Chapter 738 - Ji Hu’s Vow, Primordial Earth Mother, Reaching for the Stars - Part 1

At the Mountain of Yearning, a spirit with a twisted, ugly face stood before a massive, tomb-like boulder, gazing into the silent, surging expanse of the Yellow Springs beyond.

No one knew how long he had been standing there.

Like the other spirits around him, perhaps he once had a life worth remembering. But now, the oppressive gloom of the Underworld had crushed all remnants of who he used to be, leaving behind little more than a hollow shell.

Just then, a flying palanquin tore through the air and descended in the distance.

Suspended above it were the strange beasts that pulled it, a boar and a serpent.

A corner of the palanquin’s curtain lifted, revealing a breathtakingly beautiful woman, her expression cold and remote, gazing out with an air of detached curiosity.

Then the front curtain swept open, and a man who looked like a young teenager leapt out, landing among the crowd of spirits.

The woman followed soon after, descending lightly beside him. Though her presence was commanding, she was quite a bit shorter than the man, giving her an unexpectedly delicate appearance.

“That person you mentioned, I vaguely remember him,” Yan Yu said. “When we judged him, he triggered a bunch of killing rules tied to various ghosts. But I thought he was a good emperor. So I let him stay on the Mountain of Yearning for the time being.”

Li Yuan swept his eyes across the landscape. All he saw was a thick, gray fog, and countless pale, listless faces drifting within it.

Finding Ji Hu among all these spirits wouldn’t be easy.

“I’ll just go one by one,” he muttered.

With that, he took off, cutting through the fog at speed.

He had decided to use the dumbest method, brute-force searching.

But he hadn’t gone far when Yan Yu suddenly called out urgently, “New spirits just arrived at the Karma Hall. I need to go supervise!”

“Mhm.” Li Yuan nodded.

In a flash, the flying palanquin pivoted and vanished into the misty sky.

Watching it disappear, Li Yuan sighed inwardly.

My poor wife. Her job is brutal.

Yan Yu practically had to live inside the Karma Hall, working nonstop every second of every day and with zero room for error. Back in his old world, this would’ve made her the poster child for the

ultimate employee

.

Then again, he thought, calling it a job was misleading. She wasn’t some overworked wage slave. She was the embodiment of the Underworld. She was the sovereign of an entire realm.

Li Yuan imagined what kind of responsibilities that position should entail, then compared it to what he’d just seen. And he sighed again.

In stories, the so-called rulers of realms always seemed to spend their time posing dramatically and doing absolutely nothing, just like those idle emperors in palace dramas.

Were emperors busy in real life? Of course they were.

But in those palace dramas, emperors had no real duties. Their only job was to fall in love with concubines.

The sovereigns of realms were no different.

In stories, they were all leisure and flair, posturing like gods.

But in reality, they were just emperors on a much larger scale.

A real emperor at least got to finish work and sleep.

This

Yama

had to stay submerged in the Karma Hall, doling out judgment non-stop. No rest. No end.

Yan Yu had become one with an entire realm, which meant there wasn’t much human left in her anymore. It was only because Li Yuan had come along, pestering her endlessly, that she’d slowly regained some trace of humanity.

If not for him, even after the Underworld reconnected with the mortal world, Yan Yu probably wouldn’t have even

considered

finding more judges to share the burden. She’d have kept herself locked away in the Karma Hall, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, without rest. Eventually, she might’ve even developed the ability to split herself into multiple clones, literally becoming a one-woman bureaucracy.

Li Yuan kept searching.

He hadn’t found Ji Hu yet, but he’d run into a few familiar faces along the way.

Among them were the old members of the Court of Judges, including the Black and White Impermanence, Zhong Kui, and Long Gumeng.

After the Grand Union of Yin and Yang, these people had vanished. Now it was clear. They had died on the road while searching for the lost Ghost Prison.

Li Yuan still remembered them, so he brought them all out.

After quite a bit more searching, he finally found Ji Hu, his spirit flickering like a tiny spark within a sea of the lost, tucked behind a massive black rock.

The face of that

ugly child

came into view.

In that moment, Li Yuan’s mind was pulled years into the past.

The Human Emperor had once swung a sword that cleaved straight into the Underworld. That single act, though it shattered the path for martial cultivators and crushed his own hope for the future, had dragged a world teetering on the edge of collapse back into order. It gave the oppressed masses a second chance, returning fertile lands to barren soil and letting people once again grow crops and feed their families.

Chaos still followed, of course. The world didn’t magically become peaceful. But at least the chaos was human-made, wars, famine, and political strife, not the kind where farmland turned to sand and no one could grow rice anymore.

Because of that, the population of the Ancestral Lands had started to grow again.

Snapping back to the present, Li Yuan brought Ji Hu and the others to a temporary waiting spot.

Before long, Yan Yu’s flying palanquin appeared again.

It was empty this time. The boar and serpent pulling it had come just to pick them up.

Li Yuan waved Ji Hu and the four others onto the palanquin. A moment later, they soared across the Yellow Springs and arrived at the Karma Hall.

“Yan Yu, I brought them,” Li Yuan called out.

Far in the distance, the azure robed

Yama

paused, just for a breath. She didn’t come over right away. Instead, she calmly wrapped up the judgment she was handling, then slowed the intake of incoming spirits before making her way over to them.

“Hurry up. I’ve got more work to do,” Yan Yu urged.

Li Yuan gestured toward the group. “Take a look at these five. See if any of them are fit to be judges.”

Yan Yu gave them a once-over.

Li Yuan, remembering that she’d lost many of her memories, pointed at Zhong Kui, Long Gumeng, and the Black and White Impermanence.

“These four were once part of your Court of Judges. They worked directly under you. The fact that they ended up on the Mountain of Yearning means they were deemed virtuous souls. Things are a mess right now, and you can’t possibly handle everything on your own. Let them help.”

Yan Yu replied plainly, “Actually, I

can

handle it.”

A simple phrase, and it left Li Yuan completely speechless.

“You seriously think the Karma Hall is all there is? There’s a mountain of other things that need your attention,” he said, gently but firmly.

After a long moment of silence, Yan Yu finally nodded.

Then, without another word, she led the five of them back into the Karma Hall.

She carefully reviewed the threads of their past lives.

Then, leading the five of them beyond the hall to the Mirror of Rebirth, she gave them one final inspection. After confirming nothing was amiss, she raised a slender finger and gently tapped the center of each of their foreheads.

With that single touch, they began to awaken.

Their clouded, unfocused eyes slowly regained clarity. Memories of their lives, their time in the mortal world and their aimless wandering in the Underworld, began to stir and rise to the surface.

The Black and White Impermanence were the first to come to. Then Long Gumeng, then Zhong Kui. As they fully regained themselves and saw Yan Yu before them, they immediately dropped to their knees, bowing deeply and saying in unison, “Greetings,

Lady Yama

.”

Ji Hu was the last to awaken.

His weary, timeworn eyes eventually settled on Li Yuan. In that single gaze was the weight of centuries. And then, as if something had finally eased inside him, he smiled.

He had never met his father in life. To see him now in death, was it not a dream fulfilled? And yet that longing, once fulfilled, vanished as naturally as a breath in winter.