Chapter 1742: The Inverted Tower

As soon as the words faded, a pair of icy hands suddenly emerged from the wall behind Qi Xuansu and clamped tightly around his throat.

Qi Xuansu immediately experienced the long-forgotten sensation of suffocation. His face, initially pale with a pinkish tinge, quickly turned crimson before darkening toward black.

He instinctively reached up to pry the hands away from his throat, only to grasp at empty air.

These Yin Soldiers existed somewhere between the corporeal and incorporeal. When attacking others, they became tangible, but when someone tried to strike them, they turned intangible. It was an utterly unfair ability.

At the critical moment, Zhou Mengyao came to the rescue. Channeling divine power into her hand, she delivered a powerful slap that sent the black shadow spinning like a top, forcing it to release Qi Xuansu’s neck.

The Yin Soldier let out a piercing howl, instantly alerting the others. Countless black shadows responded with shrill screams as they surged toward Zhou Mengyao and Qi Xuansu.

Qi Xuansu and Zhou Mengyao felt their scalps tingle with dread. If they became surrounded by these Yin Soldiers, they would likely never leave this place alive.

“Force our way through!” Zhou Mengyao made an immediate decision, removing her cloak and tossing it to Qi Xuansu.

Qi Xuansu caught the cloak and immediately wrapped it around himself, using its power to lift off the ground.

Together, the two flew over the Yin Soldiers.

The Yin Soldiers stretched out their hands in an attempt to seize them. Their shadowy forms visibly elongated, much like shadows stretching farther as the setting sun sank toward the horizon.

Fortunately, Zhou Mengyao and Qi Xuansu were flying fast enough to narrowly evade the grasping hands of the Yin Soldiers.

The Commander’s Office was now just a stone’s throw away.

After crossing the high walls, they entered the grounds of the Commander’s Office. Although there were no Yin Soldiers within the compound, there were monsters dressed in the uniforms and armor of government soldiers.

This place had not been devoid of people. Rather, everyone here had undergone monstrous transformations under the influence of yin energy.

Perhaps Qi Xuansu and Zhou Mengyao had arrived too late. They had lost far too much time wandering through the mist. By the time they reached Cangyun Fortress in the yin realm, everything here had already descended into ruin.

The Commander’s Office resembled a scene of utter devastation. It appeared that a fierce battle had taken place here. Everywhere they looked, there were collapsed walls and shattered structures, with broken timber and scattered stones strewn across the grounds. The entire compound had practically been reduced to ruins.

Could they have arrived in the future?

Qi Xuansu and Zhou Mengyao landed on a rooftop, where there was a large hole. They jumped down from the opening into the building. The interior was just as devastated as the outside. It seemed as though someone had once made a last stand here, sealing every window and barricading the door with bookshelves and tables. As a result, there was only a single corpse inside, with no monsters to be seen.

Qi Xuansu examined the corpse. Judging by the official robes it wore, the deceased was likely the Chief Secretary of the Commander’s Office, a high-ranking official of Cangyun Fortress who stood second only to Li Yuanjing himself.

There was also a final letter tucked inside the corpse’s sleeve. Its contents roughly explained that no one had been sent from the yang realm for a very long time, the Yin Soldiers had grown increasingly rampant, and a rebellion had broken out within the city. The situation had deteriorated beyond any hope of recovery.

The letter was most likely intended for Li Yuanjing. This also confirmed Qi Xuansu’s suspicions that they had indeed traveled through time.

Everything now made sense. Since the Yellow Turban Army had overthrown the Commander’s Office in the yang realm, its counterpart in the yin realm had lost its foundation. Thus, it had ultimately been driven toward destruction.

Zhou Mengyao sighed. “Since things have already come to this, we might as well head toward the watchtower first.”

Qi Xuansu had no objections.

Just then, countless shadows surged into the Commander’s Office, seemingly clashing with the monsters inside. Through the gaps in the barricaded doors and windows, they could vaguely make out a mass of ghostly figures outside, their twisted and terrifying forms overlapping in the darkness.

Zhou Mengyao and Qi Xuansu no longer hesitated. They leaped back onto the rooftop and sped toward the location where the watchtower had once stood.

Suddenly, piercing shrieks erupted simultaneously from every direction. They sounded like the screams of countless people gripped by utter despair and terror, filled with hysteria. The negative emotions contained within these cries were so intense that they threatened to overwhelm all rational thought.

Countless screams merged into a single overwhelming cacophony that engulfed heaven and earth, drowning out every other sound in existence.

Nevertheless, the two barely managed to preserve the clarity of their minds. With tremendous difficulty, they finally reached the former site of the watchtower.

In an instant, Qi Xuansu once again experienced the same disorienting sensation he had felt upon entering the mist earlier. It was as though everything around him had suddenly receded into the distance, and portions of his memories became hazy. According to Zhou Mengyao’s explanation, the two had just undergone another temporal distortion.

With this latest temporal distortion, the pervasive, piercing shrieks finally subsided. The Yin Soldiers that had been pursuing them also retreated and vanished without a trace.

When they looked around, there was indeed no watchtower here. Instead, it was replaced by a massive opening.

Cangyun Fortress in the yin realm was suspended high above a bottomless abyss. Thus, beneath the opening lay an unfathomable world of darkness, much like the scene Qi Xuansu had previously witnessed when looking down through the battlements of the city wall.

However, remnants of a structure could still be seen around the edges of the opening. It seemed that this had not originally been a hole at all. Rather, some kind of building had once stood here, only to have been destroyed.

This prompted Qi Xuansu to form a new hypothesis.

Why had those Yin Soldiers attacked Cangyun Fortress in the yin realm? Was their objective to destroy this particular structure?

Zhou Mengyao carefully examined the remnants of the structure and discovered something truly astonishing.

The remnants were upside down.

The portion above ground was actually the foundation, while the main body of the structure had extended downward beneath the ground.

In other words, there had once been a building here. However, rather than being constructed upward in the conventional manner, it had been built upside down, extending downward instead. Its orientation was completely opposite to the rest of Cangyun Fortress in the yin realm.

This was entirely different from an ordinary underground palace or tomb. Although such structures were located beneath the earth, they were still constructed in the conventional upright orientation. However, this building had been constructed in reverse. Even the murals painted on its walls were upside down.

However, in a certain sense, the yin realm and the yang realm were inversions of one another. By the standards of the yin realm, where heaven lay below and earth hung above, it was actually Cangyun Fortress itself that was upside down. Conversely, the destroyed structure was the one oriented correctly, rooted in the earth and reaching toward the heavens.

Only in the yin realm could such an architectural marvel be constructed, in which an inverted structure extended downward yet still reached toward the sky.

Unfortunately, the structure had already been destroyed, and most of its remains had fallen into the bottomless abyss below.

Zhou Mengyao frowned. “This Cangyun Fortress is already situated in the yin realm. The exit beneath the Nine Netherworlds should be somewhere below the fortress. Perhaps the gateway through which we can leave this place is located inside that structure.”

Qi Xuansu stared at the architectural remains along the edge of the opening and said, “The structure that originally stood here wasn’t a watchtower but an enormous inverted tower. Much like the legendary Tower of Babel, it extended from the ground toward the heavens, except that these were the inverted heavens of the yin realm. Perhaps this was the true purpose behind the grand undertaking that Li Yuanjing spent a thousand years planning. Unfortunately, the tower has now broken apart and fallen into the abyss.”

The habitual kindness that Zhou Mengyao normally used as a facade had vanished, leaving her expression cold and solemn. “This structure was deliberately destroyed. We’ve arrived one step too late.”

With Zhou Mengyao’s current abilities, repairing such an enormous tower was clearly impossible. The two of them had used the Taiping Religion to overthrow the Commander’s Office in the yang realm, which had consequently led to the destruction of its counterpart in the yin realm, along with this massive tower. In the end, Qi Xuansu and Zhou Mengyao had effectively destroyed their own hopes of escaping this place with their own hands.

Their actions bore today’s consequences.

Could this truly be the heaven’s will in this world?

Zhou Mengyao even had the unsettling illusion that the false moon hanging overhead was not merely watching them but also secretly laughing at their misfortune.

This gave her an overwhelming urge to shatter the moon.

Just as Zhou Mengyao was seething with frustration, Qi Xuansu said, “I might be able to restore this enormous tower, but I’ll need your help. We’ll have to stake every last bit of divine power we possess, and then leave the rest to luck.”

Zhou Mengyao frowned slightly, but she still replied, “Things have already come to this. We might as well make a desperate attempt and hope for the best.”

Qi Xuansu said nothing more. Instead, he opened his magical receptacle and retrieved the Guizang Lantern.

Time was in a state of chaos here, and Qi Xuansu and Zhou Mengyao had already experienced two temporal distortions.

Therefore, the Guizang Lantern, which was also associated with time, might be capable of producing miraculous effects in this peculiar space far beyond anything it could accomplish in the yang realm. After all, there had been precedent for such a phenomenon.

Zhou Mengyao recognized the Guizang Lantern at a glance because this was the very artifact that had been used to scheme against her last time.

At the same time, Zhou Mengyao felt that the many scattered clues in her mind were about to connect into a coherent picture. The temporal distortions occurring in the yin realm, the Guizang Lantern being in Qi Xuansu’s possession, and the seemingly long-standing relationship between Qi Xuansu and Madam Qi...

However, at that very moment, Qi Xuansu interrupted Zhou Mengyao’s train of thought once again. “Infuse it with divine power.”

Zhou Mengyao gathered her thoughts and complied, channeling her divine power into the Guizang Lantern.

Qi Xuansu also began pouring his divine power into it, allowing the Guizang Lantern’s tiny flame to grow brighter.

Given their current cultivation levels, there was absolutely no way for the two of them to forcibly control the Guizang Lantern. Their only option was to hope that the artifact would respond of its own accord. Thus, just as Qi Xuansu had said, everything depended on luck.

Evidently, their luck was quite good this time. The Guizang Lantern was gracious enough to oblige them.

Qi Xuansu raised the Guizang Lantern high above his head, allowing its light to illuminate the ruins of the structure, and shouted, “Reverse the flow of time! Restore everything to its original state!”

In an instant, time came to a standstill. The yin realm, which barely had any color to begin with, became completely frozen in shades of black and white.

The next moment, everything within the boundaries of the massive opening began moving backward, as though the entire scene were being played in reverse.

The countless fragments of the structure that had fallen into the bottomless abyss rose back out of its depths, continuously reassembling themselves into their original forms.

Floor tiles fitted themselves together to form the ground, bricks stacked themselves into walls, and roof tiles reassembled into eaves. Even rust-covered bronze bells flew up from the abyss, their corrosion visibly fading away until they looked brand new before returning to their original positions beneath the corners of the eaves.

Various talismans and totems also reappeared upon the walls. They incorporated the strengths of three distinct religions—Daoism, Buddhism, and Ancient Wuism, revealing the extraordinary significance of this enormous tower.

In the blink of an eye, the foundation and first level of the inverted tower had been completely restored through the reversal of time.

Immediately afterward, the broken sections of the tower rose from the abyss and reconnected with the foundation. The inverted tower grew taller and taller, its spire extending ever farther downward into the depths of darkness.

This inverted tower had 33 levels, corresponding to the Daoist Thirty-Three Heavens.

The light of the Guizang Lantern in Qi Xuansu’s hand gradually dimmed. Having staked every last bit of their divine power on this feat, Qi Xuansu and Zhou Mengyao were also reduced to their original powerless states.

In other words, they no longer had the ability to retreat through the Commander’s Office and Cangyun Fortress to return to the yang realm.

Now, they had no choice but to see this path through to the bitter end and descend the inverted tower toward its summit below. Hopefully, they could escape this place through the depths of the Nine Netherworlds.