Lu Yun was at a complete loss for what to do next.

“I’m paying way too high a price to capture this kui.” Dismay and distress crept in.

Advantages went hand-in-hand with disadvantages when returning to hell. For one, he couldn’t advance his cultivation when inside. He could only research the supplemental paths and others, or restore his energy and stamina.

To use it as a means of escape was even less feasible, since he’d return to the outside world at the exact moment he’d gone inside. The same danger would reappear in front of him once more.

“Well, let’s forget about that for now. I need to deal with Kui first. Resurrection!” A bolt of black brilliance shot from his fingertip and sank into Kui, generating an imperceptible ripple that softly shook the creature’s giant frame, whereupon it opened its eyes.

“I’m not dead?” Kui’s muffled and somewhat naive voice sounded out. “No, I did die, but I’ve come back to life! What happened? Where am I?”

The creature scrambled back to its foot and studied the surroundings with its dark golden eyes.

“Are you the reason behind all this?” It immediately spotted the bug that’d tried desecrating its body earlier: Lu Yun. It certainly recalled the human.

Back in Azure Province, it’d been this very youth who’d used the Yi Wood Cleansing Thunder to lure it out of the celestial master tomb. Though Kui had already been a corpse divine back then, it still retained its memories from that time.

“How did you become so powerful?” The aura Lu Yun was currently exuding made it tremble and quake. The human’s strength looked to be at peak origin dao immortal realm, but there was a certain power lingering around him that seemed to depict the will of the entire world.

“Die!” Lu Yun wasted no time in nonsense. Violetgrave in hand, he unleashed a dazzling ray of violet sword radiance.

Swish!

In a flash of dream-like brilliance, Kui’s tremendous frame was instantly split in two.

Death!

Am I dead again? was Kui’s final thought before passing away. All in all, this was its third time experiencing the afterlife.

The first time was its death inside the celestial master tomb during the primordial times. The second time was at the hands of the silver scarlet ape. And this time around, it’d been felled by Lu Yun’s sword, making it three.

But the next moment, its halved body started knitting together, and before long, it stood back up with an expression of confusion.

“I’m alive again? Ah, master! This servant greets the master!”

Thonk!

Kui’s lone leg bent as it knelt to the ground and fearfully kowtowed to the young man floating in the air.

“This servant wasn’t aware of your arrival, master, and made you fall into a trap. Master, please allow me to atone for my sins by killing myself!” Kui’s muffled declaration of contrition spread through hell.

“You want to die a fourth time?” Lu Yun snorted. “Take humanoid form while we talk.”

“At once, at once!” Purple-golden lightning crackled around Kui’s apprehensive figure as it transformed posthaste.

In humanoid shape, Kui was a bulky figure, coming in at ten meters tall and clad in purple-golden immortal armor. A single horn adorned its bald head, and its features lent it a ferocious air.

Its current cultivation level was merely origin dao immortal, comparable to celestial emperors of eld. In contrast, its physique had already reached the ingress realm. But ingress realm body or not, a single blow from the silver scarlet ape had punched a hole through it all the same.

“You died inside the celestial master tomb?” Lu Yun glanced at Kui with a frown.

“Master, your servant did indeed die here,” the creature answered.

“For what reason did you die?”

“To be buried alive with the Monster Celestial Master!” Kui’s response greatly startled Lu Yun.

“What did you say?!”

“Yes, to be buried alive with the celestial master.” Kui nodded. “I wasn’t the only one. Fengbo and Yushi were also buried here for the same reason.”

Kui was a primordial thunder god, the strongest in the immortal court’s service. It was a leader among thunder gods, and the one and only kui in the world. There had also been two other figures of the same level, both reaching peak principal realm: Fengbo and Yushi! [1]

Just like him, both were unique existences—connate divine spirits, the entire lot of them. And thanks to Su Xiaoxiao’s memories, Lu Yun knew of them as well.

“Why and how?!” Lu Yun cried out in spite of himself. “The Monster Celestial Master was of the primordial realm. Why did you three have to be buried alongside him after his death?”

“Master, the Monster Celestial Master isn’t dead!” Kui shook its head rapidly. “Each of the four celestial masters possessed power that nearly rivaled that of the immortal emperor. It’s true their cultivation was at the primordial realm, but it would’ve been child’s play for them to kill us!”

“Buried alive?” Lu Yun shook. In the ancient times, Kui had been a peak principal realm existence, a step removed from emperor realm. But the Monster Celestial Emperor could have easily killed it?! Just what kind of freaks were these four celestial masters?

“Correct, buried alive! What’s more, me and the others were perfectly willing to sacrifice ourselves.” Trepidation flashed through Kui’s eyes. “The four celestial masters had long foreseen the imminent advent of a cataclysm. The Monster Celestial Master chose to defy the heavens by his own power, so that the court might have a chance to survive the disaster. Alas, it seems that it ended in failure.”

As a god in the ancient dynasty’s service, Kui’s loyalty naturally belonged with the ancient immortal court.

Lu Yun frowned slightly. There were many rumors regarding the four ancient celestial masters, but no one knew the cause of their demise. They were incredibly secretive figures that even Empress Myrtlestar knew very little about.

The four masters came from the human, divine, monster spirit, and demon races, respectively. They’d always been shrouded in mystery, with perhaps no one but the ancient immortal emperor knowing the truth about them.

What stunned Lu Yun even more was that the Monster Celestial Master had predicted the future, then chosen to bury himself alive to safeguard a wisp of fortune for the immortal court!

This was clear proof that the four celestial masters were proficient in feng shui… or at least, the Monster Celestial Master was. By burying himself alive, he’d attempted to leverage a special kind of layout to steady the immortal dynasty’s fortunes so that it would survive the oncoming cataclysm.

But that layout had plainly been wrecked—someone had modified the entire celestial master tomb’s layout. For its part, the ancient dynasty had long been destroyed, and its immortal emperor was now ashes in the wind.

……

“Fengbo, Yushi, Thunder God…” Lu Yun bowed his head in thought. The shadow of the Tome of Life and Death flickered in his eyes, and his feng shui compass floated by his side to aid him in deducing this destiny-bolstering layout.

A feng shui layout that employed live burials and sacrificial goods of connate divine spirits was one that could rebel against fate, allowing an entire faith—or an immortal dynasty—to exist forever.

“The three of you weren’t the only ones buried, correct?” He suddenly opened his eyes and looked up at the river of stars in the netherworld’s sky. After a round of inference, he’d pieced together the tomb’s original layout. In the process, he’d discovered that it was intimately related to the power of the stars.

“Master possesses unparalleled wisdom.” Kui wasted no time in flattering him. “Inside this tomb, the three of us are nothing but minor characters. The real centerpiece is the three hundred and sixty-five star divinities of the immortal court.

“The star divinites are connate divine spirits born from three hundred and sixty-five major stars in the outer realms. Each possesses an ingress realm cultivation, and when they all act together, they can manifest a myriad of cosmic phenomena that can vie with emperor realm powerhouses.”

1. Fengbo, the characters for ‘Earl of the Wind’, is the Taoist deity of the wind. In ancient times he was depicted as a grotesque deity with the body of a deer, the head of a bird, horns, the tail of a snake, and the patterns of a leopard.

Yushi, the characters for ‘Master of the Rain’, is the assistant to the Taoist god of thunder. He is known as the one who causes downpours by dipping his sword in a pot.