Chapter 1053: The Ten Powers of Sky-Pillar Island & The Broken Jade Chime
Chapter 1053: The Ten Powers of Sky-Pillar Island & The Broken Jade Chime
Four days after breaking through the Sunken-Tooth Narrows, the heavy sea mist parted ahead of the dreadnought’s prow to reveal one of the ancient wonders of the mortal world: Sky-Pillar Island.
Rising out of the center of a ten-league circular archipelago was a single, colossal column of dark-gray primordial granite that measured three leagues in diameter at its base and soared three thousand feet straight up into the clouds like a stone pillar holding up the vault of heaven.
Wrapped around the sheer cliffs of the three-thousand-foot stone pillar were nine wide, spiral terraces carved by ancient cultivators millennia ago, while at the flat summit of the pillar—directly beneath a swirling, permanent vortex of silver-purple spatial clouds—lay the five-hundred-yard Sky-Pillar Convocation Plaza.
As Wang Jian’s four-hundred-foot flagship dreadnought dropped anchor in the western berth reserved for the Golden-Tide Consortium and Abyssal Pearl City, the sheer concentration of high-tier warships and terrifying spiritual auras gathered around the island made the surrounding seawater hum.
Over two hundred armored dreadnoughts, bone-galleons, sword-cruisers, and giant deep-sea beast mounts surrounded the base of the stone pillar, representing the Ten Great Powers of the Myriad Reefs Sea Region.
Leaving Su Binglan, Mu Lianhua, and Hong Lin concealed inside the veiled inner sanctum of the flagship—Wait—no: to ensure his three Nascent Soul trump cards could enter the spatial gate on the summit when it opened without raising suspicion beforehand, Wang Jian had Mu Lianhua refine three Breath-Swallowing Tortoise-Shell Talismans over the past week. Wearing dark, hooded ceremonial cloaks of spirit-baffling silk behind Wang Jian’s back and carrying the talismans against their chests, Su Binglan, Mu Lianhua, and Hong Lin suppressed their vast Nascent Soul domains down to the exact surface appearance of ordinary Mid-Stage Core Formation bodyguards!
Flanked openly by City Lord Lin Wanyue, Commercial Queen Shangguan Wan’er, Sword Fairy Shen Mengqi, Sect Leader Hua Yimei, High Elder Bing Yun, Hua Ling’er, and Chen Ying—along with the three hooded "bodyguards"—Wang Jian ascended the wide stone stairway leading up to the three-thousand-foot summit plaza.
Atop the vast Sky-Pillar Convocation Plaza, carved from white star-marble and bordered by thirty-six ancient stone lightning-rods that enforced the island’s prehistoric truce law, thousands of elite cultivators stood grouped around ten elevated stone pavilions.
In the grand northern pavilion sat the host delegation of the Myriad Ocean Palace and its subordinate righteous sects, including the Azure Wave Sword Sect.
Seated on the central jade throne of the northern pavilion was Heavenly Tide True Monarch. Six months after the catastrophe at Crimson Reef, the eleven-hundred-year-old Mid-Stage Nascent Soul Supreme Elder looked noticeably older and more gaunt. The left sleeve of his pale blue dragon-silk robe hung pinned and empty where Shifting-Tide Patriarch had ripped his arm off, and his white hair had thinned from burning thirty years of his longevity essence. Standing directly behind his throne was his junior martial brother, the Early-Stage Nascent Soul Grand Elder Daoist Canghai, while among the twenty Core Formation elders standing in the second row stood Qiu Yun—who kept her eyes lowered in dutiful righteous composure without glancing once toward Wang Jian’s party.
Directly opposite them in the grand southern pavilion sat the delegation of the Holy Nether Sea Organization.
Seated upon his skull throne was Blood-Bone True Monarch. Though his green eye-fires still burned with venomous malice as he glared across the plaza at Heavenly Tide True Monarch, a faint medicinal smell of blood-glue and spirit-wax lingered around his cloak—a sign that his cracked Life-Bound Magic Treasure, the Seven-Skulls Blood Pagoda, was still only half-repaired inside his chest. Standing at his left hand was an Early-Stage Nascent Soul elder with a hunched back and a cloak of black feathers named Corpse-Crow Ancestor, while to his right stood Daoist Xue Li (the physical vessel of the Yin Severing True Monarch) and Inner Hall Mistress Su Ning, who gracefully cradled her Purple Crystal Toxin Gourd.
And in the eastern pavilion—separated from the human sects by a hundred yards of empty marble—stood a delegation that made every human disciple on the plaza grip their weapon hilts: the envoys of the Deep-Sea Demon Beast Courts.
Because Shifting-Tide Patriarch remained at the bottom of the southern trench regrowing his three severed tentacles, he had sent his remaining Grade 8 subordinate sovereign to lead twelve humanized Grade 7 Demon Beast commanders to the convocation: Black-Fin Demon King, an Early Grade 8 Abyssal Manta King who had taken the form of a tall, whip-thin man with slick black skin, gill-slits pulsing along his cheekbones, and a wide, cape-like mantle of razor-sharp black flesh draping from his shoulders to his heels.
As Wang Jian’s delegation stepped onto the western terrace of the plaza and took their seats inside the pavilion assigned to Abyssal Pearl City and the Golden-Tide Consortium, Black-Fin Demon King’s cold yellow fish-eyes swept greedily over the voluptuous figures of Lin Wanyue, Shangguan Wan’er, and Shen Mengqi—completely unaware that sitting three paces behind Wang Jian in a dark hood was Hong Lin, the missing Early Grade 8 Scarlet Flood-Serpent Matriarch whom the Demon Beast Courts believed had died at Crimson Reef!
Beneath the shadow of her hood, Hong Lin’s vertical golden-red slit pupils glinted with cold amusement as she sent a silent spiritual transmission into Wang Jian’s ear:
’Master, that flat-bodied bottom-feeder Black-Fin always coveted my southern coral territories when I was in the trench. Once we enter the Ancient Void-Sea Ruin where the truce array cannot see us, let me tear his black wings off and feed his Early Grade 8 Demon Core to your saber!’
’Be patient, Hong Lin,’ Wang Jian transmitted back calmly, his hand resting lightly on the armrest of his seat. ’His core is already on my ledger.’
Just as Daoist Canghai of the Myriad Ocean Palace stepped out to the center of the marble plaza to announce the rules for opening the spatial gate overhead, a piercing, metallic screech echoed down from the storm clouds two thousand feet above the island!
SKREEEEEEE—BOOM!
Every cultivator on the three-thousand-foot summit plaza looked up as a bolt of blue-white sea-lightning parted the clouds.
Descending on sixty-foot wings of crackling silver-blue lightning feathers was the Grade 7 Mutated Thunder-Winged Roc—and standing upright on the beast’s armored neck, wearing his sleeveless dark-blue Leviathan-scale battle-coat with his four-inch-wide heavy black broadsword strapped across his scarred back, was Ye Fan!
The moment the sixty-foot Thunder-Winged Roc slammed its iron talons down onto the open marble flagstones of the western independent sector, a wave of shocked murmurs—followed by the sharp shing of hundreds of drawn swords and bone-spears—rippled across both the Myriad Ocean Palace and Holy Nether Sea Organization pavilions!
"That scar-faced youth with the heavy black broadsword... it’s Ye Fan!"
"The outlaw with the one-hundred-thousand High-Grade Spirit Stone bounty who stole the Dragon-Spine Trench vein and slaughtered Blood-Skull Outpost last week!"
In the southern pavilion, Blood-Bone True Monarch’s green eye-fires flared three feet outward as he half-rose from his skull throne, while in the northern pavilion, Daoist Canghai’s hand dropped to his sword hilt.
"Ye Fan! You dare show your face before the Myriad Ocean Palace and the Holy Nether Sea Organization?!" Daoist Canghai’s Early-Stage Nascent Soul voice thundered across the plaza. "Even at the Peak of the Late-Stage Core Formation Realm, do you think you can walk off Sky-Pillar Island alive?!"
Ye Fan stepped calmly off the neck of his Grade 7 Thunder-Winged Roc. His scarred face was cold as iron, and he didn’t even look at Daoist Canghai or Blood-Bone True Monarch. Instead, he raised his left hand, holding up a three-inch triangular medallion cast from ancient violet bronze etched with a nine-sky wind glyph!
The instant Ye Fan infused a thread of his True Essence into the violet bronze medallion, the thirty-six ancient stone lightning-rods bordering the Sky-Pillar Convocation Plaza hummed loudly—and a protective beam of silver truce-light shone down from the central pillar onto Ye Fan’s shoulders!
"A Void-Sea Envoy Medallion from the ancient Tempest Sword Pavilion?!" Heavenly Tide True Monarch’s white eyebrows twitched in surprise from his northern throne.
"When the ancient sects built the thirty-six truce pillars on Sky-Pillar Island three thousand years ago," Shangguan Wan’er murmured quietly beside Wang Jian’s chair, recognizing the historical relic, "they forged twelve independent Void-Sea Envoy Medallions. Anyone holding an authentic medallion and possessing at least a Late-Stage Core Formation cultivation base is automatically recognized by the island’s prehistoric array as a protected convocation delegate. If anyone attacks him on this plaza before entering the ruin, the thirty-six lightning pillars will strike the attacker withSoul-Transformation-level sky-thunder!"
Ye Fan had found that ancient medallion four years ago inside the treasury of the Abyssal Zephyr Lord—and he had saved it for this exact day.
Lowering the violet bronze medallion to his belt as the thirty-six lightning pillars locked their deterrence onto the fuming righteous and demonic elders, Ye Fan turned his head slowly across the marble plaza.
His cold, bloodshot dark eyes bypassed the Mid-Stage Nascent Soul ancestors in the northern and southern pavilions and locked straight onto the western pavilion of Abyssal Pearl City.
Specifically, his gaze fixed upon the tall, calm man in gold-trimmed black robes seated beside Shangguan Wan’er—Wang Jian—and the breathtaking woman in a high-slitted white-and-black sword robe standing directly beside Wang Jian’s chair with her hand resting lightly on the back of his shoulder: Shen Mengqi.
With ten thousand cultivators across the plaza watching in dead silence, Ye Fan walked straight across the white marble flagstones, stopping twenty paces in front of the steps of the Abyssal Pearl City pavilion.
For four years in the outer world—twelve long, solitary years inside the time-accelerated boundary of his Temporal Jade Bead—Ye Fan had bled in the freezing mud of the southern beast-sea, telling himself over and over that there had to be a hidden reason why his pure, righteous Teacher had kissed that man in the Dragon-Spine Trench. Perhaps she had been threatened with the lives of the surviving Silver Gale Sect disciples; perhaps a temporary illusion poison had clouded her spirit.
"Shen Mengqi," Ye Fan spoke, his voice deep, scarred, and vibrating with twelve internal years of suppressed anguish as he looked past Wang Jian straight into his former Teacher’s eyes.
Around the plaza, thousands of cultivators pricked up their ears in fascination. Most of the eastern sects knew that before the fall of the Silver Gale Sect four years ago, Ye Fan had been Shen Mengqi’s favored disciple, and that Shen Mengqi now served as a senior sword protector for Abyssal Pearl City.
Standing beside Wang Jian’s chair, Shen Mengqi looked down the marble steps at the scarred, rugged man standing twenty paces away.
She saw that Ye Fan had grown taller, that a fierce white scar crossed his jaw, and that his cultivation had miraculously reached the Peak Great Circle of the Late-Stage Core Formation Realm—matching her own realm. Yet as she looked at his rough shark-scale coat and his desperate, haunted eyes, and then felt the warm, familiar heat of Wang Jian sitting beside her knee—remembering how just four days ago she had been pressed naked against the sunlit stern window of the dreadnought screaming in mind-melting bliss as Wang Jian’s Nascent Soul rod hammered into her deepest core alongside Hua Yimei and Hua Ling’er—Shen Mengqi felt nothing for Ye Fan except a cold, irritated disgust that this ghost from her tedious past was still embarrassing her in public.
"You address a senior protector of Abyssal Pearl City by her bare name, outlaw?" Shen Mengqi’s voice rang out across the silent plaza, clear, wintry, and dripping with icy contempt.
Ye Fan’s jaw tightened, the scar across his cheek turning pale. He reached inside his Leviathan-scale coat and pulled out an intact, palm-sized jade bell carved with a silver hawk—the ancestral Soul-Awakening Gale Bell of the Silver Gale Sect’s founder, which he had recovered from Azure Peak before his escape four years ago.
"Four years ago at the bottom of the Dragon-Spine Trench, I was only at the Mid-Stage of Core Formation, too weak to break the Nascent Soul domains pinning me to the mud," Ye Fan said, his voice echoing across the ten pavilions as he infused his pure Core Formation Qi into the Soul-Awakening Gale Bell, causing the jade bell to ring with a clear, purifying chime designed to shatter mind-controlling charms and awaken a disciple’s sect oath. "I spent four years in the southern beast trenches sharpening my blade to the Peak of Core Formation! This Soul-Awakening Gale Bell carries the pure wind-intent of our Silver Gale Sect ancestors! If that man beside you used a demonic slave-charm or held hostages to force you to serve him, step down these stairs toward me right now—no one on this island can stop my broadsword from taking you away!"
The clear, purifying chime of the Soul-Awakening Gale Bell washed over the steps of the western pavilion, passing directly over Shen Mengqi’s brow.
Because Wang Jian’s conquest of Shen Mengqi was rooted not just in the Heart-Parasite Demonic Seal, but in four full years of remaking her physical body with Imperial Star Devouring Steel, Scarlet Beast-Marrow Body Oil, the Nine-Turn Profound Yin Scripture, and countless nights of soul-shaking carnal pleasure that had completely rewritten her desires, the righteous chime of the ancestral bell didn’t cause even a single ripple in her spiritual sea.
Seated in his carved chair, Wang Jian did not say a word or release a shred of his hidden Nascent Soul aura. Keeping his public persona as a calm, Late-Stage Core Formation military advisor, Wang Jian casually lifted his teacup with his left hand, while his right hand reached out behind the drape of the table tablecloth—sliding his palm directly up the high side-slit of Shen Mengqi’s robe to firmly squeeze the bare, silky curve of her lush hip.
At the touch of Wang Jian’s warm, possessive palm on her bare hip, a faint, seductive flush colored Shen Mengqi’s porcelain cheeks, and her inner thighs pressed together with a wet shiver of pleasure right in front of ten thousand watching eyes.
"Hostages? A mind-controlling charm?" Shen Mengqi let out a cold, ringing laugh that echoed across the marble plaza, her sapphire eyes looking down at Ye Fan with open mockery. "Throw that piece of sect trash here."
Ye Fan’s heart leaped for half a breath, thinking she wanted to hold the ancestral bell to break a seal inside her body. With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the glowing Soul-Awakening Gale Bell gently up the marble steps so it landed on the stone floor directly in front of Shen Mengqi’s white silk boots.
Shen Mengqi did not bend down to pick it up.
Without taking her left hand off the back of Wang Jian’s shoulder, Shen Mengqi raised her right foot—and brought the heel of her white silk boot crashing straight down onto the ancestral Soul-Awakening Gale Bell!
CRACK—SHATTER!
Infused with the three-thousand-catty weight of the Imperial Star Devouring Steel inside her Spirit Bones, her heel pulverized the priceless ancestral relic of the Silver Gale Sect into a pile of worthless green jade dust upon the marble steps!
Across the plaza, a collective gasp rose from the watching righteous sects, while fifty paces away, Ye Fan froze as if struck in the chest by a ten-ton iron ram.
"Look closely at this jade dust, Ye Fan, and get it through your thick, deluded skull once and for all," Shen Mengqi said, grinding the fragments of the bell beneath the sole of her boot while leaning her upper body closer to Wang Jian’s chair so that the heavy, soft side of her right breast rested openly and intimately against Wang Jian’s shoulder! "The Silver Gale Sect was a tiny, pathetic cage run by cowards, and the years I wasted teaching an ungrateful, trouble-making stray dog like you were the biggest stain on my cultivation life! Nobody poisoned my mind, and nobody holds a single hostage over my head. I follow Advisor Wang and serve Abyssal Pearl City because he possesses ten thousand times the vision, talent, and strength that a blind brute like you could ever dream of!"
Shen Mengqi looked down at Ye Fan’s pale, trembling face, her cold eyes flashing with genuine murderous intent as her right hand rested on the hilt of her Gale-Severing Frostblade.
"On this plaza, that stolen bronze medallion keeps the thirty-six lightning pillars over your head," Shen Mengqi said coldly. "Enjoy the next seven days of breathing Sky-Pillar Island’s air. The moment we step inside the Ancient Void-Sea Ruin where the truce pillars cannot reach, I won’t need Advisor Wang to lift a finger—I will personally use this sword to sever your limbs and hand your head to the Myriad Ocean Palace to clean the reputation of my past!"
Twenty paces away, standing in the middle of the sunny marble plaza with the shattered dust of the Soul-Awakening Gale Bell blowing across the steps before him, Ye Fan stood motionless as a stone statue.
Blood dripped slowly from his clenched left fist where his fingernails had dug half an inch deep into his own palm.
For twelve internal years inside the Temporal Jade Bead, the fragile hope that Shen Mengqi had been forced against her will had been the last warm ember left inside his human heart. Now, watching her grind their sect’s ancestral bell under her boot heel while pressing her breast against Wang Jian’s shoulder and promising to take his head herself, that last warm ember died—turning into a pitch-black, freezing abyss of pure, consuming hatred.
"Good..." Ye Fan whispered, his voice so low and hoarse it sounded like two pieces of broken iron scraping together. He did not shout or make a scene. Slowly turning his back on the western pavilion, he walked back to his Grade 7 Thunder-Winged Roc at the edge of the cliff. "Very good, Shen Mengqi. In seven days inside the Void-Sea Ruin, neither of us will owe the past a single breath."
Inside the western pavilion, watching Ye Fan walk away with his Dao Heart teetering on the razor’s edge between cold focus and obsessive wrath, Wang Jian took another unhurried sip of his spirit-tea while his thumb stroked the bare skin of Shen Mengqi’s hip beneath the tablecloth.
’Master, did I break his heart cleanly enough?’ Shen Mengqi transmitted secretly into Wang Jian’s mind, her voice trembling with shameless excitement and need as she kept her public face icy and stern. ’Having you touch my bare hip under the cloth while I stepped on that bell in front of ten thousand people has made my inner thighs completely soaked... Tonight inside our island residence, please reward me before the others!’
’Wait until the spatial array begins charging tonight,’ Wang Jian replied calmly into her mind, his dark eyes lifting toward the swirling silver-purple vortex of the Ancient Void-Sea Ruin three hundred feet above the plaza. ’Once the seven-day unsealing begins, you will get everything you asked for.’