Wei stood in the silent, grey wasteland, the half-erased token of the Sky Eagle Sect resting in his palm. The implications of his discovery were profound. The Void Corruption did not just erase the land; it repurposed its most powerful inhabitants, twisting them into mindless, paradoxical guardians. This was not an empty graveyard. It was a minefield, and the mines were the souls of fallen masters.
His mission had changed. He was no longer just a diagnostician studying a plague. He was now a hunter, but his prey was not flesh and blood. He was hunting ghosts, echoes of a bygone era, and each one was a potential source of information. The Sect Master had tasked him with finding the source of the corruption, and these twisted remnants were the only signposts in this land of nothing.
He stored the token carefully. His 'Domain of Abyssal Stillness' was active, a constant, passive field that pushed back against the unraveling laws of the world, creating a small, stable bubble of reality around him. Within this domain, he could think clearly, his spiritual energy flowing smoothly. It was his only sanctuary.
He began to move, not randomly, but with a new, deliberate purpose. He followed the great, vein-like channels of corruption that snaked across the landscape. His theory was simple: where the spiritual meridians of the world had been strongest, the corruption would be deepest, and the remnants of the most powerful cultivators would be found.
He traveled for another week, using the Art of the Star-Stepping Phantom to cross vast, featureless plains of grey. The silence was a constant companion, broken only by the faint, internal hum of the 'Rune of Unchanging Self' inscribed upon his soul, a constant reminder that he was an anchor of reality in a world that had forgotten its own rules.
It was in a place that might have once been a great mountain pass that he found his next target. The space between two blurred, half-erased peaks was not empty. It was filled with a shimmering, geometric lattice of faint, golden light. The lattice was constantly shifting, folding in on itself in impossible, non-Euclidean angles. It was beautiful, intricate, and utterly deadly. Any dust or debris that drifted into the lattice was instantly sliced into perfect, microscopic cubes and then erased from existence.
Wei stopped, his eyes narrowed in academic appreciation. "A formation," he murmured to himself. "Or what's left of one."
This was not a mindless, flickering serpent. This was a structured, defensive pattern. It was the echo of a powerful formation master, their final, desperate act of defiance against the void now playing out on an endless loop.
As he watched, a figure began to coalesce in the center of the lattice. It was humanoid, but its body was composed of shifting, translucent geometric shapes—cubes, tetrahedrons, and spheres—all held together in a fragile, shimmering whole. It had no face, only a single, glowing point of golden light where its head should be. This was the remnant of the formation master, a being now made of pure, sentient geometry.
Wei knew his previous trick would not work. The 'Void-Bane' was a tool of absolute erasure. Using it on the ground beneath this creature would be pointless; the creature was not anchored to the ground, but to the formation it was projecting. To defeat it, he had to solve the puzzle of the formation itself.
He extended a single, invisible thread of his Stygian Weaver's Silk, a tool that could phase between the physical and ethereal planes. He sent it probing towards the shimmering lattice. The moment the thread touched one of the golden lines, a wave of complex, esoteric knowledge flowed back to him. It was not a conscious thought, but a stream of pure data—the principles of the formation, its energy flows, its purpose. It was a defensive array called the 'Thousand-Layered Diamond Prison', a legendary formation of the fallen Golden Pagoda Sect.
The geometric entity in the center of the formation seemed to sense the intrusion. The single point of golden light fixed on Wei's position, and the lattice began to shift, its patterns contracting. It was preparing to trap him.
Wei did not retreat. He was a poison master, but his understanding of formations, learned through decades of friendship and debate with Elder Guan, was not shallow. He saw the beauty in the array, the genius of its construction. He also saw its fatal flaw.
The formation was a perfect, self-contained loop. It drew energy from the chaotic void, filtered it through its own internal logic, and used it to sustain its own existence. It was a perpetual motion machine of defensive power. But it was a closed system. It had no external power source to draw upon, only the chaotic energy it could trap within its own boundaries.
"You are a masterpiece," Wei said, his voice filled with a cold, genuine respect. "But you are a memory. And memories can be starved."
He did not attack the entity. He did not attack the formation. He attacked the space around the formation.
He opened his inner world and drew out not a poison, but a tool: his Cauldron of Myriad Venoms. It hovered before him, its dark, swirling surface pulsing with a hungry light. He then began to pour his own spiritual energy into it, activating one of its lesser-used functions: absorption.
The cauldron became a silent, spiritual vortex. It began to draw in the frayed, chaotic spiritual energy from the surrounding area. It was a slow, laborious process, like draining an ocean with a single cup. But Wei was a Spirit Emperor, and his reserves were vast.
The geometric entity seemed to become agitated. The lattice of golden light began to flicker, its movements becoming more frantic. It sensed its fuel source being cut off. It tried to expand, to reach further for more energy, but Wei's cauldron was relentless, creating a zone of absolute energy-starvation around the formation.
For a full day and night, a silent battle of attrition was waged. Wei stood unmoving, pouring his energy into the cauldron, while the entity's formation slowly, almost imperceptibly, began to dim. It was a battle of foundations, and Wei's was absolute, anchored by the rune on his soul and sustained by the pill in his belly. The entity was an echo, a memory running on fumes.
Finally, with a faint, sorrowful chime that seemed to echo across the planes of reality, the golden lattice flickered one last time and died. The geometric entity at its center collapsed, its constituent shapes falling apart and dissolving into motes of golden light.
As the light faded, two objects fell to the ground. The first was a small, golden, pagoda-shaped artifact, cracked and damaged, its spiritual light almost completely extinguished. This was the formation core, the object to which the master's soul had been anchored. The second object was a fragment of a jade slip.
Wei walked forward and picked them up. He infused the jade slip fragment with his spiritual sense. It contained only a single, desperate, and incomplete sentence:
"...the heart of the Northern Crown... the First Emperor's Tomb... it is not a tomb... it is a..."
The message cut off there, the rest of the jade slip having been erased by the corruption.
Wei stood, the fragment in his hand. The Northern Crown was the common name for the massive, circular mountain range that dominated the continent's northernmost region. And the First Emperor's Tomb was a place of pure myth, a legend spoken of in hushed tones. The First Emperor was a being from the dawn of time, a mythical figure said to have been the first to unify the continent, a cultivator whose power was said to have rivaled the gods themselves. His tomb was rumored to be a place of unimaginable treasure and absolute death.
The message was clear. The source of the Void Corruption was located at the mythical tomb. And it was not a tomb. It was something else.
He now had a destination. His journey was no longer a blind search. He had a target.
He looked at the cracked, golden pagoda in his other hand. He could feel the faint, lingering echo of the formation master's will within it, a will of pure, stubborn defiance. He had not fought this enemy with poison. He had fought it with logic, with a deeper understanding of its own nature. It was a battle he had enjoyed immensely.
He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod of respect to the fallen master. Then, he stored the artifacts and took a single step, vanishing into a crack in reality, his path now aimed directly at the frozen, legendary lands of the Northern Crown.