The snoring began again.
Inside his cave abode, Gu Changqing slipped back into a drunken slumber, looking so utterly languid that everything that had just happened seemed inconsequential.
Luohu's pursuit of the Dao, the astonishing feat of imparting the Dao through wine... all of it had been nothing more than a trivial interlude brought on by his drinking mood.
Yet beneath that steady snoring, the depths of Gu Changqing's primordial spirit were far from as peaceful as he appeared.
His thoughts had long since pierced the barriers of Golden Ao Island and layer upon layer of void, reaching toward the distant Zixiao Palace.
There, Hongjun and the Elder of Chaos were still engrossed in refining the Heaven-Opening Divine Axe.
Neither knew that whenever they poured the power of the Heavenly Dao and Chaos Laws into the divine axe, a portion was quietly devoured by the hidden imprint Gu Changqing had planted long ago and turned to his own use.
The harder they worked at refining it, the more firmly Gu Changqing's foundations within the Heaven-Opening Divine Axe took root.
This was Gu Changqing's scheme.
Of course, Hongjun and the Elder of Chaos could never have known the secret behind it.
In their eyes, the Heaven-Opening Divine Axe was merely a chaos supreme treasure whose former owner's imprint needed to be erased before it could be refined anew.
All they sought was to seize control of the axe, then wield its world-cleaving might to sweep away the Interception Sect and suppress Gu Changqing.
Little did they know that every last part of this lay within Gu Changqing's calculations.
With his current cultivation, forcibly reclaiming the Heaven-Opening Divine Axe from Hongjun and the Elder of Chaos was not impossible.
But doing so would merely satisfy a momentary impulse.
Although the Heaven-Opening Divine