During the River-Facing Sect era, Yuan Jing and his disciple Yu Yan had once been ordered to travel to the Southern Border Poison Domain to investigate the strange changes in heaven and earth.
As the two used the teleportation array in Five Poisons City to return to their sect, all communication methods and teleportation formations throughout the Red Flame Domain happened to fail. They were then carried by the grand formation to the "River of the Dead" in the West Sea of the Heaven-Patrolling Domain!
Yuan Jing was swept into turbulent time currents and lost several decades of lifespan, while Yu Yan's Fire Spirit Body Dao Body was shredded by spatial cracks. Only his Divine Soul survived. Later, he cultivated another method and became something akin to a Soul Ghost.
Later, Shen Mo obtained seven Soul-Stabilizing Nails from Yang Chengxiong and had Yuan Jing pass them on to Yu Yan.
After obtaining the Soul-Stabilizing Nails, Yu Yan quickly found the corpse of a young cultivator under Yuan Jing's arrangements. Relying on the nails, he forcibly fused his soul and fleshly body, regaining the appearance of an ordinary person.
However, his soul-body still suffered from many intractable aftereffects at the time, leaving him unable to cultivate like a normal cultivator.
In the end, he relied on the wondrous characteristics of the Fire Spirit Body lingering within his Divine Soul, slowly refining and harmonizing his soul and flesh. Only many years later, when the two had been tempered into perfect accord, did his cultivation—which had stagnated for years—begin to advance once more, allowing him to set foot upon the immortal path again.
Since it was not his own fleshly body after all, his cultivation progressed exceptionally slowly. Having also missed the best period for cultivation, Yu Yan exhausted his lifespan after reaching