Before heading to the underworld, they had to return to the “crime scene” first.
The rift in the upper realm looked just as it had when they last left it. The temporary barrier set up by Yan Yungui and Elder Li had since been reinforced, and now only two YCG avian guards remained on watch.
The two guards had already been informed. They greeted Ye Yang and Shen Ming briefly and did not stop them.
Ye Yang hadn’t had a chance to look closely last time. Now that he was back, he was once again struck by the sight. After the massive loss of spiritual energy, the white mist that had formed from the dense spiritual power had completely dissipated. The view was much more open, and any sense of mystery had vanished entirely.
The architecture was completely different from anything in the human realm—strange at first glance, but on closer inspection, nothing particularly special. Deprived of spiritual energy, it looked no different from any abandoned, crumbling house—ruined walls, desolate emptiness.
Where spiritual plants had once flourished, only withered branches and decaying leaves remained, along with odd mucus left behind by certain dead spirit plants. The earth was cracked, ponds had turned to swamps, and soon they would probably be nothing but dry, hollow beds.
Shen Ming entered a moment later. Seeing Ye Yang standing in a daze by a railing that had broken into several sections, he asked, “What’s wrong?”
Ye Yang snapped out of it and shook his head. “Nothing. It’s just… I feel like the upper realm and the lower realm aren’t really all that different…”
“They aren’t. Just a dwelling place, no different from the human realm, the demon realm, or the underworld.” Shen Ming looked up into the distance. The once-towering mountains had been split apart during the divine war, reduced by more than half their height. From here, the view was much wider.
Ye Yang said, “It’s still a bit different from the underworld, though…”
Shen Ming withdrew his gaze, his expression growing somewhat more serious. “I just carefully examined the original barrier at the boundary between the upper and lower realms, and I discovered something.”
“The seal did weaken over the ten thousand years, but given natural progression, it shouldn’t have become fragile enough to break with a single strike this quickly.”
Ye Yang’s first reaction was, “Someone deliberately damaged the boundary barrier?”
But then he realized, “No—any being capable of doing that wouldn’t need to resort to such methods. They could just open it directly.”
Shen Ming agreed completely. “So I suspect that someone spent a thousand years weakening the seal. To accomplish that, divine power on par with mine would have been sufficient.”
“A thousand years?!” For Ye Yang, who was only a few centuries old, such a vast span of time was almost unimaginable. He found it terrifying.
In any case, there was clearly another conspiracy at work behind all this.
Ye Yang felt like sighing. He had been wrong. Half a month ago, he had complained about having no missions and being bored. Those had been the happiest days—ordinary, peaceful days!
·
When the explosion occurred, Shen Ming had told Ye Yang that the Vermilion Bird’s divine power had latched onto some underground creature, triggering its self-destruction and opening the upper realm. At the time, with the situation so urgent, everyone had rushed to deal with the upper realm, and later, when spiritual energy had poured into the human realm and caused chaos, they had all gone to safeguard the human realm.
But just because they hadn’t had time to investigate didn’t mean they had forgotten.
The power of that self-destruction had come from the abyss beneath the Underground Floating City—a fact Ye Yang and Shen Ming knew very well. That abyss led to the underworld.
At the time, everyone had agreed that the Vermilion Bird’s divine power must have followed the soul-scattered Fuye to the edge of the underworld—that is, the abyss where the Underground Floating City stood. Fuye’s soul had been utterly destroyed, so he did not enter the underworld. With no physical body to restrain it, the divine power had instinctively begun moving toward the upper realm.
The lord of the Underground Floating City had likely sensed this strange power and tried to stop it, inadvertently triggering the eruption that destroyed the city.
They hadn’t been able to contact the lord at the time to confirm this. But even now, the lord of the Underground Floating City had still not reappeared. He had vanished completely. It was hard not to suspect something was wrong.
Ye Yang and Shen Ming were now going to find this lord.
The lord of the Underground Floating City was none other than King Biancheng—the Great King of the Sixth Court, the Divine Lord Who Preserves Life and Decides Fate in the Southeast, one of the Ten Kings of Hell.
They had learned this from Ghost Emperor Ji Kang. Ji Kang and Zhou Qi, the two Ghost Emperors, had once said they would deal with this lord. But those two drunkards were notoriously procrastinators. Their “soon” could mean anything from a few years to several decades…
Luoyang City had become much more desolate after the explosion. Many demons had left the city. Especially near the Underground Floating City—the once-bustling markets were now completely empty, not a soul in sight.
“Watch your step.”
Ji Qing led Ye Yang and Shen Ming as they walked deeper, reminding them as they went. After the explosion, the ground above the Underground Floating City had completely collapsed and sunk. Getting in now was extremely difficult. Without someone to guide them, they wouldn’t even be able to find the entrance.
Ji Qing had been lucky. At the time of the explosion, he had been elsewhere helping another demon, not in the Underground Floating City, so he had escaped the disaster.
Soon, they arrived at the site of the explosion.
There was no trace of what it had once looked like. The enormous skeleton of Candle Dragon hadn’t even left ash behind. The original cabins had all turned to dust too. All that remained was a bare skeletal frame of the lord’s tower—made of some unknown material that had somehow survived.
Now that the space had suddenly emptied out, Ye Yang realized the Underground Floating City hadn’t been very large to begin with—quite a small area, really, the end visible from the start.
And yet, in this tiny space, relying on several suspended rail systems, it had accommodated more than half of the demon realm’s black market transactions.
Ji Qing looked around and couldn’t help but sigh. “Ah, I really didn’t expect this. I thought I’d be able to live here for a good while.” He had made a few friends here. Not one of them had survived. Not even their bones remained.
“Huh?” Ye Yang suddenly exclaimed in surprise.
The moment he had come down, he had felt that something was off. After looking around for a while, he suddenly realized what it was. Wait a minute—if the rail systems are gone, what are we standing on? And where’s the abyss? Where did my big, huge abyss go???
Now, the Underground Floating City looked like a massive, freshly dug cellar. Beneath their feet was solid, compacted ground. The lower half of the lord’s tower, which had originally connected to the bottomless abyss, had vanished completely along with it.
“How did this happen??”
No matter how powerful the explosion, it couldn’t have flattened the abyss into a level plain. The giant crater blasted in front of Ye Yang’s own home still hadn’t been filled in. Could someone have filled this one?
Ji Qing was just as puzzled. “We don’t know either. It’s been like this ever since the explosion. The lord of Luoyang City and several elders came to investigate. They asked me about it too. No one knows.”
Divine power was still unfamiliar to most. Their only recent encounter with it had been during the Vermilion Bird’s resurrection ritual, and only a handful of people like Shen Ming had directly confronted it. So no one could say for certain what consequences a divine power self-destruction might bring.
At that, Ji Qing looked at Shen Ming. Others might not know, but perhaps he did.
Shen Ming frowned, staring at the skeletal frame of the white tower in deep thought.
He had already noticed the disappearance of the abyss. Considering that it had originally led to the underworld, he suspected that the underworld itself might be in trouble as well.
This suspicion was further supported by the mixed, impure ghostly energy he could sense in the surroundings.
“The passage has been deliberately sealed—sealed by ghostly energy.”
Hearing Shen Ming say this, Ye Yang extended his spiritual sense. Sure enough, beneath the seemingly empty, flat ground lay layers of dense, grim ghostly energy. Countless souls were pressed tightly into the earth, twisted and flattened into thin sheets, stacked layer upon layer.
When his spiritual sense pierced through these layers of souls, he saw that there was no flat ground at all underneath—only the vanished abyss!
Ji Qing jumped back in shock. “How can this be?! What is all this?!”
The thought that he had come here several times after the explosion, each time walking atop these souls, made the hairs on his back stand on end.
After his initial shock, Ye Yang steadied his mind and carefully examined the souls.
He noticed that all of them were very recent. The souls were mostly grayish-white, some mixed with deep black, and quite a few even carried golden merits. Thinking about the complex mix of residents in the Underground Floating City, a terrible suspicion began to form in Ye Yang’s mind.
He looked up. Shen Ming’s expression was taut. Ji Qing’s face was pale, his eyes searching desperately among the still barely recognizable faces.
It seemed they all shared the same suspicion.
Suddenly, Ji Qing stumbled, nearly falling. Ye Yang caught him, and Ji Qing grabbed his arm.
“It’s—it’s him. I’ve seen him…”
Ji Qing’s gaze was fixed on one particular face. His mind was reeling; he could barely form a coherent sentence.
Ye Yang’s heart sank. So it was true. It really was as they had feared.
Some entity—whether after the explosion or simultaneously with it—had gathered the souls of all the Underground Floating City residents killed in the blast and directly refined them into this seal.
“…What kind of being could do this?” When Ye Yang spoke, he realized his voice had gone hoarse.
Shen Ming exhaled. “A Yama King couldn’t do it. A Ghost Emperor couldn’t do it either.” He couldn’t think of anyone who could. The Donghua Emperor? The Heavenly Emperor? But they had been gone for a very long time.
·
After sending the shaken Ji Qing away, Ye Yang and Shen Ming finally prepared to head to the underworld.
The Vermilion Bird’s power, the mysterious self-destruction—there must be some entity behind all of this. And that entity was very likely in the underworld. A second journey to the underworld was unavoidable.
But just as they were about to leave, another major problem presented itself.
The abyss passage was sealed—and the seal was so strong that even Shen Ming’s divine power couldn’t budge it. Shen Ming then tried to contact Ji Kang and Zhou Qi, but neither of the two Ghost Emperors could be reached. Their messages received no reply at all.
There were clear boundaries between the human realm, the demon realm, and the upper realm. Ordinary people and weaker beings might not find them, but many powerful beings could. The underworld was different.
The underworld was a unique space, completely independent of other realms. It had no clear boundary with the human realm. The flow of souls after death followed its own mysterious, difficult-to-understand mechanism.
Without guidance from the other side of the underworld, they couldn’t even get close to it, let alone cross over.
“What do we do now?” Ye Yang didn’t want to ask—it made him feel useless—but he genuinely didn’t know what to do.
Shen Ming thought for a long time, then suddenly asked, “That little ghost from Baodu Mountain last time—what was her name?”
“Teng Hua!” Ye Yang’s eyes lit up. He slapped his palm and stood up. “Right! Of course! I’ll contact her right away!”
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