Chapter 194: Strength of a Celestial Emperor (1/2)

“Who are you?” Only then did Lu Yun turn to look at the girl, his forehead slightly creased. She wasn’t a threat to him in the world beyond the Gates of the Abyss, but her very existence made him uncomfortable.

He didn’t know her, nor had he ever even seen her before. Yet there was something strangely familiar about her. It was as if they’d been together for a long time and had a deep understanding of each other. That both unsettled him and made him very uneasy.

“Me?” The girl smiled faintly. “I’m Violetgrave.”

“Violet… grave?” Lu Yun gaped at the girl, flabbergasted. “You’re the weapon spirit of Violetgrave? I thought only dao immortal-grade treasures have spirits.”

“Weapon spirit?” Violetgrave cast a confused look at the sword at her feet. “I’m no weapon spirit. I am Violetgrave.”

“Huh?” Lu Yun struggled to wrap his head around her response.

“You are Violetgrave, and Violetgrave is you,” Huangqing spoke up. “It’s said that some powerful treasures are able to take human form and exceed the limits of their nature.”

She cast a glance into the depths of hell as she spoke, to where Ruyi sat cross-legged on the ground, recovering with the energy of the netherworld. The nearby Yueshen kept the Infernum from rushing over to crowd the area.

“But isn’t that Violetgrave at her feet? She...” Lu Yun was still quite confused.

When Ruyi had possessed the Divine Spymirror, the treasure became her new body and she couldn’t materialize as a separate entity from it. But even now, however, Lu Yun could still feel a connection with the sword and hear the dread zombie’s mumblings within the weapon.

Huangqing looked assessingly at Violetgrave. She couldn’t comprehend the girl’s existence either. The violet-clad girl appeared to have only recently reached immortality, yet she could tap into a mysterious power great enough to release Lu Yun from Yuying’s cauldron.

With a wave of her hand, the sword flew into Violetgrave’s grasp. A strong feeling of harmony immediately emanated from the girl and the sword. Clearly, the two were one. Even the dread zombie remained meekly quiet in the sword, seemingly having given up on escaping.

“I can feel that you’re important to me,” Violetgrave said seriously. “I regained consciousness because of you. Thus, I shall continue to follow you.”

Lu Yun shrugged and responded uneasily, “I hear that you devour your masters?”

“They tried to force me to bend to their will despite not being my fated master,” she responded without missing a beat. “Of course I would fight back.”

Something didn’t sit right about that explanation.

“What should we do with the three big guys outside?” Lu Yun put aside the issue of Violetgrave to consider the more immediate problem at hand. He had a verbal agreement with the Dusk restriction, but he didn’t know if the deal still held, given the current circumstances.

Perhaps the restriction was the celestial emperor of Exalted Major, but the giant eyes were devoid of humanity and held only violence and killing intent. It seemed that the celestial emperor was constantly alternating between the two states.

When he was alive as the celestial emperor, reason reigned and he was capable of independent thought. When he was dead, he became the terrible Dusk restriction that’d taken countless lives.

Lu Yun had managed to strike a deal with it strictly through borrowing the Nephrite celestial emperor’s influence and flashing a hint of power from the Tome of Life and Death.