The first thing Mo Lingtian registered before he even opened his eyes was the suffocating silence. There was no whistling of the wind, no rustling of insects and beasts; there was no sign of life except theirs. All that remained was only a freezing stillness.
When he finally opened his dark green eyes, a sharp, tearing pain immediately flared through his physical body. It felt as though every bone in his body had been shattered into tiny fragments and then forcibly glued back together with molten iron. He coughed, spitting out a clump of blackened blood that instantly frosted over the moment it hit the dark, rocky ground.
There was barely moonlight in this place, only an endless sea of fog, shrubs, and trees. The air here was thick, almost liquid with a grayish-black mist. This was the concentrated Yin energy he had sensed earlier, a pure, unadulterated death energy that would rot the flesh of cultivators in minutes.
Mo Lingtian slowly propped himself up on one elbow, his breathing ragged as he took in his surroundings. His body was slowly festering with the contamination of the death energy. He couldn't even use Qi energy because, for one, his cores and his meridians had been damaged beyond repair, but more interestingly, within the zone of death energy, nobody could use Qi.
"Where could those two be?" Mo Lingtian whispered to himself, slowly standing on his feet. He rummaged around the maze of gray mist aimlessly, hoping he would somehow find them. The more he moved, the weaker he became and the more the death energy ate at his physical body.
Hours passed as he continued to search through the endless dense forest, yet there was no sign of any of them. His eyelids closed and his heartbeat slowed as the death energy completely invaded his lungs and his entire organs.
At this point, he was totally exhausted. He fell down to the ground, giving up on every hope of finding them.
"It seems like I'm really going to die here," Mo Lingtian thought to himself as his eyes finally closed.
With his body lying lifeless on the ground, the dense death energy around the forest condensed into vague, bloodthirsty phantom creatures. They swiftly descended on his body, tearing at his flesh with fierce bites.
"Tian'er!" a voice suddenly resounded in Mo Lingtian's head. It was a soft and warm sound, like the affectionate call of a mother.
"Tian'er!" a voice resounded again, but this time, it bore the calm, aged voice of an elder.
"Tian'er," that voice continued... "In eight hundred and forty millennia since our lineage began, there has been no one, living or dead, who has matched your level of talent. You are destined to become a universal being. Tian'er, you are destined to redeem your clan."
"Chief!" Mo Lingtian weakly muttered as tears trickled down his face. The creatures feasting on his body immediately stopped when they saw the tears falling from his eyes; a trace of understanding flared within their red, bloodthirsty eyes.
"Tian'er!" a voice screamed in agony. "Run! If you live, you live for me and your sister!" the voice screamed again in agony. Clothes torn, inner vests ripped, both mother and daughter desecrated before his very eyes.
Then his eyes opened. His lower body had already been torn and devoured by these creatures. With the severe pain stinging and banging his physical body, he didn't scream, he didn't yell, he didn't shout. His mouth just remained slightly opened and his eyes wide apart in shock.
Then he sighed, slowly shutting his eyes.
"Even in death, you keep hunting me," Mo Lingtian said, laughing.
"What genius! What a talent! What a defender! I don't even deserve death," Mo Lingtian said, laughing out loudly as his voice suddenly echoed all through the death zone, spanning even to the mountain caves outside, startling all the cultivators who were waiting in the caves. His voice even caught Tu Xin's attention.
Then suddenly, from within Mo Lingtian's shattered sea of consciousness, a vibrating shockwave blasted through the entire death zone. The phantom creatures that had manifested from the dense mist all immediately stopped their feasting. They bowed low, their forms trembling in resonance with the violent pulse emitting from his mind.
As they bowed, their vague shapes solidified even further. They grew legs, hands, and heads, their shadowy grips now clutching long spears and their forms clad in heavy, dark armor.
Within his sea of consciousness, the death energy that had seeped in, destroying his organs and shattering his mind into an empty void suddenly violently reversed its course. It began to rapidly condense into his Devil Core.
His lower body, previously shredded and devoured by the beasts, began to violently knit itself back together. Tendons, tissues, and bones rapidly manifested from the gray mist as if they had never been torn away. His Devil Core was forcibly hijacking the pure death energy to reconstruct his physical form as he slowly levitated from the bloody ground into the sky.
Then behind him, the book opened, flipping several pages by itself in rapid succession until it came to a stop at a page with characters that shimmered with a grayish hue. The words written on those pages suddenly came to life, exiting the book as they flew toward the thousands of creatures manifested from pure and condensed death energy.
The characters dispersed across the forest, spanning thousands of meters, and merged themselves with the phantoms as they all knelt down, holding spears in their hands and wearing armor that shone with a dark, grayish, dimmed glow.
"What a familiar feeling," Mo Lingtian whispered as his entire body and mind were reforged back to life by the death energy.
"Rise!" he said instinctively as he opened his eyes, and all of them instantly obeyed, rising on their feet.
"This energy is unprecedented," Mo Lingtian said as he looked inward into his sea of consciousness. His Devil Core had been totally reconstructed into its original state; the Qi it exuded was even more powerful than before. But his Demon Core was still damaged; it could not resonate with the death energy the way his Devil Core did.
"There's no mention of this kind of energy in the book," he continued as the book flew over from behind him to his front, its pages turning according to Mo Lingtian's probing intent.
Then he raised his head, looking at the thousands of death creatures that covered nearly the entire expanse of the death zone. Some of them were levitating in the sky with long red drapes attached to their armor indicating their different ranks; the higher they hovered in the sky, the more intense the death energy radiating from them became.
"If you're willing, I can take you all out of this place," Mo Lingtian said, looking up at the foremost triad levitating high above every one of them, but there was no verbal response from them.
"I thought they'd easily jump at my offer. It seems like what they all bowed to before now wasn't me," Mo Lingtian said, stroking his chin with his hand.
"Can you help me find someone?" Mo Lingtian said, but there was no reply from any of the chain of ranking commanders in the sky.
"Forget it. I'm already fortunate enough to have had one of my cores rejuvenated; it's even better than before," he thought to himself, stimulating his Devil Core. A powerful wave of energy expanded from him as a result across the forest.
The death creatures on the ground suddenly struck their spears on the ground when the energy from Mo Lingtian's Devil Core reached them, releasing a loud, terrifying sound like that of an army across the entire death zone.