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

Zhou Ran sat there, the coffin burial law engravings on the back of his right hand radiating a cold light polished by death.

He looked down at the black coffin.

The coffin lid was half open, and the cracks on the coffin walls, which had been damaged by the backlash of the Emperor's rule, were slowly healing themselves after Jiuyou left.

Just as he was about to close the coffin lid.

A deep, muffled thud came from deep within the coffin walls.

It's not a magical shockwave.

It's not the resonance of the Soul Abyss Stone.

It was a heartbeat.

Zhou Ran's hand hovered above the coffin lid, his entire body rooted to the spot.

The heartbeat surged from the deepest wood fibers of the coffin wall, with an extremely low frequency and long intervals, each beat carrying the dullness of traversing ten thousand years.

He had heard that frequency before.

At the very bottom of the Abyss of Despair, the last tremor left by Ye Futian's lingering shadow before it dissipated was the same rhythm.

The coffin bounced a second time, and Zhou Ran gripped the hilt of his knife tightly.

The black coffin is Jiuyou's natal magic weapon, and it is bound to her life and death.

This coffin has been sleeping in the Sixth Heaven for 30,000 years, containing the body of Ye Futian and withstanding the impact of the Emperor's rule. It only ever opens and closes, never jumps.

The third time didn't come.

The coffin walls fell silent again.

Those two heartbeats just now were probably just an illusion.

Zhou Ran slowly lowered his hand.

The final pattern on the Taihuang Black Blade doubled in brightness during the two leaps of the coffin.

Before dawn, Qin San's military report crashed into the main hall, shattering the jade communication token into three pieces.

When Qin San delivered the message, he used too much magic power, and the jade tablet couldn't withstand it and collapsed.

Mingcang extracted the last fragment of spiritual sound from the shards; the sound was intermittent.

"...Six hidden poisons...all lost contact...Burial Plain...the end of the eastern supply route..."

Ming Cang's face went from drowsy to ashen in less than two snaps of his fingers.

When Zhou Ran arrived at the main hall, Qin San's second message had already arrived.

This time we used the military corridor, and the signal was much more stable.

"My lord, I captured a segment of the last image transmitted by the Dark Gu and stored it at the bottom of the military register."

Zhou Ran opened the military register.

Six frames emerge from the image array on the bottom page, numbered from one to six, corresponding to the final records of the six Dark Gu.

The first five frames were almost identical, then the screen shook violently twice, turned white, and went out.

The standard way to die when a Dark Gu is crushed by external force.

The sixth frame lasted for an extra half breath.

In the footage, the eastern grain route ends at an abandoned mine shaft.

The entrance to the mine had collapsed, and the rubble was piled up to waist height.

Zangyuan stood in front of the pile of rubble, holding the fragment of the Emperor's Armor to his forehead.

The fragments emitted a cold white light between his five fingers, the light growing brighter and denser.

The fragment was pressed against the center of the forehead.

The process of the dark gold fragments merging into the skin took only a moment.

There wasn't even a trace left between his eyebrows; the fragment just seeped in, just like a drop of water being absorbed clean by parched earth.

Immediately afterwards, the image of the sixth Dark Gu shattered.

At the same moment, the six hidden Gu were crushed into dust by an unknown force.

Zhou Ran pushed the military register in front of Ming Cang.

"Zoom in on the sixth frame to see the angle and speed at which the fragment between his eyebrows merges."

The image in the mortal chamber is pulled up and enlarged.

The moment the fragments merged into the skin was slowed down tenfold, making every frame crystal clear.

When the fragments came into contact with the frontal bone, the cold white light on the surface turned into a deep blue-green, and then into a bluish-black.

The pen holder in the dark warehouse hung in mid-air.

"This color... is not the color scheme of the Imperial Prince system."

The Emperor's son's rule light was dark gold or cold white, and never appeared in bluish-black.

The bluish-black color has only one origin in the color spectrum of the Sixth Heaven: ancient magic patterns.

The inscriptions buried in the foundation of the Devouring Heaven Demon Palace for 30,000 years have this color tone.

Zhou Ran closed the military register.

"Has Qin San arrived at the mine yet?"

The message from Mingcang arrived quickly, and the reply came almost immediately.

"arrive.

The cave entrance was empty; the person was gone, but there were carvings on the ground.

Qin San used his personal talisman to take a picture of a complete array diagram.

The pattern was carved on the rocky ground at the entrance of the mine. The lines were smooth and about half a finger deep, and the edges of the carving were as smooth as if you were cutting tofu with a knife.

I've never seen the patterns of the formation before.

I've never seen Huanyin before.

Bloodlust glanced at it and left; she had no interest in formations.

Jiuyou emerged from a dark corner behind the palace.

She stepped barefoot in front of the imprint talisman, squatted down, and stretched out a finger to trace half a circle along the outer edge of the array pattern.

She brought her fingertips to her nose and smelled the stone dust from the rubbing.

"Something from 30,000 years ago."

Mingcang turned to look at her.

"The residual aura in the engravings is highly similar to a set of engravings on the deepest part of the seventh level of the Soul Abyss."

"I saw the rubbing at the bottom of the old archives in the black coffin."

Jiuyou flicked the stone chips off his fingers and stood up.

Zhou Ran stared at the array diagram.

Thirty thousand years ago.

An era in which the night bears the weight of the sky.

The imperial inspector, Zang Yuan, had been lying in the Sixth Heaven for forty-seven years, according to his own account.

But the formation on the ground is something from 30,000 years ago.

There is a difference of two orders of magnitude between forty-seven years and thirty thousand years.

"Bone silence".

Zhou Ran called out.

Gu Ji strolled in from outside the palace gate.

His metal spine supported his patched-up body, which creaked as he walked, making him look like a rusty iron man.

"Go to the burial camp. Investigate his men, his accounts, and whether there are any fragments remaining between his eyebrows."

Gu Ji accepted the order and left.

About half an hour later, Gu Ji returned.

"The master account is normal."

The three thousand grain transport soldiers ate, slept, and did drills as usual, with no abnormalities in their routines.

The original burial man was sitting in the tent eating; when I went in, he was drinking porridge.

His expression was flat, as if nothing had happened.

"What about the space between your eyebrows?"

"We checked, and there was no trace of it."

Gu Ji's tone twisted.

I explored it three times.

There was none of the aura of fragments, the fluctuations of imperial runes, or the remnants of ancient demonic runes.

Clean and spotless, even cleaner than if you'd washed your face.

Zhou Ran leaned back in his chair.

A fragment of the Imperial Court fused into his brow, but it could not be found after half an hour.

There are only two possibilities.

The fragments were moved, or they were consumed by some more powerful force.

"There's one more thing."

Gu Ji's voice dropped halfway.

All eyes in the hall turned to look.

Gu Ji stretched out his right hand and gripped the back of his neck.

A metal finger is stuck at the junction of the cervical vertebrae and spine, and the knuckles are white.

"When I came out of the main tent, something was moving inside my spine."

He turned his back around.

Below the back of the neck, between the shoulder blades, between the third and fourth vertebrae of the metal spine, there is a rivet the size of a thumbprint.

Those are old items from the time of the bone swallowing. They are positioning screws implanted when the bone was transformed into a semi-mechanical body, used to anchor the angle of the spinal prosthesis.

This screw has not been moved since the day it was implanted.

It rotates on its own.

Extremely slow, with each rotation accompanied by the sound of metal grinding against bone.

Bone Silence could feel that the screw's prongs had shifted position within the screw hole of the spinal prosthesis, rotating about thirty degrees.