The heavy stone doors slid shut behind Yan Shuo with a deep, echoing thud, cutting off the shocked whispers of the Righteous Alliance disciples.
He was finally alone.
The air in the deeper sections of the ruin was thick with ancient, stagnant Qi. To a normal cultivator, breathing this air would feel like inhaling crushed glass. The miasma was designed to slowly poison the meridians of anyone who lingered too long.
Yan Shuo just took a deep breath, his golden Foundation Establishment Qi naturally filtering out the toxins.
"I really need to learn how to ventilate my underground bunkers better," he muttered to himself, waving a hand to clear the dust floating in front of his face.
He strolled down the dark, winding corridor, completely relaxed. This section of the ruin was known in the Alliance's ancient texts as the 'Labyrinth of Despair.' It was a massive, ever-shifting maze of identical black stone walls that supposedly drove intruders insane.
Yan Shuo didn't even look at the walls. He walked exactly forty paces, stopped, and kicked a loose brick near the floorboards.
Grind.
A hidden stone panel slid open, revealing a straight, brightly lit shortcut that bypassed the entire labyrinth.
"Idiots," Yan Shuo chuckled, stepping into the secret hallway. "Who actually walks through their own maze?"
He followed the shortcut for about ten minutes, humming a quiet, off-key tune under his breath. The deeper he went, the more nostalgic he felt. A hundred years was a long time to be dead. Walking through these halls felt like stepping back into his own violent, chaotic youth.
Finally, he reached the end of the corridor.
Standing before him was a massive pair of doors forged from pure Heavenly Iron. They were covered in glowing, blood-red sealing runes. These were the doors to the central vault—the very heart of the ruin.
Normally, a team of Array Grandmasters would need a month of continuous, exhausting calculations to safely unseal these doors. If a disciple tried to force them open, the backlash would instantly vaporize them.
Yan Shuo walked up to the center of the doors.
He bit his thumb, squeezing out a single drop of blood, and pressed it directly against the main rune.
He didn't need to chant an incantation or solve a puzzle. The vault was tied to his soul signature. Even though his body had changed, his soul was exactly the same as the day he locked it.
The blood-red runes flared with a blinding, joyous light. The ancient array recognized its master.
BOOM!
The massive Heavenly Iron doors slowly swung inward, groaning from a century of disuse.
Yan Shuo stepped inside, and the magical torches lining the walls instantly flared to life, illuminating the absolute staggering wealth hidden within.
The central vault was the size of a grand palace.
Mountains of Spirit Stones were piled up in the corners, glowing with a soft, milky light that saturated the room with impossibly dense Qi. Racks of high-grade spiritual weapons—swords, spears, and halberds—lined the walls, their blades completely untouched by rust. On the jade shelves in the center of the room sat hundreds of perfectly preserved wooden boxes, containing rare thousand-year-old spirit herbs and ancient pill recipes.
This was the private war chest of the Demon Lord Yan.
Yan Shuo stood in the doorway, staring at the mountains of wealth. A normal cultivator would have fallen to their knees, weeping tears of joy at the sheer luck of discovering such a heaven-defying inheritance.
Yan Shuo just sighed, crossing his arms.
"Damn inflation," he grumbled.
He walked over to the nearest pile of Spirit Stones and picked one up. A hundred years ago, these were considered High-Grade stones. But sitting in a sealed, damp vault for a century had slowly drained their ambient energy. Now, they were barely above Mid-Grade.
"Well, it's better than nothing," he muttered pragmatically.
He raised his left hand, flashing the beautiful, high-tier storage ring his wife had forced onto his finger that morning. He channeled a tiny bit of Qi into the ring, and a massive suction force erupted from the gemstone.
Whoosh!
The mountain of Spirit Stones vanished, neatly stacked inside the spatial ring. He walked over to the weapon racks. Whoosh. Gone. He strolled past the jade shelves, taking the rare herbs, the pill recipes, and the defensive artifacts. Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
He swept through the room like a highly efficient, entirely unbothered locust.
Within ten minutes, the legendary inheritance that the Righteous Alliance had spent years searching for was completely stuffed into Yan Shuo's pocket.
He left exactly one thing untouched.
At the very back of the vault, sitting atop a raised dais, was a heavy, intimidating throne carved from the skull of a massive demonic beast. It was his old chair.
Yan Shuo walked up the steps, dusted the throne off with his sleeve, and sat down. It was surprisingly comfortable.
He reached into his storage ring and pulled out a soft silk cushion, a small jade teapot, and a cup. Tantai Zhi had packed it all for him, insisting he shouldn't drink stale water. He poured himself a cup of the premium lotus tea, leaned back against the terrifying demonic skull, and took a slow, satisfied sip.
"Now this," Yan Shuo smiled in the empty room, "is how you explore an ancient ruin."
BANG!
The sound of an explosion echoed from the secret hallway outside.
Yan Shuo paused with his teacup halfway to his mouth. He raised an eyebrow.
Someone had actually made it through the labyrinth?
A few moments later, three figures stumbled through the open Heavenly Iron doors and collapsed into the main vault.
They looked absolutely terrible.
It was the Array genius from the trap room, accompanied by two top-tier Late Foundation Establishment disciples from the Heavenly Saber Sect. Their pristine Righteous Alliance robes were scorched, shredded, and soaked in swamp mud. One of the Saber disciples had an arrow sticking out of his shoulder, and the Array genius looked like he had barely survived a lightning strike.
They had followed the hidden panel Yan Shuo left open, but they had clearly triggered a few of the secondary traps along the way.
"We... we made it!" the Array genius gasped, coughing up a lungful of dust. He forced himself to his feet, his eyes wide with manic greed. "The central vault! The inheritance is ours!"
The two Saber disciples staggered up, clutching their weapons, their eyes scanning the massive, brightly lit room.
They expected to see mountains of treasure. They expected heavenly artifacts floating in the air.
Instead, they saw an empty, swept-clean stone floor, and a fifteen-year-old boy in spotless white robes sitting on a terrifying demonic throne, casually sipping a cup of tea.
The three disciples froze. Their brains completely stalled.
"You..." the Array genius choked out, pointing a trembling finger at Yan Shuo. "You! How did you get in here?! Where is the treasure?!"
Yan Shuo took another sip of his tea, enjoying the rich, floral flavor. His wife really did have excellent taste.
"I walked," Yan Shuo answered mildly. "And what treasure? I didn't see any treasure. Are you sure you're in the right ruin?"
"Don't play games with us, you outer sect trash!" one of the Saber disciples roared, his face twisting in fury. He completely ignored the arrow in his shoulder, gripping his saber with both hands. "You took it! You emptied the vault! Hand over the storage ring right now!"
Yan Shuo sighed, lowering his teacup.
"You Righteous Alliance disciples really only have one script, don't you?" Yan Shuo muttered, resting his chin on his knuckles. "It's always 'hand over the ring' or 'cripple your dantian.' Can't you come up with something original? Like asking nicely?"
"Kill him!" the other Saber disciple shouted. "He's only at the Early Stage! The traps must have weakened him! If we kill him here, the Saintess will never know!"
The two Saber disciples flared their Qi, their blades glowing with a deadly, freezing light. They completely ignored their injuries, driven entirely by the overwhelming greed of securing a supreme inheritance. They lunged at the throne simultaneously.
The Array genius stayed back, quickly drawing a trapping array in the air to prevent Yan Shuo from escaping.
Yan Shuo didn't stand up. He didn't draw a weapon. He didn't even put his teacup down.
He just looked at them with the tired, exhausted expression of a homeowner dealing with a terrible rat infestation.
"You know," Yan Shuo said, his voice echoing smoothly through the massive vault. "When I built this place, I specifically designed it to keep people like you out."
The disciples didn't even register his words. They were already mid-air, their sabers swinging down toward his neck.
Yan Shuo calmly raised his left hand and snapped his fingers.
SNAP.
The sound echoed through the room like a thunderclap.
The ancient sealing runes on the Heavenly Iron doors suddenly flared to life. The glowing lines on the floor of the vault, which the disciples had completely ignored, erupted with a blinding, suffocating crimson light.
It wasn't an attack. It was the vault's primary security measure: The Gravity Suppression Array.
BOOM!
The gravity inside the room instantly multiplied by a hundred times.
The two Saber disciples were yanked out of the air as if a mountain had been dropped directly onto their spines. They smashed face-first into the solid stone floor with a sickening crunch. The heavy, localized gravity pinned them completely flat, crushing the air from their lungs and pressing their faces so hard against the tiles that their noses broke.
"GACK!"
The Array genius, who was standing further back, didn't fare any better. The array slammed him to his knees, pinning his hands to the floor. The complex, glowing array he was trying to draw instantly shattered under the pressure.
Yan Shuo, sitting comfortably on his demonic throne, didn't feel a thing. The array was tied to his soul. It completely bypassed him, allowing him to sit in perfect, undisturbed peace.
He took another slow sip of his tea.
"My wife is waiting outside," Yan Shuo said conversationally, looking down at the three "geniuses" groveling on his floor. "And she gets very cranky when I'm late for lunch."
"W-What is this?!" the Array genius choked out, blood leaking from his nose as he struggled against the invisible, crushing weight. "This array... it requires a token! A bloodline! How are you controlling it?!"
He was a genius of the Heavenly Array Sect. He knew exactly what this meant. You couldn't just hijack a central vault's security system. You either had to spend a month hacking it, or... or you had to be the master of the ruin.
But that was impossible. The master of this ruin was a legendary, terrifying Demon Lord who died a century ago!
"How am I controlling it?" Yan Shuo chuckled, a deep, dark amusement dancing in his eyes.
He stood up from the throne, his pristine white robes untouched by the dust or the blood. He walked slowly down the steps of the dais, his boots clicking loudly against the stone.
He stopped right in front of the Array genius, crouching down so they were eye to eye.
"Let's just say I have a very good relationship with the architect," Yan Shuo smiled, tapping the side of the boy's cheek with his paper fan.
The Array genius stared into Yan Shuo's eyes. He didn't see the gaze of a pampered, fifteen-year-old soft-rice eater. He saw an ancient, bottomless abyss. He saw a predator that viewed him as nothing more than an annoying insect.
A cold, absolute terror finally pierced through the boy's arrogance.
"P-Please," the Array genius whimpered, genuine tears welling up in his eyes. "Lord Yan... please spare us. We were blind. We won't say a word. Take everything!"
Yan Shuo stood back up, sighing.
"I already took everything," Yan Shuo pointed out reasonably. He looked at the two Saber disciples, who had already passed out from the sheer pain of the gravity pressure.
He didn't want to kill them. Leaving a pile of bodies in his old vault felt disrespectful to the decor. Besides, a smarter, more pragmatic idea had already crossed his mind.
"I'll make you a deal," Yan Shuo said, looking down at the terrified Array genius. "I will turn off the array. You will pick up your unconscious friends, and you will walk out of here. When you reach the surface, you are going to tell your elders that the ruin was completely empty."
The Array genius nodded frantically, his face scraping against the floor. "Yes! Empty! Completely looted centuries ago! I swear it on my Dao heart!"
"Good," Yan Shuo smiled warmly. "And if anyone asks how I survived..."
Yan Shuo paused, tapping the folded paper fan against his chin.
"...Tell them I found a very comfortable corner to hide in, and I cried for my wife the entire time."
The Array genius blinked, utterly confused by the lie, but he didn't dare question it. "Yes! You cried! Like a baby! I swear!"
Yan Shuo snapped his fingers again.
The heavy, crushing gravity instantly vanished.
The Array genius gasped for air, scrambling to his feet. He didn't hesitate. He grabbed the collars of the two unconscious Saber disciples and began dragging them toward the exit as fast as his trembling legs could carry him, terrified the boy would change his mind.
Yan Shuo watched them go, completely satisfied.
He turned around, gave his old demonic throne one last pat for old times' sake, and started walking toward the exit himself.
His pockets were full. His enemies were dealt with. And most importantly, he had a very beautiful, very dangerous wife waiting for him outside with lunch.
It was turning out to be a fantastic vacation.