Immortal Lord Yin
Deep inside the cave beneath the cold pool, the temperature was so low that water froze on contact. White frost covered the long, pitch-black walls, and clusters of ice crystals grew wildly across them.
Dozens of soul-purifying talismans had been affixed around the cave with spiritual power. Beneath them lay a sinister formation, set in a circle. The walls on either side curved inward, making it easy to enter and difficult to leave. It was, in every sense, a natural tomb.
Wind swept through the cave from outside, its howl drawn out until it sounded like an infant crying, sending an inexplicable shiver through anyone who heard it. Snowmelt trickled down where the wind had touched it, dripping onto the jade coffin in the center of the cave.
The coffin was green throughout, clearly no ordinary object. The bone-chilling cold that had frozen the whole tomb emanated from within it. In the surrounding silence, each drop of water striking the coffin rang out all the more clearly.
The jade blurred the face of the person inside, making it impossible to see clearly. But the elaborate carvings on the coffin, along with the formation that could preserve a corpse for ten thousand years, made it plain that whoever lay within was someone of considerable importance.
A series of footsteps approached from afar. Ten cultivators in black robes and jade belts came in from the cold pool. Their leader, his face lined with age, wore a grim, solemn expression.
A few of the younger disciples behind him, bolder than the rest, whispered among themselves. “Why did Master Wu Yuan bring us here today? He always says we’re not allowed in.”
“The venerable ancestor is buried here. Of course we’re not allowed in. Just look at this formation. How often does anyone get to see something like this?”
“Why was the venerable ancestor sealed away here?”
“I’ve heard that when the ancestor was alive, he was one of the greatest figures in the cultivation world. But in the end, he went berserk and died. These formations were made to suppress his corpse, and it took the whole sect’s wealth, spent over many days, to put them together…”
“You two!” Wu Yuan snapped. When he heard the whispers growing louder, he swept a hand toward the pair and sealed their mouths. “How dare you speak so carelessly of the ancestor? Be quiet and keep up!”
After that rebuke, the disciples fell silent and followed him into the inner chamber of the tomb. Wu Yuan opened the sealing restriction and stood beside the coffin, cold sweat beading in his palms.
He had suddenly sensed something amiss at the tomb beneath the cold pool. Without stopping to think, he had hurried over with several disciples to investigate. At first, he had thought some rival sects were trying to break into the ancestor’s tomb. Thankfully, it had been a false alarm.
He circled the jade coffin, unable to keep a pang of melancholy from creeping into his heart. Three hundred years had passed since the ancestor’s death. Once a peerless genius, now he was nothing more than a corpse in a coffin.
Remembering the horror of the ancestor’s rampage, Wu Yuan felt a chill crawl up his spine. A man so terrifying was better off confined to his tomb for all eternity, dead or alive.
After confirming there was nothing unusual in the tomb, Wu Yuan was about to lead the disciples out when an uncomfortable groan suddenly broke the silence.
Everyone turned in alarm. The jade coffin, silent until now, began to shake violently. Spiritual energy surged out from within, growing so dense it was almost solid.
The disciples had never seen anything like it. They panicked. “M-Master! What is this…?”
Wu Yuan immediately swept out his sleeve, shepherding the disciples back toward the edge of the tomb. “Stay calm!” Though he said it, his heart was pounding too. He stared at the coffin, wondering again and again what was happening.
Spiritual energy poured from the coffin and gathered above it. The frost and ice pillars around the chamber began melting at astonishing speed. For a moment, the sound of jade clashing rang out. Many of the ice pillars shattered into powder and flew toward the coffin. Under a few dim shafts of light, the ice crystals refracted a brilliant gleam, and the pitch-black tomb suddenly blazed as bright as day.
With a deafening boom, the spiritual energy stopped swirling. A figure slowly appeared before them, then descended from midair and settled on the jade coffin. His eyes were tightly shut. Spiritual power and ice crystals circled the black-patterned sleeves of his white robe, as though captivated by him.
The man’s skin was pale as paper. His features were striking and finely sculpted, his long brows sweeping back to his temples and a flush of red at the corners of his eyes. His lips were pale and thin, yet his face carried an effortless elegance. His waist-length black hair was tied back with a white ribbon, with a few loose strands falling beside his cheeks, lending him a wild, unrestrained air. He looked like a lifeless puppet, perfect in every detail.
Wu Yuan stared at the scene before him, eyes wide with disbelief.
He thought his old eyes must be deceiving him. Surely he could not be seeing the venerable ancestor sitting atop the jade coffin. But the moment he saw the man’s lashes tremble, his knees gave way and he dropped to the ground. The other disciples fell to their knees as well. It was the fear of blood recognizing its own, and the helplessness of being crushed beneath the might of someone supreme.
Yin Li, sitting on the jade coffin, had a splitting headache. At first, he thought he had simply had too much of the immortal wine at his ten-thousandth birthday celebration a few days earlier. But on second thought, it seemed he had been sucked into the congratulatory gift from his unfilial disciple, Lu Yuan.
Holding his head, he got to his feet, still dizzy. The moment he opened his eyes, he heard a chorus of people bowing before him. Ten cultivators in black robes and jade belts knelt on the ground. Their leader was pale as a sheet. Looking at Yin Li as if he had seen a ghost, he forced out two words through clenched teeth. “…Ancestor.”
Wu Yuan was utterly terrified. The ancestor had risen from his coffin.
He stole a glance at Yin Li and saw a red gleam in Yin Li’s eyes. His heart sank.
The ancestor had died after going berserk. Now that he had come back to life, who knew what trouble he might cause? Wu Yuan had already crushed a jade slip to contact the sect leader. Today, they had to seal the ancestor back inside the coffin!
But for all that, Wu Yuan couldn’t even lift his knees from the ground. No matter how many years had passed, no one could stand against the ancestor’s terrifying pressure.
After lying still for so many years, the body Yin Li now occupied had long since stiffened. His face was slack, and the shock in his eyes only made his expression look more ferocious. The disciples kneeling below him trembled even harder.
Yin Li had no time to worry about them. He was busy trying to make sense of things. Memories that did not belong to him flooded his sea of consciousness, churning through his mind. His expression darkened, and his oppressive aura grew even stronger.
This body wasn’t his. Or, more accurately, it belonged to someone in the book his disciple had given him.
The original owner had shared Yin Li’s name and was a born genius, but he had been solitary and violent from childhood. Not long after founding the Hengkun Sect, he had devoted himself to cultivation, then gone berserk and died.
It was worth mentioning that the original owner had committed many atrocities when he went berserk. Calling him a fiend would hardly have been an exaggeration. The original owner had been dead for three hundred years, and Yin Li had taken over the body only because of his own transmigration.
Yin Li gave a cold snort. Once he had sorted out what had happened, he stepped down and reached to help Wu Yuan, who appeared to be the leader. He wanted to ask what the world was like three hundred years later.
But the moment he grabbed Wu Yuan’s sleeve, the other man’s face contorted in terror.
A violent gust shot from Yin Li’s hand. Wu Yuan was hurled fifty meters away and slammed into the cave wall, smashing through dozens of ice pillars on the way. He stuck to the wall, unable to stop himself from vomiting blood.
“Master!” The young disciples flew to his side at once. Seeing him in such a state, they were furious. They didn’t dare show it in their words, but their eyes burned with restrained anger as they stared at Yin Li.
Yin Li was stunned. He had been cultivating for ten thousand years. How could he have failed to keep his power in check?
Bewildered, he walked over to Wu Yuan, intending to help pull him off the wall. But the disciples glared at him, so he awkwardly withdrew his hand.
As the disciples rushed around trying to help their master, Yin Li offered a word of concern. “Can you pry him off?”
His voice was hoarse and rough, like the scrape of a wooden saw inside an old bellows. He hadn’t spoken in so long that his body had gone stiff. His spiritual energy was circulating again, but the rest of him would need time to adjust.
The disciples watched Yin Li speak. His features were handsome, but his voice was dark and his expression inscrutable. There was something sinister about him. Now he was making a snide remark to their master as well. It was enough to make their blood run cold.
A few of the youngest couldn’t hold back and turned away to cry. They must have thought that they were only coming to the tomb with their master. Who could have guessed they’d end up releasing a fiend?
Yin Li watched the boys sobbing, then silently turned away and went back to the jade coffin to reflect on himself. Was he really that frightening? He had never cared much about his looks, but in the cultivation world of old, who hadn’t called him the peerlessly handsome Immortal Lord Yin? He stroked his chin and studied himself. Then his hand abruptly stopped. This chin seemed a little slimmer than his own…
He looked down in surprise. His reflection was perfectly clear on the jade coffin: black hair, pale skin, exquisite features, red light swirling in his eyes. His cheeks were a little gaunt, his air sinister, and he looked every bit like someone who had gone berserk. He resembled his old self, but was somehow even more refined. If Yin Li’s looks were those of a proud pine enduring the cold, this body’s were like a flower atop a high peak, utterly flawless.
He stared at the body’s reflection, his expression growing stranger by the moment. The original owner looked very much like him, but why did the man have to look like an upgraded version of Yin Li’s own face?
Yin Li sat back on the jade coffin and sighed. He was still wondering how to get out of this damn book when a long arrow suddenly flew toward him and buried itself deep in the stone wall.
A party entered through the mouth of the tomb. At their head was Lin Nansheng, the current sect leader of the Hengkun Sect. He looked like a middle-aged man, but his hair and beard were both white. With an air of righteousness, he held a longbow and aimed it at Yin Li, his manner aggressive. “I’m Lin Nansheng, a disciple of the Hengkun Sect. I’ve come to seal the ancestor!”
The people behind Lin Nansheng were also elders of the Hengkun Sect. At his command, they all drew their weapons and pointed them at Yin Li.
Yin Li was taken aback. Then he couldn’t help laughing to himself. But on his face, the laugh turned into a savage grin. Combined with the red gleam in his eyes, it made everyone’s hearts pound.
The younger generation might not know how powerful Yin Li had been, or how terrible the aftermath of his rampage had been, but these people had seen it for themselves.
Rivers of blood. Corpses strewn across the ground.
Sitting on the jade coffin, Yin Li rolled his neck. The fighting spirit in his eyes had been roused as well.
Fine. He could use this as a chance to stretch his limbs.