Chapter 749 - Ancient Halls Draw Near, Mountain Sea Region, the Dao Fruit May Bloom on the Far Shore - Part 1

Beside the Yellow Springs Road, the crimson flowers of rebirth bloomed in fierce, radiant clusters.

Their petals swayed with ghostly allure, trailing off toward the edge of the sky.

A line of spirits stretched endlessly forward, faces blank, eyes vacant, heads bowed in silent procession. Compared to before, their numbers had swelled immeasurably.

Years had passed. Now, the Underworld had fully enshrouded the Ancestral Land. And from that land, no spirit would ever again journey to the old realm of reincarnation. They all ended up here.

And so, the place was overwhelmed, bursting at the seams.

Each spirit would eventually arrive at the Karma Hall. There, their past lives would be judged, their deeds laid bare. The virtuous would be labeled

good

and sent to be reborn in the Human Path. The wicked, on the other hand, would be labeled as

bad

and descend into the Beast or Wood Path. It was the simplest and the only system of justice in the Underworld.

The Karma Hall had changed drastically since Li Yuan first saw it centuries ago. It had expanded hundreds of times over, and the giant mirror that once hung high above now had hundreds of copies, each reflecting a different fate.

At this moment, Ji Hu stood before one of these mirrors, watching countless memories unfold from the lives of the dead. A gray mist coiled around him, lending an eerie dignity to his hideous face. All around him, ghosts stirred restlessly.

If someone had committed evil in life, it would activate a grudge, prompting the surrounding ghosts to seize them for punishment. In that moment of torment, the evil spirit would awaken briefly, just long enough to fully feel the agony of their judgment.

Ji Hu’s role was to discern whether a spirit truly deserved such punishment. If he judged them not evil, he would stop the ghosts from dragging them away.

It was exhausting work.

Any of the ghosts here, if unleashed upon the mortal world, would be considered terrifying taboo level beings. They weren’t quite at peak second rank, but they far surpassed third rank beings. Each could easily mete out punishment to multiple spirits at once.

But Ji Hu was just an ordinary ghost. If he had to examine each case one by one, the process would be agonizingly slow, and the hundreds of mirrors would be underused.

Thankfully, the judge system was now fully established. Nearly a thousand judges stood watch before the Karma Hall.

Each of these judges had earned great merit during their time among the living. Chosen by the Primordial Mother herself, they had been brought to the Underworld to serve. Among them was Li Dao, the son of Li Yuan, who had died some time ago.

For beings like Ji Hu, whose merits were immense, Yan Yu was generous. She granted him a cultivation technique of her own creation, the

Earth Tome.

As the avatar of the Underworld and devourer of the stars themselves, Yan Yu had crafted this technique specifically for ghosts. It belonged to the class of Earth Soul cultivation techniques, but was far more profound than most.

Li Yuan stood silently at the mirror platform, watching fragments of strangers’ lives unfold. A strange weariness settled over him.

Life, in its most beautiful form, was about uncertainty. It was the nervous anticipation of tomorrow, the thrill of not knowing what was coming. It was how you were moved by your own laughter and tears, how you longed for a love that lasted a lifetime, never parting and growing old together.

But when those precious moments were repeated too often, when all the unknown tomorrows became a catalog of predictable outcomes, then life began to lose its flavor. It becomes dull, mechanical, and meaningless.

Li Yuan withdrew his gaze and turned to return once more to the mortal world.

Over the past century, he hadn’t wasted his time.

As he retraced the path of his old cultivation, a handful of new second rank skills had quietly begun to take shape within him. Now, it was time to hone them and to push them all the way to perfection.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

High atop the Everpeak, waves of terrifying energy surged skyward.

The Heavens responded in kind.

The skies turned a strange shade of violet, clouds and mists tinted purple, thunder boiling overhead like molten iron, and a tide of Yin energy churned through the air. For a time, all of the Everpeak basked in an explosion of spiritual energy.

The disciples on the mountain’s front side were stunned and delighted. They turned their eyes toward the rear peaks, chattering excitedly about how incredible their

Old Patriarch

must be. Before long, their masters snapped at them to stop gossiping and return to their training.

That overwhelming aura lasted for nearly half a month before Li Yuan finally finished his breakthrough.

Of course, the pressure wasn’t something he released on purpose. In fact, he had tried to suppress it with all his might. But even so, a mere fraction, just a sliver of his power, was enough to shake the heavens and overwhelm any ordinary cultivator. To them, that sliver felt like a dragon soaring through the sky, or an ocean crashing down from above.

As for the spiritual energy, it had simply leaked out from his body during the breakthrough, a side effect of the dense and volatile balance of Yin and Yang within him.

But this wasn’t something Li Yuan had intended.

Sure, he could use his strength to empower all the disciples on the mountain, helping them grow far faster than they otherwise would. But Yan Yu had told him that he should remain outside the world. When a sage stepped down from the Heavens to help a chosen few, it inevitably meant abandoning the many, and such favoritism always led to disaster.

Even so, after this latest advance, Li Yuan’s cultivation had taken yet another solid step forward.

If there were degrees within the second rank’s peak, he now stood at the very top.

Not long after, he stepped out of the mountain gates and summoned the sect master and elders. He distributed a few parting gifts, and gave special attention to one in particular, Lu Bu’s master. Li Yuan pulled him aside, offered some pointed guidance, and helped him solve several stubborn cultivation bottlenecks. Only then did he leave.

And once he left, his gaze shifted toward the Ancestral Land.

Across the vast expanse of the continent, the places where people lived were still safe. But at the edges, those desolate borderlands, strange, nightmarish beasts had begun to appear.

Creatures like the nine-headed bird, two-headed snake, fish-bodied monstrosities with bird wings, one-legged oxen, and tigers with human faces and nine tails roamed these wild places in increasing numbers.

Some even looked like people, but were far from it. One had a gaping hole through its chest. Another had a single head and three bodies. The more grotesque, the more plentiful.

Fortunately, these horrors seemed to be bound by some unknown constraint. They didn’t venture into human lands, instead lurking in the deep mountains, along the Eastern Sea, and other remote corners of the world.

And they couldn’t reproduce. Most were unique, one of a kind, genderless, solitary, and unnatural.

But the Tang Dynasty was never short on adventurers and wanderers, those who loved to travel the mountains and explore the world.

Every now and then, one of them would get

lucky

enough to stumble upon one of these monsters in the middle of nowhere.

The outcome was always the same.

The monster would try to eat them.

Anyone who had the misfortune of stumbling across one of those creatures was almost guaranteed to end up being hunted.

And yet, somehow, they usually managed to escape.

Those who did survive would later record their harrowing encounters in detail, and many credited their miraculous escapes to the intervention of mountain gods or sea gods.

As more stories were told and retold, certain details began to surface again and again, a figure in gray robes, a silver bell hanging from a rough staff, the voice of a scolding woman.

Gradually, people began to piece together a pattern. Instead of being frightened off, more and more thrill-seekers and explorers were drawn in by these reports. The danger only fueled their desire to venture into the mysterious wilds of the mountains and seas.

All of it culminated into the following conversation.

“You’ve really had it rough, haven’t you, Yan Yu?” Li Yuan, a gourd hanging from his waist, was gently massaging the shoulders of a young girl in gray robes.

Nearby, a worm-eaten staff was stuck into the damp earth, its top adorned with a small silver bell that jingled faintly in the breeze.

The girl was barefoot. Her hood had slipped back, revealing a lovely face, young, delicate, and quietly proud.

This was none other than a reincarnated sliver of Yan Yu’s soul, born anew nearly a hundred years ago.

Back then, even the fragmentary soul of the Northern Dipper, Ying Zhuoyao, could cling to life by devouring the lifespan of others. It was hardly surprising that Yan Yu had endured. Though a soul fragment like hers would eventually dissipate with time, to the average cultivator, she was already something close to immortal.

“Left side.” The gray-robed girl grumbled under her breath.

Li Yuan shifted his hand to the left and resumed kneading gently.