That afternoon.
Lu Chen sat alone in the central command tent.
Before him lay a map, copied from a section of an ancient scroll seized from Elder Shadow Kill—the diagram of the spirit veins beneath Dragon Head Peak.
He stared at the map without moving.
On it, the location of the enormous abyssal hole was heavily circled in cinnabar.
The surrounding spirit-vein lines stretched in every direction like a spiderweb, eventually converging at a single point.
That point was the sealing core. It was also where the Dragon Vein Soul Essence lay.
He recalled the violent energy that had erupted from the abyssal hole atop Dragon Head Peak that day, the Undead Monarch's avatar suppressed by the Dragon-Suppressing Key, and that faint green point of light that had escaped amid the chaos.
That faint green light—was it the avatar's remnant soul? Or something else?
He had no way of knowing.
Yet that scene had remained in his mind, impossible to shake.
The tent flap lifted.
Mo Qianqiu entered and sat across from him.
"What are you thinking about?"
Lu Chen looked up. "I'm thinking," he said, "was what lay suppressed at the bottom of that abyssal hole truly only a wisp of the Undead Monarch's divided soul?"
Mo Qianqiu's gaze sharpened slightly. "You suspect there was something else?"
Lu Chen did not answer at once.
He raised a hand, his fingertip landing on the spot circled in cinnabar on the map.
"The Dragon Vein Soul Essence is the energy source of the sealing core. The Dragon-Suppressing Key is the artifact that suppresses the core. To use both of these to suppress a wisp of divided soul—isn't that... too extravagant?"
Mo Qianqiu fell silent.
He lowered his eyes to the map, his brows drawing together slightly.
After a long while.
He