Chapter Ninety-Two: The Forty-Nine Mystic Art, Thirteen Transformations (Third Update)

The daylight was dim and indistinct, all colors mingling into one another. Spiritual energy roiled and gathered like clouds, colliding again and again, unwilling to rest for even a single moment.

Watching the uproarious turbulence of this so-called immortal realm, noisier than the clash of drums and gongs, Luo Zu felt only puzzlement.

He had truly never expected the immortal realm to spawn so many disturbances. At first he had thought that, as time passed, things would gradually settle down. Yet instead, the upheaval only grew fiercer and more terrifying.

Storm after storm was brewing within it, and Luo Zu’s spirit, inhabiting this place until now, had gained no great result, only a sliver of progress.

But the immortal realm was in chaos now. Most of the information gathered from every change was useless, yet Luo Zu still had to spend his thoughts upon it, analyzing and searching for anything that might prove valuable. In the end, however, it only showed itself to be meaningless disorder, producing nothing but worthless information.

After too many such futile efforts, Luo Zu had grown numb.

Still, the work had to be done. It could not be spared, for who knew whether it might prove useful one day?

Thus Luo Zu suffered this maddening toil, though he could only bear it for the time being.

And now the strange change in the immortal realm had come because Luo Zu had sensed that in one place where spiritual storms often collided, there was in fact a faint rhythm.

It was indeed a rhythm, no longer meaningless chaos.

The moment he sensed it, Luo Zu quickly drew his mind into the immortal realm to inspect the pattern and record it.

His divine sense broke through great difficulty and finally reached the place where that regular change was taking shape.

There, he saw a vaguely indescribable vortex of spiritual energy gathering. It was precisely this vortex, revolving with a certain regularity, that had allowed Luo Zu to detect that faint rhythm.

Seeing this, Luo Zu was also deeply stirred.

After so long of watching and gathering so much information, there was finally a little useful reward.

Yet what exactly was being brewed within that vortex of spiritual energy?

That too was something Luo Zu wished to investigate to the end.

His divine sense sank into it, looking left and right, up and down, and found only an “ordinary” vortex, though this vortex was formed purely of spiritual energy rather than wind, frost, rain, or water.

Spiritual energy wound around and around. Luo Zu watched for a long while, yet saw no change at all.

The regularity seemed to be nothing more than that. Without outside force, it was probably not going to be broken.

Luo Zu observed for a long time without any result and even considered whether to accelerate its progress with the Great Transmutation of Creation. In the end, however, he restrained himself and remained still for now.

Along the way, he also captured the flesh-and-blood creation of the demon lord Chou Zhi that Yang had long been thinking about, and replaced it with a new demon lord at the foot of the mountain.

Its aura was even stronger than before, startling Yang, who was in hiding and healing his wounds in seclusion.

Then Luo Zu roasted a chicken on the Primordial Lands.

He did not keep the chicken to himself. The sleepless cave dwellers atop the mountain all got a share.

“Chief, this roast chicken is truly good,” said Iron-Head, grinning broadly and giving a thumbs-up.

“So sweet, Chief. Did you add honey?” A fierce woman smeared the chicken fat all over her face as she laughed.

Her name was Xiao. She had once tried to force Luo Zu to submit, but Luo Zu had pinned her to the ground with a single slap, and she had slept peacefully through the night.

With these women of the Primordial Lands, one ought not be softhearted. Though many of them had striking faces and extremely powerful builds, some had arms nearly as thick as Luo Zu’s thighs.

Some were even rougher than men; they would strike men unconscious with wooden clubs and drag them back to use as they pleased.

Of course, some men conducted themselves that way as well.

In short, the customs of the Primordial Lands were fierce and savage. It was best not to transmigrate carelessly.

Not only humans, but other races had similar traits too.

Luo Zu even suspected that some kind of aphrodisiac hung in the air of the Primordial Lands.

He paid Xiao’s teasing and posturing no mind, and only said calmly, “No honey. Just the fragrance of the meat.”

Xiao gave a chuckle. Seeing that Luo Zu did not take the bait, she simply went to find one of the hunting party’s members. While the man was still dazed, she struck him senseless with a slap, then dragged him off to a nearby pile of dry grass...

After taking the final bite of chicken, Luo Zu silently circulated the Forty-Nine Mystic Art and pushed his body into its thirteenth transformation.

Iron-Head, standing nearby, stared so wide-eyed that his mouth gaped open and nearly dropped the chicken in it.

So just by eating roast chicken, the chief could become stronger?

Hastily, Iron-Head stuffed the chicken at his lips into his mouth, chewed twice, and swallowed it in a rush.

The thirteenth transformation of the Forty-Nine Mystic Art did not greatly strengthen the body. It still required slow, painstaking effort to build up. This transformation merely raised the height of the “barrel wall,” allowing it to hold more “water.”

The breakthroughs that followed would not bring a rocket-like leap in power, either, but they were all part of an accumulation. According to Luo Zu’s deductions, it would probably be around the eighteenth transformation that a truly dramatic rise would occur.

But Luo Zu was not short on energy, nor on the energy arrangement needed to deduce the next transformation.

Thus Iron-Head could clearly feel the aura of Luo Zu beside him rise in an instant.

Yet that change flashed by and was swiftly concealed by Luo Zu. If he had not hidden it, everyone would have lost the ability to sleep peacefully tonight.

After things calmed, Luo Zu sat back down to meditate, pondering this latest change and making arrangements for the fourteenth transformation.

Meanwhile, his thoughts divided into two streams: one observing the mortal world, the other the immortal realm.

The loner over there did not have any fancy tricks, either, but through his own efforts, with the help of the Barbarian God Hammer, he finally gathered enough energy for a second dharma-form brain.

And then, true to expectation, he successfully forged that second dharma-form brain.

With this achievement, he was finally able to fight Tai to a standstill.

And while they battled with their techniques, Luo Zu, who was also making high-intensity use of all thirty-six dharma-form brains to calculate the spiritual-energy vortex in the immortal realm, at last obtained an answer.

That place was where the fragment of the spacecraft artifact had struck first after falling into the immortal realm that day.

So the vortex here had a great deal to do with that fragment.

Seeing this, Luo Zu made an even more precise deduction, focusing specifically on the traces and patterns etched upon the fragment.

He was also somewhat excited. After so long, the means of unraveling the fragment had finally come within reach.

Rubbing his hands together, Luo Zu increased his investment in this direction. The thirty-six dharma-form brains operated at high speed, while the essence of sun and moon was refined into pure energy and fed into them. In this way, it could both sustain their massive consumption and cool them down, preventing overload.

The rhythm within the spiritual vortex became the key to deciphering the patterns on the fragment. That order resembled Morse code; Luo Zu recorded it and then deduced the meaning of each segment of rhythm.

Again and again he worked through it, consuming a single strand of sun-and-moon essence and spending an hour before finally deciphering one character:

Emperor.

“Emperor? What does this emperor mean?” Luo Zu paused for the moment and began to let his thoughts spread outward.

He wrote a character into the void, or more accurately, a kind of rhythm.

And then the winds and clouds of the immortal realm shifted once more.