Hanyuanzi sat cross-legged atop a bed of profound ice. His eyes were closed, yet his divine sense was locked tightly onto the faintly emerging formation patterns buried deep within the ice wall. For four hundred years, every subtle pulse from those runes had signified the same things: the delivery of a new batch of “Nether Dao Bodies,” or the descent of an edict from the Upper Sect.
But this time… something was wrong.
“You felt it too, didn’t you?” Youhai’s phantom twisted and drifted through the chamber, its voice carrying a rare weight. “By precedent, the Guiding Decree should arrive in three days. But this resonance frequency of the formation… it’s more than ten times faster.”
Hanyuanzi’s eyes snapped open.
Almost simultaneously, the entire subterranean world of the Nine Nether Tombs began to tremble without warning.
This was no localized quake — it surged up from the deepest ice-veins, as if the underground city itself were about to be overturned. Cracks spread across the frozen walls, fragments rained down from the vaulted ceiling, and the embedded spectral-blue luminescent stones flickered erratically. The light throughout the chamber warped and pulsed.
“It’s here…” Youhai’s phantom abruptly solidified, gray mist churning violently.
“The Xuanming Passage — it’s opening ahead of schedule!”
Hanyuanzi shot to his feet and slammed his palm into the core of the ice-wall formation.
Hummmm—!!!
The runes flared brilliantly, projecting an illusory vision into the chamber: the sky above the Everfrozen Expanse. It had been completely swallowed by boundless seven-colored clouds. At the heart of the vortex, a pitch-dark fissure was expanding madly, like a wound torn open in the heavens.
“Thirty years early…” Hanyuanzi’s face drained of color.
“Why would it open thirty years early?!”
“Who cares why!” Youhai shrieked, its phantom lunging toward the projected image, greedily siphoning the barely perceptible streams of seven-colored radiance leaking from it.
“Nether Source Qi has already begun to spill out! Three gulps— no, just one! One breath is enough for me to begin the final devouring!”
On the ice platform, the frozen Ami suddenly convulsed.
The nine scorched-yellow talismans plastered across its body ignited simultaneously in spectral blue flames. Beneath the ice, its crimson eyes flew open.
Hanyuanzi whirled around. The dark-gold runes covering Ami’s body were writhing wildly, as though alive. An ancient, savage aura — steeped in Nether contracts — was awakening from within it.
“This puppet body…” Youhai sensed it too, its voice shooting upward in alarm.
“It’s responding to the aura on the other side of the Passage! Hanyuanzi — just what did your junior brother leave behind in this ‘Nether Puppet Body’? What is it connected to?!”
Hanyuanzi did not answer.
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His gaze was fixed on the crawling runes as a memory surfaced — Wu Ming’s whispered words from long ago:
“Senior Brother… if one day you see Ami’s talismans awaken on their own, it means the Nether Domain Edict has returned…”
The Nether Domain Edict.
Those four words sent a chill through Hanyuanzi’s entire being. One of the Nine Nether Sect’s highest secrets — only Dao bodies marked by the ancient Nether Domain itself would respond like this when the Passage opened.
Wu Ming… just what did you seal inside this puppet body?!
BOOM—!!!
An even more violent tremor struck.
Multiple cracks split open across the chamber walls, and seven-colored radiance surged in like a breached floodgate. Wherever it passed, ten-thousand-year profound ice melted, vaporized — then re-condensed midair into brand-new crystal clusters that shimmered with starlight.
The cold veins of the Nine Nether Tombs were being forcibly transformed by power from the ancient Nether Domain.
…
Profound Ice Meditation Chamber.
Just as Yun Che immersed his consciousness into the core principles of The Scroll of Reincarnation · Upper Volume, the entire chamber lurched violently.
This was no illusion.
The floor of ice-jade marrow cracked and buckled. From the holes in the walls erupted not cold mist, but a raging torrent of seven-colored energy. The instant it touched his body, the two Nine Nether Cold Pills in his dantian and qi sea shuddered violently, spinning on their own and madly devouring the energy.
“This is… Nether Source Qi?!” Yun Che was shaken to the core.
Inside his sea of consciousness, the scripture from The Scroll of Reincarnation began to flow and restructure on its own, forming a new realization:
“With the unsealing of Xuanming, source qi flows in reverse.
This is a heaven-sent opportunity to forge the first aperture of the Nine Nether Body — the Nether Mansion Aperture…”
The Nether Mansion Aperture — first among the Nine Yin Apertures — lay three inches below the dantian, the very foundation of the Nine Nether Body!
Yun Che had no time to question the cause of this upheaval. Acting on instinct, he followed the scripture’s guidance and directed the incoming seven-colored source qi toward a hidden point beneath his dantian.
Hiss—!
As the energy passed through, his meridians felt as if they were being scorched by molten lava and frozen by extreme cold at the same time. The agony of two extremes intertwined. Even with Yun Che’s iron will, a muffled groan escaped him as veins bulged on his forehead.
Yet within that pain, he could clearly sense it — a physical secret realm never before touched was slowly loosening, opening…
Outside.
The sky above the Everfrozen Expanse had become a seven-colored purgatory.
At the center of the vortex, the dark fissure had expanded to a hundred li in width. Within it, shattered palace silhouettes, inverted Nether mountains, and black rivers flowing with starlight could be glimpsed — fragments of an ancient Nether Domain overlapping with reality itself.
Dong—!!!
A bell toll from primordial antiquity rang out from the depths of the fissure, sweeping across the entire Northern Territories.
Where the bell passed, every cultivator below the Golden Core stage spat blood. Qi Condensation disciples collapsed unconscious on the spot; Foundation cultivators slumped to the ground; even Golden Core experts suffered soul tremors and shaken foundations.
Only streaks of Nascent Soul aura erupted from glaciers, snow valleys, and ancient cities, transforming into long rainbows that shot toward the fissure.
An elderly, white-haired matriarch of the Profound Ice Sword Sect arrived first. Gripping her ice-crystal sword, she stared into the broken palace ruins within the fissure, her voice trembling.
“This is… the mountain gate fragments of the ancient Nine Nether Yellow Springs Dao! Could the rumors be true — that the Xuanming Passage connects to Nether sect ruins shattered during the Primordial Cataclysm?!”
More Nascent Souls arrived, all eyes locked on the depths of the rift.
Treasures. Inheritances. Ancient secret arts… perhaps even the fabled “Nether Domain Origin” itself.
Greed, fanaticism, and terror spread along the fissure’s edge.
And unnoticed by all, deep within the rift — among the inverted Nether mountains — several vague,decay-aura silhouettes slowly raised their “heads” and gazed toward the living world.
In their hands, each held a burning… scorched-yellow talisman.
Identical in form to the nine on Ami’s body.
The Xuanming Passage opened thirty years early — what do you think caused it?
A loss of control in the Nether Domain, interference from the Accord, or a hidden mastermind pulling the strings?