Chapter 135: Is the Celestial Emperor Missing?

Sang Sang’s words were half-true and half-false. She hadn't lied about the child; while she intended to scheme against the Saintess of the Hundred Flowers, she had no desire to vent her anger on an unborn baby. It was the Saintess herself who frequently probed the fetus’s spiritual light, and the repeated intrusions were what truly impacted the child. For this reason, Sang Sang had even instructed Xiao Jin to track the monitoring data. Judging by the Saintess’s behavior, although she dared not act directly, she would certainly be delighted if the child were to perish due to an "accident."

Senna rose, his brain whirring at a speed only slightly inferior to Xiao Jin’s. He mapped out the sequence of events and calculated the gains and losses before setting aside his serious demeanor to recover his usual gentle and elegant facade.

"I will go to see His Highness the Saint Son. If we handle this matter well, we might kill two birds with one stone. At the very least, we can make Saint Son Jiankong owe you a favor, provided that the problem of soul anchoring can be perfectly resolved. We also need to rethink our strategy regarding White Star... As for the *Book Mountain and Sea of Learning*, keep it safe. It would be best to purge the laws contained within; you might need it in the future—or perhaps not."

Sang Sang possessed excellent mental fortitude. After Senna left, she calmed down from her anger and analyzed the health-preservation laws derived from the Saintess of the Hundred Flowers’ essence. She dismantled the entire Law Star into several parts, turning them into nutrients for her laws of health, consumption, and creation. She didn't even let the estrus pheromones go to waste.

Although she hadn't obtained the laws of gestation, the enhancement of her health-preservation laws was still helpful for her Gestation Diagram.

The only remaining fragment concerned soul anchoring. Sang Sang gave up on integrating it into her Creation Law Star, opting instead to deeply study the principle of how anchoring communicates with the Source.

In the Creation Laws, when the soul is guided into a body for infant incarnation or resurrection after death, its connection to the Source Sea is severed, allowing the soul to fuse with the body. However, the soul anchoring utilized by the Saintess of the Hundred Flowers did not break that connection to the Source. Despite various limitations, it did allow for constant communication with the Source.

If she could crack this, connecting her own soul to the Source Sea to achieve perpetual communication, she would never have to worry about the limitations of her cultivation realm, no matter how many laws she mastered.

Although Xiao Jin was too busy to help Sang Sang with large-scale deductions, the *Pavilion of All Stars* contained a vast array of soul-related divine arts and secret techniques that Divine Citizens could study freely. He downloaded them all and dumped them onto Sang Sang, which proved immensely helpful to her research.

While she couldn't figure out how to graft the anchoring onto her own soul, she did find a way to sever the anchor and stabilize the soul’s fusion. In fact, the legacy of the Primordial Demon Master contained several obscure laws capable of severing Source anchors. Even the soul anchoring within the Creation Laws could be reversed to achieve this, provided one used a substitute for the sacrifice.

Taking the Saintess of the Hundred Flowers as an example, if she were willing to sacrifice a portion of her own divine soul for the child, replacing the child’s soul in returning to the Source, the child could be born safely. Of course, her techniques were certainly not as professional as those of the Soul Clan, and Saint Son Jiankong might not be impressed.

Sang Sang’s research fell into a dead loop: the Source, the soul, and the physical body could not exist on the same plane. With the soul in the middle, the other two could not coexist.

Naturally, it wasn't without gains. In one attempt, Sang Sang sensed the existence of the Source Sea, though it was too distant and ethereal to touch the laws within. If the Source Sea accessed during a breakthrough was like a celestial island spanning a bridge to the heavens, this sensation was like standing on the shore and seeing a mirage.

The mirage was so enchanting that Sang Sang even considered sacrificing her physical body to specialize in the soul. However, she ultimately abandoned the idea. Her spiritual sense told her that if she abandoned her body and immersed her soul in the Source Sea, while it would rapidly increase her strength, she would soon become nutrient matter for the laws within the Source Sea, never to leave again.

Just as Sang Sang prepared to burn her faith energy to find a direction, her heartbeat suddenly skipped a beat, and the sense of her contract with the Heavenly Emperor weakened abruptly.

Sang Sang’s expression shifted drastically.

Could that pervert, the Heavenly Emperor, have hit a snag and fallen into a trap?!

She forced herself to stay calm and used their soul connection to sense his condition, discovering that the sensation had weakened because the Heavenly Emperor was no longer in this time period, but was instead pointing toward the future.

After waiting for a long time, Sang Sang realized the Heavenly Emperor had not returned to the present timeline. Her mind was restless, and she could no longer continue her research on soul anchoring and the Source Sea, so she simply opened her eyes.

"Xiao Jin, where is the Heavenly Emperor? Do you have his exact location?"

"The Heavenly Emperor is currently on a mission in the Sunflower Starfield cluster," Xiao Jin’s voice came from the world-painting orb hanging nearby.

"Put up a 'closed-door cultivation' sign for me outside. He seems to be in trouble; let’s go find him." As soon as Sang Sang finished speaking, Xiao Jin darted out from the painting, his eyes glowing with an orange light. Sang Sang placed him on her shoulder and soothed, "Misfortune never kills the wicked; he won't die. Besides, I've hit a bottleneck in my training and can't just keep working behind closed doors. Changing my perspective and relaxing is necessary, and the best way to relax is to have a fight with him."

Sang Sang searched for a route to the Sunflower Starfield and found it was quite far, requiring several transfers through portals. She then checked the Main Brain’s long-distance point-to-point teleportation. Portals were the standard, convenient, and practical public transit system of the interstellar age, but for speed and efficiency in critical moments, the Main Brain’s long-distance teleportation was the superior choice—though it cost at least a thousand times more than a standard portal, a luxury only the extremely wealthy could afford.

The Sunflower Starfield cluster was named for the sunflower-like shape of its star clusters. It contained seven or eight civilizations of varying sizes, but most were fledgling civilizations that had only recently joined the Star Alliance. The only hegemon to have reached mid-level status, named Seven Colors, had only just ascended to Level Four two hundred years ago.

Sang Sang set her destination to the temple branch cathedral closest to where the Heavenly Emperor had gone missing. Unexpectedly, just as she stepped out of the portal, a fishing net artifact was cast toward her, attempting to trap her.

Her time-stasis disk activated its automatic defense, freezing the space. The net hung in mid-air, and the person hiding in the void was revealed. The attacker wore the robes of a temple official, possessed cultivation at the early stage of the Void level, and wore a look of terror and shock.

"Damn it!"

Sang Sang cursed internally. She opened the *Divine Tomb*, pulling both the man and the net into it. She threw the man directly into the center of the battlefield and placed the net onto the Primordial Demon’s Sacred Heart. Once the man was stunned by the collision of divine wills, she dragged him out, released her domain, and used reverse-synchronization.

His strength was higher than hers but had not reached the Profound level. After five or six attempts at reverse-synchronization, she achieved perfection. During the process, the man woke up twice, only to be knocked out by her time-stasis disk. As her consciousness entered his sea of consciousness, before she could even delve into his memory banks, she sensed his intense thoughts: "Why did someone come out when the transmission was closed one-way long ago?" and "Must not let the temple people meet up with them!"

Sang Sang wanted to dig deeper into the details, but she sensed several experts rushing toward her location, one of whom possessed the faint aura of a Profound-level cultivator. Not daring to be careless, she threw the unconscious man back into the *Divine Tomb*—this time in a safer, peripheral area—retracted her domain, and slipped into the gaps of space and time, though she did not move far from the cathedral.

What on earth had the Heavenly Emperor and his group encountered?

The reason she hadn't set her destination directly to the site of the Heavenly Emperor’s disappearance was to avoid being teleported straight into an enemy encirclement. She hadn't expected that even the cathedral would have been captured by the enemy, and that the opponents would be posing as temple staff!