Chapter 698: The Life-Death Reversal Grand Array
Chapter 698: The Life-Death Reversal Grand Array
As the medicinal properties of the Longevity Pill spread through his body, Huangfu Song's complexion slowly returned to normal.
He swept his gaze across the ice coffins packed below them, pondered for a moment, then said, "These ice crystals look like a chaotic, haphazard pile at first glance. But based on my years dealing with arrays, this place might be..."
He produced a set of Array Breaker Jade Discs, projected a screen of light before them, and began calculating on the spot.
Within the light screen, the ice coffins they had seen earlier appeared as tiny black dots, mapped to their relative positions. The perspective pulled back steadily, and as it did, the dots multiplied and appeared faster and faster.
The light screen revealed that these ice coffins weren't crammed together randomly. Some force bound them, arranged according to an unknown pattern.
"We still can't see the complete picture. Maybe once we've explored the entirety of this place, we'll know what array envelops this Lost Domain." Huangfu Song studied the light screen for a long time, then shook his head, regretful.
"Then don't just stand there gaping. Let's move. The longer we stay, the more weird things we might run into." Dongfang Yao called out, and the three continued exploring the remaining territory.
After another indeterminate stretch of time...
"Stop! Stop!" Dongfang Yao suddenly raised his hand, blocking their path.
"Brother Dongfang, what have you found?" Li Fan looked around but saw nothing amiss.
Confusion crossed Dongfang Yao's face, as if he were straining to hear something, to pick it out.
After a moment, his gaze locked onto the depths of the black Silent Sea of Death.
"There seems to be something alive in this sea. Like..."
"Some kind of demonic beast?" Dongfang Yao said, uncertain.
Huangfu Song shuddered at that. "Impossible. This seawater is composed entirely of deathly stillness qi. If cultivators like us fell in and got tainted by that death qi, we wouldn't last long, let alone ordinary demonic beasts."
Yet Li Fan kept staring at the eerily calm surface, lost in thought. At the furthest edge of death, life is born...
"I trust Brother Dongfang's judgment," he said. "If an exotic beast has truly been living in this Silent Sea of Death for ages, our hope of escape might lie with it. Brother Dongfang, you can speak the language of beasts. Why not try to communicate with it?"
Dongfang Yao hesitated, then nodded. A strange rhythmic and modulated sound rose from his throat, like the growl of a primordial demonic beast.
Before long, the sea's surface, which appeared unchanging for ten thousand years, stirred with a ripple.
"There really is a living creature?!" Shock crossed Huangfu Song's face.
Dongfang Yao cursed under his breath. "Damn it, this stupid thing can't understand me. It just got scared and ran off!"
"No matter. We'll follow it. Brother Dongfang, lead the way!" Li Fan instructed.
Dongfang Yao snapped out of it, quickly traced the beast's movement beneath the black sea, and shot off in pursuit.
Li Fan and Huangfu Song followed close behind.
The unknown beast wasn't particularly fast, and the three trailed it at a leisurely pace.
As they chased it, Li Fan noticed the frozen coffins around them gradually thinning out.
"It vanished, right here!" Dongfang Yao suddenly halted mid-flight, turning back to Li Fan and Huangfu Song.
Li Fan rose higher and cast his gaze into the distance.
At this height, the countless ice coffins were like specks of dust, weaving into lines resembling black ashen dragons. They stretched beyond the horizon, coiling and converging from every direction toward this one spot.
These lines worked like earth veins, channeling and gathering all the death qi of this Lost Domain into a single concentrated point. The energy was so thick, so potent, that it seemed on the verge of some qualitative transformation.
Huangfu Song flew up to join Li Fan. After careful examination, he caught a subtle clue.
"This place appears to be the central node of the grand array covering this entire Lost Domain," he said, his face grave.
"The central node of the array? Then we can get out of here from this spot!" Dongfang Yao exclaimed, overjoyed.
Huangfu Song shook his head. "We don't yet understand the full scope of the grand array so let’s not jump to conclusions. We might break free from here. Or we might—"
"Trigger the array's counterattack," Li Fan finished for him. "This array is unprecedented in scale. The fact that it's vaguely linked to the principles of life and death worries me. I doubt even a cultivator at Dao Unity could survive an attack from it."
Huangfu Song studied Li Fan, a flicker of surprise in his eyes. "Brother Li, you're well-versed in arrays too?"
"Just a passing understanding," Li Fan said, nodding slightly at the compliment.
"So what do we do now? Just sit here and waste away? I can feel the death qi affecting me. My life force is draining. I've even started getting aches and pains." Dongfang Yao grumbled, hesitated, then finally took out a Longevity Pill and swallowed it.
"Damn, that's much better." He absorbed the pill's energy far faster than Huangfu Song had, bouncing back to his usual energetic self almost instantly.
Li Fan and Huangfu Song exchanged a glance, then said in unison, “We need to map the full structure of this array.”
"We need to move faster," Huangfu Song said, then coughed lightly. His expression darkened, and he reluctantly took another Longevity Pill to slow the decay of his life force.
All this time, they found no danger in the Lost Domain beyond the steady devouring of their life force, and their Longevity Pills were running low. So the three of them stopped holding back and flew with everything they had.
Just as Huangfu Song swallowed his last pill, they finally completed a full mapping of the grand array.
"A stroke of genius. A stroke of pure genius."
Huangfu Song stared at the image projected on the Array Breaker Jade Disc's light screen, muttering to himself.
Even Li Fan found himself captivated by the exquisite design of this array.
Under normal circumstances, given his and Huangfu Song's mastery of arrays, they wouldn't need to see the entire diagram to determine an array's basic function. From just a fragment, they might even deduce its remaining parts.
But faced with this unprecedented, world-shaking array, built from tens of billions of frozen cultivators, all their knowledge and experience proved useless.
Without seeing the complete diagram, this grand array was like a dragon hidden deep in the mountains, shrouded in mist. You might glimpse a single claw or scale, but if you didn't already know the dragon existed, you could never guess what you were looking at.
Then the final part of the array appeared before them.
That final sequence instantly connected everything they had seen before. It was like adding pupils to a painted dragon, giving the array its spirit, making it whole.
This array was so miraculous it defied description.
It seemed to hold the very wonders of heaven and earth, capable of defying the Principle of Life and Death itself.
Li Fan and Huangfu Song stood before the sketched array diagram, locked in a long, silent stupor.
Could they truly escape through its central node?
Even they could not say for sure.