Bizarre Changes

Madwoman.

A female madwoman.

Lü Shenliang!

Though Wang Li's head still felt as if it were splitting apart, the image of his senior sister immediately rose in his mind again.

The more he thought back on it, the more he felt that far too many clues pointed directly at his senior sister.

This was the first time he had truly collided with his own Dao Palace.

By rights, the Dao Palace formed from the manifestation of his spiritual will within his body should only have been part of his divine sense. Yet if the two truly clashed, it should have merely been his own divine sense power colliding with itself. How could there have been any difference in strength?

If the Dao Palace had also been humanoid—

Then if he vomited blood, the Dao Palace should have vomited blood too. They should have been injured together.

Yet when his body had slammed hard into the Dao Palace walls during the tribulation, that unbreakable, icy sensation had made him feel that the two were not even on the same level.

The Dao Palace's cold, overwhelming power had even given him the crushing sensation of the Great Dao being without mercy.

Now that he carefully savored it, he even felt that the Dao Palace contained an enormous will that he simply could not contend against.

He even suspected that the formation of this Dao Palace, including the strange gray-robed cultivator he had been dragged in to fight during his advancement, had all been the work of that terrifying will.

He could not help suspecting that this will came from Lü Shenliang.

But he knew Lü Shenliang very well, and he also felt that her divine sense power could not possibly be mentioned in the same breath as that force.

Invisibly, he seemed to have entered a dead end again. The more he tried to untangle it, the more tangled it became.

Even so, there seemed to have been far too many coincidences this time.

When Lü Shenliang was lucid, she was practically the embodiment of beauty and wisdom, and her schemes were exceptionally shrewd.

Over the past dozen or so years, many of the benefits he had gained had been the result of Lü Shenliang's meticulous calculations during her lucid periods.

This Yin Thunder Umbrella plan targeting the Purity Returning Spirit Pill had also been devised entirely by Lü Shenliang.

A few days ago, they had learned that someone had sold such a spirit pill at Blackwater Market, and it had ended up in the hands of their acquaintance, Meng Xiqiong.

The spirit sand they needed for their own cultivation was not even enough, so naturally they had no surplus spirit sand to buy the Purity Returning Spirit Pill.

And if they had merely used ordinary methods and paid in spirit sand, then even if Meng Xiqiong feared that Lü Shenliang would self-detonate her Golden Core, he would not have straightforwardly named a price and sold them the Purity Returning Spirit Pill.

Because by the rules, a spirit pill of this grade had to enter an auction unless it was exchanged for a treasure of the same grade or a treasure of an even higher grade.

Thus, Lü Shenliang's plan had been to trade the Yin Thunder Umbrella for the Purity Returning Spirit Pill.

From planning to execution, the plan had been quite perfect, and along the way they had even tricked two mysterious cultivators of extraordinary origin.

But how exactly Lü Shenliang had sensed Old Ancestor Tong Hui's tribulation time beforehand, how she had still made him retrieve the umbrella after Old Ancestor Tong Hui had already achieved Nascent Soul... Wang Li had no idea where her certainty and confidence had come from.

He only vaguely felt that the abnormality in Old Ancestor Tong Hui's Heavenly Tribulation was somehow related to her, and that Old Ancestor Tong Hui's eventual gift of the Yin Thunder Umbrella to her—along with an extra artifact-refining method—had merely been his deliberate repayment of her.

As for the Purity Returning Spirit Pill itself, it was even more suspicious.

Because according to their plan, the Purity Returning Spirit Pill had been meant for him from the start.

Judging from the result of this tribulation, without that Purity Returning Spirit Pill, he might not necessarily have been killed by that gray-robed cultivator, but his divine sense would certainly have been severely damaged. He might even have needed several years to recover.

So either it truly had been a coincidence, and his senior sister's divine sense had merely been damaged too badly, making her thought process peculiar. Or his senior sister really did know something and really was manipulating something, only she had been hiding it from him and deliberately refusing to tell him.

Between those two guesses, he actually leaned toward the latter.

But there was no way he could find any evidence.

He could not exactly torture a confession out of his senior sister.

For all he knew, even if he could capture her and torture her for answers, given how unpredictable his senior sister was, she might not find torture uncomfortable at all. She might even find it thrilling and fun.

What if she became addicted to torture in the future, and whenever the mood struck, she wanted to be tortured once?

"There really is no solution!"

"There really is no way around it!"

Wang Li felt as though one head had become two, and he could not help letting out two miserable howls.

He could only persuade himself not to pursue the matter of his senior sister anymore. In any case, she would not harm him. If she really was hiding something, then she could keep hiding it for now.

He was certain that he had successfully advanced and was now a cultivator at the Sixth Level of Qi Refining.

He prepared to immediately and carefully sense the changes in himself after his advancement.

He instinctively felt that the changes this time seemed greater than during any of his previous advancements.

But at that very moment, when his gaze swept over the spirit sand on the array disk, he was immediately shocked.

The spirit sand on the array disk had completely lost its spiritual glow and had turned directly into grains of sand devoid of all spiritual energy.

"How could this be?"

His divine sense extended beyond the quiet room. Though he sensed that the sun had already sunk toward dusk outside, from the time he had activated the Spirit Gathering Array to cultivate until he defeated that strange gray-robed cultivator and successfully passed the tribulation, less than two hours had passed at most.

After he had cultivated the Profound Heaven Dao Arts on the lone peak and brought forth this strange gray-robed cultivator tribulation, his speed of refining spirit sand had already far surpassed cultivators of the same level. Yet these five hundred grains of spirit sand should at least have supported a full day of cultivation.

In his original plan, he had intended to remain within this array disk, continue refining the spiritual energy in the spirit sand, and stabilize his cultivation.

Yet in less than two hours, he had somehow refined all five hundred grains of spirit sand?

For an instant, he even suspected that this Spirit Gathering Array had gone wrong as well.

But he immediately dismissed this foolish, paranoid thought.

This kind of Spirit Gathering Array only restrained spiritual energy from leaking away. It did not increase the speed at which spirit sand could be drawn upon and refined in the slightest. The speed at which the spiritual energy within spirit sand was drawn out depended entirely on his own absorption and refinement of that energy.

"I... this..."

Wang Li forcibly steadied his mind and examined himself inwardly. Then his eyes instantly bulged wide, his face filled with shock and even a trace of terror.

Six white stars flickered endlessly within his body. Every flicker was accompanied by immense currents of Vital Energy being drawn in and expelled. The spiritual energy still filling his flesh was absorbed by those six white stars, after which the stars flowed out threads of True Essence as though returning nourishment.

This was the most direct indication of cultivating the Profound Heaven Dao Arts to the Sixth Level of Qi Refining.

Clearly, with one additional star lit, both the speed of absorbing and refining spiritual energy and the strength of the True Essence formed had undergone a qualitative leap.

But what left him incomparably shocked was not these normal changes. Rather, he clearly saw that beneath those six white stars, within his sea of qi, stood a Dao Palace!

This Dao Palace had previously appeared only when he advanced and underwent tribulation, when he faced that strange gray-robed cultivator. The instant it appeared, he would be pushed into the Dao Palace by that irresistible will. Once he defeated the gray-robed cultivator and successfully passed the tribulation, the Dao Palace would immediately vanish again.

Before this, he had believed that this Dao Palace was merely a product of his divine sense and will taking form. But now, this Dao Palace stood within his sea of qi with unimaginable reality!