Desolate Devouring Art - Chapter 1294 - Folding World
Chapter 1294 – Folding World
Ancestral talismans were vast, each large enough to contain an entire planet. Golden light flared across the talisman as gateways opened one after another. The participants stepped through, vanishing into them.
This time, even more disciples joined the event; nearly all three thousand disciples of the Heavenly Dragon Sect decided to participate.
“Go on, and be careful,” Elder Long said. He knew he could not stop Liu Wuxie and warned him to watch the Grand Unity Sect in particular. As for other races, he felt that they would not target Liu Wuxie under normal circumstances.
Liu Wuxie nodded and shot forward like a meteor. A golden ripple received him at the talisman’s surface, and invisible radiance drew him into the depths.
A few breaths later, unfamiliar spatial laws, different from those of the Indigo Bamboo Astral Domain, swept over him. When he landed, the ground didn’t feel like earth.
The talisman’s inner world differed entirely from the outside—no plants, no mountains, no rivers—only an endless expanse of spacetime.
The ground was soft and springy, yet it didn’t hinder his stride. All around stretched a gray horizon, neither sunlit nor dark, with no distinction between day and night. He drew a slow breath, and a desolate, ancient energy filled his lungs.
A ragged fissure gaped beside him, plain as day. That was hardly surprising; the ancestral talisman bore heavy damage, and despite Emperor Haoyuan’s long efforts, he had repaired only a fraction of the Fire Ancestral Talisman.
In its prime, a single unveiling of the Fire Ancestral Talisman could drape fire across a radius of ten thousand miles. Over the ages, its inner world had birthed countless runes.
Now the task was simple in name and perilous in deed: collect runes and forge a new talisman. Whoever forged the higher-grade talisman and won the ancestral talisman’s recognition would win the event.
He saw no one nearby, yet he didn’t hurry. He stood still, senses unfurling.
“This is interesting. The space here actually folds,” he murmured. Study revealed layered pockets of space; the area he occupied might not overlap with anyone else’s. Each pocket stood isolated. To move on, he would have to find an entrance to the next space.
How many pockets were there? A hundred, a thousand, more?
Folded space looked safe, but it wasn’t. A single error could mean falling into a spatial abyss, a bottomless fall without end. To make matters even worse, the talisman’s interior formed an isolated world, so spatial storms prowled the folds. One brush with a spatial storm could easily grind someone’s fleshly body to dust.
The actual danger here didn’t come from other races; it came from the space itself. He searched for half a day without encountering a soul. When he unleashed Ghost Eye, the air shifted, revealing odd patterns.
“Runes.” He narrowed his eyes at the drifting motes ahead. They were broken fragments—remainders from the talisman’s ancient shattering. To forge a profound talisman, he needed complete runes.
He felt no anxiety; a whole month remained, and he was confident he would find intact runes. He advanced with care through the bleak expanse. Though there was no day or night, time’s flow was clear. The ground appeared flat, yet each step felt like climbing an unseen slope—the space obeyed its own rules.
Outside, the world chose patience; many went into seclusion for the month. The ancestral talisman sealed itself from outside sight; no one could observe what happened within. They would wait for the talisman to open at the end of the event.
Liu Wuxie swept a palm through the air, sending faint ripples outward.
“Looks like Emperor Haoyuan hasn’t fully merged with this ancestral talisman,” he murmured after fifteen minutes.
Footsteps sounded startlingly clear in the emptiness; even steps from ten miles away reached the ear cleanly.
He circulated the Desolate Devouring Art, drawing the drifting particles toward him; as they flowed into the desolate world, they spread and merged within it.
“Primordial force.” His gaze sharpened. The floating debris was energy remnants from past damage that never dissipated; once absorbed, they transformed into primordial power.
No one knew when the ancestral talisman came into being. With each thread of primordial power that blended into it, the desolate world grew denser; every droplet of his true essence now weighed five thousand kilograms. Its circulation slowed under the weight, but the potency increased sharply.
Unless he could refine the entire ancestral talisman and fuse it into the desolate world’s fire realm, he dared not absorb on a grand scale, lest Emperor Haoyuan notice. These tattered runes, after all, were part of the talisman.
Given his current cultivation, even if Emperor Haoyuan gifted him the Fire Ancestral Talisman, he wouldn’t be able to refine it.
Just then, footsteps approached. Sightlines stretched far in this emptiness, but if an enemy appeared, there was nowhere to hide; his only option would be to breach the next pocket.
He lifted his head toward the sound and caught a shape—humanoid, yet not human. The footsteps were too heavy; the difference was evident at a glance.
“The oceanic clan.” The figure resolved—massive, inexorable.
Its cold gaze swept over him. The oceanic clan was infamous for cruelty, though they did not strike without provocation.
It hesitated before walking straight toward him. Liu Wuxie’s brows pinched. He had no grievance with the oceanic clan, so why close the distance?
A thousand meters vanished. A towering oceanic clan warrior loomed before him: gill-like ears drinking ambient spiritual energy; webbed paddles in place of feet; jagged pincers for hands—more than enough to twist off a human head.
“Something you want?” Liu Wuxie asked when it stopped three meters away. There was no feud. Why advance so close?
“The longsword,” it said, the demand blunt and unmistakable, the weapon Liu Wuxie forged in the last event.
No one had bound blood or soul to any weapon in that contest, so they remained unclaimed. This oceanic clansman had clearly targeted Liu Wuxie’s sword, intent on taking it.
“I don’t have it,” Liu Wuxie replied. He had other plans for that sword and intended to give it to Xiao Luo.
Fury rippled through the oceanic clansman; its gills trembled violently. To it, Liu Wuxie was only at the fifth-level Origin Conversion Realm and had relied on arrays to kill. As for his real combat strength, only the divine race understood it.
“Since that’s the case, I’ll help myself to it,” the oceanic clansman said—speech slightly garbled by an inhuman throat. Their anatomy differed from humans’, but the meaning of their intent was clear.
“What insolence!” Liu Wuxie roared. A mere insect at the second-level Primal Origin Realm dared speak so brazenly?
Blood flushed the creature’s eyes, and a violent tide of water heaved into being, wave upon wave, surging to drown him. Command of water-aspected energy was the oceanic clan’s forte.
Liu Wuxie answered with Dragon-Grasping Hand, descending from above to rend the torrent and seize the attacker. Shock crossed the creature’s face; it had not expected such overwhelming power.
By the time it thought to counter, it was too late. Liu Wuxie’s recent advance to the sixth-level Origin Conversion Realm had multiplied his might.
With his current cultivation, he would even dare face a pinnacle Primal Origin Realm opponent; as long as he didn’t confront a crowd, he had little to fear.
The dragon claw tore through all resistance and reached the oceanic clansman. After refining a portion of the talisman’s tattered runes, Liu Wuxie had grown familiar with the inner space and could even use those fragments to sniff out pocket entrances.
With a brutal crack, the claw closed and lifted the oceanic clansman in his palm.
“Trash like you dares to offend me?” Liu Wuxie said, voice flat. He tightened his grip, and the oceanic clansman was ripped apart.
He summoned the Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron without hesitation and fed the corpse into it. Absorbing the tattered runes had strengthened every true-essence strike; with raw physical force alone, he could kill a second-level Primal Origin Realm foe.
Expression unchanged, he rifled the interspatial pouch he had taken. Only a few deep-sea specialties turned up, along with some astral stones.
“Deep-sea coral,” he murmured, lifting a beautiful piece and probing it with Ghost Eye.
“Not bad. Coral marrow.” A faint smile touched his lips. He drew the marrow free, and the coral’s luster died at once.
The marrow dropped into the Sky Devouring Divine Cauldron; a robust surge of spirituality poured into the desolate world, further tempering his true essence. If he couldn’t break through yet, he would strengthen his true essence.
He moved on. The space ahead rippled and folded as if the world cut and rejoined itself.
“The entrance,” he said softly. Step through here, and he would emerge in another space.
He hesitated before choosing to go. He had combed this pocket and found no complete runes. Passing the threshold, he felt pressure close in from every side.
What lay ahead, whether a spatial abyss or a new world, was unclear, but as he advanced, the scenery changed from the grayness before. Soon, a desert stretched to every horizon, the sand flickering with hidden flame, as if the ground were a vast volcano. That, too, made sense, as the Fire Ancestral Talisman’s inner world bore fire at its core.
