Chapter 576: The Answer to the Celestial Tablet Mystery

As an old saying went, "a sword cultivator who didn't understand archaeology wouldn't be a good gardener."

Wandering about in the ancestral land, Wang Sheng truly did find many murals and Daoist scripture engravings in the various stone palaces. The lineage of Nuwa's descendants gradually became clearer.

Wang Sheng could only vaguely sense the general meaning of the recorded Daoist scriptures. Since his realm was still too low, it was impossible for him to completely comprehend what each sentence meant.

On the other hand, the murals' depictions were relatively complete. They were old, but few had visited the place. Moreover, the more powerful of Nuwa's descendants had created them. Hence, they remained extremely well preserved, allowing them to serve as the race's historical testimony.

This branch of Nuwa's descendants was most likely the one that Nuwa and Fuxi had exiled in legends. It was also one of the culprits that had thrown the Primal Era into utter chaos.

One of the stone palaces had over twenty murals that depicted the Primal Era and the great battle that led to the race's banishment.

They started with Nuwa floating within Chaos, which was on the boundless Immortal Saint Realm. The first land appeared beneath her, and the sky came into being above her. Afterward, the chaotic aura at the edges of space continuously diminished, slowly ushering in the Primal Era.

The murals conveyed information quite clearly, confirming Wang Sheng's earlier speculation about the opening of heaven and earth being a slow process of evolution. The original Great Dao seemed to have amassed the chaotic aura to allow the vast amounts of information and energy within it to evolve into the Immortal Saint Realm.

Afterward, the Immortal Saint Realm endlessly expanded outward. One primordial being after another fell from the Sea of Chaos into this land. Rapidly fusing with the Great Dao, they transformed and gained tremendous power.

Still, although they were powerful, they had no selfish desires. They guarded their own territories but remained relatively pure and coexisted peacefully.

However, everything continued to change.

The number of primordial beings increased nonstop, and those from the same race as Nuwa even started arriving.

One mural depicted Nuwa's kin, who had human bodies and serpentine tails, collectively departing from a mist-shrouded land. They descended beside Nuwa's tail and lowered their heads to express submission.

Wang Sheng stroked his chin. Feeling that the mural had some kind of secret, he copied it into his Heavenly Abode's palace.

As the number of primordial beings increased, conflicts became inevitable. Hierarchies between the strong and the weak began to form, and the murals started portraying scenes of slaughter.

At this time, created beings emerged. The first to appear were the plant spirits that turned into fiends and became the primordial beings' followers.

Gradually, some of the primordial beings started creating all kinds of bizarre races. Those who couldn't create a race to serve them were seen as lagging far behind.

In another mural, Wang Sheng saw a female fiend with pointed ears, a sharp chin, and an incomparably cold smile. Though mostly hidden in shadows, she began to appear beside different primordial beings and even beside Nuwa's kin, who originally had no disputes with the world.

The next several consecutive murals showed a great war suddenly erupting, with primordial deities and devils fighting chaotically. Mountains were destroyed, rivers were devastated, and living beings suffered.

Hence, Nuwa stepped forward to protect her hard-earned land. Leading some of her kin, she spent a long period of time pacifying the chaos while also sealing and exiling some of the primordial beings. Simultaneously, a branch of her race was also exiled into the Sea of Chaos for participating in the great war.

That was the origin of Nuwa's descendants in the Eastern Sky Region.

Whoever the female fiend was, she seemed to have instigated the war. She had to have been a formidable figure among her fellow fiends.

Of course, it was also possible that the fiend was a man. Since Nuwa's race practiced matriarchal worship and held women in a higher status than men, the instigator could have been artistically presented as female in the murals instead.

The murals still illustrated Nuwa as beautiful and serene. Every time she appeared, she was as large as mountains. Naturally, that was also an exaggeration. She was humanity's Holy Mother, after all.

Continuing his search in another stone palace, Wang Sheng soon found the story of how Nuwa had created humans. He also found the tale of Nuwa mending the heavens in yet another stone palace.

These two matters should have been undisputable; Nuwa had undoubtedly created the human race. However, the murals started the story with her appearing to be quite dejected. Sitting beside a river, she washed and combed her long hair. She then pinched out a small clay figure and bestowed a breath of vitality upon it.

Afterward, Nuwa immersed herself in the clay-shaping art so much that she couldn't pull herself away from it. She ended up creating many small figures and granting them abundant vitality.

However, as the number of clay figures increased, Nuwa appeared to become weaker and weaker, seemingly finding it hard to create innate Dao Bodies.

At some point, she gently scattered a patch of auspicious clouds and fell asleep beside the river. The small figures started kneeling and worshipping their creator.

The murals didn't depict the rise of humanity. They merely recorded Nuwa creating humans and the humans leaving her side in groups.

Where did she go in the end, then? Someone as powerful as her couldn't have just died randomly.

Wang Sheng searched the various stone palaces until he found the ruins of a stone palace in a corner. Within it were dismantled murals, some of which appeared to depict clues related to Nuwa.

The goddess's descendants had clearly destroyed the murals themselves.

Did she voluntarily withdraw from the world?

Wang Sheng kept searching within the collapsed palace, but all he found was half a mural of Nuwa holding her hands before her, as though praying. There was nothing behind her.

After stepping out of the palace, Wang Sheng began recalling the murals that he had seen. He then headed to a floating island that was closer to the central region. On it was a palace of murals that detailed why the Great Dao abandoned Lishang's race.

From these murals, Wang Sheng gained a summary of the endless space's rather interesting evolution.

Only the Immortal Saint Realm existed at the very beginning of the Primal Era. However, as the Great Dao evolved, the endless space also slowly appeared beyond the Immortal Saint Realm.

The Great Dao essentially created a single heaven and earth at first, but it seemed to have found the form too unstable. Hence, it changed its method of evolution to form the universe that Wang Sheng and everyone else were in.

During the Primal Era, Lishang's race had been exiled and banished to the Sea of Chaos, which was now known as the Eastern Sky Region.

When the Heavenly Court created the Three Realms, it actually merged the Immortal Saint Realm and the endless space into one by creating stable pathways between them. It was one of its great achievements back then.

Only after understanding all of this did Wang Sheng finally comprehend how Lishang's race provoked heavenly might and why the Great Dao ultimately abandoned them. Pondering the Dao of Heavenly Tribulation couldn't even compare to the taboo that they had violated. After all, Wang Sheng's actions at the time merely triggered a warning from heavenly might.

According to the murals, Lishang's race was deeply anxious about the human race's rise, the relentless expansion of the endless space, and the changes to the Great Dao's laws. Hence, they began exploring ways to return the endless space to disorder and revert it to the Sea of Chaos.

To Wang Sheng, merely thinking about such actions already felt somewhat insane and far too delusional.

However, the combined power of several hundred or even a thousand immortals was far beyond what people of the present age could imagine.

Based on the murals, they seemed to have succeeded in creating a cultivation technique. It was illustrated as a cube flickering with golden light.

However, at that moment, heavenly might descended. Its pair of eyes gazed upon this ancestral land, and countless terrifying purple lightning bolts struck from the sky. The experts of Lishang's race rose and fought back, yet despite their vast numbers and innate divine abilities, they were utterly powerless before the lightning bolts.

Merely looking at the mural made Wang Sheng's Dao Heart tremble lightly.

This seemed to reveal the ultimate form of his Heavenly Tribulation Sword Intent—the Supreme Divine Lightning!

Wang Sheng calculated with his fingers. For his Heavenly Tribulation Sword Intent to evolve into Supreme Divine Lightning, he would probably have to study it ten more times and provoke heavenly might even more than that.

After three heavenly might warnings, he would be "sent off the field," and the Great Dao would abandon him. He'd never be able to grasp the Supreme Divine Lightning... unless there was some way to avoid the gaze of heavenly might.

Wang Sheng walked forward, and the murals' colors suddenly became incomparably bleak.

The divine lightning killed more than half of the experts. Strands of baleful, blood-red aura wrapped around every last one of Lishang's race, marking the start of their rapid decline.

Standing in a corner of the stone palace, Wang Sheng found himself at a loss for words.

Those who seek death will find death. To this day, the ancients' wisdom remains true.

Thinking carefully, he wondered if Lishang's ancestors resented and were dissatisfied with the rise of humanity, which had merely been Nuwa's creation. Hence, they rebelled against the heavens by attempting to revert and return everything to Chaos.

Since they were primordial beings, they could survive in Chaos. Meanwhile, humans below the Golden Immortal Realm would certainly perish.

Dignity? A struggle for survival rights?

None of that mattered anymore. Nuwa's kin courted death, allowing Wang Sheng to deeply realize that his Heavenly Tribulation Sword Intent likely had no future at all.

He was about to turn and leave with a sense of melancholy. However, after only taking two steps, he abruptly stopped.

Where is the heaven-defying cultivation technique of Nuwa's exiled kin?

Wang Sheng carefully examined the murals once more until he found a clue within the one that showed the descent of Supreme Divine Lightning. At the corner of it, a divine lightning bolt cleaved into the golden cube, shattering it into six pieces, which then transformed into black... stone tablets...

Eh?

Wang Sheng pinched the back of his hand to see if he was dreaming. He then stared intently at the stone tablets.

Could it be...

When the six celestial tablets were discovered with Yaoyun, they were transported back to the Hua Republic and then sealed in the Cultivation Research Institute. They were even once used to lure corrupt cultivators.

Could this really be it?

The earliest version that he had heard regarding Haotian's fall had been connected to those!

Back then, it was said that Haotian mastered the supreme immortal arts recorded on the tablets. He then attempted to merge himself with the Great Dao, hoping to stand alongside the Three Pure Ones. However, the Three Pure Ones glared at him to death.

"I can't believe I'm back at the starting point."

Wang Sheng laughed bitterly, then deeply sighed a few times.

It was as if he had walked a full circle. He had been painstakingly searching for the answer, only to discover that it had been right in front of him all this time.