Hellfire was a natural counter to ghosts, but the ghosts here were too powerful for Lu Yun to deal with given his limited mastery over hellfire, unless he withdrew his will to unleash it completely.

Then, however, hellfire would rage out of control, turning all of the Xuan Yuan Tomb—nay, the entirety of Heaven Locus Land or even the world of immortals at large into an ocean of hellfire.

……

Blazing flames swirled outside the barrier of the luopan’s making. From within the compass, the former immortal emperor Meng Wang emerged, his expression tight when he noted the approaching corpses.

“These corpses must not be destroyed! The source of the chilling energy is within their bodies. Once destroyed, they’ll release it all and the Embittered Ocean outside will freeze over.” Meng Wang instantly seized on the right course of action. “These corpses may seem eerie and terrifying, but they do not seem to have any offensive power. What makes them a threat is the frigid energy within them.”

Lu Yun cast thirty-six soybeans to summon warriors in golden armor. All of them were empyrean immortals, and their strength rivaled that of their master’s.

“Blasted, it’s cold!” shuddered one of the bean soldiers. All of them were summoned by Lu Yun’s death art, the source of which was hellfire. While the soldiers could feel cold, they weren’t afraid of the cold.

Moving around to stretch their burly statures, the thirty-six soldiers charged at the corpses of the Xuan Yuan Clan.

“They’re realm monster spirits!” snapped a bean soldier that came to a sudden halt. “Stop! Don’t touch the corpses! They’ve all been transformed into realm monsters!”

Lu Yun started when he heard the soldier shout. “Realm monsters?”

“Realm monsters?!” Ashu cried out, his expression grave and eyes shining with dread.

“What are they?” Lu Yun turned to ask him.

“Don’t ask questions you shouldn’t ask! It won’t do you any good!” Involuntary shudders passed through Ashu’s body as fearful dread clamped down on him and shook him in its grasp. Lu Yun rolled his eyes. Realm monsters had come knocking on their doorstep, when was a better time than now to learn about them?

“What are realm monsters, Ge Long?” A replica took shape from the six paths of his nascent spirit and landed before Ge Long, who sat alone beneath the Karmic Tree. Carmines Eternal and Arbiter had made their way to the City of the Dead at the center of the kingdom, befriending the living souls and Infernum there.

Ge Long shot to his feet when he saw Lu Yun.

“Realm monsters? Those things went extinct before Emperors Fall… Have they emerged again?” Following Lu Yun’s gaze, he cast his eyes outside hell.

“They really are realm monster spirits!” Ge Long’s expression turned complicated.

“Well, what are they?” Lu Yun repeated.

“Realm monsters… are worlds that have died,” Ge Long murmured. “These worlds nurtured life with all the resources at their disposal, but life showed them nothing in return… And so those dead worlds transformed into realm monsters and return to the land of the living to take their revenge against all life they find.”

Lu Yun’s face twitched. Dead worlds turned into realm monsters? What the hell was that even supposed to be??

“Alright, I understand!” His nascent spirit replica scattered.

……

“So these are what people call realm monsters!” His eyes fixed on the approaching corpses, Lu Yun unleashed the full power of his luopan. An enormous dragon shot out of the treasure, brandishing its teeth and claws. This was a dragon vein that Lu Yun had released at full strength with the Dragonshift Method.

In the eyes of a feng shui master, the world itself was an enormous and complicated feng shui layout. Dead worlds were no exception.

His earlier thinking had proven wrong. He’d thought all along that his enemies were ghosts, which was why Spectral Eye failed and hellfire didn’t work on them.

Lu Yun now looked at them as feng shui layouts rather than ghosts. He would deal with them as he would a foreboding layout instead! His eyes cleared, and his tangled thoughts found their proper paths to follow.

The power of the dragon vein imbued his luopan while a karmic fruit burned at the same time. Brilliant golden light sparkled over the compass to collect into the faint image of a world, within which a giant kun leisurely swam around.

“A kun?!” Lu Yun’s lips thinned. “So this is Great Emperor Kunpeng’s kun form…”

“How, how did she turn into a realm monster?!” Some color filtered back into Ashu’s pale face and he recognized the kun drifting within the projection of the world. It was both the kun form of the great emperor and a realm monster.

The venerated great emperor had turned into a realm monster!

“Great Emperor Kunpeng was a heavyweight from the time before Emperors Fall. She’d created a world within her, a feat which placed her at the top of the ranks of great emperors then. It’s the world within her that’s turned into a monster spirit. Were realm monsters a threat at that time already? No wonder that one wanted to split the great emperor in half.” Ashu muttered his observations as he scanned the realm monsters before them.

He possessed deep knowledge of many things, but numerous reservations kept him from telling Lu Yun.

Ge Long was in the kingdom of hell and bolstered by the power of Lu Yun’s nascent spirit and Tome of Life and Death, essentially making him an undisputed lord in the netherworld. This was why he dared tell Lu Yun about realm monsters.

If he’d revealed the truth outside, he’d very likely immediately meet an untimely demise. Realm monsters had hovered threateningly in people’s lives, like an unseen boogeyman, for the longest time before Emperors Fall.

“This should be the last of Xuan Yuan territory. Unfortunately, it was devoured by realm monsters and sealed into a lifeless, frozen world.

“Realm monsters?” Lu Yun muttered at the ice coffin. “If they are monsters born of dead worlds, then their existence must hinge on something. There must be a source from which they originate, such as the orb within the ice coffin.”

With compass in hand, Lu Yun tread through air to make his way to the coffin on top of the mountain, deploying his three great tools—the Dragonshift Method, Dragonsearch Invocation, and Dragonspike Litany—at the same time.

The incoming corpses dissipated before the light of the luopan, and Xuanyuan Xiaoyue’s body also faded out of existence in front of Lu Yun’s and Ashu’s eyes. The only thing left in front of them was the ice coffin atop the peak of the snowy mountain.

Ashu and the others followed Lu Yun closely. The further they advanced, the denser the frigid air. However, the overwhelming chill dissipated as soon as it touched the golden light of the luopan.

When Lu Yun stood in front of the ice coffin, everyone else with him had vanished. A white-haired woman dressed in white appeared out of nowhere, her eyes and lips the color of ice.

“Are you a realm monster?” Lu Yun asked calmly. “Or Great Emperor Kunpeng?”