Chapter 720 - Into the Underworld, Stepping into the Second Rank - Part 2

And just like that, another year passed, another cycle of spring and autumn.

The palace within the Cloud Capital was ablaze with celebration. Even the bitter chill of winter seemed to ease.

The old matriarch, now 80 years old, sat at the head of the banquet. Her hair was snow-white, her features lined with time, but one could still glimpse the elegance that once turned heads across the empire. She smiled gently, watching her descendants fill the hall with laughter and light.

Far away, deep in the mountains, the man in the small wooden hut sat cross-legged in silence. He wore plain linen robes, draped with rough animal pelts.

His eyes had been closed in stillness until they suddenly snapped open.

Without hesitation, he moved to the corner of the wooden hut and lifted an ancient, battered wooden door onto his shoulder. Then, under the pale glow of the moon, he began his climb. Step by step, he trudged up the muddy slope toward the mountain’s peak.

Once there, he lifted his gaze toward the sky.

To most eyes, the heavens looked no different than usual, quiet and unremarkable.

But Li Yuan frowned.

Through his sight, the Underworld, thick with ghostly Yin energy, had finally drawn close to the Ancestral Land, closer than ever before.

But unlike what he had predicted, it wasn’t beneath the earth.

It was in the sky.

That meant there was nowhere for him to place the gate, nothing to anchor it to. He would have to hold it himself, suspended in mid-air, until the connection between the two realms was complete.

And what might happen during that process...he had no way of knowing. But he was certain, it would be anything but easy.

Li Yuan stared for a long moment, then made up his mind.

He unshouldered the Gate of the Beast Path, cradled it in both hands, and flew upward, piercing the clouds to reach the exact point where the realms were closest.

There, suspended in the sky, he pushed the gate forward and began to wait.

Time passed, the moon waned, and dawn crept in.

Golden light spilled across the horizon, falling gently upon the man hanging in the air.

Suddenly, the door began to tremble.

𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

It had reached the right place and the right time.

In that instant, a terrifying force surged through the space where he floated, like a spike driving through existence itself.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Li Yuan summoned his golden body, which towered over a thousand feet.

The characters

dusk

and

darkness

flowed across his body like rivers of divine script.

But the power only grew more intense.

Then, without warning...

BOOM!

Half his body was torn apart, shredded into a mist of blood. It was as if the very land and sky had taken a bite out of him.

“Daddy, be careful!” a girl’s voice echoed from the foot of the mountain.

Li Yuan looked down and saw

Ah Ting

.

He was immediately implanted with the notion that she was his daughter. She was the child he had with Yan Yu. Born with a strange illness that kept her forever trapped in a child’s body, she had always followed him, always stayed close.

At the sight of her, something in Li Yuan’s expression softened.

But his resolve only deepened.

What kind of father can show weakness in front of his daughter?

Life Star, return!

With a single thought, Li Yuan summoned his true body back to him.

Immediately, twin forces descended upon him, one of overwhelming vitality, the other a second share of the land’s primal energy.

The half of his body that had been blown apart began to regrow. Muscles twitched, sinew stretched, and flesh knit itself back together in a flash.

Then came another surge, powerful beyond comprehension.

His body was pierced again and again, but each time it healed, stronger and faster.

Li Yuan didn’t panic. He was thrilled.

This level of destruction and regeneration, this overwhelming power, could only mean one thing.

The two realms were finally connecting.

In that fleeting moment of clarity, he summoned a lotus.

It bloomed in three colors, black, red, and gold.

Each color bore twelve petals, spinning in orbit around him.

And yet, even these divine petals began to crack, to shatter one by one under the sheer pressure.

Li Yuan clenched his mind and summoned his True Will Realm cultivation.

Two eras of power, old and new, now coexisted within him, holding firm as the collision between two worlds reached its peak.

Li Yuan endured it all in silence.

Then, from the mountaintop below, he heard the sound of arguing.

A boy and a girl, quarreling voices, sharp and stubborn.

Still channeling his power, he glanced downward and saw the source, his own daughter and son, bickering as usual.

He remembered now. Ah Ting and Xiao Xu, his children with Yan Yu. Both had been born with strange afflictions, bodies that never seemed to grow. They had followed him for years, always by his side, even as he ascended through the ranks of cultivation...

What are they arguing about this time?

he thought, exasperated.

Haven’t these two been together for ages? How are they still not getting along?

“You leave,” Ah Ting said flatly, staring at Xiao Xu with her blank, unblinking eyes.

Xiao Xu held his ground. “This isn’t just your place. If you can be here, why can’t I?”

“I got here first. You leave,” she snapped.

Her voice was sharp, but her eyes remained distant and hollow, as if they’d been staring into the void, or the stars...for far too long. Every flicker of stillness in her gaze seemed etched with the passage of time itself.

Xiao Xu was the same. His pupils were dull, lifeless.

He stood his ground, unmoved by her complaints.

Seeing him like that, Ah Ting gave up trying to push him away.

So the two of them stood there, boy and girl side by side, silent now, looking up at Li Yuan suspended in the sky above.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

A little more time passed.

The Gate of the Beast Path in Li Yuan’s hands began to fade away.

And then came a sound, low, deep, and thunderous, like the ringing of a celestial bell. It echoed across the world with a single, resounding

him

.

Li Yuan watched as the golden light of the land surged upward like a rising tide. It was as if the world had just been plugged into a divine power source.

Then, from the place where the realms had joined, black threads began to seep out, inky wisps swirling like drops of paint blooming in water, spreading and curling into the air with elegant, calligraphic strokes.

From high above, red threads slowly descended from beyond the sky.

It was the twin forces of Yin and Yang.

It’s connected! The world...it’s already beginning to change!

Li Yuan slowly backed away.

His whole body burned like fire, but he didn’t have time to worry about the pain.

Exhausted, he descended to the mountaintop, eyes fixed on the point of connection.

He stared at it.

Ah Ting and Xiao Xu, however, stared only at him.

Suddenly, Xiao Xu scampered over, tilted his head, and shouted, “Dad, your body’s starting to change!”

Ah Ting ran over too, blinking curiously at Li Yuan. Her eyes searched his form, unsure what she was even looking for.

At his son’s words, Li Yuan glanced down at himself and finally noticed it.

His Three Souls Lotus and True Will were merging.

His body twisted and shimmered like silk caught in the wind, like waves rolling across the sea. It shimmered with strange colors and scripts, shifting in unpredictable patterns.

That brutal force from the two worlds’ collision, like a hammer striking twin pieces of molten steel, wasn’t just trying to destroy him. It was forcing the two powers to blend.

Or maybe...maybe they were always meant to become one. And the impact had simply accelerated the process.

Li Yuan looked once more toward the sky.

He still didn’t know how the Underworld and the Ancestral Land were meant to connect. That wasn’t something he could control.

What he could do was see this fusion through.

The next moment, Li Yuan sat down cross-legged and began guiding his body. stabilizing the fusion and pushing forward, toward the unknown.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Winter passed. Spring came. Then autumn.

“It’s done,” Li Yuan whispered, eyes flying open, joy flashing across his face.

The world around him was vast and empty, eerily still.

Just as he had suspected, the power surging before the Great Upheaval of Heaven and Earth had belonged to the peak of third rank. And now, though this new era’s power wasn’t exactly the

heavenly seal

of the second rank, it was something that shared the same essence, just in a different form.

In truth, it had never really changed. Whether past or present, it all came down to one principle. Man linked to Heaven.

A deep and mysterious force stirred from within him.

Li Yuan was stunned to discover that his original body had never disappeared, proof that some strange shift had occurred in the world itself. And he, in turn, had undergone a terrifying evolution.

He swept his gaze across the land. Within the golden essence of the mountains and rivers, streaks of red and black had begun to emerge.

Above him, the sky had twisted into a swirling black vortex.

A whirlpool of tightly concentrated Yin energy.

Was this...the gate that connected the living world and the Underworld?

Li Yuan quickly glanced inward to check his condition.

For the first time in a long while, his status window had shifted.

「 Name: Li Yuan

Stat Points: 630,616

Realm: Second Rank (1/256,000)

...

Divine Ability 1: Eternal Youth

Divine Ability 2: Six Paths - Mortal World Transformation, Myriad Beasts Transformation, Wood Transformation, Celestial Transformation (4/4)

Divine Ability 3: Imperial System 3 (?/?) 」

I can still allocate my stat points?

An irrepressible joy surged in his chest.

Without a second thought, Li Yuan dumped all 255,999 points into the second rank.

The moment he did, he felt an overwhelming resonance with the world. The power of the mountains and rivers surged toward him, an unfamiliar, mystical force enveloping his entire body.

A powerful connection bloomed between him and the Ancestral Land.

But something felt off, there was resistance. It didn’t flow as smoothly as before.

It was as if the

levelling

force inside him was locked in a tug-of-war with the power of the mountains and rivers. Yet somehow, in that contest of strength, he was slowly drawing all that power into himself.

Then, just as the last thread of energy snapped into place, his third ability shifted.

【Ability 3: Imperial System 3 (1/1)】

It was complete.

And at that exact moment, something clicked in his mind, like a puzzle finally solved.

Imperial System 1 had been the revival of the land’s spiritual veins. Polaris hadn’t used the Dragon Vein to create the Qi of the Mountains and Rivers. That power already existed. The Dragon Vein was merely a trigger, an ignition point that awakened the power of the land.

Imperial System 2 had come when Polaris, Valley Obscura, Northern Dipper, and Southern Dipper all perished together. In that cataclysm, the Ancestral Land devoured the essence of four mighty starkin and grew stronger.

And now Imperial System 3, after the Great Upheaval of Heaven and Earth, this too marked a strengthening of the Ancestral Land, brought about by the burial of so many titans from the old era.

Then, in the blink of an eye, another memory surfaced.

Li Yuan recalled the reincarnation passage and the Soul Furnace hidden within it, filled with fragments of countless mighty cultivators, stitched together in secret.

A question rose naturally in his mind.

If all those powerful beings had died, then where had their power gone?

Where did it go?

The question struck him suddenly, but the answer came just as swiftly.

Heaven gave birth to all things to nourish man. And humans, in turn, repaid Heaven with their lives.

It was like a gardener planting seeds in fertile soil. The seeds would eventually sprout and blossom into radiant flowers. And when those flowers withered, they returned to the earth, enriching it even more.

If every person in the world were like a dragon, then the world itself would rise with them. Why? Because the very strength born from this world...ultimately returned to strengthen it once more.

Li Yuan’s eyes widened sharply.

He glanced at his own stats.

What once had read as 96k~4.5mil and 180k~1.8mil had now merged to become 2.7mil~41mil.”

The sudden leap in numbers filled him with a kind of wild elation, but it also made one thing terrifyingly clear.

Things he had never fully seen before were now coming into focus.

Yin and Yang becoming one.

A world utterly transformed.

Humans scheming against Heaven, trying to destroy it, to break free of this world.

But Heaven, too...was calculating.

Li Yuan rose to his feet, staring into the drifting clouds. Before his eyes, the river of history rolled on, vast and relentless.

The Yu Dynasty, the Age of the Ancient Gods. When spiritual energy vanished without warning, it was like tearing away the ladders the gods and immortals had used to reach the heavens. One by one, they fell, shattered, broken.

Then came the Xia, Shang, and Zhou.

Starkin descended from above. Emperors warred. The river of time surged on, sweeping away hero after hero in wave after wave.

And then a cataclysm struck.

A Great Upheaval of Heaven and Earth dragged down all the power gathered by those three dynasties, all those mighty starkin who had once fallen from the sky, into the abyss.

Humans, bound by their limitations, could only see a few centuries, maybe a millennium forward or back.

Li Yuan had barely managed to glimpse ten thousand years...perhaps a hundred thousand.

But even that, measured against the true scale of time and space, was just a breath, a blink.

His thoughts shifted again, returning to the Yu Dynasty.

And suddenly, a question emerged, one he had never asked before:

The Qi of the Tang Dynasty, the very reason people could now cultivate

true insight

, came about only after the latest great upheaval of the world.

So then...what had awakened the

heavenly seal

during the Yu Dynasty?

What event had torn the void apart, shattered the Outer Region, set flame gods raining from the skies, and opened up unimaginable ghost domains?

What had caused

that

great fracture?

Thoughts rushed through his mind in torrents.

There was no time to test his new powers. No time to ponder further.

He turned and rushed down the mountain.

When he reached the base, he came across a shattered boundary marker.

It looked like it once bore the name of this mountain, but now it was broken, the characters too worn and fragmented to read.

Li Yuan lifted his head. In the far distance, perched atop a towering ridge, loomed the Underworld.

He raised his hand, summoned a massive stone with a pull of his domain force, and slammed it down with a thunderous crash.

Dust flew in all directions as he stepped forward, lifted a finger, and began to carve.

Bold, sweeping strokes. Iron hooks and silver curves.

Two words etched deep into the stone

Mount Tai