The Divine Nine-Dragon Cauldron

Without a word, the Third Junior Sister took out a jade pendant. It was a messenger jade pendant left by the Central Prefecture’s King. Hanxuan took the pendant and scanned it with her consciousness. Within it were the orders of the Central Prefecture’s King.

The Third Junior System had been sent to intercept Hanxuan and bring her back to the faction.

“Might as well. I wouldn’t want to fight the Blessed and Heavenly Lands, so I’d better return to the faction…” Hanxuan stretched and yawned. It coincided with her simple intention to cultivate in peace.

However, she suddenly felt her sight blur and instinctively waved her palm in front of her eyes. “Huh, why can’t I see my hand clearly? Why do I feel so tired right now?”

“Because your food was drugged with something that could knock out even an All Creation Old Monster! And yes, I’m the one who did it,” answered the Third Junior Sister as he raised her head.

Hanxuan felt her body go limp as the power of All Creation quickly dissipated. Her consciousness was slipping into darkness, but she still struggled to ask, “You mean you’re… taking me back to the imperial city like this?”

She felt that it could very well be the hinted instruction of the Central Prefecture’s King. As she had a previous record of escaping from the imperial city, her Master could have told the Third Junior Sister to do this to her.

“No, I’m taking you somewhere else.” The Third Junior Sister stood up indifferently. As petite as she looked, she easily grabbed Hanxuan and threw her over her shoulder.

In her confusion, she heard the Third Junior Sister murmur coldly, “It’s time to settle this once and for all, brother Su Yu!”

Su Yu? Who was Su Yu? Alas, she couldn’t resist falling asleep under the influence of the drug.

The Third Junior Sister took out a pinecone and threw it in front of her. The pinecone tore the Void open and with high speed carried her far away.

…..

In a sea of clouds, the Duanxian Cliffmaster sat with his legs crossed, facing the direction of the Central Prefecture.

Suddenly, his eyes snapped open. With a single strike, he shattered a piece of the Void right in front of him.

Something within the Void seemed to have suffered an abrupt halt in their teleportation. It stopped in its tracks, and an immense aura of a ruler poured out from the tear.

“Duanxian Cliffmaster? Were you waiting for me here?” A figure clad in an imperial robe stepped out of the Void. It was none other than the dominant and mighty Central Prefecture’s King!

The Duanxian Cliffmaster nodded. “Yes. I have promised a certain someone to stall you for nine days.”

That was the promise he had made to Su Yu. He would stop the Central Prefecture’s King for nine days. That would be enough.

Otherwise, Su Yu would be killed by the Central Prefecture’s King. If that happened, everything that the Severed Fairy Cliff had done would all go down the drain.

The unmoving expression of the Central Prefecture’s King was tinged with ridicule. “To think that a mere ant could persuade the King of Darkness to fight on his behalf. I was the one who underestimated him.”

The Central Prefecture’s King put his hand behind his back. “I’ll pay you double what he offered,” he said coldly. “Then, you will move out of the way.”

As the legendary tenth Prefecture King, the strength of the Cliffmaster had always been a mystery. No one knew how or when he had first appeared; his origins were shrouded in mystery. No one could pinpoint his background; it was like he was born in a single night, then with an unstoppable force, took control over the darkness faction of the continent, creating the Severed Fairy Cliff.

Unless there was an absolute need to fight, the Central Prefecture’s King would rather not spar with him. It was nothing but a waste of time.

“He offers something that you cannot give. If you don’t want to fight me, you must stay for nine days. Then, you will be free to go,” the Duanxian Cliffmaster said in a mild tone, his black sleeves fluttering in the wind.

The Central Prefecture’s King fell silent. If Su Yu had promised the Cliffmaster the Divine Nine-Dragon Cauldron, then it would indeed be something he could not give.

“I assume that means that you’re bent on stopping me somehow?” A crushing pressure poured out of the Central Prefecture’s King. Within seconds, the skies had turned into an endless stretch of golden clouds that streamed towards them, as if the imperial ruler had descended from the heavens.

However, the Duanxain Cliffmaster also stood his ground, unwilling to back down. Similarly, he released an overwhelming pressure, summoning dark clouds that groaned in the skies. It was as if a heavenly disaster was about to strike, the storm clouds obscuring half of the firmament. “If you insist on ignoring my warnings…”

From afar, one could see the sky split into two. One half was dark and the other half was golden.

The moment they stopped talking, the two different skies collided.

Neither the Duanxian Cliffmaster nor the Central Prefecture’s King moved from their initial positions.

It looked as if they were still and unmoving. However, they had, in fact, exchanged several hundred blows within a split second!

A drop of black blood made its way down from the corner of Duanxian Cliffmaster’s lips.

The Central Prefecture’s King, on the other hand, wavered slightly. A spark of surprise made its way into his orbs as he said in astonishment, “What a surprise! Who would’ve guessed such that the King of Darkness possessed such immense strength?”

The Duanxian Cliffmaster wiped the blood away from the corner of his mouth, then chuckled lightly. “Well, I’m afraid that no one would have guessed that the Central Prefecture’s King has touched the borders of divinity. You are the one who hid his strength the most. All the prefecture kings have been had!”

“Since you’re now in the know, why don’t you make way? You can never win against me,” the Central Prefecture’s King said emotionlessly.

The Duanxin Cliffmaster, however, shook his head. “No qualified merchant would stand aside and watch his investments go to waste! I have enough to battle you.”

In his heart, though, he smiled bitterly.

“Young man, I guess stalling him for nine days would be impossible. I could delay him for six days at most. For the remaining three, you’d have to fend for yourself!”

……

In the ruins of the Red Blood Palace, Su Yu opened his eyes and sighed in defeat.

Even with the help of the Honey of Hundred Flowers and Time Acceleration, he had made less progress than expected on both the Nine Dragons Devil Subduing Art and Demon Clan Inscriptions.

Within the unknown, there seemed to be a strength of obstruction that hindered him. Every time Su Yu reached a crucial point in his cultivation, he would be thrown off. Whenever he was about to understand something important, his mind would immediately go off track.

He was one step away from completely mastering the Nine Dragons Devil Subduing Art, and a line away from entirely understanding the Demon Clan Inscriptions.

However, he was being hindered by this unseen force.

Su Yu looked up at the skies above. The eyes of an outsider would see clear blue skies of the best of weather. However, to Su Yu, they brewed with stormy clouds and were entirely dark and sunless.

The auras of heavenly disasters tossed and turned in the clouds, ready to be unleashed at any moment.

It seemed like the heavenly tribulations were stopping the final stage of his cultivation.

Su Yu patted the dust off his clothes and stood up. Keeping away from the Five Elements Divine Prison and the Floating Life Door, he fixed his gaze at the dark clouds churning above him. He gave a slight smile. “Come for me! What can you do to me?”

It was almost as if Su Yu’s words had aggravated the heavenly disaster.

The endless stretch of darkened clouds suddenly boiled like rolling waves.

By allowing the line of sight to travel this far, the skies within a radius of tens of thousands of miles all howled and screeched in great fury.

Boom!

An earth-shattering thunder that threatened to split heaven and earth had finally befallen. It crashed into the land, shaking up the realm as the world trembled at the impact.

The ruins of the Red Blood Palace underneath his feet were instantly pulverized into specks and dust. A Fairy Confining Forest covering millions of miles was pounded to smithereens, along with every single trace of life within the forest.

Ancient valleys crumbled as the land punctured and split. In the roars of thunder, millions of mountains and rivers found themselves reduced to areas devoid of life.

Somewhere, a white-clad woman walked along the edge of the clouds. With a long sword on her back, she looked like an otherworldly swordswoman taking a stroll along the silver lining.

Even as the terrorizing roar of thunder extinguished millions of landscapes and lives, not even a piece of her sleeve was affected.

Her crystalline eyes seemed to contain the rules of heaven and earth. Her gaze traveled past the stretch of a million miles, bypassing the mountains and rivers and soared towards Su Yu’s location.

“The Tribulation of Three Nines. There was someone in the Jiuzhou continent who could go through such a tribulation? Was it the descendant of a deity?” The woman in white stopped walking. She had no intention of disturbing him.

The Tribulation of Three Nines was only tackled by heaven-defying geniuses. The description ‘heaven-defying’ would often only apply to descendants of deities.

“The Tribulation of Three Nines can be categorized as strong or weak. I wonder which category his Tribulation of Three Nines belongs to.”

At the Red Blood Palace.

Su Yu never noticed that millions of miles away, across the stretch of mountains and rivers, a horrifying existence was observing him undergo the tribulations in silence.

At the same time, within the rolling and boiling storm clouds, a pitch-black bolt of thunder as dark as ink slowly floated down.

Unlike typical thunderbolts, the pitch-black thunder was something he had never seen before. Instead of being shaped like a bolt, it looked like a feather. It was a pitch-black feather.

Su Yu had never seen a pitch-black thunderbolt, let alone a disaster thunder shaped like a feather.

A million miles away, the woman in white’s expression finally reflected her shock. “It looks like it was genuinely the descendant of a deity undergoing the tribulations. What appeared was the first-grade tribulation out of the Tribulation of Three Nines, the Tribulation of Thunderous Feather.”

The Tribulation of Three Nines was divided into nine grades. From the first to the ninth, the higher the grade of the Tribulation of Three-Nines, the stronger the punishment.

Even in the first-grade, the lowest grade of all, those who could survive it were far and few between. Such were the rules of the Great Way and the restrictions placed on the descendants of deities.

It was put in place to prevent the position of divinity from becoming hereditary.

When you put a descendant guided and taught personally by a deity beside an ordinary martial artist, who could achieve divinity more easily? It would, of course, be the descendant of a deity.

Even without the personal guidance of a deity, their descendants would have an abundance of resources. Not only that, but they would also carry the bloodline of divination from their ancestors.

If that were allowed to be the case, the descendants of deities would all become deities. At the same time, ordinary martial artists would forever lose the right to achieve divination.

That was the reason why every descendant of deities would need to undergo the Tribulation of three Nines if they were determined to achieve divinity.

As a result, only descendants of deities who had achieved the peak of the Mortal Fairy stage while being at the end of their lifespans would swear their determination to achieve divinity on the Great Way. It was a final fight before death, a last-ditch attempt to achieve divination.

On the other hand, the younger generation of those descended from deities rarely chose to swear their determination to achieve divinity on the Great Way.

“It is a mere first-grade tribulation. It must be a descendant of a deity in his final moments. Old and frail, there is no hope for him to break through to the peak of Mortal fairy,” the white-clad woman concluded mildly.

A first-grade tribulation. It meant that the Great Way had determined that he was not a threat, and a first-grade tribulation would be enough to sever his route to divinity!

“As a descendant of the deities, how could he choose to undergo the tribulation in Jiuzhou? Has he not thought that what he did would harm the spirit of the Jiuzhou continent?” The woman in white was displeased. Two beams of sword light shot out of her eyes and traveled millions of miles at once.

Wherever the beams of sword light passed, they replicated the environment within a million-mile radius.

Then, the light returned to her orbs, along with a detailed report of all happenings within a million-mile radius.

Such use of the sword was unparalleled and masterful; it was a technique second to none.

However, the powerful Mortal Fairy practicing the way of the sword could not help but gape slightly at the information she received. Her unmoving expression melted away somewhat as she gasped, “What’s going on? Why would it be a twenty-year-old young man undergoing this tribulation? Wait, he is just a Stage Nine fairy? What exactly is going on?”

The Tribulation of Three Nines was created especially for the descendants of deities. An ordinary martial artist would almost never experience something like that.

Besides, it will only surface when a Mortal Fairy is about to break through to divinity.

What happened before her eyes had overturned all common knowledge of the white-clad woman.

He was a mortal martial artist; moreover, a mere Stage Nine Fairy.

The heavens felt a need to oppress such a person with the Tribulation of Three Nines!

“Who is he? A twenty-year-old Fairy is not uncommon in the continent. Why would the Great Way regard him as a threat that needed to be eliminated from the face of the earth?” The woman in white slipped into deep contemplation.

A first-grade tribulation, when used on a dying Mortal Fairy at the peak of his cultivation stage, meant that one could easily deduce that the Great Way perceived them as a small threat.

However, at this very moment, it was not being used on a Mortal Fairy, nor an All Creations, or even a Divine Master for that matter. It was being used on a Stage Nine fairy!

Just how great a threat did the Great Way perceive that young man to be? One could easily guess from the tribulation it chose.

The white-clad woman stopped moving and locked her gaze firmly on that distant place.

Above the Red Blood Palace, Su Yu stared intently at the pitch-black thunderbolt shaped like a feather. Goosebumps stood out all over his body. It was an instinctive reaction to life-threatening danger.

“This… Isn’t the Tribulation of Three nines a tad too much?” Su Yu glanced at the million-mile radius of mountains and rivers now devoid of life and shifted his gaze back at the Thunderous Feather that had made his hair stand on his end. He could not shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, something had gone wrong.