Chapter 1257 — A World Without Flaw

A few months later, Bai Yuqiong returned to the Heavenly Court.

Hiding her features, she quietly slipped onto the Spirit Energy Transfer Bridge for the Southern Heaven. Leaving the Great Void and coming back to the Heavenly Court had been time-consuming, but from the Heavenly Court to the Southern Heaven the journey was far easier; Shen Mu had spread the Spirit Energy Transfer Bridge through every world, and with such convenient transport it was not long before Bai Yuqiong arrived. The Southern Heaven was nominally under the rule of the Red Emperor Qi Xiayu, a forest of heavens standing one upon another.

Bai Yuqiong first made for the Southern Heaven Continent where Qi Xiayu's celestial palace stood, transformed herself into a comely young maiden, and wandered about.

Her contests of wits and courage with the Nether Emperor had taught her a great deal, and she moved with the utmost caution. "Fire Heavenly Lord governs the Southern Heaven quite well. " After a first tour, she saw the people dwelling in peace and going about their work in contentment, like a pastoral idyll; no one had a heart for contention, and everywhere was a scene of harmonious joy.

Unable to suppress her delight, she began to think the less of Shen Mu's doings.

"Heavenly Lord Mu is indeed wrong, and Fire Heavenly Lord is right. The people here can live in safety, and they can also cultivate, becoming divine adepts, or even divine beings of the human race. This is a pure land.

Heavenly Lord Mu is far too extreme! " She shook her head and meant to leave, but then, as if at some ghost's prompting, she stopped and continued her wanderings, observing the lives of all living things. "After all, I have stayed here only a short time, and a glance at flowers from horseback can hardly reveal the true life of this world.

Since Heavenly Lord Mu has come so far, he must possess something extraordinary. I need to remain a few more days and discover why he bears such enmity toward Fire Heavenly Lord.

" She calmed her mind and surveyed the human civilization of the Southern Heaven with a detached eye. After several days, her expression gradually grew heavy. She witnessed the funeral rites of the Southern Heaven's humans and found them absurd beyond belief. "Even so, Fire Heavenly Lord has his reasons.

After all, the demigod races are in the ascendant now; for a human to live to sixty is already a rare achievement.

" She consoled herself.

In the other heavens, such good fortune did not exist.

She had been to the other heavens of the Primordial Realm, where people, because of harsh environments and every kind of oppression and servitude, lived only to forty or fifty. In comparison, many in the Southern Heaven reached sixty, and to be sacrificed to the demigods after sixty could be counted a ripe old age.

Of course, Jingping was an exception; the ordinary people of Jingping now lived longer, for living conditions were better and the martial arts flourished in youth, so that in every village there were a dozen or more elders of eighty. "Jingping's survival is uncertain from one morning to the next; the Southern Heaven is naturally better! " Bai Yuqiong saw, too, the Southern Heaven's education.

Although she felt the Three Obediences and Four Virtues, the Three Bonds and Five Constants, were somewhat amiss, still, if the common people were taught in this way they would not rebel, and without rebellion there would be less suffering. She thought it understandable.

She also witnessed the funeral of a divine adept. A divine adept who failed to become a god by the age of seven hundred had to offer himself to the demigods. "That is understandable as well.

" Bai Yuqiong murmured to herself.

"Compared with other places, this is already very good. After all, human divine adepts here hold high status and can cultivate in peace, untroubled by worldly concerns. If they cannot attain godhood, they offer themselves as sacrifices; their lifespan is at most a hundred years more anyway.

.

.

" Then she saw the divine beings of the human race.

Here there was no war between human divine beings and demigod divine beings; instead, all was harmonious, and the divine beings attended one another's banquets with no racial strife—genuinely rare and commendable. It was not like the other heavens. In the other heavens, the human divine beings, seeing their kindred subjected to injustice and plunged into misery, would wage war against the sacred ones of the demigods, slaughtering until rivers of blood ran. "Fire Heavenly Lord has done nothing wrong either," Bai Yuqiong said in a low voice.

She withdrew from the assembly of divine beings and came down to the mortal world of the Southern Heaven. Everything there was good, and she could appreciate Fire Heavenly Lord's painstaking good intentions; yet all of it seemed somehow false to her. Where exactly the falseness lay, however, she could not say.

She entered a town of no great size, intending to rest there briefly and then leave the Southern Heaven.

In this town she noticed a strange phenomenon: it had more than ten thousand human residents, and yet not one divine adept among them! That was nearly impossible.

Becoming a divine adept required aptitude, but after all these years of development, it was not difficult.

Bai Yuqiong made careful inquiries. An old man sitting on a field ridge, his chest bared as he picked off lice, told her, "None of our ancestors were divine adepts, so of course none of their descendants are either.

The divine adepts are all from the great hereditary clans, lineages handed down from the Dragon Han of a million years ago—which of them would be willing to marry common folk?

" Bai Yuqiong was startled, then smiled. "Why can't ordinary people become divine adepts? You can open Divine Treasuries and Heavenly Palaces too.

Never mind divine adepts—even cultivating to become deities is possible!

" The old man said in alarm, "Don't say such things!

Miss, are you from elsewhere? To speak like that is an offense against heaven and earth! The masters among the divine adepts all hold their power by Heaven's decree; they are stars in the sky, fated from birth to stand high above all! " Bai Yuqiong was stunned.

The old man went on, "We who do the heavy labor are fated to be laborers all our lives, to plant the fields. Generation after generation we are fated to be peasants. How would we dare to hope to become masters among divine adepts?

" "But. . .

" Bai Yuqiong opened her mouth, yet no words came out.

In the early years of the Dragon Han, the Seven Heavenly Lords—Heavenly Lord Yu, Heavenly Lord Hao, and the rest—had established the Divine Treasury cultivation system, so that ordinary people could open their own Divine Treasuries and become divine adepts. Yet in the Southern Heaven, the divine adepts had somehow turned into hereditary clans.

They passed the Seven Great Divine Treasuries to their descendants, stood high above all, and turned their inherited power into a divine right.

A family whose ancestors had no divine adept could never produce one, no matter how talented its descendants; they could never escape the fate of being fixed to the farmland for a lifetime!

But the Seven Heavenly Lords opened the Divine Treasuries precisely so that ordinary people could take power into their own hands and become divine adepts! Why were the people here fated to a fixed condition life after life?

Why should the descendants of a common ancestor have no hope of ever turning their fate around? "This Southern Heaven is a pool of dead water, dead water that cannot stir up the slightest ripple!

" Terror seized Bai Yuqiong's heart. She had not awakened the Vermilion Bird's divine soul, but she still remembered the Dragon Han age of more than a hundred lifetimes ago, when ordinary people could open their own Divine Treasuries and become divine adepts, when the descendants of ordinary people could become deities as well!