The Forbidden Path to Immortality-Chapter 251

Li Xun took a step forward, then suddenly jerked back. A long zzz sound echoed through the stuffy space, followed almost instantly by a sharp pop as the loose soil split open, forming a small hole out of nowhere.

He hummed. The Bottomless Nether Ring whirled faster, and he shot out a hand like lightning.

The dirt and stones around him didn’t slow him down at all. His three fingers hooked back, catching something slick and writhing. It struggled wildly for a moment, but the instant he tightened his grip, it went still.

The yin fire around him flared and shrank, carving out a small space. With his other hand, he rubbed his fingers together, and a tiny flicker of bluish-green fire sprang to life at his fingertips.

In the firelight, Li Xun saw what he had caught.

It was a long, grey creature. Hard to tell whether it was more worm or snake. No clear head or tail, its body covered in tiny scales, and a bright red stripe ran straight from one end to the other. The yin fire had charred it halfway through, leaving it cooked soft and very much dead.

A Blood-Drip Thread?

The sect’s records described it as a monster that lived deep underground. Drawn to darkness, terrified of fire, and highly poisonous. It thrived near pure yin veins and yin nodes, feeding on the surrounding energy. And more importantly, it was known to share its lair with another kind of creature.

A flicker of thought, and Li Xun twisted to the side. The yin fire around him surged outward. Its tongues of flame licked through the dirt and stone, and a faint burnt smell drifted into his nose. He reached out and pinched something from the rubble.

Just as I thought... where there’s a Blood-Drip Thread, there’s always a Cold Fungus close by.

Between his fingers was a tiny, bead-shaped bug, no bigger than his fingertip. Its life force was far tougher than the Blood-Drip Thread’s; even scorched by the yin fire, it had curled into a tight ball, a hard shell wrapped around its body as it clung stubbornly to life.

Li Xun didn’t rush to finish it off. He kept searching through the earth, picking out one after another of the little things. Only after he’d collected more than a dozen did he gather them in his palm and burn them all with a steady wash of yin fire.

In the heat, even the hardy Cold Fungus couldn’t hold out for long. One by one they melted away, until all that remained in Li Xun’s palm were a few specks of fine ash.

He blew lightly, scattering the gray dust. But in the flickering firelight, he clearly saw a few faint glimmers. He waved his hand through the air, and the tiny lights floated back into his palm.

After rubbing his hands a few times, he opened his palm again. Lying there was a tiny crystal. Barely larger than a grain of dust.

He inched closer, peering at it from every angle. After staring for what felt like ages, Li Xun finally let out a long breath. Cold Fungus forms crystals by feeding on Qi… judging by how pure this is, it must be right.

With the Cold Fungus as his guide, Li Xun didn’t have to struggle at all. In less than a half-hour, he found the source of the yin qi.

One glance was enough for him to know... For now at least, Heaven was still on his side.

Lying before him was a piece of pale-green jade. Even buried deep underground, it gave off a soft, hazy glow. Around it, several yards of space were mysteriously clear, as if the jade had carved out its own little clearing. The green light churned and folded over itself in the tight confines, thickening until it looked like drifting mist, shadows flickering inside it.

The glowing mist looked breathtakingly beautiful, but after standing there for just a moment, Li Xun noticed countless tiny cold-mussel insects crawling toward it, only to evaporate the instant they touched it, like moths diving into a flame, endless and unthinking.

The soil and rocks around the mist had clearly been warped. They were pitted and riddled with holes, yet still managed to seal the mist in tightly. Any stray wisp that slipped out was quickly pulled in by the surrounding yin qi and absorbed into the earth, carried away along the earth's veins.

Drawing a deep breath, Li Xun tore off a corner of his robe and carefully reached it into the glowing fog.

Without a sound or vibration, he lightly touched it. And half of the Wusong Iron cloth he’d used was simply… gone. It didn’t even have time to burn; it vanished without a trace.

Good… good! This really is Nine Netherworld Earth Qi!

Li Xun rubbed his palms together, noticing they were starting to sweat.

Maybe the jade itself had diluted it a little, but this had to be qi flowing out from the Yin-Transforming Pool. On its way through the earth, it must have been drawn in by this naturally formed piece of jade and gathered here.

In nearly two hundred years, the amount that had been collected was impressive. Even the leftover vapor drifting off it was enough to create a massive zone of yin qi hundreds of li away.

It wasn’t just the Nine Netherworld Earth Qi... this jade that had absorbed it for centuries was no ordinary stone either. You could easily imagine that if it were refined and combined with a top-tier refining technique, the magical artifact created from it would be terrifyingly strong.

Unfortunately, for someone like Li Xun, who barely knew the basics of refining magical tools, such fantasies were better left alone. He kept his eyes on the jade and slowly reached out his fingers.

Sparks crackled and spat within the dreamlike mist. The moment his own qi brushed against the jade’s aura, they reacted violently. In the struggle between consuming and being consumed, Li Xun’s fingers trembled, each joint creaking and groaning under the strain.

Just as his fingers were about to be crushed out of shape, a faint glow slowly dripped from his fingertip. A pale gray-white shimmer, weak at first glance, yet carrying a purity far beyond the billowing light mist that filled the room. In that instant, the bluish glow all around seemed to dim.

Bit by bit, the shimmer gathered and took form, turning into a small, transparent bead spinning lightly above Li Xun’s fingertip, the gray-white aura folding neatly into it.

At first glance, the bead’s once-smooth surface was now covered in tiny cracks, with bits seemingly chipped away. It looked as if even the lightest tap might shatter it into pieces.

This… was the Heaven's Nether Yin Pearl.

Come to think of it, this bead that could easily rank among the top treasures of the entire Tongxuan Realm, had really been through a lot since falling into Li Xun’s hands. First, it got damaged when he forced it to power two Nethermyst Puppets. It had barely recovered to seventy or eighty percent when Nether One’s kick sent it straight back into disaster. By now, its condition was almost beyond repair.

Because of that, the badly damaged bead had developed an almost greedy hunger for the Nine Netherworld Earth Qi it depended on. While it was being nurtured inside Li Xun’s body, he could never supply enough to satisfy it. But now that it was out in the open and surrounded by such abundant energy, it instinctively began drawing in as much as it could.

Even on the verge of collapse, the Heaven's Nether Yin Pearl was like the saying, “a starved camel is still bigger than a horse.” Inside it, the last traces of its pure Nine Netherworld Earth Qi acted like a giant magnet, pulling in all nearby energy of the same kind. The bluish mist within several yards didn’t stand a chance. Within a few breaths, it was sucked away as if into a bottomless pit.

The cracked pearl shuddered, though its surface barely changed. That tiny bit of nourishment was nothing to it, a drop in the ocean. Naturally, it turned toward the temptation coming from the jade stone, humming with a faint, buzzing tremor.

Li Xun chuckled and stepped through the barrier.

Even with all the blue mist drained away, the primordial qi here was still much stronger than outside. He took a deep breath, feeling his mind clear a little. After thinking it over, he finally let go of his control over the pearl.

With a soft buzz, the treasure shot upward as if it had sprouted wings, circling above the jade stone. The stone reacted at once, shivering lightly as streaks of blue light streamed upward, pouring into the pearl like rivers returning to the sea.

The pearl must have been starving. After only a couple of loops, the jade’s glow had already dimmed by more than half. It looked ready to drain the two centuries’ worth of Nine Netherworld Earth Qi the stone had stored. Alarmed, Li Xun flicked his finger through the air, severing the flow of qi between them.

The pearl hummed unwillingly, but Li Xun couldn’t allow it to break this only lead he had. He tightened his control, carefully guiding the pearl to hover slowly above the jade.

Through the pearl, Li Xun’s sense of the Nine Netherworld Earth Qi was more than ten times sharper than usual. He quickly got a result.

“Got it!”

Having traced that seemingly endless vein, Li Xun felt like bursting into song to release his excitement. In the end, though, he settled for punching the air and stomping his feet a couple of times.

There was no doubt about it. The gate to the Yin-Transforming Pool had essentially opened itself to him…

Blocking out everything else, he plunged back into another stretch of lightless days. After at least ten days of groping his way forward, Li Xun’s outstretched fingers finally brushed against what felt like a metal wall.

He flinched, then broke into a grin. He didn’t need to see it; the moment his fingertips traced those distinctive patterns, he knew. This was the first layer of the sect’s sacred defenses -- the “Five-Escape Barrier.”

The so-called Five-Escape Barrier. was a strange construct that canceled all five-element escape techniques. It’s not exactly metal, not exactly wood, and had been refined through hundreds of steps. On top of that, the sect’s ancestors have blessed and protected it for generations, making it capable of blocking any Five Elements escape technique.

Nearly a hundred Five-Escape Barriers were arranged in a special pattern, forming a powerful restriction that could defend, alert, attack, and even confuse anyone who tries to get through.

But the most important thing was that the Five-Escape Barriers were really just a distraction.

The Yin-Transforming Pool itself drifted unpredictably with the flow of primordial qi. No restriction could actually contain it.

So the sect set up the restrictions here as a kind of rough marker. Put nicely, they were a reference point. Put bluntly… they were just there to fool anyone with bad intentions.

You could spend ten thousand years here and still wouldn’t find the place!

Li Xun, of course, took it as a guide. So that means I’m a thousand li underground?

With that point of reference, he immediately got a sense of north, south, east, and west. Up and down too. Suddenly, everything in his mind became clear, and he started thinking a lot more.

On an ordinary day, a thousand li wouldn’t sound like much. But being deep underground... almost reaching the Nine Netherworlds Domain and directly beneath the sect’s heart... it felt like something else entirely.

In the end, Li Xun shook his head and smiled, got around the barrier, and kept following the thin, thread-like trail of yin qi downward.

The closer he got, the more unpredictable the yin veins became. Sometimes a single ripple could throw him off by dozens of li.

According to the Underworld Flame Yama, this happened because it wasn’t the day of ancestral rites. The world didn’t have enough spirit qi to pin the Yin-Transforming Pool in place, so it drifted, leaving signs like this.

For Li Xun, that meant trouble. One careless moment and the pool’s sudden drift could throw off his sense of it completely. Then he’d have to start all over again. Even with his sharp focus and iron will, after a few rounds of this, a thin sheen of cold sweat had formed on his forehead.

This was a hundred times harder than the grueling search he’d been on for the past ten days.

Li Xun’s mind was stretched to its limit, like a string about to snap. His body was no longer moving by conscious thought. He was running purely on that faint thread of sensing, letting instinct pull him along. Heart moves, body follows. Without even realizing it, he was darting back and forth through the vast depths of the earth as if his life depended on it. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Then -- BOOM!