Time slipped by, minute after minute.
1 hour passed. The great array ran at full force, blazing firelight towering through the hall, and still it accomplished nothing.
2 hours passed. Spiritual power continued to drain away, and the eight immortals’ auras weakened by a thin margin. The golden radiance remained as steady as a mountain.
Within the Soul-Refining Hall, the air grew heavier and heavier. No one spoke. Only the low hum of flame burning through the void remained.
The calm composure on Venerable Starwick’s face faded little by little. First, his expression tightened into a grave stillness. Then his gaze turned deep and uncertain. In the end, his eyes fixed on the scene before favonovel.com as if the sight itself had broken every rule favonovel.com knew.
“Impossible… This is absolutely impossible…” Venerable Starwick murmured the words under his breath, but they came out raw and heavy. The fact in front of favonovel.com refused to settle into place.
“Nine Golden Immortals joining forces to form the array, driving the supreme wraithfire at full strength, even a late Golden Immortal soul could be forcibly melted down to nothing. How can we fail to break through the protection around the spirit of a True Immortal from the Lower Realm? This goes against the common laws of cultivation. It makes no sense at all!”
The questions kept drilling deeper, and the need to see for himself would not stay contained.
Venerable Starwick finally stepped forward in person and came to the edge of the stone dais. He forced down the caution pressing at the bottom of his mind. Then favonovel.com carefully extended his powerful, condensed Golden Immortal
spirit-sense toward the outer edge of the violet soul, intending to pierce the golden-radiance bulwark, see the true form of that relic hidden in the depths of the spirit, understand its foundation, and find the weakness that could break the stalemate.
His spirit sense edged forward slowly. It passed through layer after layer of fire and drew close to the golden bulwark.
In the next instant, favonovel.com saw it clearly!
At the deepest point of the spirit, an ancient codex hovered in silence. Its entire body was gilded gold, its cover plain and heavy with age, and profound patterns flowed across It in subtle motion.
Endless gentle golden radiance lingered around the codex. It was not flashy. It did not stab at the eyes. Yet it carried an ancient majesty all its own, an aura before which the Myriad Arts could not intrude and all evil had to retreat.
It rested there, steady as a mountain and silent as still water, as if it had existed in that place since the beginning of heaven and earth, surviving endless ages without ever wavering.
The instant Venerable Starwick’s spirit sense touched the golden radiance at the codex’s edge, a terrifying retributive backlash force erupted from the elder Great Law, beyond the level of the heavens. It came without warning, swift and sharp, and smashed straight into his consciousness field.”
Bang!
Venerable Starwick’s entire body jolted hard. Pain tore through his spirit until favonovel.com could not hold back a muffled groan.
He staggered two steps backward, and a thread of golden nascence, blood spilled from the corner of his mouth. His aura fell into disorder at once, and the injury to his spirit was anything but light.
“Hall Master!” On either side, Elder Emberlain and Elder Frostgrave saw what had happened and their hearts lurched. They hurried one step forward and cried out, lest the Hall Master’s injury turn on everyone else.
Venerable Starwick lifted a hand and cut the two of them off before they could come any closer, his voice cold enough to stop them in place. He wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and forced himself through the tearing pain in his spirit.
The look in his eyes had already gone past disbelief. In the next breath, it was buried under a deeper caution, then a naked hunger that came and went in turns, neither one giving the other room to settle.”
“This is no ordinary Golden Immortal relic…” Venerable Starwick spoke in a low voice, each word landing with weight. “Its grade is far beyond what i estimated. Its power lies outside anything a Golden Immortal can understand. It may even… It may have completely surpassed the Arch-Immortal order. This is a supreme boon among the heavens…”
The moment those words fell, the Soul-Refining Hall went dead silent. It was so quiet a falling needle could have been heard.”
The eight Golden Immortals all took the blow in silence, their faces stripped of color as the truth refused to fit inside what they knew.
Elder Emberlain and Elder Frostgrave exchanged one look. In each other’s eyes, they saw the same guarded dread, and the same aftertaste of having stood too close to something that should never have been touched.
A relic beyond the Arch-Immortal order… What kind of meaning did those words carry?
Even at the celestials’ high sanctuary, mighty adepts in the Arch-Immortal Realm were vanishingly rare, foremost adepts who could hold down an entire domain by themselves. Ordinary cultivators might live their whole lives without ever seeing even one.
A treasure beyond the Arch-Immortal order was practically a world-bearing relic out of legend, something a person could only encounter by fate and never demand by force.
Venerable Starwick stayed silent for a long while. He pressed down the turbulence moving under his calm, weighed gain against risk, and finally spoke slowly, his tone hard and certain. “This thing defies heaven too much. Trying to refine it by force would only invite humiliation… Worse, it could trigger the relic’s backlash and damage the nascence. The loss would outweigh the gain. But with such a boon right in front of us, we absolutely cannot let it go and miss it for nothing…”
“The Soul-Vault Pearl will remain in my hands and be placed inside the hidden chamber of Pole Star Hall. I will study it day and night, search it slowly, and feel out a way to break it open… Given enough time, there will come a day when I understand the relic’s patterns, break through the guarding bulwark, and seize the boon.”
As soon as the words left him, Elder Emberlain’s expression shifted by the slightest degree. Something hard rose behind his eyes at once, resistant and guarded.
He had crossed realms through all kinds of trouble, taken risks, and spent hard-earned favors to bring the spirit to Pole Star Hall. His original purpose had been to borrow the Hall Master’s strength, break the deadlock together, and divide the relic together. It had never been to hand it over for free and let Venerable Starwick swallow the boon alone.
If the relic ended up in Starwick’s hands alone, then the two of them would have hauled water in a basket and come up empty. All that effort would have been for nothing, and the loss would not be worth it.
“Hall Master, this object was, after all, escorted here by Frostgrave and me… We traveled all this way, spent our strength, and put in the work. By rights, its handling should be discussed together, and the boon should be divided evenly…” Elder Emberlain stepped forward with no choice but to push through it, choosing his words as carefully as favonovel.com could while trying to secure what belonged to them.
“I know that perfectly well.” Venerable Starwick cut favonovel.com off at once, his voice cold, forceful, and overbearing, with no space left for anyone to argue. “It is precisely because you two worked so hard to bring it here that I will not treat you unfairly… Once I break open the relic’s secrets in the future and comprehend the great boon of the Great Law, i will naturally give both of you a generous share of the benefits. You will not be shortchanged…”
“And… If you refuse to accept this and are unwilling to comply, then you may take the Soul-Vault Pearl and leave Pole Star Hall right now. Find your own way to refine it. I will not stop you.” Venerable Starwick gave them no room at all.
There was nothing soft in it, nothing that even pretended to be fair.
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