Chapter 1426: The Ink Death Aspect of Dao Annihilation
Upon entering the Land of Carefree Joy, Li Fan wasn't immediately ensnared by its dreamscape like an ordinary person.
Instead, he beheld the Land of Carefree Joy in its true, physical form.
Traces of human activity lingered at the fringes of this tangible paradise, but they dwindled and vanished the deeper he ventured toward its core.
After flying for some time, he reached the heart of the domain. His gaze fell upon a primeval landscape, untouched by human presence. Sunlight bathed the land, the air thick and humid. Endless rainforests stretched before him, crisscrossed by winding rivers.
The vitality here was denser than anywhere else in the Xuanhuang Realm. He observed numerous species that appeared to be recent evolutionary developments, creatures unseen in any other part of the world.
Li Fan also keenly sensed a subtle force at play, delicately maintaining the ecological balance of this natural haven.
"Wuyou..."
Li Fan's gaze sharpened like a bolt of lightning. He dispatched a sliver of his divine sense, sending it hurtling toward the force hidden within the rainforest.
The vista of the surrounding rainforest vanished in an instant.
In a trance, he found himself in a small mountain village. The incessant crying emanated from one of the houses within.
Li Fan surveyed his surroundings with curiosity. He recognized this scene—it was from a painting titled *The Legend of the Carefree Demonic Infant Who Devoured Its Parents*.
Following the source of the cries, Li Fan pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The thick stench of blood assailed his senses. The scene within the house was utterly gruesome.
An infant lay in swaddling clothes upon a bed.
Beside the bed, a man and a woman were mangled beyond recognition, their bodies a blur of torn flesh and blood.
Yet, their faces showed no trace of pain. Instead, they wore vacant, idiotic smiles.
Seemingly impervious to pain, they gouged another piece of flesh from their own bodies, from which stark white bones already protruded.
They then offered it to the infant on the bed.
"Darling, eat more. Eat until you're full, hehehe."
They muttered, as if possessed, while coughing up copious amounts of blood.
As if the blood were something precious, looks of pained regret crossed their faces. They frantically gathered the spilled droplets, mixing them with shredded tissue, and stuffed the gruesome mixture into the infant's mouth.
The infant, powerless to resist, could only cry weakly.
...
The perverse scene was enough to make even Li Fan's brow furrow slightly.
This was undoubtedly Wuyou's past.
But Li Fan, now a grandmaster of formations, could tell at a glance that this was far different from a conventional illusionary array.
"At the very least," he mused, "this man and woman—Wuyou's parents—they're real, aren't they?"
His divine sense manifested as an avatar, which slowly approached them.
With Li Fan's intervention, their movements were forcibly halted.
It was as if they had been jolted from a dream back into reality. The deranged, blissful expressions vanished from their faces. Though their bodies remained frozen, their minds were now clear, and they seemed to grasp their horrifying predicament. Endless despair and a frantic madness flooded their eyes.
"Ahhh..."
They tried to speak, but no words would come, only meaningless, guttural sounds.
Dissatisfied with Li Fan's meddling, the unseen force wrested control of the couple once more.
They resumed their nightmarish ritual of carving their own flesh and scraping their bones to feed the infant.
"This is what they chose. Why must you disturb them, Senior?"
"Isn't it better to help others fulfill their desires?"
A lilting voice suddenly emerged, echoing through the small house.
"Enough of these cheap tricks," Li Fan scoffed, preparing to act.
Just then, a figure appeared in a flash, offering a graceful curtsy.
"Spare me, Senior!" she pleaded softly.
Li Fan narrowed his eyes, studying her.
She was completely naked, her body rail-thin and without curves. Her long hair, which looked as if it had never been cut, cascaded to the floor, spreading out like a winding black river.
Despite being naked under Li Fan's gaze, Wuyou showed not a hint of embarrassment.
It was as if this were her natural state of being.
"Do you know what happened next, Senior?" Wuyou asked, gesturing toward the couple in the cottage who were feeding the infant with their own flesh.
When Li Fan remained silent, Wuyou answered her own question. "These two heard a secret art from some immortal master, a method to defy the heavens and change one's fate. They were to feed their newborn with their own blood essence for eighty-one days, and then... devour the infant. By doing so, they believed they could become immortals."
"Heh..."
The scene before them shifted abruptly.
As the infant, nourished by flesh and blood, grew at an incredible rate, its cries became louder and more piercing.
Gradually, the sound carried from the cottage to every corner of the village.
The sound seemed to possess a demonic power. All who heard it lost their will, becoming like walking corpses. They would slowly approach the house and then... feed the demon with their own bodies.
Within days, the entire village had been reduced to the indistinct slurry of flesh inside that room.
The infant's cries soon echoed across the entire mountain.
The birds of the air and the beasts of the wild followed suit, drawn to the cottage as inexorably as the humans, heedless of their own lives.
A monstrous aura of blood and malevolence enveloped the house, so thick that it seemed to block out the very sun.
In the darkness, the infant's incessant cries were accompanied by a horrifying, gut-wrenching sound of chewing.
In the end, every living creature in the entire mountain range was devoured by the demonic infant.
Silence fell.
Only the infant's cries remained, echoing in the void.
...
Such a degree of carnage was hardly worth a second thought for Li Fan.
He directed his gaze toward a specific corner of the illusion.
"As expected of you, Senior!"
Wuyou's admiring voice sounded at the same moment.
As Li Fan's gaze landed, a vague, almost nonexistent figure sharpened into focus.
"Marvelous, simply marvelous! The sacred infant is developing even faster than planned!"
"In a few more days, this spiritual elixir will be perfected. The parents' sincere love, the infant's innate will to survive, combined with the primal instincts of countless beasts..."
"The Patriarch will surely be most pleased with this sacred infant."
"Seven failures... but this time, it's finally going to succeed," the figure muttered, unable to contain his elation.
After a quick calculation, the cultivator descended, his heart filled with anticipation, and slowly entered the cottage.
"Harvesting the sacred infant was his dream. Let him remain in that beautiful dream forever."
"Isn't it better to help someone fulfill their desire?"
Li Fan, however, saw the truth. As the cultivator stepped into the darkened cottage, his expression changed dramatically.
Confusion and terror warred on his face.
He struggled to break free from whatever force controlled him.
But step by inexorable step, he was drawn closer to the infant.
Then he succumbed completely, joining the countless souls consumed by the infant, and began to tear out his own flesh, piece by piece.
"Are you satisfied, Senior?"
The scene shattered abruptly. Wuyou looked up at him, her expression one of pure innocence, and asked expectantly.
Li Fan didn't answer. He simply watched as the shattered scene dissolved into countless points of light that surged toward him.
The points of light were as vast as a starry sky, and each one was a dream.
Dreams of mortals, dreams of beasts.
An endless river of memories washed over Li Fan's divine sense.
It wasn't just a record of images; accompanying them were countless insights of varying depths.
There were the insights of the beings lost within the dreamscape, and...
Wuyou's own.
Her own thoughts and epiphanies on reversing the very principles of heaven and earth in the Xuanhuang Realm!
A mere sliver of divine sense should not have been able to withstand such a deluge of information.
It was on the verge of being assimilated, of dissolving into the fabric of the dreamscape.
Yet, a final, unyielding core of that divine sense refused to dissipate.
No matter how much of her will Wuyou used to assault it, she couldn't damage it in the slightest.
A flicker of curiosity appeared in Wuyou's eyes.
Even with her power, she found herself unable to penetrate the secrets held within that resilient fragment of divine sense.
This only served to pique her curiosity further.
Beyond the starry expanse, more lights ignited. A torrent like a galaxy falling from the heavens crashed down upon the final, diamond-hard remnant of divine sense.
"Are you certain you want to see this?"
After her relentless efforts, just as she was on the verge of success, Li Fan's spectral voice echoed unexpectedly in her mind.
She hesitated for only a moment before pressing on.
The brilliant, silver fragment of divine sense exploded.
And what appeared before Wuyou's eyes was...
Raging floods, fire raining from the heavens, black clouds eclipsing the sun, a world locked in ice.
Innumerable apocalyptic visions erupted at once.
And that was merely the prelude.
The destruction of a world was only the beginning.
A monstrous tide of black energy descended, swallowing everything in its path.
Within that roiling sea of blackness, entire star seas vanished in an instant.
It was like watching a house filled with light being slowly consumed by absolute darkness.
The very existence of the world crumbled in an instant.
But the terrifying calamity was far from over.
A new image flared to life in the darkness, expanding billions of times in an instant.
She was looking at an endless ocean where every cresting wave was an entire world.
And now, a terrifying darkness rose from the depths, relentlessly devouring everything.
Every conceivable doomsday scenario played out across this cosmic sea.
An overwhelming sense of drowning despair.
The darkness began to envelop her, slowly seeping into her very being.
When the vast sea finally fell silent.
After a brief pause, her vision was filled with countless parallel threads.
The endless ocean she had just witnessed was but a single, insignificant speck of light on one of those threads.
And now, those brilliant threads were being extinguished, one after another, in vast numbers.
With the vanishing of each thread of light, a corresponding vision of a world's destruction flooded Wuyou's mind.
This was the Dao Annihilation Calamity, a cataclysm spanning countless possibilities, drawn from Li Fan's own experiences and the memories of the malevolent Evil Su Bai.
The scene was as terrifying as it was real.
It was far more than Wuyou could bear.
Even though her spiritual strength was not much weaker than that of the Dharma Spreader or the Heavenly Doctor.
But now...
A cloud of doom, terror, and despair was descending upon the Land of Carefree Joy, using Wuyou as its conduit.
Boom!
One dream world after another plunged into apocalypse without warning.
The very foundation of the dream paradise was violently shaken, thrown into unavoidable turmoil.
"Aaaah!" Wuyou screamed, jolting awake from the nightmare.
Her body trembled uncontrollably, drenched in a cold sweat.
She tried to halt the spread of the terrifying calamity throughout her dream domain.
But the catastrophe was spreading too quickly. She could barely protect herself, let alone the countless beings within her dreams.
"Spare me, Senior!"
Wuyou ripped herself from the dreamscape and appeared in the physical world.
Her body trembling, she knelt before Li Fan.
Even though she had already learned through various channels that his power was terrifying, even beyond comprehension...
...the fact that he could experience such a horrifying calamity and survive...
...was still far beyond anything Wuyou could have imagined.
All her plans were instantly discarded. Her only thought now was primal survival.
"Carefree, carefree,"
"The great calamity has arrived. How can one be free of care?"
Li Fan remarked with profound meaning.
Within Wuyou's dream paradise, the calamity that had been ravaging countless dreams suddenly froze.
Then, just as it had come...
...it vanished without a sound, without a trace.
A black speck, pulsating with a monstrous, baleful aura, appeared in Li Fan's palm.
With a flick of his wrist, Li Fan sent it floating toward Wuyou's forehead.
Wuyou's body trembled as she instinctively tried to dodge.
But the speck of light, swirling with black energy, seemed to carry the weight of countless worlds.
She was utterly powerless to evade it and could only watch as it entered her soul.
It felt like a dark cloud forming over her mind.
An instant later, it vanished into the depths of her consciousness, leaving no trace.
A long moment passed before the still-shaken Wuyou came to her senses.
Gazing at the figure before her, she realized how utterly absurd and ridiculous her earlier impulse to toy with him had been.
"Take me to the other four," Li Fan commanded coolly, his hands clasped behind his back.
A silver glow seemed to shimmer at the edges of his form, obscuring his face.
It made it impossible to look directly at him.
"Yes," Wuyou murmured, lowering her head in submission.
The scenery around them shifted once more.
This time, Li Fan felt the power of the dream domain swirling around him.
But now that he had planted a countermeasure within Wuyou's mind, knowing he could collapse her entire dreamscape with a single thought, Li Fan allowed her to pull him into the illusion.
"The immortal soul of Ink Death, fused with the aspect of the Dao Annihilation Calamity."
"Its power is quite impressive."
Li Fan mused to himself as he surveyed his new surroundings.
Wuyou, thoroughly cowed by his methods, was proving to be remarkably efficient.
One Heart Heavenly Venerate, Zhao Ruoxi, was the first to appear before him.
Like Wuyou, she was completely naked, as if she had just been sunbathing on a beach.
The inexplicable calamity had startled her, and she had risen to her feet, her expression a mixture of shock and suspicion.
The sudden appearance of Li Fan and Wuyou now only added to her astonishment.
Li Fan had seen this very body countless times before.
No matter how graceful its form, it failed to stir the slightest emotion in him.
After a brief, silent exchange with Wuyou, Zhao Ruoxi understood the situation.
Shaken, she conjured a white robe to cover herself.
"Greetings, Senior," she said, offering Li Fan a gentle bow.
Li Fan gave a slight nod.
Just then, another ripple passed through the space.
Wuyou's form flickered, and she reverted to the appearance of a swaddled infant.
The other three Longevity Heavenly Venerates arrived shortly after.
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