The moment his divine sense entered, Zhou Xuan's face darkened.
A shambles lay before him. Ji Chen's sea of consciousness lay shattered everywhere, without a trace of life. The Dao Fruit that had once rested at its center was now nothing but a shriveled shell covered in cracks.
Idiot.
Zhou Xuan cursed inwardly. For one nebulous divination, he had thrown his life away.
Deep within the ruins, Zhou Xuan saw a frozen image.
In it, Ji Chen sat cross-legged before the Heavenly Strategy Pavilion's divination compass. She used her heart's blood as the catalyst and burned the core of her Dao Fruit as fuel, her entire body becoming a ball of fire. With that power, she forcibly pried at elusive, intangible Fate.
The compass spun furiously, the scraping of its needle piercing to the ears.
The image changed.
Ji Chen saw the words "The antidote is in the mark."
But the divination did not stop. The compass needle pointed unwaveringly toward a more distant future.
She saw Zhou Xuan awaken after refining the mark. She saw the Central Province World drifting aimlessly through the demon sea. Then a vast expanse of darkness swallowed the image.
Within that darkness, an enormous eye without a pupil opened.
That eye lay in the deepest reaches of the Eye of Eternity.
When Zhou Xuan refined the divine punishment mark, that eye had fixed its gaze on him.
The price of Ji Chen's divination came due as well. An invisible chain extended from the eye, crossing time and space to coil tightly around Ji Chen's divine soul.
Grotesque runes covered the chain, ceaselessly draining Ji Chen's vitality.
He would become the sacrifice for that monstrous thing's awakening.
When that thing fully descended, his life would be drained dry.
Boom!
The ancient aura within the image