The killing intent in Gongsun Qixuan's tone was undisguised.
"Then, Fellow Daoist, please prove it!"
He fixed his gaze on Li Fan, his voice cold as iron.
The pressure shifted entirely onto Li Fan. More and more gazes converged on him from all directions.
"Since you claim the ability to divine future events, demonstrate it for us now, Fellow Daoist. If you can predict the rise and fall of specific item prices with such precision, divining something at random should be a trivial matter." Gongsun Qixuan's tone was grave and brooked no refusal.
Li Fan considered for a moment, then had no choice but to agree.
"Then this humble one will make a fool of himself." He cupped his hands in salute and retrieved the prepared Qiankun Heavenly Mechanisms Die. Then he closed his eyes to compose himself and stood motionless.
The hall fell instantly silent, every eye fixed on his next move.
Among the jade slips recovered from the ruins of the Heavenly Mechanisms Sect, there were indeed some arcane arts for divining the future, but they were all third-rate techniques. Hitting the mark once in a hundred attempts would already be cause for celebration.
Li Fan had studied them carefully enough to grasp their operational principles, and using them for show posed no great problem. Actually divining anything real, however, was utterly impossible.
Standing beneath so many watching eyes, Li Fan dared not be overconfident. He readied himself to activate Return to Truth and flee the moment his deception was exposed.
At the same time, he activated the secret art A Single Hand Veils the Heavens. A mystical, profound aura instantly enveloped his entire body.
The Qiankun Heavenly Mechanisms Die flew to him of its own accord, spinning rapidly. Fragmented scenes flickered across its twenty luminous facets.
Li Fan knew that even these fleeting images would not escape the notice of the hidden cultivators present. So the scenes appearing on the die were not fabricated nonsense; they were genuine moments drawn from events he had experienced in his past life.
Truth concealed within falsehood; what seemed false would prove real. Only in this way could he deceive everyone in the Martial Hall.
Yet no matter how convincing, he knew the forgery could not withstand close scrutiny.
So as the Qiankun Heavenly Mechanisms Die spun faster and faster and a pitch-black scene began to emerge upon its surface, Li Fan let his body tremble uncontrollably, his face draining of color.
An expression of mounting horror spread across his features. Employing the Creation Forge Technique, he violently spat out a mouthful of blood and cried out in a voice of genuine shock, "Tianxuan Soul-Locking, Xuanhuang unified?"
At that very moment, the Qiankun Heavenly Mechanisms Die seemed to lose its spiritual nature. All twenty facets turned utterly black, and it stopped spinning.
Li Fan crumpled to the ground, appearing completely spent.
Within the Martial Hall, an uproar erupted.
The reason was simple: the words "Tianxuan Soul-Locking, Xuanhuang unified" carried implications that were far too terrifying.
A cultivator clad in black robes, his features indistinct, materialized in the center of the hall. He paid no heed to the severely injured Li Fan and looked instead toward Gongsun Qixuan, clearly seeking his opinion.
In the black-robed cultivator's view, this Li Fan seemed to be engaging in mystification.
Yet he himself was not versed in divination arts, and this Li Fan was reportedly an ancient cultivator who had lain dormant since antiquity. One could not rule out the possibility that ancient methods differed from contemporary ones.
And the conclusion Li Fan had divined was truly shocking. Out of caution, he deferred to the professional.
Gongsun Qixuan's lips moved, as if silently repeating the words Li Fan had just spoken. The expression on his face grew increasingly grave.
A scroll painting appeared before him and began to unfurl. The canvas was blank at first, but as Gongsun Qixuan used his hand as a brush and swept it through the air, colors gradually bloomed across the surface, and some scene began to take shape.
The act of splashing ink through the air consumed a tremendous amount of energy. Gongsun Qixuan, who already looked somewhat sickly, grew visibly weaker as the divination progressed. It was as if a great weight pressed down upon his back, bending him inch by inch into a hunch. His movements slowed.
Finally, just as the scene in the painting was about to become clear, his finger began to tremble violently. As if meeting immense resistance, he could not complete the final stroke no matter what he tried.
A trace of ferocity flashed across his face. He bit the tip of his tongue, spat out a mouthful of blood, then clenched both hands into fists and smashed them down, using blood as ink and fists as brushes to complete the painting.
When the cultivators in the Martial Hall, and Gongsun Qixuan himself, turned to look upon the canvas and make out its contents, a dazzling green light suddenly burst from the painting. It swallowed the artwork whole, then swept outward in all directions.
Gongsun Qixuan was the first to be struck. The forced divination had already consumed the vast majority of his strength, and caught completely off guard by the assault of the green light, he had no means to evade it.
"Ah!"
He let out a miserable wail. His body began to dissolve within the green light. Only a wisp of ink-black color remained, drifting away into the distance.
"A backlash from the heavenly mechanisms?!"
"Elder Gongsun?!"
The sudden turn of events left the cultivators in the Martial Hall utterly shocked. But immediately after, they found they had problems of their own.
The green light spread outward like a tide. Whatever it touched was assimilated.
Those bizarrely shaped giant stones, along with the living beings upon them, vanished without a trace, as though dissolved by water.
The black-robed cultivator's expression changed drastically as he moved to halt the spread of this green radiance from unknown origins, but it proved impossible to block. He was forced to retreat.
Within the span of a few breaths, the public trial had transformed into a contest of who could flee the fastest.
Amid the wails of countless cultivators, the scene grew increasingly chaotic.
The moment Li Fan saw that all-too-familiar green light emerge from Gongsun Qixuan's divination painting, he was the first to sense the danger.
He didn't know what had gone wrong, or why Gongsun Qixuan's divination had stirred the energy of the yet-to-be-created Xuan Net, but that didn't stop him from making an early escape. He fled the Martial Hall amid the panicked throng.
The disturbance quickly drew the attention of cultivators across Myriad Immortals Island.
The once-majestic structure began to tremble violently before collapsing into rubble with a thunderous roar.
As the green light threatened to spread further, a streak of rainbow radiance shot across the sky and arrived above the island in an instant.
Countless translucent patterns surged from the light, weaving into a colossal net that ensnared the overflowing green light.
With that, the crisis was averted as swiftly as it had arisen.
Blending into the crowd, Li Fan lowered his head almost imperceptibly.
The newcomer was none other than Lu Xichan, Chief Array Master of the Myriad Immortals Alliance's Strategy Array Hall.