Xing Chen sat cross-legged in hell, continuously employing the great dao within him to refine and reinforce the kingdom of hell. It’d once been overrun by akasha ghosts, and many awful existences yet lurked in the deepest parts of the netherworld. Lu Yun didn’t want his final retreat to be breached again.

After the blood demon entered hell, he bounced off joyously to the deepest parts of the realm. That innermost layer hadn’t ever been part of human hell, but instead the most mysterious layer of prisons beneath the Sea of Hellfire in the netherdark.

It held some of the most vile criminals since the dawn of time, but no one knew who’d locked them there and why they were incarcerated there. There was another name for that particular prison—Hadal Battlefront.

Luo Houluo’s Hadal Bonefire originated from there.

……

“Wanfeng, come here for a moment.” Back in Dao City, Lu Yun smiled happily to see the capable maid. Despite having grown into a fine young lady, she would always be a child in his eyes.

There were three hundred and sixty-five cities in Dusk Province now, and apart from Dao City, all of them were fully opened to the public as part of the academy campus.

Lu Yun refused to run provincial affairs and Qing Yu was even more of a recluse. His ten Yama Kings busied themselves with teaching classes in the Dao Academy, so the reins of Dusk naturally fell into Wanfeng’s hands.

After a period of tempering, Wanfeng had shed her childishness and adopted a stern and decisive style. Her immense abilities cowed even top experts of peak factions.

“Sir!” She always chattered like an exuberant little bird whenever she saw her young master.

Lu Yun reached out and tousled her hair, an action that creased her eyes into crescents from the force of her broad grin. He suddenly imprinted the strand of soul force on his fingertip into her mind.

It immediately felt like a thunderbolt had crashed into Wanfeng. She shook like a leaf as a lost look flashed through her eyes.

“…big brother Lieshan…” Wanfeng looked dumbly at Lu Yun after an indeterminable silence and suddenly threw herself into his arms with loud sobs.

“There’s a good girl. Don’t cry, Ah Bao, big brother has come back.” He stroked her hair with a smile.

……

Lu Yun had refined Ah Bao’s soul force with the power of reincarnation, so Wanfeng didn’t lose her sense of self after reabsorbing the tendril. All that happened was that she recovered the memories of her past life.

She buzzed around Lu Yun, chattering for three days and nights before she fully conveyed everything that Ah Bao had seen and knew. Finally, she sat on the ground in vexation.

“What’s wrong, Wanfeng?” Lu Yun was carefully digesting everything that’d happened after his departure, so he was surprised by her long face.

“Do I call you big brother now, or still sir?” She pouted, highly troubled by what to call Lu Yun.

“Call me big brother.” He tousled her hair with a chuckle. “Affinity is a strange thing. You were the first person I saw when I came to the world of immortals… and you were also the first person I saw when I went to the great wilderness.”

“Okay!” Wanfeng nodded emphatically, not knowing why the young master had said that, but not asking further as well.

……

Winter. First month of the twentieth year in the Xuanhuang calendar.

Big, fat snowflakes drifted down upon the northern reaches of the world of immortals. Now in the twentieth year since the calendar’s establishment, laws of the four seasons were taking shape and dictating the changes of the season according to the calendar.

Lu Yun and Qing Yu stood hand in hand at the peak of Mount Xuanhuang, overlooking the world of immortals. The mountain was now the greatest sacred mountain of the world and one could see almost all of twenty-four facets from its peak.

“It’s time.” Lu Yun looked up into the sky to where the World Gates were and sighed softly. “There’s still eighty more years to go, but that’s enough.”

Qing Yu smiled and turned her hand over; a hazy lotus bloomed gracefully on her palm. Ling Rumeng had become her second disciple, and she’d offered up the Chaos Lotus of her own volition.

She knew that she wouldn’t be able to leave Dusk Province as long as the spirit root was on her, that she would die sooner or later for it. As exceptionally quick-witted as she was, she also knew why Qing Yu had accepted her as a disciple.

“It is indeed time, my primary body has reached extreme peerless immortal. If I continue to keep it down, I’m afraid the Dao Fruit will struggle free of the seal.”

In the current world of immortals and all of the other worlds outside it, a critical mass of extreme peerless immortals had collected and continued to grow by the day. If the situation continued down the same path, the Dao Fruit would be so attracted to their strength that it would forcibly break out of Qing Yu’s control.

Her cultivation realm now was also extreme peerless immortal.

Over the past couple of years, Lu Yun’s replica had refined hell to an unfathomable level. He’d also told Qing Yu everything that happened to him in the great wilderness and recorded it all in the history book he was writing.

Yuying, Feinie, Aoxue, Xuanxi, Huangqing, Cangyin, Suxiaoxiao, Xingzi, Luli, and Zhaoqing walked out of the void, also at extreme peerless immortal.

Qing Yu slowly began to free the Dao Tree. “We only need to go to the first level, there’s no need to venture down to the third.”

“Understood!” Yuying and the others reported back.

Hummm.

Lu Yun and the others vanished as the void trembled. When they next appeared, they were by the banks of the Dao Tree.

Though Qing Yu had sealed it away, that seal only severed the tree’s connection to the outside world. Its surroundings formed a world of its own, which housed a horde of long-haired monsters that opened crimson eyes at the sudden appearance of Lu Yun’s group. The ones with black fur wielded a dao weapon that looked like Worldcarver, while the scarlet ones wielded bronze spears.

The dao weapons in the hands of the black furs weren’t weapons of the immortal, human, or the primitive great dao. The Dao Tree had absorbed some of the heavenly dao and formed its own to create these weapons.

“I see… so the Dao Tree evolved from the fragments of the Builder Tree that absorbed Kunlun Mountain’s life point!” Lu Yun finally understood the tree’s origins when he saw it once again.

The fragments of the Builder Tree had combined with the heavenly vein on Kunlun Mountain, and Lu Yun had broken the mountain’s life point with the nameless spear. He’d chopped down the Builder Tree with Worldcarver and left the spear driven into the heavenly vein.

When the mountain had fallen to the great wilderness, someone had collected the tattered heavenly vein and a section of the Builder Tree. They’d then refined it into a cancerous tumor for the immortal dao after the new dao had been born.

Since the presence of the two dao weapons lingered on the Builder Tree and Kunlun Mountain, that was why the long-haired monsters wielded these weapons.