“It, me… it’s all the same if you’re going to be eaten anyway. Why not let me have you instead? Do you hate me so much?” Violetgrave feigned heartbreak, but her voice was filled with enchantment.

Lu Yun turned a deaf ear and put the sword away. “I can’t look at it or try to sense it… well, I’ll just ignore it for now. Let’s get rid of the extinction layout here first.” Really, there wasn’t much else he could do.

Qi Hai gawked at the young man’s apparent callousness for his dire situation. Anyone else would be weeping in fear right now and begging the world for a solution.

“Think about it, it’s been quite a while since I refined the hearts’ blood and it hasn’t come for me all this time… but as soon as I enter this tomb and reach where the tomb’s owner is buried, it just pounces on me?” Lu Yun explained as he looked over the scarlet hanging coffin.

The rotten flesh was almost thirty meters tall, a mass of writhing yellowish-grey that looked incomparably sticky on Lu Yun’s back. A tilt of his head was all he needed to catch a glance of it in his peripheral vision.

“Plus, why would it only attack me after I see or sense it?” he couldn’t help but add.

Qi Hai shook his head. He couldn’t answer that, either.

“Perhaps someone refined it into this tomb. If I break the part of the tomb that this thing is connected to, I may very well be able to get rid of it. Of course, it’s possible that I’ll set it loose on the outside world too.

“Anyways, are the Sacred Origin Runes really that complicated?” A wave of Lu Yun’s hand caused the floating Yin and Yang Formation Orbs to fuse back into a congruous whole. “A divine emperor’s dao runes? I’m sure they’re high level, but they’re just another kind of formation or talisman rune in the end. They’re a pattern meant to summon a greater power from heaven and earth.”

Taking out an immortal crystal, the young man began drawing in the empty space in front of him.

“What are you doing? Stop that immediately!” Qi Hai was scared out of his wits.

He wanted to break up what Lu Yun was doing, but his current host was merely an ordinary Infernum. Although he was stronger than Lu Yun, he was beholden to the youth’s control. The Sacred Origin Runes were an emperor’s masterwork, inextricably tied to the dao! Such a thing was forbidden to ordinary beings!

“I’m copying the runes, of course,” Lu Yun responded matter-of-factly. “If I want to crack the code, I need to first understand it.”

Boom!

The space he drew on exploded with dark golden light. The runes he replicated shattered, and the corresponding runes upon the hanging coffin flickered for a brief moment.

“Aha!” Lu Yun’s eyes lit up. His fingers began dancing through the air. The immortal crystal disintegrated at top speed, fusing itself into the path he traced.

“W-what are you doing?!” Qi Hai stared open-mouthed at the young man. Cracking the code of the divine emperor’s Sacred Origin Runes? No one had dared voice such a thing even in the era of human dao, to say nothing of actually putting their words into action.

“Do you remember what I said before? What happens to one will affect the other! The twin layouts here will make sure of that. When I copy the Sacred Origin Runes and make a mirrored layout here, I’ll be able to affect the real thing through that!” Lu Yun brimmed with confidence.

“Ah… didn’t you say you can’t actually do that?” Qi Hai couldn’t tell which part of Lu Yun’s words were real or fake any more.

“I was lying to Lu Shenhou. He had the Sword of Chaos so he wasn’t going to be caught that easily. How could I reveal my trump card in front of him?”

The young man began working anew as he spoke. He was more careful this time, however; the runes he mimicked now were a hundred times weaker than the last copy. Thankfully, it was because of this comparative weakness that the copied runes weren’t destroyed by the originals on the coffin.

“You really managed to copy the divine emperor’s Sacred Origin Runes!” Incredulity was the only thing on Qi Hai’s mind.

“That idiot over there can’t even break through my double Ghost Hits Wall. What kinda ‘divine emperor’ is he?” Lu Yun pointed at the Exalted Celestial Emperor still bumbling about the layout in the darkness. “Although these Sacred Origin Runes were invented by a divine emperor, completing them requires his descendants’ own understanding.

“If the runes here were set up by the Exalted Divine Emperor himself… even at this distance, we’d be dead! Thankfully we got that fool over there instead, but too bad the runes are imbued with a bloodline requirement. Anyone who isn’t one of the emperor’s descendants can’t make use of their full power.”

Lu Yun was a bit disappointed. By now, he’d copied down the entirety of the runes on the coffin. Instead of stopping there, he began to retrace his current foundation. Each iteration of imitation thickened the duplicate of the Sacred Origin Runes.

Qi Hai fell silent and kept a watchful eye on the pile of flesh on Lu Yun’s back. If it made a single wrong twitch, he wouldn’t hesitate to transplant it onto himself through whatever means he could.

“If that Exalted Celestial Emperor is a descendant of a divine emperor… his body must be that of an Exalted Divine,” Lu Yun murmured to himself. “Is there any relation between him and the two that buried Su Xiaoxiao?”

After who knew how long, he finally came to a conclusive stop. A tiny scarlet coffin hung in the air in front of him, wrapped in a layer of dark gold runes. The entire exhibit was an exact duplicate of the real thing, a mirror in miniature.

One real, one fake.

Suddenly, Lu Yun shrugged as he felt an increasing weight on his back; the scent of decay entered his nostrils.

“Don’t turn back!” Qi Hai hastily reminded him, seeing his head begin to turn.

The young man recovered himself immediately. He closed his eyes and gave his head a vigorous shake. The pressure on his back and the rotten smell went away.

“I must’ve touched something it finds dangerous! That’s why it actively attacked me.” His attention back on the coffin, Lu Yun was invigorated by the prospect. “There must be something in the real coffin that can counter the rotten flesh!”

He produced another immortal crystal, with which he began to draw over the Sacred Origin Runes on the mirrored coffin.

The twin layout was already taking effect. Every line he drew on the mirror image affected the main, and tiny lines began snaking over the Sacred Origin Runes.