Chapter 239: Corruption
Inside Li Yao’s spiritual sea, the Empress was panicking. As Li Yao attempted her breakthrough to the Nascent Soul realm, their connection had been suddenly severed. This had occurred once before when Li Yao was showing signs of qi deviation after the fight with the cult leader. The Empress wondered if the same thing was happening now.
As she thought of this, the entire spiritual sea suddenly started trembling violently. Extending her divine sense to investigate the disturbance, the Empress noticed something deeply disturbing—a dark, murky aura was slowly creeping across the edges of the spiritual sea. The malevolent energy seemed intent on consuming everything in its path.
Without hesitation, the Empress instantly teleported to the very edge of the spiritual sea. Before her stretched an endless murky void that definitely hadn’t been there before.
The Empress placed her hand against the void. The moment her flesh made contact, her hand was immediately swallowed into the darkness. Her expression turned serious as she quickly yanked her hand back. The arm was now covered in dark cracks that spread across her skin like spider webs.
"Corruption?" she wondered aloud.
She exerted her energy, shattering the spreading cracks and making them disappear completely.
The empress thought that Li Yao was quite a strange girl. When she had first appeared in Li Yao’s life, the girl had just lost everything dear to her. Back then, Li Yao had been an incredibly violent child, filled with such deep resentment and desire for violence that was absolutely not normal for a single child to harbor.
The Empress had felt deeply concerned that Li Yao would end up walking a completely different path if nothing was done to help her. Using her power, she had sealed away some of the most traumatic memories from that time. Although Li Yao somewhat understood what had happened back then, the overwhelming amount of resentment she carried had been locked away.
But now, as Li Yao was in the process of forming her nascent soul, it seemed that seal had finally broken loose. Even more shocking was that the sealed resentment had multiplied many times over during its imprisonment.
The Empress quickly made a series of complex hand signs before spreading her hands in opposite directions. Instantly, a powerful pulse of energy erupted from her position, rushing toward the edges of the spiritual sea like a tidal wave. The energy formed a barrier, blocking the corruption from advancing any deeper into Li Yao’s consciousness.
"This should be able to hold out for a while," she thought aloud.
Almost immediately, she heard an ominous crack echo through the barrier.
"Or maybe not," she spoke as she frantically reinforced the barrier with additional layers of protection.
As she poured more energy into maintaining the barrier, the Empress’s mind raced. It seemed her previous suspicions had been correct—there was absolutely no way a child could naturally harbor that much resentment, even when seeking revenge for her family. The sheer volume of hatred was beyond what any mortal soul could contain. Now that it had multiplied exponentially, she was one hundred percent certain that something else was manipulating the situation from behind the scenes.
Something big and powerful.
Li Yao was a rare genius that might not appear once in an entire generation, which made perfect sense why certain entities might target her exceptional destiny. But why would they use such a vile, destructive method? With this level of resentment consuming her, Li Yao would inevitably end up destroying the world around her, eventually losing the favor of the heavenly dao. There would be no benefits to be gained from such an outcome.
Unless someone was orchestrating this disaster purely out of spite, simply to ruin Li Yao’s potential for their own twisted satisfaction. But that made no sense either—Li Yao didn’t have any enemies. She was just a little girl living in a small, insignificant world. The Empress had already confirmed that Li Yao was living her first lifetime, meaning there was no possibility of ancient enemies from previous lifetimes seeking revenge.
So where was all this animosity originating from?
The Empress suddenly paused, her eyes widening with understanding.
"It’s from me," she thought.
How could she have been so foolish as to forget? She still had powerful enemies in the celestial realm—beings with enough influence and malice to orchestrate exactly this kind of scheme. For entities of that caliber, it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to discover that she had reincarnated and decided to cause trouble for her new vessel.
For those people, Li Yao’s destiny or fortune meant absolutely nothing. They simply wanted to destroy everything the Empress had, ensuring she could never return.
...
As the realization dawned on her, the barriers she had constructed began to crack and splinter like fragile glass. With a loud sound, they completely shattered. The corruption immediately seized this opportunity, spreading even more aggressively across Li Yao’s spiritual sea.
The Empress looked around at the encroaching darkness. Despite having somewhat figured out the source of the problem, she still couldn’t understand why her connection with Li Yao kept getting severed at these critical moments.
The timing was far too convenient to be mere coincidence. She didn’t believe those guys could exert this much direct influence, not with the heavenly dao’s restrictions still actively holding them back. And someone like Li Yao, who was even more favored by the heavenly dao than most, should have been even more protected from such interference.
A chilling thought crept into her mind—was there an even higher, more complex scheme at play here that she didn’t know about? Had her earlier assumptions been wrong?
As these troubling questions swirled through her mind, the entire spiritual sea began shaking even more violently than before. The tremors grew so intense that maintaining her footing became difficult. The Empress forced herself to dismiss these distracting thoughts—she could puzzle over them later. Right now, the immediate priority was stopping the corruption from completely consuming Li Yao’s consciousness.
Taking a deep breath, she extended both hands and began performing a series of complex hand signs. The moment she completed the technique, it was as if she had transformed into a powerful vacuum, forcibly sucking all the incoming corruption directly into herself. Her skin visibly darkened as she absorbed more and more of the corruption energy, and cracks began appearing across her form.
The corruption wasn’t particularly harmful to someone of her caliber under normal circumstances, but currently, she wasn’t operating at her peak strength. In her state, absorbing this much corruption energy was quite dangerous.
Still, she pressed on. As long as she could keep the corruption from spreading any further into her spiritual sea, Li Yao should theoretically be able to break free from whatever was binding her consciousness. Unless, of course, there was something else she was missing entirely—in which case, well...