On the Sun Star, the System's prompts appeared before Ling Xiao with a mechanical coldness.
[Detected East King Duke establishing the Immortal Court and coming to recruit you. Please make a choice.]
Ling Xiao's lip curled into a thin, mocking line. The rewards—a Spirit Treasure versus the Three Brilliance Divine Water—spoke volumes. To the System, the East King Duke's "prestige" was so negligible that the choice felt like an afterthought.
"The man is a tireless weaver of trouble," Ling Xiao murmured. It was one thing for the Duke to play at being King in his own garden; it was quite another for him to cast his eyes toward the Sun.
"Option two."
Outside the star's atmosphere, Empty Abyss was growing frantic. He had promised the Duke a victory, yet he found himself blocked by a mere boy in purple robes. Ziwei Boy stood firm, his aura a silent wall that refused to budge without a decree from the Treasure Hall.
"Step aside, boy!" Empty Abyss barked, his voice laced with the self-importance of the Immortal Court. "I am a messenger of the Head of Immortals! Does your master truly wish to defy the mandate of the Dao Ancestor?"
A voice, vast and indifferent as the void itself, rolled out from the Sun's core.
"Messenger of the Immortal Court... leave. We have no interest in your 'grand cause.'"
Empty Abyss stiffened. "Fellow Daoist! Think of the future! When the Immortal Court rules the world, the Sun Star will share in that glory! Do not let pride blind you!"
"I said: get lost."
"You dare?" Empty Abyss's face darkened with a cold rage. "The East King Duke speaks with the tongue of the Saint! Do you not even listen to—"
He never finished the sentence.
From the depths of the Sun, a giant hand woven from the raw Laws of Space and Time materialized. It moved with a deceptive slowness, yet it was everywhere at once. Before Empty Abyss could even summon his treasures, the hand closed around him like a mountain.
"What are you—"
There was no answer. The Law-hand tightened, compressing the space around Empty Abyss into a singular, pressurized point. With a casual flick, the hand hurled him downward.
Empty Abyss was no longer a man; he was a projectile. He tore through the atmosphere, a meteor of purple fire streaking across the sky. He transcended the concepts of time and distance, a shooting star from beyond the heavens that slammed directly into the heart of Zifu Island.
BOOM!
The roar was tectonic. Zifu Island—the lush, sacred seat of the Immortal Court—shuddered as if a small world had collided with it. Giant waves, hundreds of feet high, erupted from the East Sea, washing over the shores as the island itself seemed to sink into the depths.
"What monster dares to strike my island?"
East King Duke and his new council surged out of their caves, their faces masks of shock. Above them, the sky was a jagged scar of tearing Laws, the Void Realm rippling with residual lightning from the impact.
"It's Empty Abyss!" Mysterious Water gasped, pointing at the smoking crater. "I sense his aura!"
The Duke reached the center of the impact and found Empty Abyss buried in the rock, his breath a shallow, rattling thing. After a frantic infusion of spiritual energy, the messenger's eyes fluttered open.
"Empty Abyss! I sent you to negotiate!" the Duke hissed, his dissatisfaction naked. "How did you return as a falling star? If you had landed ten miles to the left, you would have wiped out our entire assembly!"
"I went..." Empty Abyss whispered, his body still vibrating from the Law-trauma. "And I was... discarded. He threw me. A casual throw... nearly extinguished my soul."
The Duke froze. Empty Abyss was a Grand Unity Perfection master. To be thrown from the Sun to the East Sea with such force that the landing nearly killed him... not even the Duke himself could achieve such a feat.
"They refused?" the Duke asked, his voice low.
"I told them who you were," Empty Abyss said with a bitter wince. "I told them you were the Head of Immortals. That is when he threw me."
"Preposterous!" The Duke's face flushed with a humiliated rage. The Golden Crows hadn't just rejected him; they had used his messenger as a weapon against his own home. "When my Court is absolute, I will teach them the meaning of cruelty!"
But as the Duke cursed the heavens, the sea around them began to change.
The residual Law-power from Ling Xiao's strike had not faded. It pulsed against the surface of the East Sea like primordial lightning, causing the very space to distort and ripple.
"Look!" Daoist Metal Stone shouted, pointing toward a distant stretch of the horizon.
Immortal light was erupting from the water like a fountain of liquid diamonds. The radiance intensified, turning the sky into a tapestry of thousands of auspicious colors. On the boundless sea, the projections of three gargantuan islands—shimmering like mirages—turned from illusory phantoms to solid reality.
"Three islands?" Metal Stone whispered in awe.
East King Duke stared, his eyes widening until they were dinner plates. He saw the flowing springs, the flying waterfalls, and the mists of Chaotic Spiritual Qi that clung to the jagged peaks. These islands were incompatible with the modern world; they were shards of the pre-creation Chaos.
The strike had been too powerful. Ling Xiao's "trash disposal" had acted as a key, shattering the Innate Great Arrays that had hidden these islands since the dawn of time.
Empty Abyss had literally been smashed into a treasure chest.
"The Three Immortal Islands..." the Duke whispered, his lips trembling with an almost religious ecstasy. "Formed from the fragments of the Chaos... and they haven't been touched since the beginning."
He saw the projections reflecting in the water—Penglai, Yingzhou, and Abbot. They were a world of infinite opportunity, enough to fuel his Immortal Court for eons.
But as he reached out a hand toward the shimmering horizon, his face darkened. A phenomenon of this scale was like a beacon across the universe.
"Every titan in the world," the Duke growled, "is already on their way here."