And so, Shiheng took the siblings Ryder and Linor with him and settled deep within this eternally silent Death Demon Cavern.
None of them had expected this stay to become forty long years of lying low.
For divine and demonic powerhouses whose lifespans routinely stretched into tens or hundreds of millions of years, forty years passed in the blink of an eye, hardly a vast span of time.
Yet in the inescapable purgatory of the Death Demon Cavern, forty years of safe, undisturbed cultivation and devoted contemplation of the Dao was an unparalleled opportunity countless prisoners dreamed of their entire lives but could never attain.
The entire cavern lay shrouded in an eternal aura of death and annihilation, dark and lightless all year round, with cold winds wailing without end.
This supremely dense death aura was nothing like ordinary turbid energy. Like a corrosive poison refined for millions of years, it seeped everywhere, perpetually saturating every inch of the cavern's soil while gnawing day and night at the flesh, bones, and fundamental divine souls of every trapped prisoner.
Any cultivator of the myriad races who remained here needed no outside attacks or battles to suffer: the death aura would continuously plunder and wear away their innate vitality.
Their divine souls would wither by the day, their Dao hearts would rot and crumble layer by layer, and the foundations of laws they had cultivated for years would steadily loosen, decline, and disintegrate, their cultivation foundations weakening with each passing day.
Across the worlds outside, cultivation meant swimming against the current, improving daily and climbing step by step. Every session of meditation and Dao comprehension deepened a cultivator's foundations and strengthened their abilities.
Only in this Death Demon Cavern was the path of cultivation entirely reversed, proceeding wholly against the Dao.
Cultivators