Chương 477: Realm in Chaos (III)

Long Tao had a rather peculiar expression on his face as he watched the swarm of the dead coalesce toward the big gash in the world. The moment he saw that flat, he knew it was his Master's doing, as there was a familiar, remnant Qi there that was repulsing the onslaught of Death Qi, providing a temporary sanctuary for all those lost lambs. What drew his attention, however, was the realm-spanning array of Imperial grade. There was a genuine Imperial-level formation laid across the entire realm.

No, there were three, in fact, layered and mixed and twisted together into a singular, barely functioning one.... yet, its functions were marvelous. Even Long Tao admired it slightly, as it was well beyond this realm. Not only did it prevent Death Qi from returning to Dao, and not only did it read memories of Dao from this place, and not only did it convert the straying Death Qi into figures from those memories...

but every time a child would die, their Life Qi would look like it immediately got converted into Death Qi. The truth was that, too, was part of the illusionary nature of the array; Life Qi remained Life Qi and was sucked away toward the core of the formation, likely where its Master was. Long Tao supposed that the person at the center was gathering Life Qi for a breakthrough and that everything else was... an experiment.

Though the realm-spanning array was marvelous, a single gust of wind at a precise point would be enough to immediately destroy it. It was clear that they were simply testing its core functionality, as none of the children or elders who got sucked in here would be able to discern it. No, there were perhaps a few at the start who might have stood a chance of discerning the truth of the matter, but it looked like they had been culled.

It was unsurprising; rather, if Master hadn't done what he did and disrupted the realm's core, it was likely that nearly everyone would have perished over the length of time, fought and killed in the shadows. Not that it made much of a difference now that they had gathered. If left alone, they would inevitably get overwhelmed; perhaps if the few masked ones revealed the full extent of who they were, the group might last a bit longer, but this was a trap that they would not be getting out of.

"P-please, please kill me..." a rather unpleasant voice sullied his somewhat recovering mood as he glanced back at the disfigured thing lying in the pool of blood. It was a gift from the little shadow, Long Tao supposed, and it looked like one of the array monitors that was positioned in the realm. After a nice little talk, Long Tao merely confirmed what he already knew: that the previous Holy Maiden hit a wall in her cultivation, was approached by a strange man, and started plotting this quite some years ago.

None of it mattered, prompting Long Tao to flick his wrist leisurely and behead the man by a sword array. Just before it happened, the figure's lips parted into an inaudible 'Thank you', causing him to smile faintly. Standing up, he stretched and yawned; it turned out rather marvelously in the end, actually, as the kids could stretch their limbs and fight until they were thoroughly satisfied. The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

His eyes veered away from the battlefield and northward; there, well beyond even his sight, his Master's presence had... dulled. The man was still alive and well, but there was something that had temporarily expelled Long Tao's trace completely. There was a touch of Divine Qi, but seeing as his Master was still alive...... he likely passed the tortoise's test. Long Tao smiled--he met the tortoise himself a long while back. Though he could kill the beast at the time, he still asked it to test him, and he failed...

resoundingly. In fact, that thing told him that his heart and soul were so vile that burying them into paradise would cause that paradise to inevitably become a corrupted wasteland. He merely laughed at the time, but the weight of filth was something he would become far more aware of later on. If he had Master with him in his past life, would it have been any different? Unlikely. He, as he was, would have never paid attention to a man as seemingly ordinary as his Master.

Cultivated hubris of an Imperial was as tall as the heavens, and his twice as tall as that. And yet, he failed. So utterly, so deeply, so perfectly failed. Somehow, however, it had turned out that his death was perfectly timed; were he still alive and running away in the Upper Realms, he would have never learned that the Sages were so interwoven with those bastards. There were only so many things willing to study Death Qi in any capacity, and even fewer who had any level of control over it.

Though he suspected it for a while now--ever since he'd been to Sunless Garden--the realm-spanning formation confirmed it: at least three of the Seven Divine were still seeking to disciple themselves under those two things they deemed Outer Gods.

One was Death Emperor, for certain, and this array was either his creation or a creation of one of his disciples; the other two were harder to pin, though he suspected one of them was Life Empress and that she was, in some way, connected to the order of those sages in this realm, and the last... He couldn't say.

Sword Emperor was a lone wolf sort that never even officially accepted the Divine title, let alone much else; Destruction Emperor was a madman whose life goal was destruction of Dao itself, as he believed that was the ultimate expression of Dao of Destruction; Elemental Empress was... an oddity. He'd never actually met her face-to-face, as she had over a thousand avatars spread out everywhere, and only one person even knew who she was. Unity Empress was the likeliest candidate, but in his memories... she was smart.

Did they get to her, too? Likely. Then there was the last one, the visage behind the Heavenly Court, often cited as the strongest cultivator not just of this era but of all time --God-Emperor. Long Tao met him once, and though the man was many ways stronger than him, there was not a chance he was the strongest of all time. In fact, Long Tao knew for certain he wasn't even the strongest at the moment, as he'd met and fought at least two others who eclipsed both of them a great deal.

It wasn't God-Emperor, however; though he subtly permitted most of the atrocious acts, and his word was the reason Long Tao was chased like a rabid dog by the entire heavens, that man was a coward beyond cowards. He'd never have a direct tie-in to any of this.

"Haah," Long Tao sighed and cracked his neck slightly.

"For now... I should probably go destroy the array before it's too late." His eyes turned south beyond the endless desert, where the heart of the formation was situated. Even he couldn't actually fight them; even if, for some reason, there wasn't a Sage present, just the former maiden herself was on the cusps of the Imperial Realm. Forced and filthy though it was, her sneeze alone would obliterate him out of existence.

Luckily, the formation wasn't tied to her--just because all Life Qi coalesced toward her didn't mean he had to interrupt her to end the formation. The thing was beyond unstable, and disrupting just one line in the thousand would work. And that one line was merely about ten thousand miles to his south. He simply hoped that the world was ready for the war that was about to break out once he plucked the string and ended the song of darkness...