thought."
"Without the resources of a complete world, they would be forced to scavenge what they need from the dark sea of stars, putting every scrap to use. The true depth of this Immortal Boat's power might be far greater than I imagined..."
Li Fan's thoughts churned as he began to strategize, searching for a weakness to exploit.
From the cultivators' conversation, he had gathered that the Immortal Boat was embroiled in a power struggle between the Immortal Pivot Academy and the Broken Immortal Tower.
As an outsider, this was precisely the kind of situation he had hoped to find.
"It's easier to fish in troubled waters," he thought. "I just need to find a way to stir them up a little more."
Before long, Zhao and his companions emerged from the Broken Immortal Tower.
In stark contrast to their earlier resentment, their faces were now flushed with excitement, their eyes bright with a joy they couldn't suppress.
Once they were back on the green walkway, halfway across the void, they finally broke into fervent discussion.
"I can't believe it! The Broken Immortal Tower actually found a way to harness the power of world extinction!"
"There's an infinite supply of relics in the void! We'll never have to worry about running out of energy again!"
"Things are about to get interesting!"
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