“Whoever doesn’t want to stay… can piss off.” Lu Yun swept the monsters that were still in their true forms with an icy gaze.

They swallowed their objections back into their throats. They were guests in another’s house and it was only natural that they would have to bend their heads.

“Shrink down as much as you can, turn into human form if you need to!” Situ Zong demanded. “Don’t you see that the barrier is stronger when it contracts? Out of everyone here, you’re the ones wasting the most space!”

“You!” A thirty-meter-tall woolly mammoth glared at him.

“Sect Head, why don’t you toss the rest of these animals out, too?” Situ Zong turned to Lu Yun.

Terrified by the prospect, the monster immortals instantly shrank to approximately human size, enabling the Divine Glory’s barrier to contract smaller still, strengthening itself in the process.

“Let us fight, milord!” Noticing that Lu Yun had ignored their earlier request, Beigong Yu and the Scaled-Dragon King stepped forward again.

Lu Yun turned toward them. “Do you know who these corpse divines are?” he asked calmly.

The two monster kings were stunned by the question. What did it matter who their enemies were?

“They… are the primordial immortal court’s heavenly soldiers.” Lu Yun cast his gaze over the tide of corpse divines. Their armor was cracked and their weapons were rusted, but their motions still exemplified the glory of their bygone era. “If Kui can be resurrected… the same is true for them!”

This army should’ve died in battle, or fallen to the calamity that had destroyed their era, not go out with a muffled whimper in the darkness to satisfy the needs of an intangible fortune. This wasn’t the fate they deserved. These soldiers’ lingering obsession most likely lay on the battlefield, protecting the last hopes of the immortal court.

“Get on!” Lu Yun bellowed.

The giant fortress ship expanded to twice its size at six hundred meters long, delighting the surrounding immortals. They stood up and clambered aboard as quickly as they could.

Rumble...

Black and white burst forth with blinding brilliance upon the ship’s deck. Lu Yun was employing the Yin Yang Formation Orb from his position at the ship’s bow.

……

“Lu Yun is right in front of us!” A number of immortals looked at the young man’s back with wavering uncertainty.

A puny cultivator will surely die under my full power, even if he is void realm! A peak aether dao immortal swallowed hard, suppressing his temptations as best he could. If I kill Lu Yun, I’ll be able to take the fortress ship for myself. That connate treasure will also be mine! He approached Lu Yun with slow, deliberate steps.

“Hmph!” A frigid snort demolished his plans.

The aether dao immortal stumbled back several steps as a lean, white-haired man in black robes appeared suddenly before him. Though he was only a peerless immortal, his aura was deeper and more foreboding than even the Scaled-Dragon King and Beigong Yu’s. His gaze was as sharp as physical blades as it pierced into the aether dao immortal’s own.

“Aieee!” the immortal howled in pain as blood streamed out of his eyes.

“A divine!” Many immortals colored at the sight of the white-haired man. Divines were the public enemies of the entire world, but no one dared make the first move on him.

“Forget it, Tianhuang,” Lu Yun shook his head.

“Yes, milord.” Yuchi Tianhuang retreated to Lu Yun’s side and kept watch as a cautious guard. He couldn’t kill people now. If he did, the five thousand immortals aboard the ship would be thrown into disarray, and Lu Yun would have a hard time staying alive in the resulting chaos.

“Who is she?” Lu Yun lifted his chin with curiosity, his focus upon the corpse divine atop the bone dragon.

“Yu… Yu’er…” Finally focusing his attention on the army commander in front of him, Yuchi Tianhuang stared at the female divine perched there. His body began convulsing in anger.

“Ge Yanxia! You bitch! You whore! I’ll cut you to pieces if it’s the last thing I dooooooo!” the Infernum suddenly wailed in anguish. Two trails of bloody tears trickled out of his eyes.

“She’s a dao immortal general of the primordial immortal court who died here before the primordial war. How do you know her?” Lu Yun frowned.

“A general of the ancient court… dead before the primordial war?!” Yuchi Tianhuang was incredulous.

“Who is this ‘Ge Yanxia’ you just mentioned?” Lu Yun pressed again. The name made him rather uncomfortable. There had been a Ge Clan in Dusk City, once, and Ge Long formerly its steward. The head of that clan had been possessed by someone from the Exalted Immortal Sect to target Lu Yun.

However, the entire clan had vanished overnight after he grew in strength, and there was no sign of them anywhere in the province anymore.

“Milord... do you believe in time travel?” Yuchi Tianhuang ventured uncertainly after some hesitation.

“Time travel?” Lu Yun blinked. “You mean…”

He wasn’t some antiquated relic who couldn’t accept anything new. Yuchi Tianhuang’s merest mention unlocked in him a new realization.

“Yu’er is a Black Tortoise Divine… but that race went extinct long ago. I thought she was the last heir of the race, but…” Through the barrier, Yuchi Tianhuang stared at the figure upon the bone dragon, enraptured. “It turned out that I’d traveled back in time to the Primordial Era. No wonder… no wonder she had other clansmen around her, and no wonder she hadn’t been surprised to see me.”

In the Primordial Era, the four cardinal divine tribes existed as the four pillars of their race. They were quite plentiful back then.

“Milord, do you see the spear in her hand? I refined it for her…” Yuchi Tianhuang wasn’t a master refiner, but he wielded connate metal energy through his White Tiger bloodline. He was capable of harnessing its power, and the spear had come about through exactly that.

He recounted everything he had seen during his time in the past. Back then, he hadn’t realized he’d traveled back in time, and had always thought her ‘clansmen’ to be those who had adopted her. He’d thought he’d stumbled upon an isolated pocket of the world.

“You say you went back to the Primordial Era from the West Sea? And you brought Yu’er and your daughter back to the present?”

“Yes!” Yuchi Tianhuang’s eyes narrowed in pain. “If not for that Ge bitch, Yu’er wouldn’t be dead… she would’ve been able to come to the present with me too…”

He clutched his head in silent mourning.   

In the Primordial Era, Yuchi Tianhuang had brought his wife and the young Yuchi Hanxing to a secret realm in the West Sea to return to the world as he knew it. However, their encounter with the Ges there had led to a woman destroying the realm altogether.

He’d only been able to save his daughter; his wife was lost alongside the secret realm. He’d always thought his wife to have died then and there, but the evidence in front of his eyes showed that she’d only returned to her proper time.

The Ge Clan was a major clan of the West Sea monster court, and Ge Yanxia was a dao immortal. The considerably weaker Yuchi Tianhuang couldn’t seek vengeance against them in any effective capacity. His only resort was to bide his time and found House Yuchi. After making arrangements for Yuchi Hanxing, he then used the resources of the divines to find the Divine Spymirror and other treasures to gain strength.

Of course, that’d eventually led to him crossing Lu Yun’s path and becoming an Infernum.

“Some things are set in stone by destiny.” Lu Yun looked at Yu’er atop the bone dragon and noticed that the corpse divine’s eyes had focused on Yuchi Tianhuang. The soldiers under her command had long since ceased their attacks.