Aspiring to the Immortal Path

The Divine Spring Domain.

Jinxuan, transformed into a blue-robed scholar, sat on a large stone in the center of Skywater Lake, boredly looking up at the sky. His long tail listlessly swung around in the lake, causing splash after splash.

Around the lake, thousands of fiends, great and small, were prostrating to him.

Unlike in the Verdant Cloud Domain, the fiends here lived in the most primitive fashion, with no countries or cities. Each fiend lived according to their own instincts and stuck to their own habitats, whether it was the mountains, forests, rivers, or lakes.

Jinxuan was the strongest fiend of Skywater Lake. Here, he was the king, able to decide the life or death of every fiend in the area!

He was in a good mood today.

Thus, he planned to treat himself by eating a higher-level fiend.

He lowered his head and breathed in, upon which an unlucky black goat fiend flew through the air. The projection of a golden serpent manifested behind Jinxuan’s head, opening its mouth and sucking up the goat. It was clearly just a projection, yet the goat was nevertheless sucked through its mouth into the serpent’s stomach, disappearing with a terrible scream.

The serpent projection faded, leaving behind that scholar.

The gathered fiends, having been granted mercy, all fled for the hills for fear that they would have to serve as toothpicks if they were too slow.

Jinxuan casually watched them go, lying on the rock as he sighed, “I miss the taste of humans. Those brains bursting with intelligence were a true delicacy.”

He lay down on the rock and fell asleep.

But moments later, he sensed something wrong and looked up at the sky.

The sky was as calm as ever, but in the middle of that serenity, Jinxuan felt something strange.

Far up in the sky, something was changing.

“An outer space phenomenon…” Jinxuan muttered, and then he shook his head. “Nothing to do with me.”

And then he fell asleep.

Many other great fiends sensed this outer space phenomenon.

To the south, within a vast forest, an old tree slowly opened its eyes. Its body was so vast that an area with a circumference of five hundred kilometers was covered by its canopy or supported by its roots. It was as if it was the forest and the forest was it. And on its perimeter, the many trees were its children and grandchildren. Together, they created the world’s greatest forest of death. Anything living here had to have its permission. This was the Evergreen Tree Ancestor, one of the True Immortals of the Divine Spring Domain.

The Tree Ancestor was the first to notice the outer space phenomenon, but after glancing at it, it continued to slumber.

In a vast mountain range to the east, an Earth Bear was slumbering atop a mountain peak, its huge body like its own small mountain. This king of bears had also sensed the outer space phenomenon, but its eyes only flickered open briefly before it fell back into slumber. For this bear, nothing was more important than sleep.

In the Carefree Sea to the west, a pair of golden eyes floated to the surface, gazing up at the sky and letting out a few strange sounds before sinking back into the sea.

To the north was the Great Fiend Palace, a palace-type divine treasure that floated in the sky. A dark-faced elder with horns sat within a basin in which burned an eternal flame, sitting motionlessly within the flames and seeming unperturbed by the outer space phenomenon.

There was no way the approach of a domain could not influence its surroundings. The ripples it produced would emanate for many kilometers and persist for a thousand years. And as this domain drew closer and closer, the ripples would grow stronger and stronger.

At first, it was taken for some sort of cosmic development deep in the void.

But as the domain drew closer and closer and the ripples grew stronger and stronger, even the weaker fiends started to notice. As for the high-level fiends, they were affected even more.

Jinxuan, who had slept for 150 days and nights, once more awoke.

It was his rumbling tummy that had woken him up.

Yet his first reaction wasn’t hunger, but shock at the immense power overhead.

He could sense that a great force was approaching!

“Strange,” Jinxuan muttered.

Unable to sit still, he rolled off the rock, assuming his true form as a long, golden serpent dragon with four feet. With a howl, it took to the skies.

Jinxuan wasn’t the first of the Divine Spring Domain to sense the strange energy, but he was the first to react.

As he moved, so did the other great fiends of the planet, and with great howls, fiends from all across the world took to the skies.

Some of them were Void Returning Fiend Gods, and others were Divine Division Fiend Emperors. Upon sensing those ever-strengthening pulses, they finally ascended toward the endless void.

The Domain Astral Winds of the Divine Spring Domain took the form of green spore clouds.

They weren’t as intense as the Gold Ignis Astral Winds of the Rosecloud Domain, nor were they as fierce as the crimson winds of the Blood River Domain. They seemed like gentle and harmless green clouds, but these clouds contained a vicious poison that severed all spiritual energy while also melting away an individual from the inside out.

Even so, its isolating power was much weaker than that of the Rosecloud Domain.

Its power was around Deification, which meant that anyone who cultivated to the Deification Tier could break out of the Divine Spring Domain.

One great fiend after another broke through those corrosive clouds, and after suffering through that difficult voyage, they finally appeared in the void. Free of the various constraints and worries of the domain, they all revealed their true forms, their enormous bodies casting giant artificial eclipses over the world.

But the fiends were all gazing into the distance.

There, they saw a domain approaching. It was like a carriage, being pulled along by a giant beast through the void.

“It’s a moving domain!” a fiend shouted.

Domain migration formations were the stuff of legends, and even these powerful fiends had only heard of them. Their knowledge of inter-domain transportation was only up to teleportation formations.

So when they saw a real moving domain, they were all amazed.

“It seems to be the Rosecloud Domain, but it’s also different,” a blue-eyed Fiend God whispered.

The Rosecloud Domain had also welcomed its fair share of traveling Titans, and some of them had been from the Divine Spring Domain, so it wasn’t strange for some of them to know of it. But the appearance of the Rosecloud Domain had changed after merging with the Blood River Domain, so that fiend couldn’t be sure.

However, as the domain drew closer and closer and it felt those familiar Astral Winds, that Fiend God finally confirmed, “It’s the Rosecloud Domain. Those are its Domain Astral Winds. It might have changed, but I can sense that it’s the real deal!”

The Fiend God’s voice seemed a little bitter, as if it had a bad impression of the Rosecloud Domain.

This was a given, since the Rosecloud Domain was a world ruled by humans. It was hard for a fiend to not run into trouble in such a domain!

“‘The Rosecloud Domain’?” All the fiends grew excited.

The fiends had long coveted their neighbor, but the distance and the fact that the humans reigned over it meant that it wasn’t a place they could just visit.

But today, the Rosecloud Domain had come on its own.

“What sort of domain is the Rosecloud Domain?” a red-crowned Fiend God asked.

“Peak Earth Immortal. Without some blessing, it would be extremely difficult for it to produce a True Immortal. When I was there four hundred years ago, it had only six Earth Immortals.” The speaker spoke in a very sweet voice, and it was none other than Yiyi. In her years in the Divine Spring Domain, she had managed to make a name for herself. Her words just now were quite clever, for she hadn’t lied at all. Four hundred years ago, the Rosecloud Domain truly did only have six Earth Immortals, not on the same level as the Divine Spring Planet at all. Even those who could sense lies through spell arts wouldn’t be able to find a problem.

“That is indeed the case.” Even better, the blue-eyed Fiend God confirmed her statement.

It had also been to the Rosecloud Domain, but even earlier, so it could corroborate Yiyi’s words.

“Just a puny Earth Immortal domain,” the red-crowned Fiend God cackled. “And only six! For them to dare travel across the void, they’re basically looking to die!”

“What are we waiting for? This is a gift from the heavens, and if we don’t accept, we’ll be punished instead!”

“Right, right. We can’t miss out on such a blessing from the heavens.”

“I haven’t tasted a human in years!”

“Let’s go to the Rosecloud Domain and eat all the humans!”

“Eat all the humans!” the fiends all echoed.

“And we also need to take that domain migration formation, and then we can use it to step onto the path of the stars and travel the myriad domains!” a Fiend God added.

“Travel the myriad domains and eat all the humans!” the fiends called out.

“If the Rosecloud Domain dared to take the path of the stars, they must have something to back up their confidence. Isn’t it a little rushed to just go over? Shouldn’t we contact a few more of the great fiends?” There were still some among the fiends possessing rationality.

Yiyi sneered, “Cowards won’t achieve anything. With this delicious piece of meat right in front of us, not immediately taking it ourselves and instead inviting other great fiends to the feast is pure idiocy! My cowardly friend, you can just stay back and defend the domain while the rest of us go and fight, and then you can have a share once we exterminate all the cultivators within. But when the time comes, don’t come complaining if you don’t get anything good.”

“Agreed, agreed!” the fiends called out.

Greed had overcome reason!

When the prey was weak, peers became competitors, not allies.

This was true for both fiends and humans.

For fiends, the Rosecloud Domain was like a crisp walnut. A light rap was all it would take to shatter the hard shell and reveal the delectable flesh within.

And who would want to share with others in such a situation?

A moment later, a hundred-some Fiend Gods and Fiend Emperors flew toward the Rosecloud Domain. Some of them even opened passages to bring along their fiend children and grandchildren.

This was a unique skill of the fiends of the Divine Spring Domain. They could use Divine Connections to create passages that could ferry weaker fiends through the Astral Winds, allowing fiend armies to cross the void to loot and plunder.

They had used this method to attack the Ocean King Domain, but they had ultimately failed and been forced to retreat in disarray, abandoning many fiends in the process.

Their wild natures meant that they had failed to learn their lesson. Ever headstrong and impulsive, the fiends of the Divine Spring Domain immediately repeated their old strategies when new prey presented itself, boldly setting off on the path of no return.

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Author’s Note: In the last chapter, I made an error. Yiyi reached Soul Projection long ago, so she should be at half-step Immortal Platform.