Chapter 1,417 – Interment

Zac felt as though he was falling at the speed of light as darkness surrounded him. A familiar signal from the seal on his left hand prompted him to quickly bring forth Tam’s identity. The Inverse-attuned teleportation array was seemingly bringing them directly into a memory domain.

The discomforting sensation lasted but a second before a world cast in turquoise and white appeared. Zac didn’t get the chance to take a proper look at where the teleporter brought them before dense streams of energy came pouring out of his pores.

“What the hell!” Ogras exclaimed, and neither was Tavza spared.

The streams were a mottled mix holding the hallmark of life and death from the sixteen isolated realms they’d crossed over the past months—not one was missing, including the life from Second Garden and Avicii’s death. Zac had thoroughly scanned himself after both harrowing crossings, and he’d never seen a hint of these energies hiding within his body.

Since there was no pain or danger involved, the trio quickly calmed down. Neither was it a simple cleansing protocol performed on new arrivals. The expelled energies were rapidly condensing into tokens. Since the mixture of energies was different among the three, they ended up with distinct designs.

Zac’s held a perfect balance of life and death perfectly fused together. It wasn’t done with the help of the Void. The purplish token had adopted a similar solution to the Twilight Ocean. With the help of a generous serving of Inverse Dao and Imperial Faith, Death and Life had taken on characteristics that allowed them to mesh together.

The token’s alignment matched the extraordinarily generous ambient energy, which easily surpassed the common areas of the Mercurial Court. The mixed-meaning energy permeating the memory domain was an extremely malleable concoction holding a balanced mix of Life, Death, and Inversion.

Different from the Twilight Energy that presented a constant headache for the trial-takers, the Hollow Court’s energy was extraordinarily practical. Zac quickly found he could absorb the attunement he wanted from the surroundings. If he wanted life, only life would be attracted. The imbalance it created only triggered a gentle reshuffling that resupplied the missing energy from somewhere else.

The method wasn’t of interest to Zac, who pursued a true fusion through Void. His attention was consumed by the familiar rune emblazoned on the front. It spelled ‘Fuxi’ in the script of the Limitless Empire. Zac’s heart thrummed at the familiar term, and he quickly glanced at the tokens his companions had formed.

Their greeting gifts looked more similar to each other than to Zac. They veered toward a darker hue that made them look black. The tokens emitted spiritual fluctuations mainly based on the eight hells, and the rune carved on their surfaces said something else.

“Interment?” Zac read out loud before displaying his own. “Anything?”

The question was directly addressed to Tavza. He’d never mentioned the name before since it was connected to the most precious relic in his possession. While it remained in an unstable state, Zac believed it was no less valuable than the supreme treasures hidden in the depths of the Outer Courts.

“Fuxi…” Tavza mused. “I have heard that name somewhere. I remember seeing his works being cited in ancient records, but I have never encountered a first-hand account. He should have been a famous sage during the empire’s final epoch.”

“Perhaps one of the main architects behind the System?” Zac ventured.

“It’s possible, but yet unsubstantiated.”

“I’m sure it’ll make sense soon enough,” Ogras said as he looked around. “Now this is something else.”

While the memory domain was extremely sturdy, it wasn’t as large as Zac had expected for an Outer Court. It was on the smaller end when compared to most of the memories he’d visited. It was certainly smaller than the domain of the Transformation Docks and the beast tide battlefield. Zac judged it was somewhere along the line of Black Zenith, the smallish city built atop a beast skull, and the very first memory domain he visited.

What it lacked in size, it made up for in other ways. For one, its shape. Different from the domes they’d encountered thus far, the Hollow Court’s domain was a perfect sphere. The teleporter had brought them straight to the middle, surrounding them with grand structures. There were no gravity arrays or a floating platform, either. Any E-grade cultivator sent here would fall straight into the bottomless abyss below.

The light came from eighteen entwined energy rivers drifting through the area, split evenly between life and death. Upon a second look, Zac realized that calling them rivers wasn’t accurate. The currents were enormous spirits. Going by energy alone, they were no worse than Divine Monarchs.

Thankfully, they appeared busy with their slow courtship dance, and their auras were perfectly restrained. Looking right at the spiritual centers at the front of the rivers made Zac’s head buzz, but they appeared safe otherwise. Occasionally, they’d brush against one of the floating buildings, at which point they’d leave behind enough Divine Energy or Miasma to last Zac a year of intense cultivation.

The spirits only appeared within the confines of the small memory domains. When they swam beyond the borders, it looked like they were swallowed by the darkness lurking outside. It was extremely oppressive. Even the countless memory domains floating down from above were enough to pierce its shroud. Zac wasn’t sure, but he felt as though the memory domain was slowly sinking deeper into the unknown.

“Is this how the Lower Planes look?” Zac whispered, nodding at the border.

“I… think not,” Tavza said after some deliberation. “I believe we are looking at the Ninth Hell. Balance is only upheld within the confines of the memory. When the court fell, the First Garden must have retreated from the Left Imperial Expanse.”

The explanation made sense, yet Zac wasn’t convinced. Rather than Death, the darkness beyond made Zac think of the endless desolation waiting beyond the Void Mountain and outside the Multiverse’s protective curtain of Imperial Fate. It was like the Limitless Empire had trapped a section of that emptiness and hidden it beneath the Left Imperial Expanse.

“We’ll have to investigate later,” Zac said as he turned his attention to the floating palaces.

The arrangement was similar to the Ensolus Ruins back home. Most of the space was occupied by a few dozen majestic buildings marked as basic training facilities, exchange centers, and administrative buildings. There was also another chapter of the Order of the Fertile Earth surrounded by concentric plateaus of floating farmland. A few dozen people in earthen robes worked the soil by hand. Zac couldn’t tell whether they were disciples of the court or templars.

What they saw certainly wasn’t the full extent of the Hollow Court. For one, spirits patrolling the area continued beyond the bounds, and Zac occasionally glimpsed the corners of buildings just beyond the memory’s reach. There were also the two enormous gates that framed the empty space in the domain’s center.

The gates looked just like his [Fuxi Mountain Gate]. The only difference was that the majestic figures carved into his gate had been replaced by complex patterns that looked like a precursor to the fractals of modern cultivation. Considering the name on Zac’s token, it was obviously not a coincidence.

Both gates were in operation. Zac could see vast farmland from the gate floating next to the chapter of Fertile Earth. Instead of a floating city, there was a proper world on the other side. The gate of death instead led to a cemetery. Thankfully, the environments on the other sides weren’t as one-sided as the realms they’d passed through. Both emitted the healthy mix surrounding them; it was just that Life and Death had taken leading positions.

People were constantly coming and going from the two gates. Judging by their different robes, the disciples were sorted into two camps. No disciples wearing black cloaks entered the gate of Life, and no disciples wearing the earthen robes entered the cemetery. That wasn’t good news as far as Zac was concerned.

Their main goal in coming all this way was to find the Primo’s heirloom, and it wasn’t hard to guess where such a thing would end up. Between Tam’s connection to the Order of Fertile Earth and his human body’s Life-attuned constitution, it was to be expected that he didn’t get a token with an aura matching the cemetery.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“It’s not necessarily a hard rule. I mean, why would a Life cultivator waste time and contribution points to visit the other side?” Ogras offered upon seeing Zac’s frown as he watched disciples come and go.

“His token doesn’t match the other gate, either,” Tavza commented as she pointed toward the bottomless chasm below. “There could be a third gate outside our reach that corresponds to the Inverse Peak.”

“You aren’t helping right now,” Ogras said with an exasperated tone.

“I am simply presenting a possible explanation to the facts presented us.”

“Let’s see what they say,” Zac sighed, taking the lead in flying toward the administrative center.

———————-

“Nothing special happened, huh?”

“Not really. A lil’ speech, a lil’ prayer, and we went on with our day,” the inebriated man slurred as two shadowy tendrils massaged his shoulders. “Didn’t e’en get to see the Margrave.”

“But the prince was there, wasn’t he?” Ogras smiled while pouring another glass, suppressing the violent urges in his heart.

‘Stay calm, buddy. This isn’t the place to extract information through torture,’ he reminded himself.

Knowing that only made the pain worse. He’d saved this rare vintage of the Joyful Gardens for a special occasion, and this bastard was working his way through it like it was water. Unfortunately, Ogras didn’t have many spirits left that could get a Hegemon clobbered, and he’d never track down an isolated sealbearer this dumb again.

Ogras had already given up on extracting information from the dour members of the Hollow Court’s Interment Gate. A single innocent question, and you suddenly had a gaggle of those dour bastards cross-examining you.

‘Why are you asking about supreme treasures of the Ninth Hell?’