After I stopped trying, a rich woman trained me into a demon emperor.

Chi Lin's expression changed drastically. He tried to pull his hand back, but the Black Gold Emperor's Decree resonated with the Killing Decree first.

The brand of inspection on the captured divine messenger's chest crossed the city wall and landed directly on Crimson Scale.

A cold rule emanated from the anchor core.

[Qualifications for conducting the inspection.]

The holder of this command has participated in the karmic retribution.

[His identity has been incorporated into the Imperial Prince's execution sequence.]

The aura of the Emperor's Bone within Chi Lin's body was fully awakened.

Instead of continuing to draw upon the Nine Nether Earth Veins, the Causal Anchor began to devour his cultivation along with the Imperial Decree in his hand.

In the early stages of the tribulation, demonic energy surged into the Devouring Heaven Seal like a burst dam.

Red Scale roared and severed its right arm.

Before the severed arm even hit the ground, the execution order transformed into black and gold chains that burrowed into his primordial spirit through the wound.

"Zhou Ran, what you gave me wasn't the Devouring Heaven Seal!"

Zhou Ran raised his locked hand.

"The authority is real."

Half a bone pen flew up from the waist on its own.

"As for what was in the seal, you were in too much of a hurry to check."

Outside the platform, the bodies of the first batch of hostages simultaneously became transparent.

Huan Yin had already used the moment the Devouring Heaven Seal was activated to send the Formless Soul Shell into the Causal Anchor.

Thousands of phantoms replaced the real coordinates, and all the brow bone needles were nailed to the false soul imprint.

The Gu natal Gu in Xiao Rou's sleeve emitted a sharp cry.

Outside the Nine Nether City, thousands of transparent Gu worms surged into the array platform along the real coordinates, biting off the causal threads on the hostages one by one.

Chi Lin sensed that the hostage was breaking away and pressed his left hand down hard on the underground blood vessel.

The seven blood sacrifice pipelines had just lit up when the Blood Sea Spear had already pierced through the spatial node.

Bloodlust stood on the River of Blood and Bones, his spear sweeping across the land.

Seven pipelines broke off in sections from the Netherworld veins.

Jiuyou stood in front of the black coffin and pressed his natal soul imprint into the military register.

The master-disciple soul line extends from between her eyebrows to the Crimson Scale Primordial Spirit.

Crimson Scales attempted to transfer the backlash from the anchor core to Nine Netherworld.

As soon as the soul thread reversed, the Nine Nether Twelve Arrays rose from the ground, sealing all the backlash within the seventh layer.

Nine Nether looked at Crimson Scale through the global projection.

"I personally taught you every level of the cultivation technique you practiced."

His voice held no anger, only utter indifference.

"Using the master-disciple soul seal to scheme against me is the stupidest thing you've done today."

Chi Lin's cultivation level dropped from the early stage of Tribulation Transcending to the peak of Integration.

He disregarded the need to maintain control of the hostages, pressing down on the causal anchor with both hands simultaneously, and forcibly activating the deepest anchor core.

"The coordinates the Emperor Prince gave me are accurate! As long as the location of Blue Star is sent out, the Name Erasure Order will bypass the military registers of the Four Realms. Even if you save a few thousand people, it won't stop the entire Demon Realm from being wiped out!"

The black anchor was completely pulled out of the Nine Nether Earth Veins.

The chains binding Zhou Ran as the emperor tightened.

His primordial spirit was pried open again, and the Black Gold Rules attempted to extract the true location of Blue Star from his memories.

The black lines on the path Lin Qingxue left behind suddenly lit up.

A look of wild joy appeared in Chi Lin's eyes.

"Found it!"

A beam of black and gold light shot out from the anchor core.

The coordinates within Zhou Ran's primordial spirit were forcibly dragged into the sky.

At that moment, the broken bone pen fell into his palm.

The brushstroke had only a last vestige of strength left.

Zhou Ran neither severed the causal anchor nor modified the coordinates of Blue Star.

He plunged the broken pen into the scrutiny mark left by the divine messenger on the execution order, changing the target that Anchor Heart was tracking to the captured executioner.

[Coordinates attribution: sender.]

The black-gold beam of light suddenly turned back.

The divine messenger in the coffin had his chest pierced by the anchor light, and all twelve imperial bone tokens rose into the air.

Every cross-boundary path is forcibly opened by causal anchors.

However, the anchor could not find any complete location leading to the blue star.

Chi Lin desperately urged the Emperor's Decree, causing patches of red scales to fall off his face.

"Impossible! The anchor clearly contains the tidal energy of Blue Star; the Imperial Prince personally confirmed those coordinates!"

The seventh-level array platform began to collapse.

Thousands of hostages have been sent out of the Corridor of Cause and Effect by Huanyin.

Qin San led 6,000 demon soldiers to break through the first three layers of the array gates and is now advancing downwards along the Nine Nether Twelve Arrays.

Chi Lin lost his hostage, and his cultivation was continuously drained by the execution order.

All he could hold onto in the end was the anchor.

"Open it!"

Red Scale poured all of its remaining primordial spirit into Black Anchor.

The causal anchor pierced the sky above Nine Nether City, obscuring the military records of the four regions.

An ancient tidal roar emanated from within the anchor core.

The coordinate anomaly, sealed for 30,000 years, was finally forcibly released.

Zhou Ran looked up.

There is neither Blue Star nor Jiangcheng deep within the causal anchor.

At the edge of darkness, a silver moon slowly rises.

Silver moonlight falls upon the sixth heaven.

A wound appeared on the surface of the moon.

Large amounts of blood were flowing down from the moon.

The silver moon bled, and the blood fell onto the anchor of cause and effect.

The execution order within Chi Lin's body jumped.

He had seen that silver moon before. Three thousand years ago, when he first stepped into the seventh level of the Nine Nether Well, he saw the same lunar wound in a discarded array stone. The Nine Nether warned him then that this was a forbidden coordinate left over from the era of the Demon Emperor, and no one was allowed to touch it.

He secretly investigated for three hundred years before finally contacting the Son of God's messenger through this connection.

But the divine messenger said that the blue star lies behind the silver moon.

"The Emperor's coordinates can't be wrong; this moon must be the outer barrier of Earth!"

Chi Lin suppressed the weakness caused by the sharp drop in his cultivation level and reached for the Devouring Heaven Seal with his left hand.

His right arm is broken, but as long as he regains control of the main account, he can allow the causal anchor to continue tracking the world behind the silver moon.

Zhou Ran was faster than him.

Inside the Devouring Heaven Seal, the dark red notes of the Illusionary Sound flipped.

The soul shell, originally used to simulate complete authority, shrank inward, carrying the execution order away from the anchor core.

Red Scale only caught an empty shell.

The true Devouring Heaven Seal returned to Zhou Ran's hands following the order from the main command of the unified military register.

The imperial chains binding his primordial spirit were still there, but once the Heaven-Devouring Seal returned, the military registers of the four regions responded in unison.

Each military register only expends a wisp of soul power, yet when combined, it far exceeds the causal rules that Chi Lin can control.

The chains were stretched and cracked.

Chi Lin suddenly raised his head, and the remaining scales on his face kept falling off.

"Your cultivation was reduced to the peak of the Nascent Soul stage by the black coffin, so why can you still mobilize the military forces of the four regions? Those soldiers don't even know what a causal anchor is, so why would they dare to entrust their soul power to you!"

Zhou Ran gripped the Heaven-Swallowing Seal with his five fingers, and the Unified Army Register unfolded above the seventh-level array platform.

"They don't need to understand causal anchors."

"The people of the Blood Sea know that I will make up for their lost wages. The Nine Nether Guards know that I came here to remove the bone needles from their brows. The people of the Devouring Heaven Demon Palace also know that I have never used them to fill the void left by my own family."

Zhou Ran looked at Chi Lin.

"And you, you gambled the lives of the entire city on whether the Emperor would remember your contributions. And after losing the gamble, you still want to ask them why they didn't believe you?"

On the seventh-level platform, thousands of hostages have already escaped the Corridor of Cause and Effect.

Xiao Rou sat in the center of the army formation outside the city, her natal Gu lying in her palm.

Each time a thread of true cause and effect is severed, a spot of light will darken on the Gu worm's carapace.

The last seventeen points of light never went out.

"Your Majesty, there are still seventeen people left."

Xiao Rou's voice traveled through the military register to the bottom of the well.

She marked the positions of the seventeen people, nine of whom were hidden below the anchor core, while the causal threads of the other eight were entangled in the primordial spirit of the Crimson Scale.

Chi Lin never intended to release all the hostages from the beginning.

Upon hearing this, Chi Lin plunged his left hand directly into his chest.