txolops Chapter 202 The Beginning and End of Dongzhou, The Six Great Dao Sources
Chapter 202 The Beginning and End of Dongzhou, The Six Great Dao Sources
Chapter 202 The Beginning and End of Dongzhou, The Six Great Dao Sources
Liu Yun hid in a secret chamber in the back mountain, coldly watching the demons run rampant on the land of Dongzhou.
The brutality of the Blood River Sect, the hypocrisy of the Flowing Cloud Sect, the rigidity of the Azure Profound Sect, the savagery of the Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain, the cold-bloodedness of the Medicine King Valley, and the debauchery of the Illusionary Sound Sect.
The lineages left behind by the six great divine courts are like six poisonous trees growing on endless corpses, deeply rooted in the crust of Dongzhou, draining the last bit of clarity from this land.
The six major sects divided up the mortals and destiny of the Eastern Continent, and a fierce war broke out among them in order to compete for the few spiritual veins.
The mountains and rivers of Dongzhou were shattered by this endless internal strife, and the spiritual energy became increasingly scarce.
Liu Yun sensed a strong sense of danger in the secret room.
The spiritual energy that he was giving back to his believers was already becoming insufficient.
Just as the six major sects had gathered all their resources and were preparing to wage a final battle to the death on a massive spiritual vein on the border of Zhongzhou.
A catastrophe that did not belong to any of them was about to befall them.
An ancient black dragon, transcending the laws of this world, tore through the void, bringing with it a world-destroying storm, and crashed heavily into the Far East sea.
The black dragon was tens of thousands of feet long, its scales as black as ink, like a steel Great Wall stretching between heaven and earth.
Its eyes were like two crimson blood moons, and in the blink of an eye, it stirred up a storm that covered half of the Eastern Continent.
It is not a product of the Divine Court; it is a calamity-ridden star beast that exists outside the plane of existence.
The moment the black dragon descended, a black tsunami thousands of feet high was unleashed in the Far East Sea.
The sky-covering seawater, mixed with thunder, poured directly into the inland heartland, submerging hundreds of cities and dozens of spiritual veins.
Faced with absolute annihilation, the civil war became a pointless farce.
For the first time, the powerful figures of the six great divine courts were truly terrified.
Liu Yun emerged from the secret chamber behind the mountain, Blood River Ancestor stepped out of the Crimson River, Cang Xuan's Taoist raised his hand seal, the monsters of Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain roared, the Valley Master of Medicine King Valley summoned his Poison Cauldron, and the fairy of Illusionary Sound Sect plucked the strings of her zither.
These remnants of the Divine Court, who usually schemed against each other, stood on the same side for the first and last time due to the pressure of survival.
Through Liu Yun's eyes, Gu Yan personally witnessed the battlefield, which resembled a hellish realm.
The sky was filled with falling corpses.
The sword formation of the Flowing Cloud Sect sparked a string of sparks on the black dragon's scales, but couldn't even leave a white mark before being swept away by the dragon's tail into a cloud of blood mist.
The Blood River Sect's invincible bloodthirsty aura melted instantly before the black dragon's breath imbued with the law of annihilation, like snow under the blazing sun.
The Taiji Array Plate of the Cangxuan Sect was crushed to pieces by the black dragon's claw. The giant demon of Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain had its neck bitten off by the black dragon.
The poisonous fog of Medicine King Valley had no effect on this star beast, and the music of the Illusionary Sound Sect was like an ant trying to shake a tree.
The entire foundation of Dongzhou was utterly helpless in the face of this black dragon.
The battlefield stretched from the Far East Sea all the way to the inland heartland, where mountains were shattered and rivers flowed backward.
The supreme elders of the six major sects were almost all killed or injured.
Just as Liu Yun, with his hair disheveled and his Qingfeng sword dulled, was preparing to abandon the mortal realm and escape into the void,
A man, an unpredictable force that should not exist, appeared amidst the churning black waves.
He was an ordinary swordsman with a tattered gray robe and an unremarkable appearance.
He had neither the dazzling light of divine bloodline nor the blessing of any top-grade magic weapon.
In his hand, he held only a plain iron longsword without any patterns.
Yet this seemingly powerless gray-robed man, as he stepped forward across the waves, found the raging wind and rain automatically giving way to him.
His body exuded a pure, deathly stillness that even an ancient being like Liu Yun, who came from the Divine Court, felt his soul tremble with fear.
That is the ultimate sword intent that casts aside all worldly laws, merges life and death into one, and seeks only to unleash a final, magnificent swordplay between heaven and earth.
"All things have an end, but the spirit of the sword is immortal."
With a barely audible sigh, the grey-robed swordsman slowly drew his rusty iron sword, facing the black dragon's terrifying breath that could melt the void.
The sword energy of annihilation soared into the sky. This sword energy had no color because it was pure nothingness.
In Liu Yun's memory scroll, Gu Yan captured the magnificent brilliance of that sword that looked down upon the heavens.
That single sword strike drained the last of the spiritual energy within a radius of 100,000 li in the Far East Sea.
Heaven and earth lost their color, and all things returned to stillness.
The invisible sword energy flowed upwards, slicing through the world-destroying dragon breath and the black dragon's scales, which were a hundred times harder than divine-forged black iron.
Finally, they severed the black dragon's enormous, mountain-like head.
"Boom!"
A mournful cry that shattered the heavens and earth resounded throughout the eastern land.
The massive skeleton of the black dragon crashed down from the clouds.
The scalding black dragon blood, like a cascading waterfall, dyed the entire sea an indelible, unfading black.
The seabed, bearing the intent of that single, deadly sword strike, was cleaved open by a deep, abyss-like fissure stretching for thousands of miles, forming a raging, turbulent sea eye called Guixu.
The black dragon has fallen.
The gray-robed swordsman who unleashed that earth-shattering sword strike, having exhausted his meager lifespan and all his vital energy, stiffened at the very moment he delivered that blow, transforming into a gray-white stone sculpture frozen in a sword-wielding pose.
This stone sculpture stands eternally atop the Eye of Guixu, suppressing the surging resentment of the dragon soul beneath the abyss.
Those low-level sword cultivators who survived the war and lost the protection of their sects and the jurisdiction of their elders were overwhelmed by the gray-robed swordsman's earth-shattering and awe-inspiring sword strike.
Instead of returning to the treacherous inland areas, they chose to remain in the extremely harsh environment of the Far East.
They knelt before the stone sculpture and, based on this place, established a cold and ruthless sect that revered only the way of the sword, disregarded ghosts and gods, and put life and death aside.
The Guixu Sect was thus established amidst the ruins.
With the six ancient lineages of Dongzhou and the newly reborn Guixu Sect, the grand structure of sects across the land is gradually taking shape due to the destruction and rebirth caused by external forces.
Liu Yun withdrew his defeated gaze from the distant Far East Sea.
Dragging his badly injured and dying body, he gathered the last remaining disciples of the Flowing Cloud Sect and prepared to return to the devastated mountain gate to close it off and recuperate in seclusion.
A torrential rain, formed from black dragon blood, was falling from the sky.
Raindrops fell on the faces of mortals who had no spiritual protection.
The clouds drifted low through the sky, overlooking the land that resembled a scorched hell after the great war.
The earth was covered in churning black mud, the mountains were flattened, and everywhere were piles of broken and mangled corpses of cultivators and shattered natal magic weapons.
Suddenly, Liu Yun's gaze was drawn to a small movement in the muddy puddle.
It was the ruins of an ordinary village that had been swept inland by the tsunami.
The torrential rain poured down, relentlessly washing away the blood and mud mixed with the blood of people and livestock on the ground.
Beside the ruins of a mud-brick house that had been uprooted, lay a mountain of human corpses.
A thin arm covered in frostbite and grime struggled to emerge from the black mud and sewage.
A skinny, bony boy, only seven or eight years old, with a few tattered strips of cloth hanging from his body, crawled and writhed among the corpses like a wild dog with its spine broken.
He was starving, and he was rummaging through the corpses for any moldy dry food he might have.
Unfortunately, fate was blind, and the torrential rain continued to pour down.
The black rain took away the last bit of warmth from the boy's body.
His lips were frozen purple, his eyes had rolled back, and he was about to breathe his last in this foul-smelling mud pit.
Just as the boy's hands were digging haphazardly.
Beneath the dark, skeletal remains, he touched a cold, hard object with edges as sharp as a knife.
The thing cut his palm, but no red blood flowed out.
The boy used all his strength to dig the thing out of the soil.
Only then did I realize that it was a palm-sized scale, pitch black all over, and even when covered in mud, it still emitted a metallic glow.
It was an inconspicuous piece of real dragon scale that fell from the gap between the dragon scales when the ancient black dragon was beheaded, and drifted in with the gale and tsunami that swept across half of the Eastern Continent.
The dragon scales detached from its body, and its life force was completely severed.
However, a trace of mixed blood and energy belonging to a giant star beast still remains within it.
When the boy's bleeding hand gripped the dragon scale tightly, the violent blood energy, like a raging venomous snake, burrowed directly into his heart, which was on the verge of stopping.
The boy's eyes widened suddenly in the muddy water, and he gasped for breath from the extreme pain and sudden force.
His bones crackled like firecrackers in the rain, and his once emaciated body suddenly developed bulging muscles, with faint black snake scale patterns appearing on his neck and side.
He survived.
He not only survived hunger and cold, but also gained a trace of extraordinary power from this ruin, which was regarded as garbage by cultivators, enough to dominate this mortal dynasty.
The boy pressed the dragon scale to his chest, and his previously unfocused eyes suddenly blazed with unprecedented ferocity, savagery, and greed.
He raised his face, covered in black mud, and let out a hoarse roar as he faced the torrential rain of dragon blood.
Gu Yan, through the perspective of Liu Yun, stood at the edge of the gray clouds, quietly watching the wild grass that was growing tenaciously in the mud.
Liu Yun neither tried to snatch the broken scale nor casually unleashed a divine lightning bolt to crush the filthy mortal.
To Liu Yun, a being who had witnessed the glory of the Divine Court and lived for countless years, a broken dragon scale, devoid of all its divine essence, was no different from a stubborn rock by the roadside.
He merely twitched the corner of his mouth, finding the ways of the world somewhat absurd.
The powerful immortal cultivators fought so fiercely that the heavens and earth shattered and they perished, yet in the end, a nameless mortal ant, who was only fit to beg for food in the mud, found a scrap of food that could change his fate.
Time is like a never-ending, rolling river, relentlessly washing away everything in its path.
The peasant boy who had been infused with dragon blood emerged from the ruins.
Relying on the violent power of that black dragon, he fought bravely and ruthlessly in the martial arts world and in the streets, committing murder and robbery.
He rose from a beggar to a gang of scoundrels and thugs.
He established a gang, but because he didn't know that they were dragon scales, he only thought that dragon scales were black and shaped like snake armor, so he named his gang the Black Dragon Gang.
Who could have imagined that, years later, the true origins of that low-class gang that preyed on the people in the border prefectures of the Great Wei Dynasty and was casually wiped out by Gu Yan could be traced back to the Black Dragon Disaster that nearly destroyed the entire Eastern Prefecture.
When Gu Yan saw the establishment of the Black Dragon Gang in Liu Yun's mind, the original fog in his heart dissipated, and all the clues suddenly became clear.
The gears of cause and effect turn, and subtle clues lie hidden for miles.
The Black Dragon Gang that rose from the mud pit, the Cangxuan Sect that sat by the deep pool and established the rules of Tai Chi, the Blood Demon Cave established by the Blood River massacre, the white bones scattered all over the Medicine King Valley and the seductive music of the Illusionary Sound Sect.
Everything, it turns out, formed a chillingly perfect closed loop within this dream spanning ten thousand years.
All forces, whether sacred or base, are rotten and foul from the very core.
Time did not stop in this ancient history because of Gu Yan's enlightenment; the footsteps of Liu Yun continued to advance.
He dragged his broken and weary soul back to the Flowing Cloud Sect, hidden in layers of mist.
He reopened the mountain gate and continued to sit in that secluded room where sunlight never reached.
He lived too long.
So long that he had forgotten what the Divine Court originally looked like, and forgotten those comrades who had fought side by side with him, only to be ruthlessly abandoned or even assassinated by him.
So long that every time he closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the image of Gu Jiu's sorrowful eyes, wide open in death, would appear in his mind as he pierced Gu Jiu's heart.
Is immortality truly a blessing from heaven?
For the sake of this so-called "immortality," he betrayed his comrades and abandoned his dignity, only to end up hiding in a dark secret room, consuming the lifespan of his disciples and followers to eke out a living.
Liu Yun looked at the hands in the dark, secret room, wrinkled like withered wood due to the stagnation of life, and felt the soul within him gradually solidifying due to the turbidity of the lower realm. He was filled with deep confusion and indescribable fear.
Through the heavy stone door, he scanned the bewildered new generation of disciples outside with his divine sense.
He discovered that these poor creatures, whom he had kept as human batteries, providing them with faith and spiritual energy, only had a lifespan of a little over a hundred years.
But when they practiced swordsmanship in the mountains at dawn, their eyes held a pure and aspiration for the Great Dao.
This pure light was something that he, a remnant god of the Divine Court, had been forever taken away from when he betrayed his brothers and sought only to survive ten thousand years ago.
Liu Yun began to go mad during his long, solitary sitting. He started to question himself: was the sword that pierced his back on the Divine Court's defensive line even meaningful?
He kept saying he would do anything to survive, but the years he spent hiding in these dark ditch and cave, sucking human blood to survive, were also a form of torture from which he could never awaken.
Under the relentless crushing of time, the spiritual energy of Dongzhou inevitably declined after repeated destruction and exploitation.
From that sealed chamber that had been closed for ten thousand years, a sigh of relief, yet also of utter despair, finally came.
Liu Yun exhausted the last bit of life force he had stolen, his body withered rapidly, his muscles collapsed, his meridians broke, and he turned into a pile of dull yellow ashes on the stone bed.
However, his complex remnant soul, tainted with the original sin of betrayal and filled with confusion and regret, was trapped in this world because the laws of heaven in this realm were inherently incomplete, and could not dissipate for a long time.
At the top of Changqing Peak, in the purple bamboo forest.
A gentle breeze blows, and the night rain patters softly.
The transparent remnant soul of Liuyun drifted above the Liuyun Sect like a wisp of lingering green smoke.
This lingering soul cannot affect reality, nor can it make a sound.
He could only watch silently as generation after generation of disciples and their descendants schemed and plotted against each other to seize power within the sect and to acquire more spirit stones.
Looking at that once tranquil and blessed land of immortals, Liu Yun watched as it slowly fell from grace after his death, becoming a third-rate sect and a filthy, stagnant swamp full of infighting.
Many years have passed.
The remnant soul of Liuyun was weathered and worn away by the years in solitude, becoming more and more transparent, and his consciousness becoming more and more chaotic.
On the night of the full moon, just as he was about to be assimilated by the turbid air of the lower realm and completely dissolve into nothingness.
The remnant soul of Liuyun lingered on the familiar stone steps of the mountain gate.
On that day, the Flowing Cloud Sect was ambushed by the Blood River Sect in the Cloud Dream Marsh, suffering heavy casualties.
In order to replenish fresh blood, the sect opened its gates wide and made an exception to recruit rogue cultivators to fill the vacancies for menial tasks.
Amidst the bustling, still-shaken recruitment procession, Liu Yun Piao Dang's gaze suddenly stopped on one person.
He was a down-on-his-luck rogue cultivator who carried a tattered bundle, wore a blue long robe, had a sorrowful face, and was always timid and subservient to everyone he met.
The rogue monk walked up to the deacon in charge of registration, his back hunched over.
"Name, cultivation level, bone age," the deacon asked without looking up.
"Little one————"
The down-on-his-luck rogue cultivator rubbed his hands together and answered in a trembling voice.
He gave a name.
He said his name was "Gu Changsheng".
Upon hearing this name, Liu Yun's transparent, remnant soul, which should have lost all emotional perception and was about to dissipate, suddenly twisted violently.
Gu.
That was the day the Divine Court collapsed, the day his brother, whose heart he had pierced with his sword, lay in a pool of blood.
longevity.
That is because he betrayed loyalty, abandoned dignity, and fell into this filthy lower realm, like a leech, sucking the marrow of his disciples and followers to eke out a living for ten thousand years, seeking only the two words "vain and absurd".
The very source of his evil, which he had personally extinguished, and his eternal, unfulfilled greed, were absurdly stitched together by the malicious hand of fate at the very end of his journey when he was about to lose his way.
He transformed into a lowly ant from the lower realm, whose life was as worthless as grass, and stepped onto the stone steps of the mountain gate he had built with his own hands.
Is this a reckoning of cause and effect, or a cruel mockery of the will of Heaven?
Amidst this horror and absurdity, Liu Yun's remnant soul let out a silent yet extremely mournful laugh.
Laughing at himself for his millennia-long, clown-like struggles, laughing at the inescapable cage of fate that he could never escape from.