Lu Yun was truly frightened out of his mind. For a fleeting second, he seemed to have glimpsed a pair of giant eyes floating in the center of the altar. They were crimson in color, and radiated a powerful evil presence.
They weren’t human, living creatures, or even zombies. They weren’t anything Lu Yun had seen before. Although the moment had been brief, seemingly a trick of light, he firmly believed what he’d seen. Wayfarer had turned into a pair of eyes just then!
Though they were a couple back in the day, Yuying decided not to be dao partners with Wayfarer at the last second. She must’ve discovered something!
Lu Yun took several steps back, his expression shifting through grim changes. He could read Yuying’s memories, but not her inner thoughts. Memories of Wayfarer were buried deep, and she’d even gone so far as to destroy her recollections of their breakup.
After her resurrection, she’d immediately burned the painting that Wayfarer had made for her. That wasn’t only to cut ties with her past, but also a sign that she didn’t wish to recall anything about the man.
Have the eyes become sentient? This was such a baffling situation. The Wayfarer in the abyss was blind; were these his eyes?
But that didn’t make any sense either. Though the Wayfarer in the abyss couldn’t see, his eyes were intact in their sockets. Besides, it was simply too far-fetched for one’s eyes to leave their owner and gain a mind of their own.
Wayfarer’s appearance became increasingly twisted.
“Hand over the Portrait of Emptiness!” he shrieked at Lu Yun, a disorienting ray shooting from his eyes and into Lu Yun’s to seize the governor’s mind.
“Hell no!” Hellfire blazed in Lu Yun’s eyes and blocked the look as he retreated. There was something seriously wrong with this Wayfarer.
Suddenly, all of the monsters, including the zombies and the undead hags, lunged at Lu Yun under the man’s command. An undead hag stealthily crept up on the governor and almost killed him with a single bite.
Hum.
A bright crescent of sword energy careened out from behind Lu Yun and cut the monster down. Feinie emerged from the Gates of the Abyss with sword in hand, making seals with her free hand as she kept the monsters at bay with flashes of sword energy. The Formation Orb surged to envelop Lu Yun within the protection of a grand formation.
“You?! Impossible!” Wayfarer screamed with disbelief when he saw Feinie. “I killed you myself five thousand years ago! I saw your contamination by boundless resentment and transformation into an immortal ghost with my own eyes. How are you alive again?!”
“Nothing is impossible.” With an impassive expression, Feinie snapped formations into existence with her fingers, pinning the monsters down. Recovering to the empyrean immortal realm had increased her strength by more than tenfold. She was able to tap into more of the combined Formation Orb’s power as well.
“Remember not to kill the zombies.” Lu Yun noted the presence of the eerie monsters he still wasn’t able to deal with. Whoever killed the zombies would be turned into one of their kind by an unknown power.
“Understood.” Feinie nodded and set up a dozen trapping formations around the zombies instead of slaughtering them.
She suddenly realized something. “It’s not him that’s keeping the altar suppressed, sir, but the other way around. Removing the Portrait of Emptiness released him from the altar!”
“I see.” Lu Yun nodded. “He was trying to coax me into handing the portrait over. That’s probably why he approached Yuying back in the day—her Panorama of Clarity. Strange, though, it’d be easy enough to take the panorama after Yuying’s death, but he didn’t. Why not?”
He couldn’t come up with an explanation for this. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that both the Portrait of Emptiness and the Profile of Harmony were placed in the same burial mound.
This Wayfarer must have been the man Miao had seen, the one that had placed the bronze outer-coffin in the layout of resurrection with the Profile of Harmony hidden in it.
Wayfarer slowly calmed down and his eyes grew increasingly brighter as he chanted softly, casting a strange art.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
The cavern trembled and shook. Something big was coming.
“What is that?” Lu Yun almost threw up when he saw what came walking—no, crawling out of the darkness.
It was more than two hundred forty meters in size and resembled an undead hag, but there was an additional head next to it that belonged to a corpsefish. A long fish tail trailed between its two legs. It looked like a chimera of an enormous undead hag and a corpsefish and reeked of a thick, pungent smell.
It was plain to see that the fish head and tail had forcefully been grafted onto the undead hag’s flesh. Lu Yun could even see rotten skin and white bones from where their body parts intersected.
Flanking it were countless undead hags and corpsefish that’d crawled ashore, and the entourage rushed them with reckless abandon. The enormous monster instantly tore through the trapping formations Feinie had set up.
Hiss hiss hiss!
Making sounds like a snake, it broke another formation with its claws, releasing the zombies trapped within.
Feinie backed away. “It’s more powerful than the undead hag we encountered before. It can rival at least a peerless immortal!”
If she’d recovered to the golden or august immortal realm, she would’ve been able to kill the monster with her formations. But as an empyrean immortal, there were four cultivation levels between them; it was an enormous gap that even the complete Formation Orb couldn’t bridge.
“Kill them!” screamed Wayfarer.
The monster abruptly picked up speed and scuttled to Lu Yun’s side. The tentacles on top of the corpsefish’s head somehow circumvented the defensive formations and grabbed at the governor.
“Waughhhhhh!!!” An enormous roar interrupted the attack. Nine crimson shadows rushed out from behind Lu Yun and lunged at the monster. Yueshen had charged out of the Gates of the Abyss with the bloodcorpses.
“Hurry and seal the altar with your formations, Feinie!” the immortal ghost blurted out.
No matter how terrifying the bloodcorpses were, they were merely arcane immortals. The chimera, on the other hand, was one step higher as a peerless immortal. It easily scattered the nine bloodcorpses with a casual backhand.
Under Yueshen’s control, they regathered their forms and leaped at the monster, opening their mouths so that ghostface maggots could burrow into the monster’s body and slow it down.
“Don’t worry!” Yueshen used the opening to explain, “The altar is here to seal the abyss. It won’t sacrifice all of Dusk Province!”
“Alright!” The last of her concerns dispelled, Feinie sent the light of activation flaring throughout the Formation Orb. The sealing formation she’d been preparing clamped down on the altar, temporarily deactivating it.
“Not so fast!” Eyes bloodshot, Wayfarer lifted his arms and punched the formation, breaking it before it could bring its full power to bear. But at that moment, the altar stirred to full wakefulness, its black light surging and restraining Wayfarer.
“Not again!” he yelled. “Which bastard sealed me in this forsaken place when I was asleep?!”