"Lan, then what are you planning to use to pay the bill?"
After hearing Lan Yi's reasonable—or unreasonable—request for a trade, Jin Buhuan smiled broadly and rubbed his hands together. Visible flakes of old grime came off them.
The next second, the faintly visible Gengjin Sword Qi surrounding Lan Yi blew them away.
"Since you still remember what happened before the reset, our account hasn't been settled yet." A rare, sly smile appeared on Lan Yi's face. Since the account wasn't settled, he was going to freeload.
"You want to catch a wolf empty-handed?"
Jin Buhuan slammed his palm onto the table in fury.
The sound of his slap was thunderous. It echoed through the empty resting hall and traveled far into the ears of the martial artists waiting nearby for orders, leaving them trembling with fear.
Who was this beggar?
He actually dared to openly challenge Immortal Master Lan Yi.
Could it be that, just as described in the storybooks, this beggar was an Immortal Master who had descended into the mortal world for amusement and disguised himself as a beggar? That was the only possible explanation. Surely only an Immortal Master would dare challenge another Immortal Master. If anyone else had come, they probably would have been slapped into mincemeat before they could even finish issuing a threat.
Jin Buhuan argued vehemently and spoke with a silver tongue. He even resorted to the sophistry that the past was the past and the present was the present, that they were not the same person and therefore not the same account.
Yet the more he argued, the more certain Lan Yi became.
If this deal couldn't be done,
Jin Buhuan would have already patted his backside and left.
Clearly, as a merchant of everything who was responsible for bringing hope and despair to others, Jin Buhuan himself felt that the high-quality client Lan Yi was worth investing in. Otherwise, he would not have wandered over the moment the conditions matured, triggering this encounter in Artificial Divine Realm 1909 and alerting Lan Yi to his presence.
Although Jin Buhuan could wander freely throughout the cluster walls of the Artificial Divine Realms, and could even slip into some abandoned or unfinished Artificial Divine Realms, if he wanted to come into contact with the spirit-energy cultivators who descended through the War Zone, he still had to abide by certain underlying rules.
Besides, this deal really was somewhat difficult.
Opening a passage between the main world and an Artificial Divine Realm, and overlapping the two worlds, was by no means as simple as one plus one. The rippling interference in space-time, defensive loopholes, space-time pollution, spatial quake phenomena, and sudden superhuman mutations involved could all give the main world unexpected surprises at any moment!
Even during the era when the main world's two great civilizations were at their strongest in the dimensional ocean, incorporating an Artificial Divine Realm into Two Realms Mountain—which the Dayang Civilization called Avalon—required calculations in the quantum supercomputer tree before it could be approved.
Before his rebirth, Lan Yi had been a lone wolf.
When it came to opening dimensional passages, he had behaved rather unscrupulously and had no particularly reliable or stable experience.
He often went to wreak havoc in the Artificial Divine Realms of the Dayang Civilization.
After all, those Artificial Divine Realms were often back gardens such as Loli Island, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and man-eating paradises. Lan Yi was not the only one. Some spirit-energy cultivators from the River Civilization frequently disguised themselves and slipped into the other side's back gardens to cause trouble. Sometimes, when they happened to encounter Lan Yi, that demonic figure, they would tacitly pretend not to know his true identity and cooperate with him.
Because of this, the spirit-energy cultivators of the Dayang Civilization frequently lodged serious protests against the River Civilization, accusing them of destroying the healthy competitive atmosphere of Human Civilization.
The spirit-energy cultivators of the River Civilization would publicly tell those foreigners to settle the account with Lan Yi, while privately cursing their depraved and chaotic antics. Then they would turn around and contact lone wolves like Lan Yi, urging them to try harder.
Those were all amusing stories from the past.
Since Artificial Divine Realm 1909 was going to come under his control,
he could no longer use such unscrupulous methods.
"...Fine, fine. You're pitifully adorable in your current state. Even if I had a way, you couldn't use it. As for the trade requests you made, it's impossible to fulfill them all. For instance, I can't help you erase the traces of the spirit-energy revival."
After a round of negotiations, Jin Buhuan was the first to back down.
One of the underlying rules of an Artificial Divine Realm was causal entanglement.
For example, if you played at reviving spirit energy in an Artificial Divine Realm, it would inevitably draw in Mythical Species, ancient monsters returning from slumber, and extraterrestrial immortal sects that sensed the spirit energy. If you played at bringing about the end of the world, Cthulhu, zombies, swarms, natural disasters, and other causal consequences would inevitably follow.
In the terminology of spirit-energy cultivators,
"To conceal the workings of Heaven, only a great expert can do it!"
To completely isolate an Artificial Divine Realm from every other system, to leap beyond the Three Realms and stand outside the Five Elements, untouched by calamity, was no less difficult than reopening Heaven and Earth in the void.
"Then you should at least be able to deal with the rest."
Lan Yi had no expectations of being able to erase the traces of the spirit-energy revival. It was fine if that couldn't be done. In fact, he was thinking of fishing for someone.
"Helping you apply for a temporary passage won't be a problem." Jin Buhuan searched through the information in his mind.
"Temporary?" Lan Yi felt a touch of PTSD.
After the answer to all the grievances and resentment filling his belly had turned out to be "temporary worker," he had completely let himself go and started killing. Only killing had been able to help him vent all the bitterness and injustice he had swallowed back then, allowing those masters who had never treated him like a human being to savor the meaning of equality for all.
"Temporary doesn't mean you can't become permanent. Right now, first, you haven't refined the void, and second, you haven't created a star river. Even if I applied for a permanent passage for you, would you have the ability to complete it?"
Jin Buhuan carefully sized up Lan Yi.
His realm was still too low.
But his combat power was genuinely formidable.
Others could not see it, but Jin Buhuan could still estimate that Lan Yi's current destructive power was roughly around the Fifth Energy Level, and he had even touched the edge of the Sixth Energy Level!
The Fifth Energy Level possessed an incomparably vast amount of spirit energy, enough to cover more than a kilometer. It could transform the body in finer detail, granting the physical form the property of turning reality into unreality, breaking through the shackles of mortals. The specific effects varied from person to person. Control over the body could even reach the level of nanometer-scale interference. Bacteria, viruses, curses, and radiation could no longer threaten such an existence.
The most obvious characteristic was that small nuclear bombs could no longer threaten an existence of this level. Even if a small nuclear bomb exploded right in one's face, there were still ways to neutralize it without injury.
That was the terror of arcane arts.
With sufficient arcane-arts knowledge reserves, even someone with only Refining Destiny Clusters could leverage astonishing power and create natural disasters capable of destroying cities.
All one could say was that he truly lived up to his status as a top-tier spirit-energy cultivator reborn into the past.
With Lan Yi's current strength,
if there were no other reborn individuals in the main world to restrain him, then relying solely on the standing military forces of the various nations, he would be a living god among men. Anyone who dared waste even one more sentence on him would already have chosen the path to death.
"I want to add one more condition to the trade. You have to tell me whether this Artificial Divine Realm contains any information about Divine Destiny Clusters." Lan Yi also took a step back. A temporary passage would do; he could find a way to make it permanent later.
Divine Destiny Clusters were extremely important to Lan Yi.
One could say that
a large part of the reason Lan Yi had been reborn was Divine Destiny Clusters. This was one of his most closely guarded secrets. His ability to switch to a clean, primordial body at any time had been prepared for the sake of Divine Destiny Clusters.
If he could not gather the Divine Destiny Clusters,
then his painstaking rebirth would amount to nothing more than repeating the cycle of world destruction.
Before you continue