“Mercy, milord, mercy! This lowly one will never dare do it again!” The elder dropped to his knees in front of Lu Yun and begged for lenience.

“Speak, what manner of thing are you and who are those you speak of?!” Lu Yun roared.

“This humble one is no thing, this humble one is a darkfury!” the elder quickly explained. “Those I speak of are the rulers of the Quiet Realm. They established the rules that no creatures of this world are to harm humans.”

“The Quiet Realm?” Lu Yun looked around. This world was a newly born star from the intermix of energy from a realm and the chaos. Still and quiet, there were very few lifeforms on it. It was quite appropriate to label it part of the Quiet Realm.

“Are they humans as well?” he blinked at the rule.

“This humble one doesn’t know who they are.” The darkfury snuck another glance at the little fox, swallowing gently.

Miao almost erupted in a furious tirade. Many connate demon gods had sized her up in the great wilderness, but they’d coveted her beauty or the Bell of Chaos. This darkfury was the only one who’d ever wanted to eat her!

Lu Yun knew of this species—they were beings of the Blood Sea that’d gone extinct when he ransacked the netherdark and fought Luo Houluo and Darkriver. They were reborn in the hell of human dao sometime later and became indigenous residents of hell.

When human hell was broken, its natives scattered throughout the multiverse. Once a peak race of the netherworld, darkfuries were second to only the Asura race. However, the latter was extinct and even their ancestor turned into a blood demon. In contrast, the darkfuries were alive and well.

This new addition to the Quiet Realm was a brand new star that the immortal dao was slowly sinking into. Most of its inhabitants didn’t practice the immortal dao yet. The race before Lu Yun, for example, practiced human dao.

“Alright, get out of here.” Lu Yun swept a glance over the darkfury and then ignored it.

The elder immediately scuttled off like he’d been reprieved from a death sentence.

“You’re letting him go just like that?” grumbled the little fox. “You should’ve at least asked him about this Quiet Realm.”

“What would a low-ranking being who hasn’t eaten for three years know?” Lu Yun shook his head. “I’d be better off using formula dao than interrogating him.”

This world was incredibly large and at least ten times bigger than Earth. However, its native population was very low. There weren’t that many dead spirits and there were ever fewer living ones. Lu Yun scanned less than ten thousand life forms with his consciousness—there were the darkfuries and some other strange races that he’d never seen before.

Dead spirits weren’t very interested in a newly born world. Only a few of them roved this star, so those living here were relatively safe.

After shooing away the darkfury, Lu Yun sat down cross-legged to calculate where his fortunes were. He was certain that his dao fruit was in this world, but where?

The answer remained elusively out of reach.

While he struggled for the answer, the little fox lay quietly in his robes and didn’t disturb him.

“I still can’t do it,” he chuckled wryly. “Formula dao can deduce the world and all living beings, but it doesn’t operate as smoothly when it comes to matters of the self.”

The flaw of formula dao was that it couldn’t be deployed on the user. He and Qing Yu had used it on each other to determine where the other’s fortuitous opportunity was. Determining that his dao fruit was located in the Quiet Realm taxed the limits of Lu Yun’s abilities.

When the little fox heard this, she jumped out of his robes and imitated Lu Yun’s position, deploying formula dao herself.

“There! In that direction!” She opened her eyes and pointed a furry paw in a certain direction. Though her grasp of formula dao wasn’t as strong as Lu Yun and Qing Yu, she still counted for a strong expert in her own right.

“It’s over there, somewhere very far away… But I can’t figure out where exactly it is,” she concluded woefully.

Since she wasn’t as adept in formula dao, she could only determine a rough location. If it’d been Qing Yu here, she could’ve instantly deduced what Lu Yun should do here.

She’d offered to come, but Lu Yun had turned her down. She needed to refine her own dao fruit and increase her strength so that she would have absolute power in the cataclysm to come. Lu Yun needed to handle his own matters by himself.

“A general direction’s enough. We’ll find that star as long as we keep walking that way!” Lu Yun grinned broadly. It looked like the little fox could do more than just create trouble for him.

……

“They were here, a human with a monster spirit!” The darkfury from earlier reappeared on the scene with a dozen of his compatriots behind him.

They were all extremely skinny, some to the point of skin and bones. It really did seem like they hadn’t eaten in many years. The group surrounded Lu Yun the second they arrived and pointed pairs of glowing green eyes at the little fox.

To their gaze, this dusty creature wasn’t a fox, but a delicious feast!

“I want to eat her tail! Her tail looks so soft, it must be delicious!” A darkfury that looked rather young swallowed hard.

“Pfft. Children know nothing about the world, alright. Her tail is nothing but fur and doesn’t have any meat. You need to eat her hind leg… roasting it fills your mouth with juicy oil with each bite!” rebuffed a female darkfury beside the child.

“But she’s so small, is there enough for us to split?” Discussion sprang up in earnest.

The darkfury that Lu Yun had pardoned earlier approached him merrily. “Young man, take a look around you. Leave the fox behind and we’ll let you go, or you’ll suffer for it otherwise!”

The little fox teetered on the edge of a murderous rampage as she listened to how these darkfuries would prepare and eat her. If it wasn’t for Lu Yun maintaining a death grip on her scalp, she would’ve already sliced and diced this group into minced meat!

For some reason, a thick sense of sorrow rose in Lu Yun’s heart. In the Primeval Era, the darkfuries had been a guardian of the human race. Their emperor had served the Great Emperor of the Eastern Peak and helped humans conquer new territories and defend against the outer demons.

Who would’ve thought that their descendants would fall to these straits?

“Are you really that hungry?” Lu Yun asked.

“Young man, we share kinship with the human race and are under that group’s rule. We cannot eat humans, but you must leave the fox behind!” the elder called back.

Thump!

Lu Yun waved his hand and flung a wild board the size of a small mountain onto the ground.

“Meat!” The darkfuries couldn’t restrain themselves any longer when they saw the struggling boar and pounced forward, opening their mouths to tear at the flesh.