The atmosphere within the Northern Mountain Gate was taut, yet tinged with an undercurrent of ease. Along the way, quite a few of the cultivators Wei Yuan encountered were chatting and laughing. Exactly one year ago, however, every corner of the mountain gate had been steeped in gloom and despair.
Though the territory the Northern Mountain Gate held now was smaller than last year's, the war had turned into a fierce give-and-take. On many battlefields, forces deliberately dragged out skirmishes, steadily inflicting heavy casualties upon the Liao Clan. Liao losses on the battlefield far outstripped those of the Palace of Grand Beginning, filling everyone with confidence in ultimate victory.
Upon arriving at the Northern Mountain Gate, Wei Yuan stowed his conspicuous thruster tubes ahead of time and flew at low altitude toward the side hall where Xuanyue resided. The Palace of Grand Beginning's Northern Mountain Gate enforced strict discipline: True Monarchs could fly at will, True Persons of the Dharma Idol realm could only skim low below a hundred zhang, and Dao Foundation cultivators were forbidden from taking to the skies without urgent military business.
Xuanyue had returned from the fierce battle beyond the heavens just days earlier and was quietly meditating to recuperate. The moment he heard Wei Yuan had arrived, the old Daoist exited seclusion at once.
After formal greetings, Wei Yuan said, "The day before yesterday in the Nether Cold Realm, this disciple shattered Nether Shaman Shu Li's realm and erected the boundary stone left behind by our ancestral founder. I have made this trip back specifically to request Grandmaster's aid."
Xuanyue's spirits lifted, and he burst into hearty laughter. "Shattered a Nether Shaman realm? Good, good, good! What a magnificent feat! Nothing like this has happened in centuries!
"Come, let me take you around the halls first to catch up with the ancestral masters and familiarize them with your face—and borrow some money while we're at it! I want to raise the Azure Great Hall by another ten zhang! In the future, this will all be left to you... Wait, what boundary stone did you erect?"
Wei Yuan recounted in detail how he had obtained a fragment of the ancestral founder's boundary stone from the Shamans, and how he had ultimately erected it to utterly eradicate the Nether Shaman realm.
Xuanyue's expression grew increasingly grave as he listened. "You erected the boundary stone inside a Nether Shaman realm?! Come, follow me to see the Palace Master."
"Which Palace Master?" Wei Yuan asked.
"Immortal Monarch Tinghai, of course. You are qualified now to know some of the palace's secrets. The Grand Palace Master left centuries ago, and there has been no word of him since." Xuanyue did not slow his pace, leading Wei Yuan straight out of the side hall.
Xuanyue brought Wei Yuan to a secluded, towering peak. Landing halfway up the mountainside, they ascended the stone steps all the way to the summit.
At the peak stood a modest little courtyard. Plain as it appeared, the subtle flow of the four seasons drifted within it: spring blossoms, lush summer shade, autumn leaves, lingering winter snow... Flowing from one to the next, time shifted silently in an endless cycle, quietly embodying the essence of reincarnation.
Walking further ahead brought them near a stone precipice, where a verdant pine grew. Every rock and tree seemed shaped entirely by nature, carrying a pure, wondrous grace.
Seated beside the precipice was a green-robed cultivator, fishing quietly.
Seeing Xuanyue ascend the peak, Immortal Monarch Tinghai laid down his bamboo rod. "What brings you here? Your wounds haven't healed yet, have they?"
"A minor scrape, nothing serious. But my grand-disciple has run into a major matter, so I had to come."
Immortal Monarch Tinghai invited them to sit, then brewed a pot of tea and poured a cup for each of them. Wei Yuan thanked him and drained his cup in one draught, only to discover that it was ordinary mortal tea—the cheap sort that commoners on the streets could afford.
Immortal Monarch Tinghai smiled faintly. "Having cultivated for so long, I had completely forgotten how mortals live. In these final remaining years, I thought to make up for that regret. Had I realized this sooner, perhaps I wouldn't have lost to Xu Wangu."
Wei Yuan sensed a deeper meaning in those words and pondered them carefully in his heart.
"What trouble have you encountered? Let me hear it. I can't use any divine abilities right now, so I can only rely on your words."
Wei Yuan recounted the entire sequence of events in great detail.
Immortal Monarch Tinghai listened attentively, silently calculating.
The moment immortal power stirred, Wei Yuan suddenly seemed to glimpse countless minuscule fragments drifting away from Tinghai's body, only to be drawn back by wisps of immortal qi.
Wei Yuan was startled, but when he looked again, the anomaly was gone. It appeared Immortal Monarch Tinghai was indeed critically wounded, barely able to preserve the integrity of his immortal body.
Having finished his divination, Immortal Monarch Tinghai said, "You were indeed plotted against, though the malice behind it was limited. You carry numerous immortal plants and bear the true intent of the ancestral founder's boundary stone. Killing you through schemes alone would demand a staggering price—so vast that not even an immortal would willingly pay it.
"A Heavenly Abyss fiend is difficult to deal with, but it is not an inescapable trap. Since the Shamans have placed the problem before us, we naturally must respond. We cultivators must first look within rather than rely on external aids, taking self-improvement as our first response. Lower your defenses and let me inspect your dharma idol."
A trace of dejection flickered across Xuanyue's face.
Wei Yuan lowered his mental guard as instructed, though he knew in his heart that Immortal Monarch Tinghai was truly at the end of his rope if he needed a Dharma Idol disciple to drop his defenses before he could inspect him. In his prime, let alone a Dharma Idol cultivator, hardly anyone at the Scenery Command realm could have withstood Tinghai's scrutiny.
After examining him for roughly the time it took an incense stick to burn, Immortal Monarch Tinghai withdrew his gaze. He pondered for a moment, then said, "You are clearly only at the Myriad Transformations Realm, yet your mindscape world has already formed, with a scale no smaller than a Scenery Command realm cultivator's. This has rarely been seen in the past several hundred thousand years.
"However, advancing will also be hundreds or thousands of times harder for you than for ordinary cultivators. For now, you must treat your mindscape world as the core, viewing it as a single point, and build the Chaos Sea and Void Nether Sky around it—emulating Pangu's ancient deed of splitting heaven and earth."
"Did Pangu truly split heaven and earth?" With such a rare opportunity, Wei Yuan seized the moment to ask.
Immortal Monarch Tinghai smiled. "Every race has similar legends, and our human race is no exception. It truly happened. The difference between us and the foreign races, however, is that the world Pangu opened up seems not to lie within this realm."
Since even Immortal Monarch Tinghai used the word 'seems,' the matter was naturally impossible to verify.
Next, Immortal Monarch Tinghai shared many key insights on dividing chaos and splitting yin and yang, as well as how to construct formations within the mindscape world to accelerate the absorption of heaven and earth's origin qi and transform it into sentient beings.
All of this was immortal-realm knowledge, meant to perfect the mindscape world, merge it with reality, and make final preparations for ascending into the immortal heavens. Xuanyue had not yet reached this stage, so his guidance naturally could not be as lucid as Immortal Monarch Tinghai's.
Immortal Monarch Tinghai then handed Wei Yuan a sheet of jade paper. As he spoke, Wei Yuan recorded his words; in moments, Tinghai listed dozens of books and more than three hundred treatises before saying, "Most of the contents within relate to the Heavenly Abyss. Once you read them, you will understand. Here is also a volume of my insights on a Dao art. I only managed to write the opening, but you may use it for reference. This art is well-suited for dealing with the Heavenly Abyss."
Immortal Monarch Tinghai placed a book before Wei Yuan. Inscribed on the cover was: *Basic Principles and Advanced Applications of Five Elements Dao Soldiers*.
Five Elements Dao Soldiers? Wei Yuan suddenly recalled that when selecting Scenery Command-level Dao arts some time ago, he had chosen Five Elements Dao Soldiers. Could that truly be just a coincidence?
Wei Yuan accepted it respectfully. Scanning it with his divine sense, he found that the preface alone was packed with methods for calculating the yin, yang, and five elements of heaven and earth—he could scarcely understand a single line.
Bestowed by an immortal, this art was something Wei Yuan naturally held in utmost regard. He secretly resolved to master it, no matter what it took.
Immortal Monarch Tinghai said, "Now that you know of the Heavenly Abyss, you must have questions in your heart. Let me tell you about the First Human Sovereign's thoughts, and why the immortals of that era joined forces to cast a celestial restriction forbidding mortals from discussing the Heavenly Abyss.
"Back then, our human race was weak. Aside from the First Human Sovereign, the other immortals had barely clawed their way into Unity. In their desperate drive to advance, they damaged their foundations to varying degrees. Disasters raged constantly within their mindscape worlds, leaving their grotto-heavens virtually uninhabitable. Immortals like that probably couldn't even defeat your Patriarch Xuanyue.
"At the time, the Shaman and Liao clans invited the Human Sovereign to confer on grand affairs under the pretext of granting mankind equal footing. In truth, they strictly partitioned our territory to less than half the size of any single kingdom among the Nine Kingdoms—roughly the size of the Emperor of Tang's domain.
"In exchange, the Human Sovereign was tasked with suppressing three extraterrestrial fiends. That would have dragged him to his death in the Heavenly Abyss and choked off humanity's growth, all in return for an empty title of equality. Heh.
"The Human Sovereign flipped the table on the spot."
What followed was recorded in history books: the First Human Sovereign rallied the entire strength of mankind and fought a bloody, thirty-year war against the Shamans and the Liao. The earth ran red for ten thousand li, and bones littered the wilderness. Immortals from all three sides fell one after another, and blood rain poured from the sky for three straight years.
The war only ended when fierce conflict erupted between the Shamans and the Liao once more, leaving neither side able to spare attention for mankind. After the war, humanity's domain expanded tenfold, but its population was reduced to a mere tenth of what it had been.
Historians of later generations leveled many criticisms against the First Human Sovereign's deeds. Some called him tyrannical and autocratic, some branded him disrespectful of heaven and earth, and still others accused him of slaughtering innocent lives.
All of this, Wei Yuan already knew.
Finally, Immortal Monarch Tinghai said, "When the First Human Sovereign broke through the encirclement and returned to mankind, he gathered all the immortal cultivators and spoke only one sentence:
"'If our human race cannot thrive and prosper with dignity between heaven and earth, then this heaven and earth is better off destroyed!'"
Chapter 646