"Watered down? How dare you!"
Granny Meng trembled with rage. "My soup would make even immortals dizzy and forget their past lives! You've been giving him too much. He's developing resistance."
She paused, suddenly realizing her mistake. "Forgive me, Your Excellency. But my soup is never watered down."
The figure took the bowl and drifted away beneath the green umbrella, vanishing into the gray mist.
In the temple world, Su Yan dropped from the great bell onto the mountain below. He moved through the forest, avoiding the stone dragons' search. The bell followed him to the nearest altar.
The idol beside it had broken into several pieces, but its posture remained imposing—mighty and majestic.
Strangely, dense incense offerings still clung to the shattered stone, stronger than anything around Magistrate Xue.
*When gods die, their incense disperses. That's common knowledge.*
Su Yan drew closer. Faint voices murmured in the incense—echoes of prayers and wishes. People begged for rain, for children, for peace, for harvests. These prayers were similar to the visualizations of qi cultivators and nuo masters. Combined with incense, they became divine power.
A god's strength depended on two things: years of worship, and number of worshippers.
Su Yan examined the break. The edges were irregular, worn by time. But the crown of the idol's head was different.
The skull had burst open from the inside. The pattern of destruction suggested something had forced its way out, expanding until the stone crown shattered.
"Gods' heads are hollow. But why?"
Gods didn't need brains. Their souls simply inhabited the idols.
Su Yan leaned into the hollow skull. Strange patterns covered the inner walls—not quite writing, not quite symbols. Too dark to see clearly.
"Uncle Bell, shrink down."
The bell compressed to two feet tall. Su Yan grabbed the bell's nose, leaned inside the skull, and shook it. Light flared from the bell's surface, illuminating the interior.
Su Yan couldn't read the writing. But the great bell could.
"Summoning inscriptions. Ancient qi cultivator script, used to call wandering ghosts. But these are corrupted—more like dark arts, using souls to forge treasures or refine spirit pills. Some characters are written wrong. Whoever carved this wasn't an ancient qi cultivator."
"Ancient dark arts?"
Su Yan withdrew, frowning. "If this is the Immortal Realm, why are there gods? Why summon ghosts?"
Gods needed worshippers' incense. The Immortal Realm shouldn't have people worshipping gods.
"Then is the one preaching in the great temple really an immortal?" Su Yan looked up at the temple floating among five peaks.
He studied the mountains. "Uncle Bell, look at the arrangement of these five peaks. Doesn't it resemble the five organs' positions in the Realm of the Subtle?"
The great bell laughed. "The Realm of the Subtle? The five organs? Impossible. This is the Immortal Realm. The temple has immortals preaching..."
It stopped. Compared to the Immortal Realm, the Realm of the Subtle was far more credible. Even in its master's era, no one had seen the Immortal Realm.
The bell sent out ringing waves, using the mountain echoes to survey the terrain. Su Yan was right. The five peaks mirrored the five organs.
In the Realm of the Subtle, the organ-mountains hung inverted from the sky. These five peaks also floated with their bases upward, tips pointing down. Their heights matched heart, lungs, liver, spleen, and kidneys. Their shapes resembled those organs.
More tellingly, the debris falling from the peaks contained hair-like fibers. True immortal mountains wouldn't have such things.
"These peaks are more like petrified organs, corrupted by some external evil, growing mold and disease."
The bell rang an alarm. Su Yan grabbed it and fled.
Shortly after, two stone dragons arrived, found nothing, and departed.
"If only we'd brought some earth gods," one muttered.
Su Yan moved toward a second idol. Suddenly a scream came from above. Netherworld spirits and Prefect Zhou's men had clashed on the floating stones. Spells and techniques exploded in chaotic battle.
A Zhou Clan clerk, gravely wounded, activated his Mud Pill Secret to heal. But his body's vitality suddenly drained out, sucked into the floating stone beneath him.
The stone's fibrous growths erupted. Countless hair-like tendrils pierced the clerk's body, pulsing as they drank.
The man shrieked, his vitality racing away. He withered into a skeleton, shrunken to two or three feet tall, every trace of vitality consumed.
The stone flushed red, wet with blood. Tendrils—actually blood vessels of varying thickness—whipped through the air, catching others and plunging into their flesh.
The spirits were less affected, not being flesh and blood. But the human clerks and guards were drained in moments.
Chaos erupted. People threw themselves from the stones, trying to reach the mountains, only to fall screaming into the void.
"This Immortal Realm is cursed," Su Yan whispered.
The great bell warned, "Many have entered the temple to hear the immortal preach. Yuan Qi went there too."
Su Yan frowned and approached a second altar. This one was more intact, situated at a crossroads between mountain paths. An idol stood beside it, four arms gripping the altar's edge, gazing down at the center.
This god had four arms, a crown of fire, green face, fangs, and wings on its back. A green dragon coiled around its body.
Its stone had turned golden, gleaming as if forged from solid gold.
*This god has achieved a golden body. Stronger than a city god.*
Su Yan had seen Magistrate Xue fight Zhou Yihang. The city god's divine power, with his shrine floating and thousands of worshippers chanting, had been terrifying.
But this shattered idol exerted even greater pressure.
From a distance, he could hear the murmur of worshippers—faint, distant, yet persistent.
He drew closer. A dragon's roar split the air. A forty-foot stone dragon descended on clouds of green mist, landing between Su Yan and the altar.
The dragon's form shifted, becoming a dragon-headed man over ten feet tall, faint golden light shimmering on his skin. Weak reading voices murmured around him—the prayers of scholars, far weaker than the four-armed idol.
"Xu Ying. I am Shilongzi of the Ningyuan Temple, sent by the city god to capture you." He gathered incense offerings into a flying sword. "Don't resist. The city god ordered me to kill you if necessary and bring back your soul."
Two more dragon roars echoed. Two more dragon-men descended, one to Su Yan's left rear, one to his right rear. They formed swords of qi, silent and deadly, completing a triangle with Shilongzi.
Su Yan looked up. A fourth dragon circled overhead, locking his escape route.
He recognized them—stone dragons carved on the pillars of Ningyuan Temple. Scholars had burned incense there, praying for examination success. The dragons carried the scent of books.
"I killed Zhou Yang and Zhou Yihang with the sword." Su Yan gathered his own sword qi. "You four have done no evil. You have good reputations among scholars. Don't force my hand."
The four dragons tensed. Zhou Yang had been their equal in power. Su Yan had killed him. And Zhou Yihang represented the city god's level of power.
Even together, they might not survive.
Su Yan's heart hammered. His qi hadn't recovered. The great bell had drained him further during flight. If all four attacked, he was finished.
Suddenly Shilongzi dropped to his knees. An eerie smile spread across his face. He kowtowed to the four-armed idol, chanting strange prayers.
The other two dragons paled. "Xu Ying, what did you do to our fourth brother?"
Su Yan gathered his qi. "I did nothing!"
One dragon edged toward Shilongzi. "Fourth Brother, what's wrong? Who attacked you..."
He reached to pull Shilongzi up. Then his own face twisted into that same unnatural smile. He fell to his knees, kowtowing madly, chanting the same prayers.
"A-Yan, that idol and altar are cursed!" the great bell whispered.
Gods gained power through faith and incense. Shilongzi had enjoyed four centuries of worship—powerful incense. How could he suddenly worship a soulless stone idol?
The two kneeling dragons chanted faster, their smiles growing more distorted. Then—*pop!* *pop!*
Their skulls burst from the inside.
Su Yan activated his Heavenly Eye. He watched their souls rise from the shattered heads and float toward the altar.
Through the Heavenly Eye, he saw what ordinary sight could not.
The altar's center contained a furnace structure. A pearl floated inside it, rotating slowly.
The two dragons' souls reached the furnace and shattered. Only fragments of undying spirit essence remained, absorbed into the pearl.
"A-Yan, even if this Realm of the Subtle has immortals, they're evil sword immortals!" the great bell cried. "They're using human souls' undying essence to refine the Myriad Souls Pill and repair their Primordial Spirit!"