"Yuan! Is it really you?! Are you really not a ghost?!" Lan Yingying tightly embraced him to make sure that he was real.
"What is going on? Who is this?" Wang Xiuying was surprised when a beauty suddenly fell from the sky.
"M-Miss Lan? What are you doing here?" Yuan asked her in a dumbfounded voice after catching her from the sky.
"We came to the Mystic Pagoda to check up on the phenomenon that occurred here recently, but to think we’d see you here!" Lan Yingying said.
"We?" Yuan raised his eyebrows.
A second later, two more figures descended from the sky.
"Grandpa Lan! Grandma Lan!" Yuan was pleasantly surprised to see them as well.
"Are you really the young man...? How on earth did you survive the Demon Lord’s Core Detonation? And where have you been this whole time?" Grandpa Lan asked him with a dazed look on his face, almost like he was looking at a ghost.
Yuan then said, "It’s a long story, but I barely managed to survive the blast. And thanks to my regeneration skill that I’d obtained from consuming the Demon Core, I was able to recover fully."
"Y-You obtained a skill from consuming the Demon Core...?" They all looked at him with baffled expressions.
"Anyways, it’s relieving that you have managed to survive that blast." Grandpa Lan said.
"Yuan, who are these people?" Wang Xiuying asked him a moment later.
"They are the Lan Family, and they’re natives in the Mystic Realm. They were also the first ones I met when I came to this place, and they have helped me a bunch since then." Yuan introduced the Lan Family to Wang Xiuying.
"H-Hello, I am Wang Xiuying, and I am a friend of Yuan..." Wang Xiuying greeted them.
"Any friend of Yuan is our friend." Grandpa Lan nodded, seemingly in great spirits.
"Anyways, how did you open the Mystic Pagoda, young man?" He turned to look at Yuan.
Yuan shrugged and said, "I honestly don’t know. I think it has something to do with the Empyrean Overlord, but I don’t have any solid proof. The door opens when I get close to it is all I know."
"I see... Interesting..." Grandpa Lan began pondering.
After a moment of silence, he spoke, "If you don’t mind, can you show us the inside? I have always wondered what the Lord’s living quarters looked like."
"W-Wait... Living quarters? This place?" Wang Xiuying said in a dazed voice.
"That’s right. This place belongs to the Master of the Mystic Realm, who we call the ’Lord’." Grandpa Lan confirmed.
"Unbelievable... To think this mysterious place that cannot be opened by normal means turned out to be a living quarter for some individual... And here I thought it was a special place filled with treasures and whatnot." Wang Xiuying mumbled.
"It is a special place... but probably not in the sense that you outsiders are thinking." Grandpa Lan said with a smile on his face.
Sometime later, Yuan brought the Lan Family inside the Mystic Pagoda, leading them from the first floor all the way to the ninth floor.
During this whole time, Lan Yingying stayed close to Yuan like two peas in a pod. It was as though she was reluctant to leave his side after almost losing him once, and the grandparents found this cute of her.
Wang Xiuying, however, was puzzled by Lan Yingying’s seemingly intimate relationship with Yuan, and she wondered what happened between them.
"This place is much more spacious than I’d expected... And by that, I mean there’s nothing in here..." Grandpa Lan said after climbing all nine floors.
"There seems to be another floor to this place. I thought there were only nine floors?" Lan Yingying said after she noticed the 10th floor.
"Let’s check it out." Grandpa Lan said.
"W-Wait! Don’t go up there!" Yuan hastily said to them.
"Hm? Why not?" They looked at him with their eyebrows raised.
"Because there’s a teleport formation up there that will take you to this place called Ancient Dragon City," Yuan said, and he proceeded to explain the Ancient Dragon City to the Lan Family.
"Is that so... No wonder why I can sense this inhuman aura around you..." Grandpa Lan said afterward. "So this is the feeling of a ’dragon’."
"I don’t know how, but the Lord is most likely related to the Ancient Dragon City in some way for him to have a teleport formation to that place inside his home."
"Yuan, look at this... There’s a slit here..." Lan Yingying suddenly pointed to the floor in front of the place where Yuan got his mask from.
"Oh, yeah. I noticed it before but didn’t think too much about it." Yuan said.
"If you look closely at it, don’t you think your Empyrean Overlord would fit perfectly inside this slit?" Lan Yingying said.
"What?" Yuan looked at her with wide eyes, then he turned to look at the somewhat unnaturally wide slit in the ground.
"Let me try it..."
Yuan then retrieved his sword and inserted it inside the slit.
And to his surprise, it was a perfect fit, almost like this slit was made for his sword.
The moment the tip of his sword reached the end of the slit, Yuan felt a ’click’.
Suddenly, the entire Mystic Pagoda began rumbling as though there was an earthquake.
"W-What’s going on now?"
The shaking lasted for a good moment before it calmed down.
And when it did—
Ding!
[Congratulations! The Mystic Realm now recognizes you as its Master! You have become the Master of the Mystic Realm!]
[You have obtained the title ’Master of the Mystic Realm’!]
[You now have full command over the Mystic Realm!]
"Uhh... I think I just became the Master of the Mystic Realm," Yuan suddenly said, shocking everybody in the room.
"What?! How?!" Grandpa Lan exclaimed.
"Probably because of this?" Yuan pointed to the Empyrean Overlord that was inserted perfectly into the floor.
"Good lord... To think you can become the Master of the Mystic Realm in such a manner..." Grandpa Lan mumbled in a dazed voice, and then he realized that unless one had the Empyrean Overlord, it was literally impossible to become the master of the Mystic Realm!