91 The Soul Lock (Part Three)
"The beneficiaries are everyone."
The voice below suddenly tightened, the previous nonchalant tone vanished without a trace, replaced by an indescribable tension, even carrying a hint of imperceptible urgency.
"Say it again...who is it?"
Ran Qinghe's mind was in turmoil. Lou Tinglan's unauthorized planting of the Injury-Bearing Technique made her both angry and bitter, and she didn't immediately notice the strangeness in his tone.
She said irritably:
"It's none of your business."
Ran Qinghe clenched her hands, her nails digging into her palms. The pain brought her back to her senses, and she whispered:
"What an idiot."
Now that things have come to this, how could she not understand everything he had done for her?
He kept everything from her completely hidden, from Wei Lin's affairs, the pain of the Spirit-Locking Whip, and even the Dao Heart Tribulation Mark on his forehead.
A longer period of deathly silence fell over the depths of the tower.
Ran Qinghe finally snapped out of her own emotions and keenly noticed the drastic change in the man's attitude.
"You know Lou Tinglan?" she immediately pressed. "Who exactly are you?"
Ran Qinghe's suspicions deepened. A person who had been imprisoned in the tower prison for at least a hundred years, knew the formation created by Lou Yunya, and reacted so strongly to the name Lou Tinglan...
An absurd yet gradually becoming clearer conjecture slowly emerged.
According to the restrictions set by the Tower Prison, cultivators in the Void Refining Realm Prison and the Body Integration Realm Prison cannot freely enter and exit the Divine Transformation Realm Prison, but she can freely enter and exit the higher-level realm prisons.
Instead of painstakingly unraveling the mystery to find the truth, it's better to take a decisive, all-or-nothing approach. Instead of being led by the nose by this self-proclaimed "young and promising" old man, let's see his true colors!
In a flash, she made her decision.
She left her cell and walked a few dozen steps to the entrance in the center of the tower leading to the next level.
She reached out, her fingertips touching the restrictions of the Tower Prison. Ordinary Nascent Soul cultivators who approached this place would feel their spiritual energy stagnate, their souls sting, and be repelled by an invisible barrier.
But she was different.
She possesses the Injury Healing Technique, and Lou Tinglan should have sensed her current situation long ago. She is gambling that Lou Tinglan will open the Tower Prison Restriction for her.
Sure enough, after hesitating for a moment, she suddenly mobilized all her spiritual power and "stabbed" into the restriction.
The bizarre and colorful scene before my eyes swirled rapidly, and my body began to fall at an alarming rate, as if I were penetrating layer after layer of viscous swamp.
First, the Void Refining Realm.
Next is the Integration Realm.
Finally, there's... the Tribulation Transcending Realm.
"Bang!" She fell heavily onto the hard, cold ground, feeling as if her internal organs had shifted.
Even with the Injury-Bearing Technique, the dizziness from the impact made her vision go black, and she couldn't get up for a long time.
This place is even darker than the Divine Transformation Realm Prison, almost pitch black. But what's strange is that, unlike the eight-story tower prison above, there is even a faint flow of spiritual energy here.
She struggled to her feet. The scene here was somewhat different from the hellish landscape she had imagined. It seemed that the entire Tribulation Realm was just a more spacious prison cell.
The center was empty, surrounded by mottled stone walls covered with ancient restrictive runes that shimmered faintly.
In the deepest part of the cell, near the wall, she saw a figure.
The man sat against the wall, his posture even bordering on relaxed. But Ran Qinghe's gaze was immediately drawn to what was on his body.
Those were several dark gold chains engraved with dense ancient runes, piercing through his shoulder blades, wrists, and ankles, deeply wrapped around his waist and abdomen, and disappearing into the surrounding stone walls and ground.
These are prisoners in the Tribulation Transcending Realm...?
Ran Qinghe looked at the man warily.
The man seemed to be looking at her too. The darkness couldn't completely block the cultivator's vision; she could even see that he was wearing a tattered Taoist robe whose original color was no longer discernible.
His long hair was loose, covering half of his face, but the half-face that was revealed almost made Ran Qinghe speechless:
"Lou Yun Cliff".
How could it be him?
Is it really him?
"You actually dared to come down here." The person spoke, and it was the same clear voice they had heard before, but now it was so close that it lacked the vague echoes of the Tower Prison.
"Don't come any closer!" the man suddenly warned again.
Three steps away from Ran Qinghe, a large array slowly appeared as it sensed the approach of the cultivator.
Using the dim light that appeared, Ran Qinghe could see his face clearly.
It was a very young face, even handsome, but it was too pale because it hadn't seen the sunlight for a long time.
With deep-set eyes and a straight nose, his amber eyes seemed to suppress the vicissitudes of time, creating a stark contrast with his youthful appearance.
"Are you really Lou Yunya?" Ran Qinghe asked again, but her voice was now filled with certainty.
The man maintained his nonchalant tone: "If my memory is still clear enough, it seems we've never met before. How can you be so sure of my identity?"
She and Lou Tinglan once entered the Mirror of Past Lives together to investigate the truth behind Qianxue's death. The face before her was virtually identical to the one in the Mirror of Past Lives.
"What does it matter to you whether it is or not?" he said desolately. "I'm just a forgotten person."
Although Ran Qinghe had expected it, hearing it with her own ears still shocked her beyond belief. The legendary, brilliant, and missing former head of the Discipline Hall had actually been trapped at the very bottom of the Tower of Babel!
"Why are you locked up here? Who locked you up? Qian Zhong? Or the other four sect leaders?" Questions came one after another. "Does Lou Tinglan know? Does he know that his father is still..."
Lou Yunya gestured for her to look at the array patterns around them.
"How does it feel? Does it still look familiar?"
A spirit-locking array?!
If she wasn't mistaken, the formation in front of her was exactly the same as the spirit-locking formation of the Nascent Soul Tower Prison.
He gave a slight smile, as if he was carefully choosing his words, or perhaps he simply didn't want to recall the past.
"The Spirit Locking Array was indeed created by me initially, and it was indeed to restrain my own power and leave the five sects with a means of checks and balances."
"But I never imagined that this formation would trap me for so long, and I never imagined that one day I would become an executioner on the execution ground."
Ran Qinghe became more and more confused as she listened. "If it's based on your abilities, how could a mere spirit-locking array have trapped you for over a hundred years?"
Lou Yunya said, "Are you sure you only saw a spirit-locking array? A person born with a spiritual body wouldn't have such limited perception."
Even now, he still has the audacity to keep things a secret.
Ran Qinghe closed her eyes and carefully sensed the flow of spiritual energy above the array.
The more he sensed it, the more unfathomable the formation seemed. It was as if a formation could spread so far, almost piercing through the spiritual veins of the five sects. And Lou Yunya's location seemed to be merely the core of the massive formation.
Suddenly, Ran Qinghe frowned and asked in confusion, "Why is there a gap at the extension of this formation?"
Lou Yunya smiled. "What, you just finished blowing it up, and you've already forgotten about it?"
Ran Qinghe: "You..."
But then she thought again, "Wait a minute, how do you know I was the one who blew it up?"
Lou Yunya's smile deepened. "What, is it hard to guess? Someone just blew up the mountain, and you were locked up right after. Does this cause-and-effect relationship need to be examined more closely?"
Ran Qinghe: ...
He sighed softly, "If you hadn't blown a corner off this formation, I probably wouldn't have woken up..."
Ran Qinghe: "So, this formation is actually connected to the Azure Sky Spiritual Vein?"
"Is it a thousand bushels? Is that right?"
She drew a conclusion quickly and decisively.
"I don't know," Lou Yunya said frankly.
When he said this, his eyelids drooped slightly, and his tone was calm, as if he had already detached himself from all of this.
"You don't know?" Ran Qinghe stared intently at the figure in the darkness. "How could the person who activated a grand formation that could trap you here for a hundred years, or even connect the spiritual veins of the five sects, leave no trace?"
"Who benefits? You really don't know?"
She paused. "Or do you know, but can't say, or are unwilling to say?"
Lou Yunya raised his head, his gaze fixed on the endless darkness, as if piercing through layers of towers and looking towards the distant past.
"Beneficiaries?"
"What if I said that the beneficiaries are all the people in these five cases?"
His words carried a penetrating insight that seemed to see through everything. "Even including you."
"What do you mean? Explain yourself clearly." Ran Qinghe's heart clenched suddenly, as if she had a premonition of something.
He looked at Ran Qinghe again: "As you can see, this is just the core of the Spirit Locking Array. There are a total of 108 such Spirit Locking Arrays, connecting the spiritual veins of various sects."
"And I am merely the most suitable vessel for absorbing spiritual energy within this grand formation."
Ran Qinghe felt a jolt of unease under his gaze, and somehow she understood something.
When she destroyed the spiritual vein, the spiritual energy naturally flowed into the mortal valley. It was not a coincidence at all, but rather that the spiritual energy was meant to be that way.
"All things possess spiritual energy. In your opinion, is the spiritual energy more abundant in the human world, where fireworks and fires rage, or in the Five Sects, which consist of only a few sacred mountains?"
"Are these so-called spiritual veins formed naturally, or are they created intentionally by others?"
After a moment of sighing, Lou Yunya said again, "You should leave. I don't know where you'll stay for long. Although the Spirit Locking Array is incomplete, its core is not broken, and its suppression of me is still present. It is not without harm to you either."
So that's how it is. Lies, all lies!
In his ears, he seemed to hear Ye Buchen's long sigh when he was in the Valley of Mortals. He had said forlornly, "This Valley of Mortals was once a place full of spiritual energy."
"But later..."
What happened next? The answer is obvious.
Because the best container to serve as the eye of the Spirit Locking Array has been found, spiritual power is restrained and restricted, becoming the exclusive resource of the five sects.
Even she was once a beneficiary of it.
Suddenly, a faint tremor and fluctuation of spiritual energy emanated from the tower above. Was someone coming?!
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