Chapter 1287: Golden Furnace, the Great Elixir!

Phei emerged into darkness and his first impression was heat.

It rolled over him with enough force that an ordinary human would have been boiled from inside out before properly understanding where they had arrived.

Where they were was a hall but it was more like a furnace wearing the skin of a hall, waves heat so hot it felt like he was being cooked inside a stone and the air itself seemed steeped in it, dense and heavy with power, carrying a faint metallic sweetness beneath something older and stranger that immediately made Phei’s blood stir.

His Primordial Blood did not merely notice it much of lunging towards that power and pure hunger.

He did not move until his eyes adjusted first in the waves of heat but he’d already spread his perception out.

The chamber around him resembled a hall built for silence with dark stone that formed the walls and floor, smooth, unadorned and almost completely bare, with no paintings hung from the walls, or furniture occupying the wide space and no decorative formations tried to persuade visitors that wealth had been involved.

It felt less like a bathhouse and more like a tomb of heat that had decided to keep working after the corpse inside it finished dying from the incinerating heat.

There was only one pool which looked like it had been carved directly into the center of the floor.

Steam rose constantly from the sunken basin in thick golden-dark clouds, spread through the hall before dissolving near the high ceiling and the liquid inside did not resemble water; it was a deep molten gold touched by darker of some corruptive energy currents and every slow movement across its surface released sparks of concentrated essence that snapped through the air and disappeared before reaching the walls.

Those sparks did not glitter but they bit instead; each one carried enough pressure to make the air flinch, as if the pool were exhaling the last remaining power and authority of something that had once stood above worlds.

Phei’s expression changed slightly:

Three enormous feathers rested within the pool.

Each one was taller than he was.

Dark gold covered them from root to tip, though the color shifted whenever the liquid moved around them, revealing faint layers of crimson, bronze and something almost golden-white hidden inside the feather shafts. Their barbs were immense, each individual strand was broad enough to resemble a narrow blade, yet portions of them had already begun dissolving into the pool.

They looked less like feathers and more like the remaining bones of a fallen sky or some angelic being; they were after all three remnants of a Great Immortal God being and they were still bleeding its immerse power even after death had already taken everything else.

’They are not melting.’

No, they were being refined.

Dark-golden energy continuously peeled away from the feathers in slow luminous streams and sank into the steaming liquid. Every thread that dissolved caused the pool to pulse, sending rings of concentrated power outward until the entire basin seemed to breathe. That breathing was not gentle.

It was the slow, drowning inhale of a Great Immortal God’s leftover being boiled down into an elixir!

Phei could feel that breathing inside his bones.

His Primordial Blood had already reacted immediately as deep pulses continued striking through his veins.

His body wanted the pool.

There was no polite curiosity attached to the feeling.

Phei recognized something enormously nourishing and his whole being starting from his Primordial Blood responded with an instinct so fierce that Phei’s fingers curled before he consciously stopped himself from walking forward. Hunger rose through him like a second heartbeat, old and shameless, the kind that did not ask whether a mortal vessel could survive swallowing what a Great Immortal had left behind.

The heat reached him from several meters away and seeped through his clothes without touching the fabric, sinking directly into his flesh; his muscles tightened and his meridians that had been quiet moments earlier had already stirred awake.

Even his bones carried a faint ache that felt suspiciously like anticipation.

It was the ache of a body that had already decided it would either grow from bathing in the pool or split itself from refusal; should there be one.

Phei breathed in slowly.

The energy saturating the hall entered his lungs with the air and immediately scattered through his body in threads so small they barely deserved to be called traces but that tiny amount was enough to make his blood surge:

A single breath of it felt like swallowing a spark from a funeral pyre that had never been allowed to go out.

His eyes narrowed.

’What the hell are those feathers?’

He had never seen them before and where would he have?

Yet something about their presence carried a strange familiarity, not because Phei recognized them directly, but because the darkness clinging to their ancient power reminded him of Sienna’s Soul Energy. The energy was not exactly Nether and it was not Death either, but it possessed that same impossible age, as though whatever creature had shed these feathers had existed when the worlds around it were still learning how to grow old.

Another wave of heat crossed the chamber and Phei’s body absorbed a fraction through his skin.

Understanding came almost instinctively.

This was not simply a pool filled with energy.

It was an elixir furnace for tempering one’s body or whatever shit that awaited him there should he enter that pool.

The dark-golden essence from the pool pressed against his flesh and Phei could somehow feel what would happen if he stepped inside: it would enter through his pores, follow his blood, flood his meridians and burrow into places ordinary cultivation could barely touch. His body would be forced to refine it or be overwhelmed by it.

And his body desperately wanted the challenge.

"Phei." Sienna’s voice reached him from somewhere beyond the wall to his left.

Phei’s True Void Sense spread naturally and the chamber stopped being isolated. His awareness flowed beyond the dark stone and entered the structure around him, mapping halls, neighboring rooms and passages with a clarity that would have seemed absurd only days ago.

Melissa was nearby. Phei found her in another chamber remarkably similar to his own.

She had already entered her own pool similar to his own.

Only her head, shoulders and the upper line of her chest remained above the dark-golden liquid as steam curled around her. Her eyes were closed and her hair gathered away from her face while the water around her glowed in slow pulses.

Phei’s attention sharpened immediately in worry upon their child but nothing felt wrong in Melissa or he could’ve felt it.

If anything, the energy surrounding Melissa had become far gentler than what filled his chamber, portions of the violent potency stripped away or restrained so that it nourished rather than battered her body.

Sienna had prepared them differently.

Phei’s perception moved farther.

Dravenna was somewhere else within the complex while Sienna stood between several chambers, her presence so deep and still that the surrounding flows of energy seemed to bend around her without ever touching her unless invited.

Then Phei looked farther.

Much farther and his expression changed.

There was no Paradise Island beyond these walls.

True Void Sense extended through the building and into open air, encountering dense vegetation, dark stone, winds saturated with unfamiliar Mana different from what Paradise’s was like and then coast.

Water surrounded everything.

Phei pushed his perception to its current limit.

’Just more water.’

He could sense an island beneath the structure, perhaps large enough to contain hills and a forest, but beyond its shores there was nothing within his range except an ocean stretching farther than he could perceive.

That alone did not prove they had left Hell’s Paradise.

Paradise Island possessed smaller islands.

But Phei knew better; every place had a presence.

He had begun noticing that more and more since True Void Sense evolved. Locations were not merely collections of stone, trees and people. Mana gathered differently according to the land beneath it and elements developed their own balance while ancient-like things left traces so did the powerful people in it changing the flow of air and mana itself; all contributed faintly to the spiritual character of a place until entire regions carried something almost resembling a scent to perception.

Hell’s Paradise Island possessed age.

’Ancient, stubborn age.’

Its Mana flowed through layers of buried history and powers that had been sleeping beneath the island long before its modern towers existed. Even standing inside the most luxurious districts, Phei had sensed that old heaviness somewhere beneath everything.

This place possessed none of it.

The Mana was cleaner, thicker too and its flow through the island was smoother and considerably denser than ordinary Earth, though less ancient and less profound than Hell’s Paradise itself. Several unfamiliar energies were mixed through it, some flowing from beneath the island and others carried across the sea upon the wind.

Phei smiled faintly.

Wherever Sienna had brought them, they had definitely left home.

"Ah, Phei." Sienna’s voice came again, carrying effortless clarity through the walls.

Phei turned toward the pool. "Can you get inside. Absorb as much as your body can endure."

He looked down at the crackling dark-golden liquid. "And what exactly am I about to endure?"

Sienna was quiet for a breath.

Then her voice returned: "The feathers contain what remains of a Great Immortal’s essence."

Phei’s amusement disappeared.

He looked at the three colossal feathers again.

’A Great Immortal?’

Of course.

Apparently normal bath salts had been judged insufficient for his family.

"Their essence is being broken down into a tempering elixir," Sienna continued. "The original power would destroy your current body if you attempted to refine it directly. The pool has been prepared to soften it enough for your Body Cultivation while preserving the parts your body needs."

Phei walked towards it and crouched beside the basin and dipped two fingers into the liquid.

Pain immediately shot through his hand.

His eyes widened.