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Chapter 19: The Forbidden Abyss Ruins – Awakening the Void World Sacred Lotus
The sky above was cloaked in heavy gray clouds as if even the heavens feared to look upon the place Ye Ling now approached. After traveling thousands of miles for several days, he finally stood before the border of one of the most infamous places in the mortal world—the Forbidden Abyss Ruins.
A land untouched by light, time, or sanity.
The stories were countless—sect masters who ventured in, never to return. Explorers who entered with entire armies only to vanish without a whisper. The very space here distorted with madness, and cultivation itself seemed to shiver under the oppressive aura. Ancient, broken pillars poked from the ground like jagged fangs. Floating boulders hovered above ravines of eternal black, and strange, spectral winds carried long-forgotten screams across the barren earth.
No beasts dared roam this place.
Even the insects that dared crawl across its soil would crumble into dust moments later.
And yet, Ye Ling stepped into this nightmare without hesitation, his expression calm, his eyes ancient and divine.
The moment his foot landed within the abyssal boundary, the system's voice rang out in his mind like the voice of a god from beyond the heavens.
[Sign-In Location: Forbidden Abyss Ruins Detected.]
[Sign-In Successful: Reward—Void Spirit Lotus (Heaven-Tier).]
[10,000-Fold Amplification Activated: Reward Enhanced—Void World Sacred Lotus (Mythic-Tier).]
Ye Ling stood still for a long moment.
Then, he smiled.
This smile wasn't ordinary—it held the calm pride of a man who had seen the fall of empires, the collapse of stars. For this was his very first sign-in after leaving the Ye Clan, and the reward had instantly shot past Heaven-Tier into the realm of Mythic-Tier—a tier that didn't belong in the mortal world.
The Void World Sacred Lotus.
A legendary lotus that existed only in whispered myths of the Immortal Realms, beyond the Nine Heavens. Even there, one could search the void for thousands of years and never lay eyes on it.
This lotus… was born at the intersection of countless collapsed dimensions. It absorbed the essence of dying worlds, drinking the chaos and reforming it into divine purity. Its petals glimmered with colors no mortal eye should perceive. Just a single breath of its fragrance could stabilize a crumbling soul. A drop of its dew could heal a body even if only ashes remained.
In the Immortal Realms, such a lotus would start wars.
In the mortal world… it was the seed of invincibility.
"If refined into pills, even peak immortals would experience rapid breakthroughs." Ye Ling muttered, staring at the lotus floating in his spatial ring. It rotated slowly in the void, radiating waves of power that even his body felt unworthy to endure.
But he wouldn't refine it into pills.
"If I consume it bit by bit—absorb its essence directly—my cultivation speed will multiply endlessly," he said to himself. "I will not waste this miracle by converting it into something ordinary."
But even this came with risks.
The lotus was not just a treasure—it was a miniature world of pure chaos. Consuming even a single petal without proper preparation would be equivalent to ingesting a violent star. Even a peak immortal's flesh could be torn asunder.
Ye Ling was still in the mortal realm. Even if he stood at the peak of the Divine Formation Realm and was nearing the Void Formation, consuming the whole lotus at once would obliterate him. His body would disintegrate into a mist before he could even scream.
Thus, he set off once more into the endless stretches of the Forbidden Abyss Ruins, searching for a location with absolute spiritual balance, a place isolated from the chaos, to begin refining just a portion of this divine lotus.
He walked for days, traveling across abyssal ridges, shadowy plains, and through eerie, dimensionally fractured storms that could swallow even space itself. At one point, he crossed a river made entirely of black fog—its surface flat and still, yet beneath it slumbered things with more eyes than stars.
But Ye Ling was unfazed.
Eventually, he found it.
A natural formation of balance—an ancient shrine lost in time, half-buried beneath the ruins. The shrine pulsed faintly with harmonic energy, left behind by a long-dead civilization that once attempted to comprehend the heavens. It was perfect.
Within this ancient temple, lit by floating blue flames and guarded by statues of unknown beasts, Ye Ling sat cross-legged and summoned the lotus into the air.
The Void World Sacred Lotus bloomed.
Its petals spread in slow, majestic silence, illuminating the entire shrine with holy brilliance. The chaotic winds outside ceased. The heavens above briefly parted, allowing a single divine ray of light to kiss the lotus as if even the cosmos acknowledged its sanctity.
Ye Ling reached out, plucked a single petal the size of a palm, and began refining it.
The moment it entered his body, his veins ignited.
BOOM!
It felt as though an entire world was trying to be reborn inside him.
Every cell in his body trembled, screaming both in agony and ecstasy. The energy was so pure, so ancient, it bypassed the limitations of the mortal realm entirely. It pushed against the bottleneck of the Divine Formation 9th Stage, cracked it slightly—but didn't shatter it yet.
Still, the effect was more than enough.
His spiritual core swirled with divine clarity, and his body—already nearing the mid-stage of body cultivation—suddenly broke through.
His skin became jade-like, his bones radiated golden light, and his organs transformed into spiritual sanctuaries. Every heartbeat echoed like the chant of an ancient god.
But before he could fully stabilize his breakthrough—
He paused.
His divine senses, sharper than the edge of a mythic blade, picked up movement.
"From the northeast," he murmured. His gaze pierced the misty abyss for hundreds of kilometers. To him, distance was meaningless. What others saw as vast terrain, he perceived as if it were a few meters.
A group of cultivators had entered the Forbidden Abyss Ruins.
From their auras, he could sense their cultivation: several Nascent Soul realm cultivators, and one at the early stage of the Divine Formation Realm.
They were cautious—terrified, even—but determined.
Ye Ling's eyes narrowed.
They didn't belong here. The Forbidden Abyss Ruins devoured those who weren't chosen. But what interested him wasn't their presence. It was their direction.
A slow, cold smile curved on Ye Ling's lips.
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