txolops Chapter 201 Eternal Flourishing and Declining, A Dream of Flowing Clouds
Chapter 201 Eternal Flourishing and Declining, A Dream of Flowing Clouds
Chapter 201 Eternal Rise and Fall, A Dream of Flowing Clouds
The ancient dragon's might echoed in the void.
Tens of thousands of longswords trembled violently.
Two eerie green flames flickered within the enormous skeletal eye sockets.
Divine soldiers and flowing clouds.
These four words, piercing through ten thousand years, carrying terror and resentment, are nailed to Gu Yan.
The moment the words fell, the entire Guixu Secret Realm was crushed by an invisible giant hand.
Gray dust lingered in mid-air.
Zhou Tianqi's horrified expression froze the moment he turned his head.
Gu Yan stood still, his hand still on the hilt of the sword at his waist.
Within his dantian, the Divine Bone and the Heavenly Demon Heart were pounding wildly.
A power of the Three Lives Tea, a secret buried deep within the soul and originating from the cup of resentment and hatred brewed at the foot of Burial Dragon Mountain, was stirred by this ancient dragon's roar.
Time and space folded before Gu Yan's eyes.
The black dragon bones transformed into countless twisted lines and receded.
The frozen soil is cracked, and the sky is turned upside down.
The feeling of weightlessness, as if detached from the body, then follows.
This feeling was not unfamiliar to him, but this time it was far more intense, more real, and more irresistible than the illusion created by the Three Lives Tea.
Gu Yan opened his eyes.
He saw a pair of long, calloused hands.
He held a green-bladed sword in his hand, its blade shimmering with a cloud-like aura.
He lowered his head, his body clad in a tattered set of silver-white armor, the gaps in which were filled with dried, blackened blood and mud.
Ahead, a tall and imposing figure stood, clad in crimson armor, wielding a massive, blood-red broadsword, and laughing hysterically to the sky.
That is a river of blood.
At the feet of the two men lay a body in a pool of blood, its chest pierced by a sharp sword.
The corpse was dressed in tattered golden armor, clutching a halberd broken in two, its eyes wide open, filled with resentment and absurdity at being betrayed by its brother.
That was Gu Jiu, and also Gu Yan himself within the Three Lives Tea.
At this moment, Gu Yan's consciousness was perfectly embedded in this silver-armored body.
He was no longer the Holy Son of the Flowing Cloud Sect, nor Gu Yan who held sway over the millions of lives in the Eastern Continent.
He is Liuyun.
That person was trying to survive, trying to achieve a ridiculous immortality.
The divine soldier who plunged his sword into his brother's heart.
From Liu Yun's perspective, Gu Yan clearly sensed the complex emotions surging within this body.
There was fear, relief, guilt, and even a kind of madness after crossing the line.
It was accompanied by a loud "boom".
The black crack in the sky collapsed instantly.
The Divine Court was defeated.
The high and mighty priests were reduced to withered bones as they were devoured by the extraterrestrial demons.
The magnificent temple was engulfed in an inextinguishable black demonic fire.
Huge pieces of white jade dome-shaped ceilings fell to earth like meteorites.
Countless winged demons flew among the golden ruins, tearing the once high and mighty goddesses to pieces.
Blood River turned his head, his face covered in blood, his smile ferocious and terrifying.
"Liu Yun, Ninth Brother is dead, the Divine Court is destroyed, we are free! The Demon Lord promised us that as long as we surrender, he would grant us eternal life!"
Liu Yun heard his own voice echoing between heaven and earth, hoarse and cold.
He looked at Gu Jiu's corpse at his feet, without the slightest lingering attachment.
"Let's go. The celestial realm is finished. Let's go to the mortal realm, to where mortals live."
The two followed the fragments of the collapsing divine court and transformed into two streams of light.
Passing through the thick thunder and fire, through the void barrier above the nine heavens, it fell towards the unknown lower realm.
Countless shattered palaces of the Divine Court, along with the remnants of the Divine Court who also chose to flee to the lower realm amidst the chaos, followed closely behind.
A meteor shower ripped through the dark sky below.
They crashed onto a desolate and barren land.
This is Dongzhou.
Ancient trees reach for the sky, swamps are everywhere, and poisonous miasma lingers year-round.
Ignorant mortals, dressed in animal skins and carrying sharpened wooden sticks, fought wild beasts and lived a precarious existence.
Flowing clouds and a river of blood descended.
They set foot on this desolate land, carrying with them the tattered legacy of the divine court, their greed for immortality, and their twisted souls after betraying their brothers.
Time has lost its precise measure here.
Liu Yun and Xue He soon discovered that the immortality promised by the Demon Lord was a vicious curse.
Their physical bodies no longer age, but the thin spiritual energy of the lower realm is simply insufficient to sustain their enormous divine power consumption.
The power of the Divine Court in the lower realm is like water without a source; every drop used diminishes it.
If no way is found to replenish them, their souls will slowly wither away, their bones will become brittle like mud, and they will eventually become mindless walking corpses.
Blood River quickly made its choice.
A stormy night.
Xuehe, carrying his nicked, blood-red broadsword, walked into the largest mortal tribe within a hundred miles.
Liu Yun stood atop a distant mountain peak, observing coldly.
Night rain washed over the mountains and forests, and screams pierced through the thick rain curtain.
Blood River did not use any divine power; with only his powerful physical body, he slaughtered the entire tribe of tens of thousands of people.
Strong men, women, the elderly—no one could escape his blade.
Flesh and blood churned in the mud, and the Blood River, with the essence and resentment of these mortals, forcibly dug a ditch, which converged into a thick, scarlet river of blood.
Blood River leaped into the Blood River and let out a long, satisfying roar.
His body was covered in dark red hair, and his eyes were a wild, scarlet red.
He used the corpses covering the mountains as his foundation, slaughtering living beings as his path, and the blood and essence of mortals as his sustenance, thus establishing the first and most feared cultivation lineage in the Eastern Continent.
Thus, the Blood River Sect was born.
Looking at the blood-soaked river churning in the wind and rain, and smelling the pungent stench in the air, Liu Yun felt no pity whatsoever.
He turned around and walked towards the mountain range in Dongzhou where the spiritual energy was most abundant.
He couldn't live like Xuehe, eating raw meat and drinking blood; he felt that was too crude and ugly.
He needs a more respectable and sustainable way to maintain his existence.
The drifting clouds stopped in their tracks amidst those mountains.
The mountain peaks soar into the clouds and are shrouded in white mist all year round. The green pines stand tall and the waterfalls cascade like ribbons, making it a fairyland on earth.
Liu Yun sat on a blue stone atop the mountain and plunged his Qingfeng sword into the rock.
He changed into a snow-white robe and began to take on disciples.
He went among the ordinary people who had been displaced by war and wild beasts, and selected the children with the best potential.
He taught them the incomplete method of refining divine energy, instructed them to breathe in the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, and guided them to sever their worldly ties with their swords.
He told these mortals that this was the path to immortality.
Those who achieve mastery in cultivation can fly through the air and escape into the earth, and can live forever.
He named this mountain range "Flowing Cloud Sect".
Batch after batch of disciples grew up here, practicing swordsmanship in the mountains and meditating under waterfalls.
Day after day, they tempered their physical bodies, cultivating strands of pure spiritual energy.
In the eyes of these disciples, Liu Yun was always the aloof, compassionate, white-robed patriarch.
However, Liu Yun was never a good person. He set up a spirit-extracting array at the foot of the Liu Yun Sect's mountain gate.
Those disciples who are grateful to their ancestor will have their spiritual power and soul drained if they are unable to break through their cultivation level for a long time. This power will be used to nourish Liuyun, who is sleeping in the forbidden area of the back mountain.
The Flowing Cloud Sect became the birthplace of the prestigious and righteous sects of Dongzhou.
Clad in flowing white robes, their swords flashing, the disciples descended the mountain to vanquish demons, uphold justice, and earn the reverence of the people.
No one knows about the most sacred immortal sect in the eyes of the world.
Its founder was nothing more than a giant leech that lay on all its disciples, constantly sucking their marrow.
From Liu Yun's perspective, Gu Yan sat in a dark and cold secret chamber in the back mountain of Liu Yun Sect, feeling the passage of time.
He witnessed the dramatic changes in the outside world and saw a distorted prosperity in the cultivation world of Dongzhou.
Besides Blood River and Flowing Clouds, other survivors of the Divine Court also fell to this land during the catastrophe that led to the collapse of the Divine Court.
In their desperate struggle to survive, they displayed an appalling madness.
A divine court official fell into a deep pool where yin and yang met.
He held a tattered copy of the Divine Court Law in his hands.
When he saw the lawless, beast-like world of mortals below, he fell into extreme paranoia.
He attempted to rebuild the absolute laws of the divine court in this desolate lower realm.
He sat by the deep pool for three hundred years, witnessing the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and observing the birth, aging, sickness, and death of birds and beasts, finally comprehending the true meaning of Tai Chi.
He founded the Cangxuan Sect using black and white chess pieces as its foundation. The Tai Chi symbol rotates, and the world is governed by its rules.
The Taoist priests of the Cangxuan Sect held whisks and measured the good and evil, black and white of the world.
They established extremely strict rules, not allowing anything in the world to violate the order of Tai Chi.
Those rogue cultivators and demonic sects who violated their rules were all suppressed under the Demon Locking Tower in the name of acting on behalf of Heaven, becoming sacrifices to the Tai Chi formation.
In the west of the Cangxuan Sect, a servant of the Divine Court's Beast Taming Bureau fell into a primeval mountain range that stretched for millions of miles.
This servant held a lowly position in the divine court and was bullied for many years. After descending to the mortal realm, he lost all his divine power.
In order to survive in the jaws of those enormous and ferocious ancient monsters, he abandoned his human dignity and followed behind them like a wild dog, gnawing on their leftover rotten flesh and drinking the poisonous blood flowing from their wounds.
Over time, the violent factors in the monster's blood altered his physique.
He forcibly fused the bloodlines of various demonic beasts with his own body, transforming himself into a half-human, half-beast creature with a tiger's head, bear's arms, and snake scales.
He defeated the demon king of the Hundred Thousand Mountains through the most primitive and violent hand-to-hand combat, and enslaved the demon race of the entire mountain range.
They established a barbaric kingdom where the law of the jungle reigned supreme and there was no moral bottom line; this was the Mountain of Ten Thousand Beasts.
The disciples of Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain are all madmen who don't consider themselves human; they only care about bloodlines and devouring.
As the view passes through the Ten Thousand Mountains, it falls into a continuous swamp at the southernmost tip of Dongzhou, where purple miasma lingers year-round.
This place is a death trap that mortals fear, but it is also a breeding ground for another extraordinary force.
Years ago, a female official from the Divine Court Pharmacy came here.
She was once a noble goddess in the Divine Court, specifically responsible for cultivating immortal herbs and refining divine pills.
When she first arrived in the mortal realm, the air was polluted, and the mortals reeked of sweat and the sour smell of disease, which made her feel extremely nauseous.
However, without the nourishment of divine energy, her smooth, jade-like skin began to sag, and her once black hair began to turn white.
The fear of losing both her beauty and her life drove this goddess into a deep abyss of madness.
She needs elixirs, rare and precious materials that can be used to refine longevity pills.
However, the lower realm is barren and lacks the exquisite and beautiful immortal herbs found in the divine court.
So, outside this valley shrouded in poisonous miasma, she changed into a spotless, moon-white dress, took a small jade cauldron in her hand, and entered the mortal tribes who were suffering terribly from plague and disease.
She used her meager magical powers to cure several plagues.
The ignorant mortals regarded her as a goddess descended to earth, and they knelt down in the mud and water, kissing her footprints.
The goddess smiled and established a paradise in this valley, where she practiced medicine and opened her doors wide to the world.
This is the original Medicine King Valley.
Thousands upon thousands of mortals traveled across mountains and rivers to come here, hoping to be taken in by the fairy.
The goddess then took these mortals as her medicine-testing boys.
She mixed all sorts of highly poisonous miasma plants, venomous snakes, insects, and rodents from the valley together and boiled them into bowls of strangely colored medicinal soup, which she then gave to the young medicine boys to drink.
For thousands of years, hundreds of ordinary people died every day from excruciating pain, bleeding from all seven orifices.
The goddess remained cold and showed no pity.
She directed the remaining people to bury the bodies of those who had died from drug testing, layer by layer, into the poisonous swamp deep in the valley.
As time went by, on those corpse swamps that had absorbed the blood, flesh, and resentment of countless mortals, spiritual herbs that emitted a strange fragrance and could prolong life actually began to bloom.
Beneath the veneer of a doctor's benevolence lies a foundation of endless corpses piled up as fertilizer.
Every crystal-clear elixir and every life-saving herb in Medicine King Valley is a sinful flower forcibly cultivated with the lives of tens of thousands of people.
On the surface, they are the most compassionate healers, but in reality, they are ruthless killers.
And in the most prosperous metropolis in Dongzhou.
A fairy who was in charge of music and ceremonies in the Divine Court settled here.
Having been pampered for so long, she could not bear the arduous training in the deep mountains and forests, nor could she tolerate the bloodshed of slaughtering mortals.
To continue her legacy, she built a magnificent painted boat in the center of a giant city, where she sat behind a red and pink gauze curtain, playing the zither.
Her ethereal music was so enchanting that all who heard it were captivated.
Emperors, generals, scholars, and beauties from the mortal world were all drawn by the music and gathered beneath this pavilion.
The fairy used the incomplete melodies of the divine court to weave a series of bizarre and wonderful paradises.
Within this dreamlike realm created by the music, mortals can obtain the power, wealth, and beauty they dream of, and experience the ultimate joy in the world.
They indulged in sensual pleasures and laughed incessantly in the illusion, unaware that their emotions and their perception of joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness were being stripped away and drained by the music.
When the music ended, the illusion shattered.
Those mortals who listened to the music fell to the ground like withered trees, their faces bearing strange, satisfied smiles, but their souls were already exhausted.
The fairy absorbed the purest emotional power of these mortals, nourishing her soul and maintaining her exquisite beauty.
She took in a group of equally beautiful female disciples, teaching them the art of illusionary sound, and sending them to seduce people in the mortal world, absorbing the desires and true essence of cultivators.
This towering building, built amidst the bustling world, gradually evolved into a hidden yet powerful sect.
They have no fixed temple; their practice grounds are in the taverns, pleasure boats, and entertainment venues of the human world. They use illusions to confuse people's minds and music to captivate their spirits.
This is the Illusionary Sound Sect.