167: Ice Emperor is my old friend!

Lu Chen let out a chuckle that sounded like metal rubbing together, his humanoid phantom flickering in and out of sight amidst the wind and snow.

As he completely shed his skeleton form to transform into a black-haired youth, the undead elements beneath the ice layer suddenly boiled like ink, and hundreds of shipwreck skeletons lit up with faint green light in the deep sea.

Shelley's ice crystal earring suddenly shattered, but before the fragments could hit the ground, the Undead Monarch reached out and caught them, piecing them back together into the shape of a frost flower.

"Then let the Arctic bear witness to our journey!"

Lu Chen's phantom and true form appeared on both sides of the glacier simultaneously. As the Undead sky screen tore through the polar night, the entire ice field rang with a crisp echo like colliding Dragon bones!

This was a combination of Huaxia necromancy and Arctic forbidden spells!

The people at the nearby base gazed at the strange phenomenon in the distance, all of them filled with admiration.

What immense power this was.

After diving, Lu Chen successfully opened the Secret Realm here.

Sure enough, the source of contamination was deep within the glacier, inside this Secret Realm.

The magic barrier from Lu Chen and Shelley allowed them to be in the deep sea as if they were on land.

To reach this level, one must have at least Tier 8 power.

Under the scouring of their dual magic, runes appeared in the ice crevice at the entrance of the Secret Realm. The moment the two leaped into the abyss, the ice bridge Shelley swung from her staff caught the falling ten-thousand-year mysterious ice.

Lu Chen noticed that she deliberately avoided the left ice wall—there, a female ice sculpture with a face 70% similar to Shelley's was frozen, and the gem embedded in its forehead was oozing black mist.

"What is this?"

"My mother's statue."

"As expected of mother and daughter, both so beautiful."

"Watch out ahead, Little Skeleton."

"It seems the miasma of the Heavenly Dao is still eroding the core here—the Ice Soul Bead." Lu Chen's true form suddenly changed, transforming into a Bone Dragon. Wherever the Bone Dragon's tail vertebrae swept, taotie patterns recorded in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" appeared, emitting the sound of metal clashing against stone as they devoured the black mist.

Shelley took the opportunity to insert her staff into the ice bridge connecting to the depths of the Secret Realm. The chanting of the spell triggered a resonance in the glacier, and the entire ice crevice instantly lit up like daylight, revealing the churning dark blue seawater below.

In the vortex formed by deep-sea pressure, the two saw a Frozen Throne hovering a thousand meters below.

The twelve Frost Guards had just awakened, but Shelley wore an expression of disbelief—the emblems on the guards' armor were clearly the insignia of the Royal Guards who had gone missing during the coup a thousand years ago.

"It seems the traitors from a thousand years ago have all become Puppets of the Secret Realm," Shelley said softly, looking at these Frost Guards.

Lu Chen's bone wings swept down a rain of ice cones. When his Undead Domain expanded, countless glowing jellyfish-like Soul fragments floated up in the deep sea.

Shelley's ice magic suddenly became violent. The Tier 8 forbidden spell "Eternal Freeze Prism" sealed half of the guards into an iceberg, but it suddenly stalled when it touched the faceplate of a certain guard—beneath it was a Great Master of swordsmanship from the Arctic Kingdom a thousand years ago.

A Magic Swordsman at the level of a Grand Magister.

Lu Chen's Soul Fire suddenly surged, and the Huaxia secret technique "Corpse Driving Order" forcibly controlled the remaining guards to defect.

When Shelley's ice blade pierced the heart of the last guard, the two heard the roar of gears turning from the seabed. A thousand-meter-tall mechanical giant whale rose from the Frozen Throne, with an Ice Soul Bead polluted by the Undead pulsing in its eye socket.

"Back off!" Lu Chen's true form fully appeared, and the pressure of the Undead Monarch shattered three hundred meters of the ice layer.

The ancient bronze sword he summoned by tearing through space had inscriptions on its hilt that actually resonated with Shelley's staff.

The female mage suddenly realized something and injected all her magic power into the ice crystal totem behind Lu Chen, and the aurora instantly turned into a solid entity, wrapping around the sword blade.

The mysterious cold Qi spewed out by the mechanical giant whale was dyed purple-black by the Undead fire. Lu Chen stepped on the footwork evolved from the "Luo Shu" and thrust out nine sword strikes, while Shelley simultaneously used ice crystals to draw the Polaris formation in the deep sea.

The moment the Ice Soul Bead detached from the giant whale's eye socket, the entire Secret Realm began to collapse. While falling, the two saw an ancient battlefield sealed within the ice layer—countless undead and Frost Dragons were awakening!

Lu Chen wrapped his arm around Shelley's slender waist.

Looking deeper, he said:

"Next level!"

"Mm."

Second level.

This was clearly an ice crystal corridor, and the world had completely changed.

Looking at the dangers here, Lu Chen knew it was another life-and-death gamble.

The Heavenly Dao is also a clever little rascal.

Hiding deep in the polar region isn't enough.

It's even inside the Secret Realm within someone else's Secret Realm.

It really is careful and cautious.

The Heavens planning to destroy the world are plotted in this same way.

How lucky people are! To encounter such a Heaven.

The ice crystal labyrinth the two fell into refracted the aurora, with tens of thousands of hexagonal ice mirrors forming a corridor, each mirror reflecting a Shelley from a different time and space.

The Undead Monarch Lu Chen's pupils contracted; he saw a young girl in one of the mirrors holding a blood-stained crown—that was Shelley as a young girl in the past.

"The illusion is reading our memories." Lu Chen's bone claws crushed the ice mirror, but he saw the fragments turn into ice cones attacking Shelley's back.

"Don't use magic to counterattack!" Lu Chen pulled the princess through the mirror surface, and in the interlayer between reality and illusion, the afterimage of an Ice Soul Bead floated.

Shelley suddenly clutched her chest, her mother's voice before she passed away seemingly calling out from the depths of her Soul:

"The Eye of the Polar Abyss hides the original sin of the Arctic Kingdom... Why do you want to oppose the Supreme Heavenly Dao, my daughter?"

Shelley panted as she shared what her "mother" had said with Lu Chen.

A phantom image appeared on the ice wall ahead, with hundreds of ice coffins sinking to the seabed in the picture, each coffin overflowing with black mist—that was the source of the heavenly dao contamination polluting the Ice Soul Bead.

Lu Chen's Soul Fire suddenly split into a Bagua Formation Diagram!

"It looks like your ancestors used living people to suppress the contamination here? This contamination appeared long ago, and these living people were them—themselves!"

Lu Chen told Shelley this shocking fact.

He was also shocked in his heart.

"My mother had also secretly told me the truth..." Shelley's ice crystal staff began to frost over, "To obtain safety for the polar region, the first king sacrificed himself and the Elders at that time."

The sound of chains breaking came from the deep sea, and the vengeful spirits that had been sealed for three hundred years broke through the ice coffins.

Lu Chen summoned his bronze sword and cut his palm, using the "book of easy change from lian shan" taught to him by Sun Feifei to calculate the direction of the gate of life, "Follow my footsteps closely; one wrong step and you will be forever trapped in these twisted magic rifts."

In the deep-sea vortex, it felt as if he was cooperating with the Ice Emperor from one hundred thousand years ago.

The ancient covenant appeared once again.

The Ice Emperor led the Arctic clan to pledge allegiance to the Huaxia Undead Monarch!

After passing through the ice crystal labyrinth, the ruins of a Dragon palace appeared in the deep-sea area where the pressure suddenly increased.

Shelley's royal emblem heated up slightly, guiding them to find a broken stele, on which was engraved in oracle bone script: "The East Sea Dragon Clan and the Arctic Kingdom covenant here."

This was from the era of gods and demons one hundred thousand years ago.

When Lu Chen touched the inscription, the Soul of the Bixi beast sealed at the base of the stele awakened, and the true purpose of the Ice Soul Bead appeared on its back shell—it was originally the treasure of this place for suppressing the sea, and it had also been transformed into a symbol of the Northern Kingdom's imperial power.

"No wonder the Ice Soul Bead would attract the heavenly dao contamination." Shelley inserted her staff between the eyes of the Bixi, "Mother said that the Eye of the Polar Abyss is also a crack connecting the firmament and the Nine Netherworlds, and the Ice Soul Bead is the key."