Chapter 373: Forged by the Profound Verse

The ancient verse echoed like the chime of a bronze bell across the murky ruins of his Sea of Consciousness.

Heaven is cold, but the flesh is warm.

Yin craves the fullness of Yang.

Yang hungers to consume Yin…

A spark of crystalline will flared in the dark.

Shen Yu did not break through to some omnipotent state, nor did his soul suddenly mend, rather, the manic bloodlust that had hijacked his senses receded just enough to restore cold, ruthless reason.

His body was a crumbling ruin, his dantian clogged with necrotic sludge, three ribs pulverized, and a lethal Nascent Soul curse corroding his marrow from the inside out.

He had perhaps five breaths before his heart turned to black ash.

‘Move.’

Shen Yu clamped his bloody teeth together, dragging the absolute last ember of refined Qi from his dying meridians into his fingertips.

He lunged toward the center of the Taiji Samsara Altar.

His trembling, blood-caked hand snatched the dark-gold spatial ring resting in the bone dust, forcing a sliver of divine intent into its matrix.

With a desperate sweep of his arm, he shoved the ancient dragon-bone slate inside the spatial ring.

Next, his claw clamped onto the torso-sized Taiji Samsara Serpent egg.

Buzz!

A spatial rejection shockwave rattled his wrist.

Because the egg contained a living, undulating ancient embryo of a Tier-5 beast, the spatial ring refused to absorb it.

Shen Yu didn’t waste a half-breath cursing the heavens.

Tucking the massive, pulsing egg tightly against his bleeding chest with his shattered left arm, he kicked off the altar with his remaining strength.

Splash—!

His broken body, clutching the black-and-white egg, plunged straight into the violent seam of the River of Seven Desires.

Sizzle… BOOM!

The collision of extreme elements hit him like the hammer of the gods.

The left half of his body was engulfed by the Absolute Yin waters, a subterranean frost so absolute it flash-froze the necrotic curse in his outer flesh into crystalline black frost.

The right half was submerged in the liquid gold of the Supreme Yang current, a roaring river of primal fire that instantly seared his open pectoral wound and boiled his blood.

Any ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivator would have been ripped in half at a molecular level within a single second.

Yet, Shen Yu’s eyes blazed with desperate focus beneath the roaring waters.

‘In the friction of opposites, the Golden Elixir is forged!’

He did not attempt to fight the currents, nor did he use raw physical strength to resist the lethal pressure.

Instead, he initiated the fundamental cycle of the “Primordial Yin-Yang Scripture”.

Using his own body as the crucible and the Nascent Soul curse as the volatile catalyst, Shen Yu opened every withered meridian.

He guided the piercing Absolute Yin frost into his left arm and left chest, using the extreme cold to freeze and paralyze the creeping black miasma of the curse.

Simultaneously, he dragged the scalding Supreme Yang liquid fire through his right side, directing the molten heat straight toward the paralyzed curse-clusters.

CRACKLE— HISS!

Inside his chest cavity, Yin and Yang collided with the necrotic Nascent Soul poison.

The three forces clashed in a violent, microscopic war.

The extreme Yang burned away the foul, corrosive rot of the curse, turning the lethal miasma into a pressurized burst of pure, unrefined energy.

The Absolute Yin immediately cooled the explosive heat before it could rupture his heart, condensing that volatile energy into thick, medicinal dew.

Thump… THUMP!

Clutched tightly against his ribs, the Taiji Samsara Serpent egg began to pulse with wild, frantic hunger.

Sensing the purest confluence of Yin and Yang swirling around Shen Yu, the egg’s shell acted like a natural siphon, greedily drinking the excess chaotic runoff that threatened to burst his veins.

A subtle, profound equilibrium formed between the dying cultivator, the ancient curse, and the slumbering primordial beast.

The withered meridians in Shen Yu’s chest, stripped bare by the poison, began to drink the newly synthesized Yin-Yang dew.

Layer by layer, the blackened rot peeled away from his ribs, replaced by a faint, pearlescent luster that slowly bound his fractured bones together.

His dantian, previously choked with dead sludge over the nine layered altar, began to slowly rotate again, a tiny, nascent vortex of black and gold light forming at the very center of his core.

Submerged in the depths of the roaring abyss, Shen Yu closed his eyes, allowing the river’s subterranean current to sweep his floating body deep into the unknown darkness of the subterranean cavern.

The subterranean river swept Shen Yu through endless miles of sunken cavern systems, far beneath the bedrock of the ancient tomb.

Submerged in the boundary of absolute black water and liquid gold fire, he entered a state of suspended animation.

He did not swim, nor did he fight the violent pull of the current.

His entire consciousness had retreated deep inward, hovering over the fragile, nascent vortex spinning at the center of his dantian.

Day after day, the relentless cycle ground on like an immortal millstone.

The extreme Absolute Yin froze the necrotic rot left by the Nascent Soul curse, crystallization creeping along his severed meridians like frost on winter glass.

A fraction of a breath later, the roaring Supreme Yang current surged through his marrow, burning the frozen rot into fine gray vapor before it could poison his heart.

Whenever the explosive friction of fire and ice threatened to tear his Foundation Establishment shell apart, the Taiji Samsara Serpent egg pressed against his chest pulsed with heavy, rhythmic beats.

Eventually, the violent subterranean rapids slowed to a gentle crawl, washing his battered, unconscious form out of the underground abyss and depositing him onto a desolate shore of fine, blood-red sand.

Above him stretched an open sky painted in hues of bruised crimson and sickly rust.

He was lying on a bizarre, unknown scarlet beach, the dark surf lapping softly against his naked body.

One week passed.

The necrotic black sludge clogging Shen Yu’s primary meridians dissolved completely, purged by the rhythmic, dew-like condensation of refined Yin-Yang essence.

His shattered ribs, once jutting through torn flesh, realigned with dull metallic clicks as dense, ivory-hard bone wove across the fractures.

Two weeks passed.

The gaping, cauterized crater in his right chest sealed shut, leaving behind a smooth, pale scar traced with faint gold and pitch-black ancient script.

Deep within his dantian, the purified Qi began to surge and compress violently on its own.

Without Shen Yu’s conscious control, his foundation was instinctively perfecting itself.

Having already defied the mortal limit by breaking into the mythical Tenth Stage of Qi Condensation in the past, his physical shell was merely repeating what it knew best, the elusive, taboo Tenth Layer of Foundation Establishment was quietly solidifying upon his internal altar, an impossible realm hidden from ordinary mortals.

Three weeks turned into four.

The tenth foundation platform within his core stood on the very precipice of completion, humming like a subterranean dragon.

Week five.

CRACK.

Shen Yu’s eyelids twitched.

As the layers of disguise and mortal strain melted away, his flesh shifted, reverting to the ethereal, peerless contours of his true visage.

Slowly, his golden eyes parted in the dark.

A sharp glint of cold reason flickered in the depths of his golden irises, yet beneath that calculating gaze, the chaotic demonic madness still simmered like an unextinguished sea of magma.

His flesh had been tempered and reforged, but the catastrophic fissures running through his soul were far from mended.

Crack… crackle…

Shen Yu slowly tilted his head back.

His gaze pierced into the bruised, blood-red sky above, where suffocating, pitch-black clouds were violently congregating in an ominous vortex, backlit by jagged arcs of violet and crimson lightning.

The stagnant air grew heavy and charged with raw celestial wrath, crushing down with the weight of an executioner’s descending blade.

A demonic, unhinged grin slowly pulled across his pale lips, exposing sharp, predator-like teeth.

High above him, the Heavenly Dao churned with furious intent, the heaven-defying clouds of Tribulation Lightning had finally locked onto their taboo target.

The thunderclouds did not merely gather, they boiled with personal, vindictive fury.

Ordinary cultivators encountered Heavenly Tribulation only when attempting the perilous leap from Foundation Establishment to Core Formation.

To summon the wrath of the heavens while merely treading within the Foundation Establishment realm was an anomaly, a taboo that violated the natural order.

The Tenth Layer was never meant for mortal bones.

It was a forbidden boundary.

RUMBLE——!

The crimson sky shrieked as a vortex of pitch-black tribulation clouds spanned across the entire horizon of the scarlet beach.

The ambient atmospheric pressure spiked tenfold, pressing the dark waves flat against the blood-red sand.

Violet and carmine lightning serpents coiled within the boiling eye of the storm, fusing into a single, blinding spear of celestial retribution aimed dead at Shen Yu’s skull.

Shen Yu looked up into the churning apocalypse, his lips parting in a brazen, demonic smirk.

“Missed me, beautiful?”

High above, the violent vortex seemed to stutter for a microscopic fraction of a breath.

The suffocating violet thunderhead rippled in bizarre disarray, and along the outer edges of the wrathful storm clouds, a faint, unmistakable flush of rosy pink bloomed against the dark firmament.