Time flowed on like sand slipping between fingers, and in the blink of an eye, a year had passed.
The Undead Realm, silent through the ages, had always been a land of extinction without dawn or dusk, without years or seasons. Across hundreds of millions of years, deathly energy had forever filled this place and soul winds had howled. There was only the endless cycle of life, death, and annihilation, never the slightest living trace of passing time.
Only Nether Valley within the Undead Realm, because Shiheng had stopped there to make his home, had forcibly broken that eternal silence, allowing this desolate sanctuary to quietly acquire traces of time's passage.
For that entire year, Shiheng lived peacefully in the simple stone house he had carved out and built with his own hands.
After several earthshaking battles spanning planes, he completely shed his overwhelming murderous aura and fierce brutality, cast aside all thoughts of conflict and distraction, and settled down to recuperate in peace and consolidate his vast cultivation.
His earlier incursion into the Undead Realm deep in the Netherworld, the world-destroying battle unleashed by the four-blade formation, and his desperate flight across the Hell Plane-one utterly savage clash at the pinnacle after another had nearly exhausted all his reserves.
The relentless, high-intensity battles had not only continually depleted his bodily essence and left the foundation of his divine soul unstable, but had also left enormous hidden dangers in his cultivation.
His cultivation had advanced far too quickly, soaring in near-leaps, leaving him nowhere near enough time to consolidate and refine it. In particular, the tremendous surge in his divine soul brought by the Human Emperor Banner's enhancement had come too swiftly and forcefully. The scale of his divine soul and his reserves of laws had surged repeatedly within a