Volume One: "The Nature of the Devil Does Not Change"
The black hole swelled and began devouring everything. The sounds of destruction and suction spread everywhere. Before Ikalat could be pulled in, he sensed hellish energy. The disciples were dragged in as well—some screaming, crying, and clinging to anything they could grab in the hope of surviving. In the end, Lin Yuan was swallowed too, but the elders managed to withstand the pull through sheer speed.
Once the elders had taken positions far from the black hole, one of them spoke as he stared in shock, his eyelids stretched wide and taut:
"It's… a cosmic cave!"
The elder with the red mustache said:
"Yes. It's a cosmic cave—but it looks like it belonged to an expert who died in one of the one hundred and eleven layers of Hell."
One of the elders—black-haired, with a long beard and mustache, wearing black-and-gold robes resembling an emperor's—asked:
"But how could a fragment of a layer of Hell be here? The aura of Hell is strong."
The bearded elder replied:
"Hell is unstable. Its layers are destroyed periodically, then re-formed anew. The remnants of previous layers are disposed of by opening space-time gates and throwing them into a random location. And it seems that because of that black hole, the cosmic cave was opened when space-time tore around the cave's entrance—then the black hole swallowed the cave. Even so, the hole doesn't have the ability to destroy a cosmic cave, because a cosmic cave is far stronger than something like a small-mass black hole. You'd need, at minimum, a supermassive black hole to cause any real damage to a cosmic cave."
The black-haired elder spoke to the white-bearded elder with an extremely sly expression:
"Zhao Tianyi, I'll request reinforcements, and we'll save the disciples trapped inside the cosmic cave."
Zhao Tianyi answered calmly, a malicious smile on his face:
"I'll bring reinforcements too. I also have to save my disciples."
The black-robed elder thought to himself:
(Damn you, Zhao Tianyi… I wanted to request reinforcements and bring my sect's disciples inside to take all the important treasures, but this vile old man knows exactly what I'm thinking.)
[Inside the Cosmic Cave]
Scarlet King woke up. His body was covered in wounds, and his clothes clung to him, but within seconds his garments re-formed around his body. He stood and started moving—only to realize he was inside the trunk of a truly gigantic tree. He had been separated from Ikalat and Lin Yuan, who woke up and found themselves with the rest of the disciples on a flat, grassy plain.
Scarlet King moved and began exploring where he was… but he sensed an energy that was intensely familiar. He smiled faintly and spoke in a dry, low voice:
"Hah… what an irony of fate… It's the place where I died in my previous life—but it's turned into a cosmic cave."
He moved a little farther and noticed a faint green glow. When he approached, he spoke in shock:
"It's the Cosmic Poison Pearl."
It was a green sphere with rippling patterns like ocean waves, releasing an extremely powerful poisonous aura. Scarlet King thought to himself:
(Right—its poison is incredibly strong. But if I refine it before the poison kills me, I'll be able to remove the poison through the Cosmic Poison Pearl, whose core ability is producing and absorbing poison. And it's considered one of the 22 cosmic weapons.)
Scarlet King snatched the pearl quickly, sat cross-legged on the ground, placed it between his hands, and began refining it.
[Minutes later]
Scarlet King's face swelled, his skin turning green. He clenched his teeth to maintain focus—otherwise he would lose consciousness and die. Then the pearl blasted him away with tremendous force, sending him flying until he slammed into one of the massive trunk's roots and shattered it.
A small girl emerged from the pearl—red hair, a red dress, pale skin, and blood-crimson eyes—carrying a heavy stench of poison. She spoke in a rough, feminine voice:
"Who dares awaken this princess?!"
Scarlet King thought calmly to himself, even as his body rotted from the poison:
(Hah… a spiritual body… It seems her physical body has been destroyed. Otherwise, she wouldn't have hidden inside the pearl to keep her soul from fading.)
"Power Stones + rating, please