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

Zhou Ran sat on the throne in the main hall, with the Taihuang Black Blade held horizontally in front of his knees.

Deep within his consciousness, the wisp of silver will huddled in a corner, its three tentacles retracted.

It didn't move. But Zhou Ran knew perfectly well that the thing was awake.

Less than half an hour after the farce in the side hall, the silver eye had recorded the location, frequency of fluctuation, and interference relationship of the three marks.

The Moon Emperor hadn't figured out what he was after in these data. But there was one thing he didn't need to think about for too long—he couldn't let it continue looking at them.

You can't forcibly remove it. Xiao Rou said it herself: the silver consciousness is embedded in the primordial spirit, mixed together with his own soul power. Forcing it apart is like ripping your own brain out with a knife.

Let's try a different approach.

"Illusory Sound".

Zhou Ran relayed the message through the military register.

In less than a quarter of an hour, the dark red skirt appeared at the threshold of the main hall.

Huanyin's hair was still covered in dust.

She leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, and glanced at Zhou Ran, knowing he was plotting something underhanded again.

"What do you need me to do?"

Zhou Ran didn't beat around the bush.

"Can your illusionary magic create a scene within my consciousness?"

Huan Yin raised an eyebrow.

"The same soul imprint is still hanging in your primordial spirit; setting up a temporary stage isn't difficult. What play do you want to perform?"

Zhou Ran lowered his voice. "Sinful Blood."

Huan Yin paused, her fingers moving slightly.

Zhou Ran repeated the Moon Emperor's last words before he left: "Unless you return the blood of your sins to me."

"She installed eyes in my brain, not to watch the three of you fight over a man."

Zhou Ran tapped the cover of the military register with the back of his hand.

"The three marks were just noted down casually. What she really wants to keep an eye on is when the Sin Blood will leave her body."

Huan Yin narrowed her eyes slightly.

Zhou Ran added another sentence.

"The blood of sin is intertwined with the origin of the Demon Emperor, and cannot be separated by external forces."

If the Moon Emperor wants it back, he can only wait for me to voluntarily separate it from my primordial spirit. That eye of hers is guarding this window.

Huan Yin walked to the long table, pressed her ten fingers on the edge of the table, and dark red soul power flowed out from between her fingers.

"You're going to feed her fake food."

"right."

Zhou Ran opened the blank page of the military register and drew a rough diagram of the structure of the sea of ​​consciousness.

"Build a scene in my mind."

Content: "I extracted the sinful blood from the depths of my primordial spirit and entrusted it to Jiuyou to be sealed in a black coffin, to be completely destroyed in three days."

Huanyin stared at the picture for three breaths.

"If the Moon Emperor believes this, he will definitely take action within three days. He will either come in person or send someone."

Huan Yin's fingernails left a white mark on the table. "You're fishing."

"Not just fishing."

Zhou Ran closed the military register.

"When the silver consciousness was forced out, it carried all the scanning records left by the Moon Emperor in the Sixth Heaven. It scanned for as long as it had been looking at them."

A flash of red light appeared in Huan Yin's eyes.

"You have to take everything, pot and all."

Zhou Ran ignored that, turned and roared towards the outside of the hall, "Bloodlust!"

The crisp sound of a gun barrel striking a stone slab echoed from the depths of the corridor.

Bloodlust emerged from around the corner, carrying a long spear. His red eyes swept over Huan Yin, his expression unchanging, and he stood on the other side of the doorway.

The two stood four steps apart, ignoring each other.

Zhou Ran didn't bother with this awkwardness.

"Your ancestral blood can burn away foreign parasites in your sea of ​​consciousness. You missed the last time the Emperor's son had that black-gold eye. This time, a smaller version has come."

The bloodthirsty gaze shifted from Huanyin back to Zhou Ran's face.

"The wisp of hair left by the Moon Emperor?"

"Yes. First, use the illusionary sound to feed the false images. Once the Moon Eye has absorbed all the information, you use the Ancestral Blood to burn from the outside."

The goal isn't to kill it, but simply to force it to slip out from the dimensional rift within its primordial spirit.

The bloodthirsty gun's butt paused on the ground. "What happens after you force it out?"

"Xiao Rou's Gu worms are waiting outside. The moment the silver light appears, she's responsible for chasing and biting them."

Bloodlust paused for two breaths, his mouth twisted slightly, revealing half a tooth.

"Ancestral blood burns the primordial spirit; if you don't control it properly, it'll burn your soul too." She raised her gun, the blade pressed against Zhou Ran's forehead. "You dare put your head in my hands?"

"You bit my neck last time but didn't kill me, your technique is not bad."

His bloodthirsty red eyes flickered. The spearhead deflected two inches.

"Stubborn to the end."

There was no need for Jiuyou to call out. When she emerged from the dark corner of the hall, there wasn't a trace of death energy emanating from her, as if she had grown out of that pillar herself.

"Black coffin cooperation." Those four words are so superfluous; any more would be superfluous.

Zhou Ran glanced at her.

Jiuyou stood barefoot on the stone slab, the hem of her black dress remaining perfectly still. She had heard the entire plan.

"You need to open the coffin lid halfway to expose the space inside," Zhou Ran added.

"In the fabricated scene by Huanyin, the sinful blood will be sealed into a black coffin. What the Moon Emperor's silver eyes see must be the real coffin."

The coffin was real, the blood was fake.

Jiuyou lowered his eyelids. "When the coffin lid is opened, and for how long, is up to me."

"OK."

The four took their places.

Through the connection of the soul imprint of the same frequency, the illusory sound built a realistic picture on the outer layer of Zhou Ran's consciousness.

Her formless illusion technique has deceived the divine sense probing of cultivators in the Transcendent Tribulation stage more than once. Now, she is operating at full power, and every frame of light and shadow, mana fluctuation, and temperature difference in the air is precisely replicated.

In the picture, "Zhou Ran" sits cross-legged in front of the black coffin in the side hall.

With his hands forming a hand seal, a thick, dark red liquid slowly emerged from the depths of his primordial spirit.

The liquid exuded an ancient aura, with fine golden patterns swirling on its surface.

Sin and blood.

In the scene, Jiuyou stepped forward and lifted the black coffin. "Zhou Ran" sent the sinful blood into the coffin.

The coffin lid closed, sealing away the deathly aura.

The whole process took about thirty breaths.

The silver consciousness awakened in the seventh breath of the illusory soundscape.

The three tentacles no longer pointed to three marks, but instead shot straight towards the center of the image. The swallowing speed was extremely fast, like a wild dog that hadn't eaten for three days pouncing on a bone.

It believed it.

Zhou Ran sensed this through the feedback from the Soul Imprint of the Same Frequency.

After the silver consciousness swallowed the image of "Sinful Blood Sealing Coffin," its overall brightness increased by 20%—it was transmitting data towards the mother body.

"That's enough." Zhou Ran nodded bloodthirstily.

Bloodlust stepped forward. He spread his five fingers on his left hand and pressed down on Zhou Ran's crown.

Extremely pure ancestral blood power surged from his palm.

The crimson liquid energy transformed into threads, probing downwards along Zhou Ran's meridians, reaching the layer between his primordial spirit and his inner core.

pain.

The scorching force of the ancestral blood penetrated into the outer wall of the primordial spirit.

Zhou gritted his teeth, and several veins bulged on his temples.

The bloodthirsty technique was indeed impressive; the ancestral blood threads precisely bypassed his own soul power structure, only burning the gap where the silver will parasitized.

The silver consciousness trembled desperately.

The three tentacles thrashed back, trapping the entire ball of light in a corner with nowhere to run. The burning heat of the ancestral blood continued to rise.

Finally, the silver consciousness slipped out of the primordial spirit's inner layer.

A streak of silver light shot out from above Zhou Ran's head, moving so fast it disappeared in the blink of an eye, flying straight towards the ruins of the Nine Nether Well.

Xiao Rou was already waiting a hundred feet away.

Although the golden gu had broken its membranous wings, it could still fly with the remaining five.

The Gu worm shot out from her shoulder, its five wings fully extended, its dark golden barbs locking onto the silver light's trajectory, before plunging headfirst into it.

The speed of the silver light far exceeded that of the Gu worms.

But the Golden Gu doesn't chase speed; it chases direction.

The connection between Xiaorou and her natal Gu was pushed to its limit.

The remaining barbs on the insect's shell stood up, and just before the silver light was about to escape, its mouthparts closed, forcefully biting off a fragment from the silver thought's tail.

The silver light disappeared into the void, leaving no trace.

The golden gu fell onto the ruins, its mouthparts tightly gripping a silver fragment the size of a thumbnail.

Xiao Rou ran over and caught the Gu worm.

The fragment struggled twice within the mouthparts of the golden gu before settling down.

Zhou Ran opened her eyes.

Cold sweat streamed down his forehead, and the crevice where his primordial spirit had been scalded by the ancestral blood still throbbed with pain.

But the silvery thought was indeed completely cleared away. Nothing remained at the bottom of the sea of ​​consciousness.

"Bring it here."

Xiao Rou delivered the fragments to the military register.

Zhou Ran reached out and took it. The moment the silver shards fell into his palm, a flood of information poured into his mind.

It is not a record of three marks.

It is a complete scan of the six layers of the celestial veins.

The route of every main vein, the strength of every node, the defensive blind spots of Nine Nether City, the load-bearing limit of the Devouring Demon Palace, and the distribution of spatial rifts at the intersection of the four domains—nothing is missing.

That level of precision is something even Mingcang couldn't achieve by spending two days hunched over military records.

The Moon Emperor wasn't just watching. She was calculating whether the entire Sixth Heaven could withstand a second wave of attacks.

He withdrew his bloodthirsty hand, his red eyes fixed on the fragment.

"This woman is more cunning than the emperor's son."

Huan Yin leaned against the long table, her dark red eyes deepening. "The Emperor's son is openly robbing, the Moon Emperor is inspecting the goods. She's weighing whether this territory is worth her involvement."

Jiuyou walked to the military register. She stared at the earth vein map reflected in the fragments, and the black lines between her brows furrowed slightly.

"Thirty thousand years ago, when Ye Futian was still around, the Moon Emperor came to the Sixth Heaven to scout the area." Jiuyou's tone was extremely calm.

"I have seen similar scanning marks in the old files at the bottom of the black coffin."

Zhou Ran entered all the information from the fragments into the bottom page of the military register. The silver light merged into the paper, transforming into a dense array of data.

He closed the military register and glanced at the four people present.

"The Moon Emperor will come to collect the blood of sin in three days."

Half of Mingcang's head peeked out from beside the military register.

He couldn't say when he woke up or how long he had been listening, but he did hear that last sentence.

"Your Majesty, shall we give it to you or not?"

Zhou Ran tapped his fingers on the cover of the military brochure.

"Not only will we not give it to her—we'll make her owe us a sum of money instead."