“Ice Empress, are you suggesting I take Snow Lady in as well?” After the Ice Empress became the sentient soul ring for his Necromantic Calamity martial soul, Huo Yuhao was preparing to pack his belongings and head back to the Mingyue Hotel.
In this life, Huo Yuhao had no intention of retracing the cultivation path of his previous existence.
He had already decided that once his divine sense fully recovered, he would determine what kind of divine seat to condense, and he already had some ideas regarding the cultivation methods and divine artifacts that would revolve around that seat.
The only reason he had come here to retrieve the Ice Empress was because Brother Tianmeng had asked him to.
He knew his own situation well: unlike the so-called “path to the heavens” that Tang San had charted for him in his previous life, the path he walked now had no safety net.
The companions who followed him in this life were not guaranteed to ascend to the heavens—instead, they might very well fall into an abyss of eternal damnation.
Huo Yuhao did not wish to drag others down with him.
“Since sooner or later, our Extreme North Ice Plains will face a great calamity, why not take a gamble with you now?” Within Huo Yuhao’s spiritual sea, the Ice Empress’s cyan eyes burned with fighting spirit.
The Ice Empress added, “No one wants to be slaughtered.”
“Snow Lady is something like an ice elemental spirit.
Her form of existence, born of heaven and earth, is already quite similar to your current state as a soul beast.
Even in the era ten thousand years from now that I told you about, when soul masters replace spirit beast hunting with soul spirits for cultivation, she won’t face survival pressures that are too irreconcilable.”
“Hmph…
How many humans are as candid as you?” The Ice Empress shook her head.
“I know Snow Empress’s temperament well.
She could never accept living in such a humiliating, twisted manner.
By that time, I’m afraid you humans wouldn’t even let her live.”
Seeing Tianmeng also lazily nodding at him, Huo Yuhao replied, “Alright, then after I return to the Sun Moon Empire, I’ll go to the Mingde Hall to retrieve Snow Lady.”
“Hmm…
no, wait.
At this point, Snow Lady shouldn’t have fallen into the Sun Moon Empire’s hands yet…” Huo Yuhao suddenly remembered something.
With the Ice Empress guiding the way, Huo Yuhao hurried toward the core region of the Extreme North.
The journey was far from peaceful: Huo Yuhao encountered many evil soul masters along the way.
Seeing the carcasses of soul beasts strewn across the ground, along with a few human corpses mixed among them—the greed still frozen on their faces in their final moments—Huo Yuhao knew that a group of soul masters, too desperate for advancement, had just been in a chaotic battle with the soul beasts here.
These dead ones had probably been reckless and ill-prepared, which was why they had met their end here.
In his previous life, during his years at Shrek, Huo Yuhao had learned of the existence of a secret method for crafting soul bones.
To craft such secret-method soul bones, one needed to slaughter soul beasts using specific techniques: for example, for any given type of soul beast, killing a hundred within half an hour and using secret arts to draw upon their soul rings would give a ten percent chance of obtaining a secret-method spirit soul bone.
It was considered a relatively simple way to acquire soul bones.
To carry this out, the necessary preparatory work and operational arrangements required massive human and intelligence resources.
Most evil soul masters were self-taught, and even the Holy Spirit Church itself was a half-baked organization, making it difficult for them to execute such operations.
“See that?
The savage expressions on their faces—that’s the true face of you humans.” Within Huo Yuhao’s spiritual sea, the Ice Empress spoke, struggling to suppress her discomfort.
Several days later, near the Ice God Lake.
Sensing soul power fluctuations at the Rank 9 Titled Douluo level, Huo Yuhao immediately realized what was happening.
“So this is a large-scale soul hunting operation!
For a Rank 9 Titled Douluo-level force to make a move, their target must be at least a hundred-thousand-year soul beast!
No wonder so many rogue evil soul masters followed along to fish in troubled waters.”
Drawing closer, Huo Yuhao discovered that the Rank 9 Titled Douluo-level soul power fluctuations were being emitted by three Rank 9 soul engineers.
One of them spoke in a solemn voice: “The environment here is too harsh.
Let’s make this quick!”
The other two Rank 9 soul engineers burst into laughter.
“We’ve hit the jackpot this time!
This hundred-thousand-year soul beast embryo is simply priceless.”
The three men advanced into the Ice God Lake with sinister smiles, arriving before a pristine white lotus platform at its very center.
Upon the lotus platform lay a graceful, breathtaking figure.
From her silky, flowing hair, to her cold and ethereal features, to her exposed shoulders, to the flowing skirt she wore—the young girl was entirely white, radiating a delicate luminescence.
Barefoot, she held in her hands a lotus flower of equal purity.
This girl was Snow Lady.
Facing the inescapable seventy-thousand-year heavenly tribulation, her plan had been to use this ten-thousand-year snow lotus—which possessed little sentience—as a vessel to be reborn and start anew.
“Despicable humans!”
Snow Lady had never imagined that, as a daughter of the Extreme North, she would encounter these human strongmen at her doorstep so soon after beginning her cultivation anew.
If Snow Lady had not been in the transitional phase of her rebirth, she could have crushed these three Rank 9 soul engineers like ants.
But the impermanence of worldly affairs rarely allowed for such “ifs.”
Struck by several beams of soul power, the lotus flower in Snow Lady’s hands had already been damaged.
This feeling of powerlessness at such a moment made Snow Lady wish she could drag these humans down with her to mutual destruction.
“BOOM…” An explosion like thunderclap erupted, and countless ice blades scattered like shrapnel.
The force of this upheaval was comparable to mountains crumbling and the earth splitting apart.
It was not Snow Lady who had activated a mutual destruction technique.
It was Ice Explosion!
A hereditary skill of the Ice Empress’s Ice Jade Emperor Scorpion clan.
With the assistance of the vast bloodline power stored in her preserved torso bone, and catching the enemy off guard, the Ice Empress channeled this strike through Huo Yuhao’s body, dealing fatal injuries to the three Rank 9 soul engineers.
A deep crater a hundred meters in diameter appeared where the three had been standing.
Snow Lady’s movements were equally swift: no sooner had the three climbed out of the crater than a giant, misty white hand descended, seized them, and tightened its grip.
As the blood mist dispersed, Snow Lady had crushed the three to death with a single squeeze.
In the distance, Huo Yuhao spat out blood and collapsed limply to the ground.
At this moment, blood was seeping from all seven of his orifices.
Though he was not dead, his body was completely immobile.
If it were not for his divine sense—as a “bag of divine kings” who had lived two lifetimes—precisely controlling every subtle change within his body, the backlash from the Ice Empress’s Rank 9 Titled Douluo-level Ice Explosion, channeled through his body, would have been enough to reduce him to pulp.
Sensing the fluctuations of the Ice Empress’s soul power, Snow Lady froze on the spot.
“What is this?”
“Ice, how did you end up here?”
Snow Lady knew that the Ice Empress’s talent was inferior to her own.
She herself had managed to reach the seventy-thousand-year level, whereas the Ice Empress had struggled even to survive the forty-thousand-year heavenly tribulation.
Snow Lady’s plan had been to rely on her talent as a child of ice and snow, after her rebirth, to catch the eye of an ice-attribute deity in the divine realm, thereby obtaining a divine test and ascending to godhood.
At that time, she could make the Ice Empress her sentient soul ring and bring her along to ascend to the divine realm.
“Snow Empress, it’s me,” the Ice Empress’s voice sounded in Snow Lady’s ear.
Then she recounted in detail how she had been persuaded by the Tianmeng Iceworm and had become Huo Yuhao’s sentient soul ring.
“So, Snow Empress, are you willing to join us?” the Ice Empress, with her tyrannical temperament, asked.
Though his body was unable to move at this moment, upon hearing this, Huo Yuhao couldn’t help but feel something was off.
Why did it seem like he, Lao Huo, was running a pyramid scheme?
“I am willing!”