Read Novel Full Chapter 1173: Chapter 1167: Special Event
Chapter 1173: Chapter 1167: Special Event
[Special Event: Crisis of Life and Death]
[Your family has encountered foreign enemies.
They have already entered the Azure Cloud Prefecture, heading toward the locations of the major Grotto-Heavens where your family’s experts reside.
They know Azure Cloud Prefecture and your family like the back of their hands.]
[Without exception, they all consist of elders from major sects and immortal clans, or cunning, deeply experienced wandering cultivators of the cultivation world.]
[During these hundreds of years of chaos, every single one of them has waited for opportunities to plunder.
Having survived crisis after crisis amidst troubled times, they are the absolute elites of their respective domains.
In every City, Region, and Prefecture, in every place where opportunities are plundered, they have managed to survive.]
[Emergency Level: Full Stars!]
…
Azure Cloud Prefecture.
This area is the central heartland of the prefecture, where destiny converges, resulting in incredibly dense worldly spiritual energy.
Daoist Mosquito, who arrived from the Northern Frontier to lead the Monster Race, established the ‘Ephemeral Grotto-Heaven’ here.
The Li Clan possesses a Grotto-Heaven nearby, named Immortal Seed.
Thirty percent of the descendants of the Li Clan, generation after generation, reside here.
Within the Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven, numerous Tier-4 spiritual veins converge, and massive quantities of heavenly materials and earthly treasures are cultivated.
A rainy night.
Outside the Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven, in a mountain forest nurtured by fairy spiritual energy for hundreds of years, the rainy night was cloudless, illuminated only by a faint nocturnal glow.
The heavy rain fell on the rocks and vegetation, producing crisp, melodic sounds. Yet, in mid-air, the falling rainwater was suddenly severed, as if sliding off the edge of a massive pane of glass.
Ordinary people would not be able to see it, but a group of over a hundred people had already arrived silently in the rainy night.
At the forefront was Zishu Ling.
This ambitious woman from the royal family wore an expressionless face, but her eyes held an unprecedented high-spirited vigor.
Without moving her body, her eyes shifted slightly to the right.
“Divine Calculator, what is the situation now?”
Behind her stood over a hundred people.
An old man among them stepped forward.
He wore a purple Daoist robe printed with the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams. His face was gaunt and wrinkled, yet his eyes shone brightly.
Holding an abacus in his hand, his five fingers flicked the beads rapidly, producing a clattering sound that surprisingly rivaled the noise of the rain outside.
White silk threads pierced through the rainy night, spreading in all directions.
Finishing this divination, the Divine Calculator smiled. “A sign of Heavenly Favor!”
Hearing this, everyone was overjoyed.
The Divine Calculator of the Southern Sea had cultivated the art of destiny his entire life, capable of predicting the past and future, and divining good and ill fortune.
Relying on such methods, he sought good fortune and avoided disaster in these chaotic times, allowing him to travel anywhere in the world.
Countless people would gladly offer heavenly materials and earthly treasures just to beg for a single divination from him.
“With Uncle Rain bringing down the rain, there is nowhere in Azure Cloud Prefecture we cannot go, and we can support each other at any time.
Drenched in this downpour, the Li Clan can neither escape the rain nor the prefecture itself.”
The Divine Calculator stroked his beard, looking profoundly unfathomable.
“However, I have placed karmic threads on our fellow Daoists. All good and ill fortune lies within this abacus of mine.”
“The Li Clan’s Yunlin and the Li Clan’s Old Ancestor have already confronted Young Master Banshu.
Trapped within the Young Master’s spatial rules, even the Li Clan Old Ancestor’s spatial rules cannot help him escape.
We simply wait until our business is concluded, and then we will go annihilate those two.”
“The Li Clan’s Merit Grotto-Heaven has already been approached by Daoist Qiuyue leading his men. Daoist Qiuyue is truly decisive in his killing.”
Great fortune!
With the Li Clan’s two strongest individuals trapped, and the most difficult to breach Merit Grotto-Heaven fallen, what else was there to fear?
At this moment, the eyes of the over a hundred people were darting around wildly.
Now that the overall situation was set, they had to think carefully about how to secure more benefits for themselves.
Zishu Ling was equally ecstatic in her heart, though a trace of regret flashed in her eyes.
Had she known Perfected Qiuyue would conquer Merit City so easily, she should have taken the task for that side.
Now, she had handed the Merit City—the place that could boost one’s prestige the most—over to Perfected Qiuyue.
“Mister, please divine if there are any arrangements inside the Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven.
This will allow us to quickly dispatch these Li Clan juniors and then go assist Perfected Qiuyue.”
Zishu Ling was impatient. Feeling the numerous cultivators behind her, her heart swelled with passion.
Almost there, almost there.
The cultivators who came on this trip were all top-tier experts.
If they served under her in the future, each could take charge of a sector on their own. Why worry about not being able to ascend to the royal court in the future?
With Zishu Ling’s prompt, the Divine Calculator smiled faintly.
Flicking the abacus, how could a tiny Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven escape his brilliant calculations?
The sound of his wrinkled hands flicking the beads gradually slowed down, but this calculation took far longer than the previous ones.
Seeing this anomaly, Zishu Ling furrowed her delicate brows tightly. “Mister, did you divine some trouble?”
“Drip…”
She felt increasingly that something was wrong.
There was no rain beneath their Spiritual power, yet the sound of a water drop echoed.
It was a bead of sweat falling onto the abacus.
“Clatter, clatter, clatter…”
It wasn’t the Divine Calculator of the Southern Sea flicking the abacus; it was his hands trembling, causing the abacus beads to jump up and down.
The Divine Calculator… was trembling!
“Mister!” Zishu Ling’s heart pounded violently.
“Could it be a trap inside the Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven?”
Following the Divine Calculator’s movements, she saw his neck stiffen as he slowly raised his head.
As he looked up, his eyes widened more and more.
With great difficulty, he turned his head to look at the hundred-plus cultivators who had come with them.
“No.”
The Divine Calculator’s originally clear old eyes now held only the murkiness that follows absolute terror.
He had divined destinies his entire life, but this time, he divined the most accurately.
Behind him, fellow Daoists were looking at him one by one.
Zishu Ling’s voice grew increasingly anxious. “Mister, exactly what has happened?”
“Gulp.”
The sound of the Divine Calculator swallowing hard could be heard.
“How many people came on this trip?”
“One hundred and twenty-four people.”
“But…”
The Divine Calculator struggled to control his neck, afraid he wouldn’t be able to stop trembling.
He felt his body swaying.
Using all his strength, he replied, “But I calculated, we have… one hundred and twenty-seven people.”
“What… did you say?!!”
“Pfft!”
The Divine Calculator spat out a mouthful of old blood, spraying it all over the abacus.
Zishu Ling and the numerous cultivators supported the Divine Calculator with horror in their hearts.
The Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven was right before their eyes, yet they had done absolutely nothing, and Senior Divine Calculator had suffered a severe injury!
“Clatter, clatter, clatter!”
This time, even without the Divine Calculator flicking the abacus, the abacus itself was jumping up and down!
“One hundred and twenty-seven people? Divine Calculator, are you saying we have three extra people among us? Absolutely impossible. Quick, look and see who the strangers are.”
“Absolutely impossible. Under our Spiritual power, how could anyone possibly sneak in? How did the Li Clan people know our whereabouts?”
“Fellow Daoist, stay away from me.”
The crowd was instantly thrown into panic, guarding against one another.
A powerful cultivator swiped his Dharma eyes open, and everyone’s expressions changed even more drastically.
They saw that where they stood, centered on the Divine Calculator, his art of destiny was spreading in all directions through spiritual energy.
But these threads, clearly used for divination, were shattering inch by inch, like broken hair tossed into the sky!
“Not good, the Divine Calculator’s art of destiny has suffered a backlash!”
Terror descended.
“Divine Calculator…”
Among the crowd, Zishu Ling continuously used Spiritual power to sustain the Divine Calculator’s vitality.
But with the threads of destiny broken, where was the vitality to be found?
The destinies the Divine Calculator had divined over tens of thousands of years had gone against the Heavenly Dao.
Now, all this karma fell squarely upon him.
His body aged at a speed visible to the naked eye.
A dignified Void Refining realm expert, coughing up blood mouthful by mouthful, he grabbed Zishu Ling’s arm in sheer terror.
“The… the things I calculated… were all… wrong…”
“Here… there are people who are… better at…”
“The art of destiny.”
“And… two of them!”
In the rainy night.
The Divine Calculator’s vitality was extinguished.
As the night rain beat down, the one hundred and twenty-three cultivators all stared in horror and vigilance at the pitch-black surroundings.
The rainy night felt like the gaping maw of a prehistoric ferocious beast.
Cold sweat poured down their faces, a sense of crisis erupting in their hearts.
It seemed that no matter where they fled, they would be swallowed whole by an unknown great terror!
Three…
Three unknown cultivators had silently sneaked in among them, these experts who were viewed as gods by the people of the world.
If it weren’t for the Divine Calculator losing his life, they wouldn’t even have known what happened.
Like headless flies, they kept a vigilant watch on everyone around them.
…….
“Disperse, maintain a safe distance.”
Outside the Immortal Seed Grotto-Heaven, the numerous cultivators had already fallen into complete chaos before even breaching it.
No one cared anymore about what heavenly materials and earthly treasures were inside, nor did they care how many people were hiding within, much less whether they would alert the Li Clan and cause them to flee.
The gazes they exchanged were filled with suspicion and vigilance; there were simply too many possibilities hidden among them.
At this moment, two people stood shoulder to shoulder: a white-robed old man with red hair, and a Daoist-robed woman holding a small bamboo pole.
The two watched with great interest as the crowd of cultivators devolved into a disorganized, paranoid mess.
“Little Tree, your skills have grown quite a bit.” Li Yaoqing touched the small gourd at her waist, a thick black iron ring worn on her left wrist.
With a soft click, the gourd opened, and a fine white powder drifted silently through the barriers the crowd used to ward off the heavy rain.
The white powder drifted barely three inches before merging seamlessly into the spiritual energy.
Hearing Li Yaoqing’s praise, the Old Tree—who usually appeared stern and fierce to most clansmen—actually became bashful.
“My innate talent shatters delusions; he basically walked right into the line of fire. But it wasn’t entirely my doing.
Yaowen has been manipulating the destiny of Azure Cloud Prefecture through the Prefecture Lord’s Token for hundreds of years.
I secretly coordinated with him; the deeper he calculated, the more the destiny of heaven and earth backlashed against him.”
He looked around, growing increasingly excited.
Having cultivated with the old Li family for many years, he had finally broken his bloodline limit to become an ancient tree.
During the battle in the Western Frontier, he hadn’t done anything.
Perhaps since the day his leaves grew increasingly vibrant, the combative bloodline of the old Li family had silently rubbed off on him.
Rather than calculating fortunes for those brats, he much preferred taking root in the earth like he used to in Azure Cloud Region, wildly thrashing his root tendrils and letting his towering canopy cast its shadow over the entire Azure Cloud Prefecture.
“Should we strike now?”
Changsheng, following him, was a burden on him.
But now, having Li Yaoqing by his side was entirely different.
The Divine Art wielded by Li Yaoqing, combined with his existence as a true spirit of heaven and earth’s flora, gave him more than enough courage to challenge anyone—including the one hundred and twenty-three people present.
“What if they run away? Wait a little longer. Little Tree, don’t be too overconfident; none of these people are simple.”
Li Yaoqing casually replied.
At this time, the enemies who had come to Azure Cloud Prefecture and were now wary of each other suddenly erupted into chaos.
Zishu Ling had ultimately overestimated herself.
In such a crisis-ridden moment, no matter how she tried to stop them, no one cared about her status as a member of the Zishu royal bloodline.
“Wait!” Zishu Ling shouted furiously, finally bringing everyone to a halt.
It wasn’t because her voice was loud.
It was because…
The crowd saw the terror in her eyes. “We now… have one hundred and twenty-five people left!”
There were three extra people.
But now… one person was missing, silently vanishing into this cold, rainy night.
Suppressing their wildly pounding hearts and the fear emanating from the depths of their souls, they looked around.
They had never been to a place this dark before.
Among the crowd.
Li Zhiheng silently arrived behind a Golden Core realm cultivator.
The Heavenly Dao Divine Heart was influencing human desires, including fear.
“Thump… thump…”
He could hear the heartbeat of the person in front of him.
This kind of heartbeat was simply the best cover for the Heavenly Dao Divine Heart.
He looked around at everyone, but everyone seemed completely blind to his presence.
Then, he openly and brazenly grabbed the person’s neck.
Under the pressure of immense Spiritual power, the person cried out and died. Yet no matter how miserably he screamed, the people around him seemed as if they hadn’t seen a thing.
“Even a Golden Core realm dares to come.”
Only then did Li Zhiheng’s field of vision dissipate.
Just like after Yuanwu died back then, when he stood outside Yuanshang’s room watching Yuanshang, he was clearly still somewhere else, yet it felt as if he had done many things.
Li Zhiheng stroked his Heavenly Dao Divine Heart.
Ever since that day, he felt his human emotions and desires returning, and he had also mastered a new method.
“The human heart is driven by emotion. When the human heart reaches its absolute extreme—whether it be terror, joy, despair, or sorrow—at the very end of that path, they will meet me.”
Li Zhiheng exhaled a long breath. Looking at the terrified cultivators in all directions, he said expressionlessly, “Feel the fear. I await you at the edge of despair to come meet me.”
“Not good!”
“Another fellow Daoist has disappeared.”
“Flee… we must flee quickly!”
“We can’t flee; there are enemies in the rainy night!”
—
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