Chapter 66 – The Bizarre Descends Upon the World

At that time, the first group to enter the Cloud-Water Celestial Palace ruins numbered over a hundred cultivators.

Most were at the Qi Refining or Foundation Establishment stage.

They had assumed it would be an ordinary ruin. No one expected the Cloud-Water Celestial Palace to be riddled with the bizarre. Caught completely off guard, the group suffered catastrophic casualties.

In the end, fewer than one in ten made it out alive.

Among the survivors was a man named Si Kong Yi.

He was only at the late Qi Refining stage — utterly unremarkable in appearance.

Everyone assumed he had simply survived by luck.

No one could have imagined that it was this inconspicuous Si Kong Yi who, upon returning to Ten Thousand Immortals Island, submitted 《The Cloud-Water Chart》 and completed a bounty mission worth a staggering one hundred thousand contribution points.

After collecting his reward, Si Kong Yi used a long-range teleportation formation to leave the Layered Cloud Sea, vanishing from everyone’s sight.

From that day on, Si Kong Yi was never seen again.

“Search: information related to the bizarre and sect ruins.” Li Fan slowly recalled what he had witnessed in his previous life and spoke to the Celestial Mystery Mirror.

In an instant, hundreds upon thousands of results surfaced.

However, the vast majority showed only the first few lines. To access the full content, one had to pay a certain number of contribution points.

Li Fan did not hesitate. He immediately spent 100 contribution points to purchase the highest-ranked result: 《The Sect Ruins Survival Guide》.

The guide’s author was named Qi Yuanzhou — also a rogue cultivator by origin.

He had spent years exploring and wandering through various ruins, cultivating all the way to the Golden Core realm before joining the Myriad Immortals Alliance.

To have escaped from the treacherous depths of sect ruins time and again, Qi Yuanzhou naturally possessed abilities that set him apart from others.

The 《Sect Ruins Survival Guide》 he compiled was eagerly sought after by many cultivators and held up as a sacred reference.

The Cloud-Water Celestial Palace ruins were extraordinarily perilous and strange. Even with his foreknowledge, Li Fan dared not be complacent.

He settled in and read carefully.

When the ancient Great Calamity descended, countless sects were annihilated, leaving behind nothing but crumbling walls and broken foundations scattered across the world.

Some of these ruins had been explored countless times over the centuries by cultivators, stripped bare until nothing of value remained.

Others, too vast and treacherous to fully explore, remained uncharted to this day. Even now, many cultivators ventured into them each year — some seeking cultivation techniques, others hoping to find a breakthrough opportunity.

Then there were those sects that had remained hidden from the world, concealed behind pocket realms and formations, untouched and undiscovered. These were entirely virgin territory, brimming with opportunity at every turn. The moment such a sect appeared, it would inevitably draw surrounding cultivators swarming in like bees.

The experiences compiled in 《The Sect Ruins Survival Guide》 addressed the latter two categories.

The guide noted that in the current cultivation world, all sect ruins worth exploring could be divided into two broad types.

The first: those without the bizarre.

The second: those with the bizarre.

In ruins without the bizarre, as long as one remained wary of formations and mechanisms, there was generally no extraordinary danger.

But where the bizarre was present, one had to exercise extreme caution.

The so-called “bizarre” referred to all manner of anomalous phenomena within ruins that could not be measured by ordinary logic.

As if not belonging to this world, the bizarre invariably operated by its own unique rules.

The rules of the bizarre also varied in strength.

Within the cultivation world, it had become convention to classify the intensity of bizarre rules into tiers.

Based on the highest cultivation stage they could affect, they were correspondingly categorized as Qi Refining-level bizarre, Foundation Establishment-level bizarre, Golden Core-level bizarre, and so on.

Cultivators within the range of the bizarre who possessed a cultivation level lower than its rule intensity were compelled to abide by its rules.

Should they violate those rules, death was inescapable.

Cultivators whose cultivation surpassed the bizarre’s rule intensity might be unaffected by it and escape with their lives.

Yet no matter how high one’s cultivation, no one could alter the bizarre itself.

Not even a cultivator at the Dao Harmony stage could change a Qi Refining-level bizarre rule.

And it was even less possible to rescue a cultivator within the bizarre who had violated its rules.

Once a living being entered the range of the bizarre, it would be triggered.

Only when the number of deaths reached a certain threshold — or when the bizarre’s rules were deciphered — could those within be permitted to leave.

The guide offered an illustrative example.

A hundred and fifty years ago, on a nameless island in the western Layered Cloud Sea near the mainland, a cave dwelling suddenly appeared.

From the moment it manifested, radiant clouds of light poured forth from within, illuminating the sky for hundreds of li in all directions.

Many cultivators were drawn in by the treasure-light and entered to explore.

After a thorough investigation, the cultivators discovered that this cave dwelling had been constructed by an ancient Nascent Soul rogue cultivator — Venerable Hongzhi — on the eve of his death.

The cave dwelling housed over a dozen cultivation techniques, along with an uncountable number of magical treasures.

Overjoyed, the cultivators began scrambling to seize them.

It was then that something terrifying happened.

Every cultivator who had obtained a cultivation technique or magical treasure — every single one who broke into a smile — had their head fly from their shoulders without warning.

Their smiles were frozen on their faces forever.

In an instant, more than half of those present were dead.

The remaining cultivators were thrown into a panic. They assumed the techniques and treasures had been sealed with some kind of restriction.

Leaving the scattered treasures untouched on the ground, they fled the cave dwelling.

Once the news spread, there were naturally cultivators who refused to believe it and came to test their luck.

After holding the treasures for a long while without triggering any restriction, they each broke into smiles — some contemptuous, some delighted.

Immediately after, their heads parted from their bodies and rolled across the ground.

Only one cultivator — one born with a naturally expressionless face — emerged unscathed.

But even he was so terrified by the gruesome sight that he simply grabbed a single magical treasure and fled as if his life depended on it.

The news of yet another group’s annihilation struck fear into all the covetous cultivators nearby.

The stone-faced cultivator who had miraculously survived and walked away with a treasure from the cave naturally drew everyone’s attention.

But no matter how the others pressed him, he could only say that he himself did not know how he had survived.

It was not until later that a sharp-minded man, after lengthy contemplation, revealed the secret.

This cave dwelling forbade laughter.

For whatever reason, the moment one’s face broke into a smile, one’s head would fall.

Absurd as it sounded, after the sharp-minded man calmly walked into the cave dwelling, retrieved a cultivation technique with a perfectly composed expression, and emerged completely unharmed, every cultivator present believed it.

And so, one by one, they followed his example, retrieving all the treasures remaining in the cave dwelling.

……

What occurred in Venerable Hongzhi’s cave dwelling was the most classic and simplest form of the bizarre — containing only a single rule.

In practice, the bizarre found within sect ruins often comprised multiple rules layered together.

The bizarre is, without question, extraordinarily dangerous. Without knowing its rules, the slightest misstep means death.

Yet once the bizarre’s rules are understood, the risk it poses drops to almost nothing.

Drawing from his own firsthand experience of surviving the bizarre on multiple occasions, Qi Yuanzhou distilled dozens of hard-won lessons.

First: remain calm at all times.

Under the shroud of the bizarre, anything unimaginable can happen.

Second: do not act rashly.

When the rules of the bizarre are unclear, the faster one moves, the faster one dies.