"It's like trying to find a single piece of gold in the dark depths of a vast ocean, when you have never even heard of or seen what gold looks like before," the commander by her side said, sighing heavily.
"Let's all hope this goes well."
– Lingtian's Sea of Consciousness –
"It's been ten days. The death energy is becoming less and less familiar to me. I can't even catch a glimpse of the law within it," Mo Lingtian murmured to himself. The thick fog of death energy within his consciousness swayed gently with the current of his mental winds.
"Forget it. I have to figure out another way." He halted his spiritual probe, retracting his senses from the dark void.
"The Devil Converging Seal..." Mo Lingtian whispered, panting slightly as he watched the glowing formation float just a few meters above his palm. The rigorous, continuous probing into the energy particles had drained a massive amount of his mental stamina.
"Converging Seal?" Mo Lingtian yelled, suddenly struck by an idea.
"What if I reversed the features of the converging seal into a diverging seal? I wouldn't need to expend so much energy manually probing the particles. I would get ten times the result with almost no effort," he muttered, falling into deep thought.
With a swift wave of his hand, he made his decision. The Devil Converging Seal instantly constructed itself in front of him.
"Devil Converging Seal, turn!"
He slowly pushed his right hand counter-clockwise, forcing the seal to reverse its natural rotation. It required immense mental pressure, but the moment the seal began to turn backward, it violently shattered into glowing shards.
The backlash instantly severely wounded him internally. The clash reflected outside his consciousness; on his physical body, a dark trickle of blood oozed from the corner of his mouth.
"What is this brat doing?" the chief commander yelled agitatedly, her eyes locking onto the blood.
All the phantom vanguards and commanders looked on in shock. It was the very first time the chief commander had expressed genuine frustration or panic in front of them.
"What went wrong?" Mo Lingtian asked himself as he wiped his chin and reconstructed the seal in his mind.
He tried again, forcefully driving it against its clockwise motion, but it shattered once more.
Gritting his teeth, he reassembled the seal for a third time. He tried reversing the flow, and it fractured again, delivering a mental backlash far heavier than the last two combined.
"Where did it go wrong?" he asked, watching the dissipating energy of the broken formation.
Then, it clicked.
He assembled the formation one more time. But this time, before channeling his energy to reverse the rotation, his consciousness reached into the very fabric of the seal. He began to manually rewrite the ancient runic laws inscribed around its edges, altering them to perfectly match the diverging function he visualized.
With one final, heavy stroke of mental energy, he rewrote the last runic inscription, making the entire array the exact opposite of what it initially was.
"Now, turn!" he roared, channeling every last drop of mental energy he had left.
The resistance was staggering. It felt like trying to manually push a massive, grinding stone wheel backward. The friction sent a deafening metallic screech echoing through his mind, causing the waters of his sea of consciousness to churn violently into tidal waves.
Outside his consciousness, the modified seal materialized beneath his feet, quickly expanding several meters in size. The chief commander and the entire vanguard watched intently as the seal began to visibly rewrite itself, restructuring the ancient principles and inscriptions right before their eyes.
"Turn!" Mo Lingtian yelled, his mental energy finally hitting rock bottom.
For a few agonizing seconds, the seal remained completely static. Then, with a heavy, resonating boom, both the seal outside and the one inside his mind simultaneously spun counter-clockwise. The vacuum inverted. It was now a diverging seal.
Instantly, Mo Lingtian's perception was violently pulled into a single particle of death energy. His vision tore past thousands of layers of restrictions, spatial dimensions, and dead, ashen attributes. The deeper he plunged, the darker it became, until he finally reached the fundamental unit of the energy, suspended in the middle of a reality-inverted tunnel.
"This... So this is the law of the death domain," Mo Lingtian muttered.
He drifted closer to a phasing mold of glowing golden and crimson threads, pulsing rhythmically in the pitch-black void. The moment his fingertips brushed the phasing object, it sprang to life. It rapidly unraveled, extending into long, razor-thin luminous strings that coiled up his arms and spread across his entire body, branding his skin with intricate patterns everywhere except his face.
Once the cleaving was complete, his consciousness was rapidly shot out of the inverted reality, slamming back into his physical body.
"I... I've finally glimpsed it," Mo Lingtian breathed.
He opened his eyes, returning to the outside world. A powerful gust of wind immediately followed, reacting to the violent shift in the energy surrounding him.
"You... you've seen it?" the chief commander asked the second his eyes opened.
"Yes," Mo Lingtian replied. He flexed his arms outward, revealing the glowing golden-red lines now permanently etched into his skin.
"Show me," she demanded, intense curiosity drawing over her face.
The entire death army, including the vanguard commanders levitating in the sky, watched in heightened anticipation.
Mo Lingtian immediately got to work. He expanded his energy outward, channeling his power over the entire forest. But this time, the death energy began to exact its Law over reality itself.
The monochrome area covered by his domain instantly dilated. Every plant, rock, grain of soil, weapon, and piece of armor within the zone even the natural elements themselves was suddenly overlaid with a dark, suffocating shade of gloomy gray.
The same golden lines etched into his skin suddenly manifested in the air around the death zone. They expanded line by line, forming a massive, spherical, geoid geometric structure that locked together and glowed brilliantly, sealing the entire area beneath a structural dome.
Levitating the remains of his friends, he channeled the geometric lines encompassing the zone directly into the tattered clothes and charred dragon scales, cleaving the symmetrical lines tightly to their surfaces.
– Outside The Death Zone –
The gravitational pressure Mo Lingtian had unknowingly released from inside the zone which had swatted all the outside cultivators, including Tu Xin, directly into the dirt had hardly waned. Except for Tu Xin and the four Dao Realm elders, not a single cultivator could get back on their feet.
The Dao Realm elders were visibly weak, bearing deep wounds and cuts across their bodies. They had quite literally been slammed hard into the ground from the peak of a mountain. Struggling to stand, they immediately began healing themselves, desperately absorbing spiritual energy from the surroundings.
Tu Xin was also slightly shaken, but his body bore almost no injuries. There was merely a small cut near the left corner of his mouth, and portions of his well-adorned, plain robes were torn. In his hand, his sharp, tingling sword still brimmed with a shifting, colorless energy that cut the very air around it.
"That was the power of an immortal. There is an immortal in there," Tu Xin muttered.
Without warning, he swiftly levitated into the air, shooting up past several hundreds of meters until he reached the uppermost peaks of the mountains, stopping just a short distance below the cloud line.
The four Dao elders followed suit, dashing into the sky after they had partially stabilized their wounds. On the ground, a few of the younger cultivators finally began to stagger to their feet, utilizing various strange and mysterious artifacts to mend their broken qi. No cultivator present was ordinary, not even those at the early stages of Qi Refining.
"We calculated wrong. You would have instantly lost your life if you met that immortal inside the death zone," one of the Dao elders said to Tu Xin as they arrived beside him, all of them slightly lowering their heads in shame.
Their constant pushing for Tu Xin to break into the death zone would have cost him his life had he not hesitated.
Tu Xin sharply turned his head, watching them menacingly from the corner of his eyes. The elders instinctively retreated a few meters in fear. None of them wanted to experience the legendary tales of Tu Xin firsthand.
"We... we... we are sorry," one of them stuttered, while the others kept their heads lowered in swift agreement.
"You're finally here," Tu Xin suddenly said, turning his head back to face the swirling fog of the death zone, completely ignoring the four Dao Realm elders.