My Journey to Immortality Begins with Hunting-Chapter 538 – The Human Emperor and Li Yuan - Part 2

Back on the hilltop, the little crow blinked in surprise. “The Human Emperor didn’t chase us... Do you think he used up too much energy? Maybe he’s too tired to fight again?”

The mirage sparrow said nothing. Instead, it scratched a word into the dirt with its talon.

“No.”

“Eh? Then what is it, Papa?” the crow asked with a curious squawk.

The sparrow wrote again.

“Just wait.”

“Wait for what?” the crow asked, frowning in confusion.

The reason Li Yuan told her to wait was simple.

At that very moment, he was deep in the southern wilderness, inside a makeshift tent, scribbling furiously.

He was writing. Drawing. Desperately capturing every flicker, every glimmer of the golden radiance he had witnessed while the memory was still fresh.

He hadn’t returned to Gemhill County because, although peace had seemingly returned there, not a single soul had gone back.

The reason was obvious. All those massive ghost tides had ultimately converged on one place, the Ghost Prison. And when they reached it, they were completely absorbed, disappearing into its depths.

No one knew whether the Ghost Prison might erupt again. So no one dared move back to Gemhill County, even if technically speaking there was no danger now.

At this moment, the interior of the Ghost Prison had become strangely uniform. It was shrouded in a dense black mist so thick it seemed almost solid. From the outside, the entire place looked like a massive black egg, its shape reminiscent of a giant hen’s egg.

The Court of Judges kept sending in scouts to investigate. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

But the egg continued to change.

Swish! Swoosh! Fwoosh! Li Yuan’s ink brush danced wildly over the paper, tracing those patterns, those golden lines.

He had seen countless life chronicles in his time, and even developed a few himself.

These diagrams were, in essence, the crystallization of an ancestral seal seed, a unique power that used intent to guide shadow blood and blood energy to reinforce the mind.

It was a cycle, a mutual nourishment between spirit and flesh, and the first step on the path of the Human Soul.

It sounded simple. But without the wisdom of those who came before, trying to walk that path alone...was as hopeless as scaling the heavens.

To truly form a life chronicle, two elements were essential.

The first was a conceptual form, a mental threshold needed to nurture the ancestral seal seed.

The second was a blood energy circulation method, a physical technique to drive the body’s energy and feedback into the will.

Only when both elements were present, aligned and unified, could an ordinary person step into the sixth rank and experience their first evolution in vitality, breaking past the natural limit of a hundred-year lifespan.

But that golden pattern in front of him, what was it?

Li Yuan kept drawing furiously, every brushstroke pushed by urgency and instinct. Only after a long while did he finally put the brush down.

The duel between Naran and Ji Hu, and the brief flurry of sword strikes that followed, had ended almost the moment he grabbed his pen.

As expected, he had only managed to record a fragment. But even this small sliver was enough to push his mind to the brink.

It was now clear. Even if he’d held a brush and paper beforehand, he wouldn’t have been able to copy it down in real time. Not something like that.

Now he sat still, eyes scanning the arcane sketch he'd captured.

And he realized...he couldn’t understand it at all. It looked like a pattern...but also like a single, impossibly complex character.

He tried to focus, but the thing danced and shifted constantly, without rhyme or reason.

From top to bottom, countless branches emerged and dissolved, growing and vanishing in the blink of an eye. In the center, circles upon circles of swirling vortices spun endlessly. Try as he might, he couldn’t make out what lay within.

It reminded him of those animated illusions he used to see online before he came to this world, images that looked like they were moving when they weren’t. Only this time, the movement was real.

Just a few seconds of staring left him dizzy and nauseous, his head throbbing.

“This is definitely hiding something big,” Li Yuan muttered. He carefully laid the paper aside and let out a long breath. Then he tucked it away, planning to study it more slowly later.

Where this new world was headed, even he had no idea. Truth be told, no one did, not even the ancient forces behind the Deathless Tomb or the Eastern Sea’s Immortal Domain.

So, he had to seize every opportunity to adapt, to probe the limits of this reality and survive within it.

Only after doing all this did the mirage sparrow finally turn back to the little crow.

Then, calmly, it shared what it had deduced.

The Human Emperor’s stance toward the Nine Flames Tribe was...complicated.

For one, the Emperor likely carried the will of the Dragon Vein.

And the Dragon Vein, strangely enough, had once been an ally of the Nine Flames Tribe. After all, both opposed the rise of the Grand Union of Yin and Yang.

But now that it had already happened, the alliance crumbled. After all, the union would bring a great strengthening of the Central Plains.

No wise ruler would ever stake their nation’s future on a naive hope that a stronger neighbor might choose to be kind. A strong Central Plains meant disaster for the Nine Flames Tribe.

So Naran had no choice but to march his armies into the heart of the continent. Yet their deep-rooted worship of the flame made long-term campaigns abroad unsustainable. They could scorch the land, but they could never replace the Central Plains.

“So...the Human Emperor doesn’t see the Nine Flames Tribe as a real threat anymore. But because he once shared an alliance with them, he let a few survivors go. He left them a spark, a seed, not out of mercy, but to preserve the idea of a hidden ally,” the little crow murmured, piecing it together, “Is that it, Papa?”

The mirage sparrow nodded once, then spread its wings and flew silently away.

The great battle here was over. What remained was little more than a cleanup, like a skilled player methodically clearing the board after a decisive move. What followed wasn’t war, but the expansion of victory.

Still, what intrigued Li Yuan wasn’t the aftermath, it was the state of the Emperor.

At this point, just who was the Son of Heaven? A human-shaped Dragon Vein...or Ji Hu?

Li Yuan didn’t dwell on the question long. Soon, his attention was once again swallowed by the golden patterns, those dazzling trails of light that still lingered in his memory.

He began replicating them relentlessly, redrawing the intricate symbol etched in his mind by the Human Emperor’s sword. Then he tore the paper apart, studying it fragment by fragment, trying to see deeper, to understand, to remember...

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

After driving back the 20,000 ferocious twin-headed direwolf riders at the banks of the Eternal Rest River with a single strike, the Emperor didn’t pursue.

He left the mop-up to his soldiers, who surged forward to retake Cloudpeak Province.

They quickly secured everything east of Cloudpeak Province, but progress to the west proved far more difficult. That land had already been absorbed by the Nine Flames Tribe, entirely and irreversibly.

The Great Zhou troops could seize ground today, only to lose it again tomorrow.

It became a tug-of-war.

Still, Ying Shanxing and the rest of the commanders had arrived on the frontlines with a clear goal.

Driving the Nine Flames Tribe back was not enough.

They aimed to pull the entire Nine Flames Tribe territory into the Great Zhou’s map, claim it, annex it, and rewrite its borders.

To that end, they launched aggressive offensives and even sent out formal letters of negotiation, offering terms. If the Khagan would surrender and relocate his entire household to the Jade Capital to receive a formal title from the Emperor, the war would end. Troops would be withdrawn.

It was the kind of letter that might’ve sown doubt, tempted weaker tribes, and sparked civil unrest.

But not the Nine Flames Tribe, especially now that it was fully under the control of the Deathless Tomb.

The war ground on.

East of Sword Mountain, the Great Zhou forces found themselves locked in a bitter stalemate. And once they truly understood how deeply the Ice Folk were woven into Cloudpeak Province’s western side, their tactics shifted from conquest to vengeance.

Burning, pillaging, massacres. Cities razed in anger, not strategy. Soldiers looted and killed to vent their rage. The army justified it two ways, as a reward to their troops and as a way to provoke the Ice Folk into open battle.

They didn’t dare push west, deeper into the icy heart of the Nine Flames Tribe territory.

So Cloudpeak Province’s eastern region became their hostage, leveraged to draw the tribesmen out.

It was a brutal logic, but one as old as war itself. No single order or lofty speech could stop it. From lowly footsoldiers to seasoned generals, all harbored the same ruthless resolve.

And so, the campaign dragged on for over two months.

Blizzards raged. Troops froze in snow and mud. And slowly, the commanders of the Great Zhou began to face an unsettling truth.

They might not be able to conquer the Nine Flames Tribe after all.

That’s when Ying Shanxing proposed a new plan, a poisonous one.

He began forcibly evacuating every single citizen east of Cloudpeak Province, driving them eastward, out of reach of the Nine Flames Tribe. If they couldn’t cut down the enemy, they could at least starve it, deny them manpower, labor, and logistics.

Of course, the Ice Folk wouldn’t accept this quietly.

But their elite forces had been gutted in the earlier battle, and only a few hundred surviving twin-headed direwolf riders remained, shattered in spirit and cowering behind their borders. Meanwhile, the Great Zhou had countless cultivators, armies, and resources encircling them.

So, slowly but surely, a great exodus began.

At the same time, another official proposed fortifying Sword Mountain.

A new checkpoint. A wall. A line that must not be crossed.

No one, not one civilian, would be allowed past Sword Mountain into the western lands.

Alongside this came a flood of propaganda, stories that the people of the Nine Flames Tribe were cannibals, that those who crossed westward would be captured, skinned, and devoured alive.

The message was clear.

Behind this gate lies hell. And the Nine Flames Tribe are savage brutes.

The proposal was approved. Large teams of craftsmen were immediately dispatched toward Sword Mountain to begin construction.

The chaos in Cloudpeak Province hadn’t ended with Naran’s defeat. In truth, that was only the beginning. The conflict was only growing fiercer.

But all of that...no longer had much to do with the young Son of Heaven.

Ji Hu had turned his focus elsewhere. He began sweeping east and west, seeking to drag the fractured martial world under the firm grip of imperial rule.

This boy emperor, barely more than a youth, took only the 8,000 riders of the Flying Bear Army with him. And at his side stood only one companion, the banner-bearing beauty He Si.

And so began his campaign to conquer the martial world.

His first target was the former Kingdom of Han, specifically the Golden Buddha Temple in Silkfloss Province.

The Golden Buddha Temple had always been low-key. A quiet sect, not known for powerful martial artists, and officially aligned with the Buddhist tradition.

When the Son of Heaven arrived, they didn’t even consider resisting, they simply prepared to surrender. But once they heard his terms, the temple’s abbot was utterly dumbfounded.

The Emperor’s demands were simple.

Surrender all sacred texts and traditions, and submit every fifth and sixth rank martial artist to the imperial registry, bound to follow court orders.

The abbot balked. There was no way he could agree.

He tried to gather like-minded allies, hoping to reason with the Emperor.

But the Emperor did not come to reason.

That same day, he slaughtered the temple.

He seized the temple's legacies and moved on, heading further west.

His next destination was the dominant power in Silkfloss Province, the Holy Tree Temple.

The temple split almost instantly. The Jing Faction surrendered, and the Gu Faction fled.

What was notable was that neither side chose to fight. No one dared.

They all knew that resistance was meaningless.

So when the Emperor arrived at their gates, the head of the Jing Family opened them wide and formally surrendered, offering to join the imperial ranks. He also reported, with all due righteousness, that the Gu Faction had fled, and, for what it was worth, hadn't taken any martial legacies with them.

The Emperor said nothing. He simply ordered his troops to pursue.

In the depths of winter, many of the Gu Clan’s strongest martial artists were hunted down and executed.

This young Emperor’s strength was simply too absurd.

When Li Yuan heard all this, he had already seen it with his own eyes. Sixth, fifth, and even fourth rank martial artists were fleeing south in a panic, desperate to find protection in the Bladeseekers.

More and more came each day.

And the Bladeseekers, which didn’t even have a single fourth rank powerhouse of its own, suddenly found itself surrounded by martial artists far stronger than its own disciples. It was paralyzed.

Their response was to simply refuse everyone. If they wanted shelter, they’d have to stay outside.

The newcomers, uncertain of the Bladeseeker's real stance and unwilling to risk seizing it by force, ended up camping just north of the compound’s grounds, forming a ragged, uneasy satellite camp of their own.