Yuan Wuji was still kneeling over the Old Matriarch's body when he felt it. A tremor in the fabric of the tomb's false sky. He looked up, and the grief drained from his face like water from a cracked cup.
"So that's where you've been hiding," he murmured. Then he laughed, loud and triumphant. "The Nine Tripod Cauldrons! No wonder I couldn't find them!"
His brow flared with spirit sense. Behind him, nine grotto-heavens manifested—vast, bottomless urns with the color of primordial chaos. They merged into one, a single world-devouring vessel whose surface rippled with complex patterns of dao.
The already-tilting sky of Mount Li's tomb began to fall into that urn.
Lady Yuan staggered back. The power Yuan Wuji displayed was monstrous. This was not the careful, precise Primordial Dao Heavenly Sensing that the Yuan family had passed down for generations. That art required delicacy—subtle communion with the hidden heavens.
What Yuan Wuji wielded was hunger. Devouring.
*The Yellow Court Dao Validation Technique did this?* she wondered. *Or something else?*
She remembered stories. Nuo immortals who entered Inner-Realm Subtle Transformation and emerged as hollow shells. If you looked at the back of their heads, you could see a thin line of light, a paper-thin seam where something had cut them open and emptied them out.
Lady Yuan's gaze drifted to Yuan Wuji's skull.
Nothing. No line of light. She exhaled—
Then Yuan Wuji turned his head to look at her.
His shoulders didn't move. His neck rotated like a paper tube crumpling in on itself, hollow beneath the skin. His face was perfectly calm.
"Don't worry about me," he said, turning back to the sky. He sounded almost annoyed. "Whatever force has entered this place, I'll crush it. Show yourself!"
His voice boomed through the tomb. The Xiyi Domain unfolded behind him—celestial river, three passes, Jade Capital, spirit bridge glowing with immortal light, Twelve Towers blazing, five sacred mountains erupting with radiance.
He was no longer hiding his true cultivation.
The sky cracked from east to west. The false heavens split apart like tearing silk, revealing a single massive eye that filled the entire sky. Its pupil focused on Yuan Wuji.
A cacophony of voices poured into his mind.
Yuan Wuji laughed, blood trickling from his eyes and ears. "You can't break my will! Nothing in this world can stand against me!"
The eye blinked.
Yuan Wuji crumpled. His chest caved inward like a paper lantern stepped on. But the urn grotto-heaven blazed brighter, flames of shattered space raging around it as it tried to devour the abyssal eye itself.
The tomb shook. Mountains crumbled. And then the first cauldron emerged.
A massive ding, its outer walls carved with rivers and mountains. The landscape projections within the tomb flickered and vanished as the true form of Liangzhou Cauldron revealed itself.
"The Zhou King's Nine Tripods!" Zhu Chanchan gasped. "I knew I'd seen them before!"
One by one, the remaining cauldrons manifested, arranged in the nine provinces pattern. The entire geography of Mount Li's tomb had been an illusion woven by these nine artifacts.
Four thousand years ago, the Qin Empire's cultivators had used them as blueprints to build an underworld kingdom.
* * *
Su Yan and Veyon's consciousnesses were still tethered to the cauldrons when the second force grabbed them. The giant eye in the abyss pulled one way; Yuan Wuji's urn pulled the other.
They didn't hesitate. Using the moment of tension, they wrenched their spirit senses free and shot upward along the tripod connections, back toward their bodies.
They opened their eyes.
Before them, Yuan Wuji raged, his urn-grotto tearing at the sky. And beside them, Lady Yuan smiled with terrible relief.
"Veyon," she whispered. "The Yuan family is yours now. Elder Xiao—treat her as you would me."
Veyon's eyes widened. "Mother—"
Lady Yuan moved. She drifted behind Yuan Wuji and struck the back of his head with a palm strike of pure, desperate love.
"Run!"
The seam on Yuan Wuji's skull split open. Light poured out.
The cauldrons lurched toward the sky, pulled by the abyssal eye. Yuan Wuji scrambled to regain control—and Su Yan grabbed Veyon's hand.
"Flying Peak!" he roared.
Zhu Chanchan understood instantly. She summoned her mountain peak and sent it crashing into Yuan Wuji from the side. He raised one hand to block. The mountain slammed down, pinning him beneath its weight.
The shockwave threw them all backward.
"Seventh Master, open the umbrella!" Su Yan shouted.
Yuan Qi unfurled the green paper umbrella. A azure sun rose from it, shielding them as they tumbled through the collapsing tomb. The umbrella's light flickered, dying.
Lady Yuan appeared before them. Her eight grotto-heavens blazed as she caught the rebounding Flying Peak in midair and hurled it toward the exit, carrying Su Yan and the others with it.
"Go!"
The peak shot through the dissolving sky of Mount Li, breaking free of the tomb entirely.
Lady Yuan fell to her knees, blood on her lips. In the distance, Yuan Wuji's skin tore like old paper, and the thing inside emerged—a being of pure light and bottomless hunger.
"Four thousand years," it said, in a voice that was not Yuan Wuji's. "And this is the first time I've been wounded."
Lady Yuan didn't run. She opened her heavenly-man sensing and charged, a moth made of starlight diving into a flame that could swallow worlds.
"Monster!" she screamed. "Fall with me!"
The being of light raised one hand. The Nine Tripod Cauldrons froze in the sky. Grotto-heavens of chaos and flame bloomed behind it—countless realms, incompatible, wrong.
"Foolish."
It flicked one finger. Lady Yuan's spirit sense shattered. She fell, life draining from her eyes.
But in her last moment, she saw golden light descend from the heavens. A figure in a golden cape, walking on air, nine cauldrons orbiting him like planets.
"My cauldrons," the First Emperor said. "And you thought you could take them?"
Tai'a sword flashed from the stars. The being of light retreated, again and again, blood spraying with every stroke.
It leaped into the void and vanished, laughing. "First Emperor! You only win because of your treasures. In skill, you are nothing!"
Lady Yuan closed her eyes and smiled.
*She got away,* she thought. *My daughter got away.*
The First Emperor looked down at the fallen woman, puzzled. "So weak. Why fight so hard? Strange."
He turned, his golden cape sweeping across the ruins. The Nine Tripod Cauldrons flew into his Xiyi Domain. He raised Tai'a and walked in the direction the Flying Peak had fled.
"My Undying Immortal," he murmured. "You must still be alive."
The ground split open, swallowed Lady Yuan's body, and closed again. When the cape passed, nothing remained.