Everyone stared in stunned disbelief. Their expressions twisted in horror, and they looked as if they had just seen a ghost.
Even Heaven Profound Realm cultivators left afterimages when they moved, yet Liu Wuxie had vanished without a trace.
"After him! Quick!" Chen Shan shouted, shooting off into the distance. He assumed Liu Wuxie had escaped using some secret technique and couldn't have gone far.
Liu Dongqing darted in another direction as the rest of the cultivators scattered, fanning out across the valley. In the blink of an eye, the area became empty.
Just then, Liu Wuxie calmly stepped out of the hidden house and hovered mid-air in the exact spot where he had vanished moments earlier.
"So this is spatial manipulation," he muttered, relief flickering in his eyes.
Had it not been for the Ghost Eye, which allowed him to see through the structure of this illusory world, escape would have been impossible. Facing three Quasi-Heaven Profound experts head-on was out of the question.
The surrounding mountains merely concealed illusions; those who grasped the spiritual rune patterns could perceive the actual structure of the space.
He hadn't left the valley at all. Instead, he hid in a cave veiled by spatial illusions. He placed an array compass and built a defensive spiritual array. He couldn't afford the slightest disruption, as this was the moment to break through to the Earth Profound Realm.
With the third-grade spiritual pill in his possession, no one would return for a while.
Liu Wuxie retrieved the pill and examined it in his palm. It was large and unfamiliar. The faded runes etched across its surface suggested it had once been a fourth-grade spiritual pill, degraded over time.
"It all depends on you," Liu Wuxie muttered. Then, he swallowed the pill without hesitation.
The moment it entered him, the pill dissolved into a violent torrent of energy. It surged through his limbs and into his dantian, threatening to tear him apart. Spiderweb-like cracks crawled across his skin.
"What powerful medicine..." Liu Wuxie gritted his teeth and circulated the Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron to refine the rampaging energy. Blood poured from his pores, dyeing him crimson.
He summoned the cauldron outright. It joined the refining process, devouring part of the pill's energy to ease the pressure on his breaking body.
Having just reached the pinnacle of the Spirit Profound Realm, Liu Wuxie stood poised on the edge of transformation, but the energy pressing down on him nearly overwhelmed him.
A cultivator's body was like a pond, and each breakthrough expanded that pond. The spiritual pill, however, was like a torrential flood, relentless and overpowering. The energy threatened to flood the pond, spill over, and rupture his body.
The only way was forward.
"Time to break through!" Liu Wuxie's voice was steady. He had waited for this moment long enough. Once he reached the Earth Profound Realm, even Heaven Profound experts would struggle to kill him. Perhaps he couldn't yet kill them, but they would no longer be an immediate threat.
As his energy surged, the Desolate Devouring Art in his mind changed. The characters within the technique split and evolved, becoming far more profound.
"This... could this be the true form of the Desolate Devouring Art?" Liu Wuxie muttered, stunned.
"I can see it now... What I practiced before was only the foundation, meant to temper my roots. This is the real cultivation technique."
The technique's profundity astounded him, but Liu Wuxie didn't pause to study it. His breakthrough would have to come first. Everything before the Heaven Profound Realm was merely laying the groundwork. Actual cultivation began only after stepping into that realm.
However, Liu Wuxie had already completed his foundation within the Earth Profound Realm; he was a realm ahead of others.
As the Heavenly Dao Book unfolded, new sequences appeared across its pages.
The Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron also evolved, expanding in size. Within it, an illusory realm began to form—one that resembled hell.
"The Avici Hell?" Liu Wuxie's brow furrowed. "But why? The Desolate Devouring Art is pure. Why does the cauldron carry such sinister energy?"
He remembered how the cauldron had continuously emitted demonic energy, and the appearance of the Avici Hell made that demonic energy more refined, more terrifying. A monstrous suction force erupted from within, drawing in all the spiritual energy hundreds of thousands of meters around him.
Before he could react, the spiritual energy liquefied into rivers, flooding the desolate world within.
There was no time to ponder. The cauldron's evolution brought only benefits, and the intensified suction was accelerating his breakthrough.
In just half a breath's time, the cauldron devoured every ounce of spiritual energy within a hundred-thousand-meter radius.
The Heavenly Dao Book shuddered violently as its sequences rearranged themselves. The book itself thickened, growing twice its previous size. His soul sea swelled as divine force surged through its gates, reinforcing his body.
The gateway to the Earth Profound Realm opened, and Liu Wuxie surged through it in a seamless breakthrough.
True essence surged through his meridians. Liu Wuxie still hadn't fully absorbed the spiritual pill's energy. He channeled the remaining power to temper his body, pushing the pill's potential to its limits.
Slowly, the cracks knitting across his skin began to close.
A golden radiance coated his skin, spreading across him like molten metal. Dragon scales appeared on his chest and back, and their aura filled the entire cave with a majestic dragon might.
Far away, Chen Shan and the others had already covered thousands of miles in their chase, but they soon realized that the spiritual energy behind them was thinning rapidly. Then, a surge of terrifying dragon aura swept out, blanketing ten thousand miles in every direction.
"Wait, something's wrong!" Chen Shan skidded to a stop, his face twisting in realization.
The others sensed the anomaly and turned around, racing back toward the mountain valley.
The dragon aura vanished as quickly as it appeared.
Inside the cave, Liu Wuxie's Divine Thunder Physique materialized. The Divine Glazed Cloth wrapped around his body. As he progressed, he would no longer need clothes as the laws themselves would clothe him.
Ten thousand supreme-grade spirit stones exploded in a burst of spiritual light, pouring into the desolate world.
After breaking through, Liu Wuxie discovered that the desolate world had expanded to more than twice its original size.
Mountains that once scraped the heavens now looked like mere hills. Mighty rivers and vast lakes had shrunk to mere pools. Even the stars in the sky appeared as faint specks, but it wasn't because they had grown smaller; the world itself had just become unimaginably vast.
He could feel a new force surging within this space—world power.
The desolate world had formed its laws, and from those laws, world power emerged. If he unleashed it, it would be like hurling the might of an entire world at his target. The destruction would be catastrophic.
Liu Wuxie dared not use it lightly. The price of such a force would be the desolation of the world itself. Once drained of world power, the internal realm would collapse completely.
With this breakthrough, Liu Wuxie burned through nearly all of the supreme-grade spirit stones he'd collected. He circulated his technique, unleashing torrents of true essence that rampaged through him like a stampede.
When the energy was finally stable, he stood, executed his movement technique, and left behind afterimages as he reappeared outside the cave.
"So, this is the Earth Profound Realm," Liu Wuxie whispered.
He wasn't unfamiliar with it. After all, he had consumed countless laws over the years in preparation. Now, the power was finally his.
Two hours later, his aura settled at the pinnacle of the first-level Earth Profound Realm.
It was time to move on, as there wasn't anything holding him back here. The master of the heavenly coffin had scattered treasures throughout this internal world, and whether he could obtain them depended on his fate.
Liu Wuxie sent his divine sense into his soul sea and began studying the new version of the Desolate Devouring Art. The evolved chapter radiated an ancient, mysterious aura. Liu Wuxie couldn't recognize the majority of the characters and had to deduce their meanings independently.
Before he could finish, dozens of powerful auras surged toward him from every direction.
"Brat, hand over the spiritual pill!" Chen Shan roared, eyes bloodshot with fury. The instant he spotted Liu Wuxie, killing intent flared in his eyes. He wanted nothing more than to tear him apart.
What baffled them most was how Liu Wuxie was still here. They had searched miles of terrain without finding a trace. Yet Liu Wuxie was standing there, right where he vanished. Even worse, he had used the time to make a breakthrough.
Their minds struggled to process what they were seeing.
Liu Wuxie withdrew his divine sense and cast a cold, cutting gaze across the crowd. These were the same cultivators who had gone to hunt him down, and they had returned, drawn by the terrifying commotion from his breakthrough.
"He refined the third-grade spiritual pill?" Liu Dongqing muttered, disbelief on his face.
It had barely been a day, but Liu Wuxie had already refined a third-grade spiritual pill, something that would take even elite cultivators several days to process.
What they didn't know was that Liu Wuxie's Desolate Devouring Art had evolved. Its speed had increased drastically. The Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron had revealed the Avici Hell, which devoured spiritual energy ten times faster than before.
Meanwhile, the Heavenly Dao Book's deduction ability had improved dramatically, guiding him through the most efficient breakthrough route.
"Kill him! Refine him into a pill!" Chen Shan snapped and lunged without hesitation.
The medicinal effects of the third-grade spiritual pill were still flowing through Liu Wuxie. Killing and refining him would allow others to reap the same benefits as consuming the pill directly, especially the laws inside it.
Liu Wuxie's eyes turned cold as he scanned the crowd, committing each face to memory.
When his gaze landed on Chen Shan, he narrowed his eyes. A strange imprint pulsed in Chen Shan's soul sea. He was from the Golden Cauldron Pavilion.
The other Earth Profound Realm cultivators fanned out into formation, cutting off every escape route.
Liu Wuxie activated Ghost Eye. In an instant, the terrain melted away, revealing the world's hidden structure.
"Now!" Liu Dongqing barked, unleashing his aura. The crushing pressure of the Quasi-Heaven Profound Realm descended upon Liu Wuxie like a tidal wave.
Before his breakthrough, Liu Wuxie couldn't have withstood someone like Liu Dongqing.
However, things were different now. With his advancement to the Earth Profound Realm, he could command the laws of this realm. He had also grown a hundred times stronger than before.