Chapter 268: Heavenly Pivot Source Realm!

……

……

Just as Gu Yuan was investing resources into the new world,

Sanqian Zhou.

The wrath of the Supreme Immortal Palace has been burning for a full year.

After Li Hentian defected and the Gu Family took away most of Sanqian Zhou's territory, the edict issued by the Supreme Immortal King became a blade hanging over the heads of all Immortal Kings in the Immortal Realm.

The five great Jue Dian Immortal Kings—Tian Ge, Chong Ming, Jiu You, Fen Tian, Lie Kong—led a massive expeditionary force of ten True Immortals and hundreds of Supremes, conducting a dragnet search in the void.

Their primary goal is to locate the great provinces taken by the Gu Family, capture the half-step Titanic Gu Cangsheng, and retrieve the Chaos Spirit Stone fragments and Sanqian Zhou.

However, the system's transmission gate is rather high-end.

Even if the Supreme Immortal King personally acted, deducing countless positions,

they were all still wrong.

And each mistake brings misfortune upon the Immortal Kings below.

On a white bone warship stretching a million zhang in length,

Tian Ge Immortal King wore a set of dark-gold battle armor and stood at the prow.

His eyes were like two drawn swords, slicing through the void storm ahead.

"One year."

Chong Ming Immortal King approached from behind, his body surrounded by black vapor; with each step, a layer of black ice formed on the deck beneath his feet,

"The deadline given by the Supreme is approaching; if we still can't find Sanqian Zhou's whereabouts, our fate upon return will likely be no better than that of the Thunder Emperor and Wind Empress."

The Thunder Emperor and Wind Empress were both dispatched to the Chaos Immortal Realm battlefield to garrison for a million years due to dereliction of duty.

Nominally a garrison, in reality it's just wiping the noses of the juniors there while also having to guard against various forces of the myriad worlds taking action against our Immortal King's dignity.

It can be said to be a place of much trouble and poor treatment, where once besieged, one could die in battle at any moment.

As for the Martial Venerable……

Relying on having another Titanic Immortal King behind him, even the Supreme Immortal King cannot say anything.

Thus, full of anger, he could only vent it on them.

Tian Ge Immortal King gave a cold snort and gave no reply.

Even the Supreme Immortal King's personal intervention ended in nothing; what could these ordinary Jue Dian Immortal Kings possibly do?

"What then? Return empty-handed?"

Jiu You Immortal King's voice emanated from a cluster of emerald-green ghostly fire, carrying a chilling gloom.

Tian Ge Immortal King raised his hand, palm holding a broken Star Plate.

On the Star Plate, aside from the light dots representing the Immortal Realm, at its extremely distant edge there flickered a faint red dot.

"Sanqian Zhou wasn't found, but half a month ago, my Probe Star Plate captured a brand-new world coordinate."

Tian Ge Immortal King stared at that red dot, his tone icy and grim: "It's not small in scale, its law barriers are extremely thick—a world guided by soul and flesh; conservatively estimated, it is a top-tier great world not inferior to the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths."

Chong Ming Immortal King and Jiu You Immortal King exchanged a glance.

"You mean..."

"What the Supreme wants is resources, supplies, and face."

Tian Ge Immortal King put away the Star Plate,

"Losing over forty provinces is fine, but even all the mortal realm beings together amount to merely a continent within the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths. If we bring back a brand-new great world to offset the loss, re-evolving it into Ten Heavens and Ten Earths, I reckon… the Supreme Immortal King won't quibble further."

The four Jue Dian Immortal Kings exchanged glances, their eyes flashing with fervor.

Not only because they wanted to avoid punishment,

but also because…… discovering a new world.

It means war, it means merit.

Only with sufficient merit can they accumulate enough possibility to promote to Titanic Immortal King!

So……

They, need war!

"Good."

The war ship changed course.

The vast Immortal Realm fleet, like a pack of sharks that have smelled blood, surged full-speed toward that unknown coordinate.

……

This transmission gave Gu Yuan a very peculiar feeling.

It was a strong sense of severance.

Not the weightlessness of the flesh crossing the void, but the soul being forcibly ripped from the flesh, a dislocating experience.

When his consciousness regained clarity, his nasal cavity inhaled no air, because he fundamentally had no nasal cavity.

He floated in midair.

Below his line of sight lay a garbage mountain piled from scrap metal, discarded prosthetics, rusted tracks, and industrial wastewater emitting a pungent chemical odor.

Acid rain drizzled down from the gray overcast sky, striking the metal wreckage and emitting a sizzling sound.

Gu Yuan lowered his head and looked at his hands.

Semi-transparent, they glowed with a faint seven-colored halo.

A soul body.

Exactly.

Gu Yuan had projected himself here.

Since anything can be invested.

Then a strand of his divine soul could naturally be counted as a 'resource' invested in, ah.

This is very reasonable.

Is this the Heavenly Pivot Source Realm?

Gu Yuan muttered.

He could feel that the divine soul he had invested was one in ten thousand.

However, it was still at the half-step Immortal King level, and it could still grow stronger through cultivation, and could borrow power when needed.

Hmm……

Borrow his own strength.

This is even more reasonable.

Gu Yuan spread out his divine sense, covering the trash mountain below.

At the midway point of the trash mountain, a thin figure was struggling to climb in the acid rain.

That was a boy who looked only fifteen or sixteen years old.

He wore a crude raincoat made of waterproof plastic sheeting, and held a metal pry bar with a magnet at its tip.

The boy's movements were practiced; the pry bar rummaged through scrap copper and iron, occasionally picking up a metal flake the size of a fingernail, which he would treasure and stuff into the cloth pouch at his waist.

Gu Yuan's divine soul drifted over and hovered above the boy's head.

His intuition told him that this was the target he intended to invest in.

A half-step Immortal King–level divine sense could read a mortal's memories without needing to use a soul-search technique.

Only a touch of thought was needed, and the information in the boy's mind flowed into Gu Yuan's understanding like water.

As expected, the boy's name was A Qi.

He had no surname; an orphan from the slums didn't deserve a surname.

This was a world distorted to the extreme.

In the Heavenly Pivot Source Realm, the hundred arts of cultivation—alchemy, weapon forging, formations—were all deconstructed by technology, and traditional sects were replaced by the four super conglomerates.

The conglomerates built the 'Star River Sphere' that blotted out the sky, arranging it as a Spirit Gathering Array in the heavens above, sucking the planet's free spiritual energy dry, compressing and purifying it, then sealing it into 'Spiritual Energy Crystals' the size of a fingernail.

Cultivators no longer needed to meditate and breathe; they just had to buy crystals, plug them into the neural interface at the back of the head, and could directly gain cultivation.

No money to buy crystals?

Then they could only slowly breathe in the lowest-grade 'trash spiritual energy'.

What's more terrifying, the conglomerates, to squeeze the last drop of blood from the lower classes, enacted a 'breath tax'.

After the spiritual energy in the air was drained, the ecological environment rapidly deteriorated, and toxic gases permeated.

The conglomerates set up large-scale air purification towers in the slums.

To breathe clean air, each person had to pay ten credit points per day.

Those who couldn't pay the tax would have points deducted by the purification tower's identification system.

Once enough points were deducted, they would become blacklisted.

They would be arrested to serve as some unspeakable labor force.

A Qi hadn't paid his breath tax for today.

He had to, before dark, scavenge enough scrap parts from this conglomerate-dumped junkyard to exchange for ten credit points, or else… he would become blacklisted.

Gu Yuan looked at the boy shivering in the acid rain and gave only two words: absurd.

Cultivation is fundamentally about defying heaven, seizing the cosmos's creation to perfect oneself, pursuing the naturalness of all ways and transcendence of the Great Dao.

But in this world, the four super conglomerates, with their sky‑covering giant Spirit Gathering Array, drained the planet's essence, compressing the spiritual energy that should nourish all beings into priced Spiritual Energy Crystals.

Lower‑level cultivators no longer inhaled the world's qi; instead they relied on inserting tubes into the back of the head and buying crystals to gain a false realm; to pursue a higher spiritual conversion rate, they even went so far as to cut away flesh and replace it with cold mechanical prosthetics.

What's more ridiculous, even the most basic human act of breathing was saddled with a heavy 'breath tax'; those who couldn't pay were reduced to filling slag.

Flesh is weak, mechanical ascension—this is simply the most vicious desecration of the innate Dao body and the laws of the Great Dao.

But what truly made Gu Yuan feel something was off was not this extreme exploitation.

The Heavenly Dao was too thoroughly deficient, and the ascent passage for all beings was sealed too perfectly.

The conglomerates may be greedy, but how could they, relying on a few so‑called ancestors whose highest cultivation is no more than Heavenly Emperor realm and early True Immortal, possibly suppress the Heavenly Dao of an entire great world to this extent?