The night passed without incident.
At dawn the next morning, Jared opened his eyes from meditation, a sharp light flashing through his violet gaze.
After a full night of cultivation, his spiritual power had completely recovered. His realm hadn't broken through, but his chaotic force had become a little more condensed than before.
He rose, left the guest room, and made his way to the great hall of the Void Pavilion.
Cedric was already there waiting for him.
Today, Cedric had changed into silver-white robes embroidered with the Exchange sigil. A silver-white token hung at his waist, and he held a fly-whisk in one hand. He looked less like a merchant than a cultivator with the bearing of an immortal.
Claire stood behind Cedric.
The slate-green gown she’d worn before was gone, replaced by silver-white panoply. A slender estoc hung at her waist, her long hair tied back tight. The quiet, reserved woman from before had vanished. She looked sharp, capable, and battle-ready—like a completely different person.
More than a dozen people stood behind Cedric, all of them elite cultivators from the Abyssal Exchange.
The weakest among them was Golden Immortal Level One. The two strongest had both reached the peak of Golden Immortal Level Three.
They all wore matching silver-white panoply, with standard arcane implements at their waists.
Every face was set in the same grave, disciplined expression.
This was the Abyssal Exchange’s finest detachment, assembled for one purpose alone—to explore the secret realm.
"Mr. Chance, did you rest well?" Cedric asked with a smile.
Jared nodded. "Very well."
Cedric turned and headed outside the door. "Then let’s go."
The group left the Void Pavilion and made their way to the platform.
Cedric drew a golden jade talisman from his sleeve and poured spiritual power into it.
The jade talisman burst apart in midair and expanded into a massive golden sky-barge.
The sky-barge was roughly 30 yards long and 10 yards wide.
Its hull was carved all over with dense spatial sigils. At the bow was the Open Eye of the Abyssal Exchange, and at the stern a golden banner snapped in the wind.
The cabin was divided into three levels.
The bottom level was storage. The middle held guest chambers and cultivation chambers. The top housed the control room and the reception chamber.
It was several times faster than the silver-white sky-barge Claire had ridden before, and far steadier too.
Inside the cabin, there was almost no sense of movement at all.
Cedric was the first to leap aboard.
Jared followed right behind him, and Claire boarded after that with the rest of the Abyssal Exchange cultivators.
The sky-barge rose into the air and shot north at astonishing speed.
Stormhaven shrank rapidly behind them.
Its dozens of floating islands soon became nothing more than a few black specks adrift in the cloud-sea.
The ice plains stretched endlessly below them.
Under the sun, the white snow and ice flashed with a blinding glare.
After the sky-barge had flown for about 1 hour, the landscape below shifted from ice plains to even bleaker frozen ground.
Nothing grew on that frozen wasteland.
There was only black stone and white snow woven together into a stark world of black and white.
Far off in the distance, a massive chasm appeared at the edge of the sky.
It ran from the ground all the way into the heavens, as if an invisible giant sword had split the world open.
Dense force of Space Law poured out of the chasm, glinting in the sunlight with an eerie sheen.
The air around it twisted and warped.
It looked as though something inside the chasm was struggling, shrieking, roaring to get out.
That was the void passage leading to the secret realm.
Cedric stood at the bow, staring at the chasm.
A heated gleam flashed through his red-gold eyes.
"Mr. Chance, that’s the void passage."
There was excitement in his voice now, impossible to hide.
"The Abyssal Exchange has tried countless times, and we still couldn’t get through. Today, it all depends on you, Mr. Chance."
Jared nodded and fixed his violet eyes on the chasm, feeling the force of Space Law surging out of it.
That power was immense, chaotic, and thick with the aura of destruction.
If cultivators below Golden Immortal Level Three entered it, they really would be torn to pieces.
But his chaotic force could suppress every element—Space Law included.
For him, getting through that chasm shouldn’t be difficult.
The sky-barge came to a stop several dozen miles from the chasm.
It wasn't that they could push any farther.
It was that from here on, they absolutely couldn't.
The space around the chasm was violently unstable. If the sky-barge got any closer, the spatial turbulence would drag it straight into the tear—and everyone aboard would die.
"Mr. Chance, from here on out, you're on your own."
Cedric turned to Jared. Something unreadable flickered through his red-gold eyes.
"I'll wait here for your good news, Mr. Chance."
Jared nodded and was just about to leap off the sky-barge when Claire's voice cut through the air.
"Chairman, we're being followed."
The warmth vanished from Cedric's face in an instant.
He spun hard, his gaze sharp as lightning as he swept the space behind the sky-barge.
Hundreds of miles away, several black sky-barges broke through the clouds and came straight at them.
There were no markings on them, but golden saintlight sigils flowed across their hulls.

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