Chapter 1831 — That Youth Three Thousand Years Later

They felt ashamed. Granny Zhu set out the treasures she had scavenged upon the deck, but a beam of golden light swept over, rolled up the things she had worked so hard to collect, and cast them overboard.

Granny Zhu flushed and spat, "Shen'er is getting worse and worse at managing a household.

Really, so extravagant. .

. " The others flushed even more.

They wanted to throw away their own finds, but could not bear to—these were indeed earth-shaking treasures, yet next to the treasures on the golden ship, they truly counted for nothing. The world-crossing golden ship carried them toward the Cosmic Bell.

The closer they came, the vaster the bell grew, and the more their hearts pounded in dread. The bell did not look like a treasure so much as a divine power.

On its outer surface and inner walls one could see every kind of Dao-law structure—great Dao chains, small Dao patterns, delicate runes—all distinctly visible. One could even see the myriad Daos of the primordial universe flowing across the bell's wall: suns, moons, stars, rivers of stars, constellations, and all the great heavens, all in plain view.

Near the bell's crown, however, there were the transformations of the Five Ultimates—Taiji, Taisu, Taishi, Taichu, and Taiyi—and the closer to the crown, the closer one came to the Genesis Kalpa.

They shuddered and stared blankly at the place where the Cosmic Bell's Genesis Kalpa erupted. It was an unimaginable catastrophe.

It was clearly meant to create a brand-new universe and bring boundless life, yet its might seemed capable of destroying every decayed thing in the past.

Zhu Santong in particular trembled so violently in his legs that he could not walk. Heavenly Duke, Shen Fengqing, and the others had heard of the Genesis Kalpa but had never witnessed it; merely sensing its power made them shudder.

But he had witnessed it!

During the years when Lord Taishang had suppressed him in the forest of obelisks and cast him into those filthy grounds of the void, he had undergone several great Genesis Kalpas. Every time, he had been certain he was going to die; every time, he had been scared out of his wits.

The Genesis Kalpa of this Cosmic Bell brought it all back.

At the crown of the Cosmic Bell stood a majestic, towering Chaos Hall, seated in the ancestral court of the seventeenth epoch. Rolling chaos aura poured out of the hall and coalesced into an enormous hand.

From that hand burst the Genesis catastrophe, shaping the magnificent vision of the Cosmic Bell, blasting through the sixteen Chaos Rivers around the World Tree to open a path for Kaihuang and the others to attack the Tree. Within the sixteen Chaos Rivers, countless immense roots of the World Tree intertwined, piercing into the great bell and restricting its power.

That was the Boundless Elder using his own body to resist Shen Mu! Countless masters of the sixteen cosmic epochs climbed onto the roots, charged into the great bell, and fought Kaihuang, Shen Ye, and their forces in a bloody battle that darkened heaven and earth.

Clang—the bell went on tolling like the opening of heaven and earth, vast and overwhelming, striking the Great Dark Mountain.

At the Great Dark Mountain, the black mountain formed from the roots of the previous World Tree flew up, cracked, shattered, and turned to powder in the sound. Aboard the golden ship, their hearts were shaken, but the ship did not plunge into the great bell.

Instead, it flew toward the Chaos Hall at the bell's crown.

They looked into the distance and saw the hall's doors wide open, chaos stretching into dimness, and at the center of the hall a World Tree faintly visible. Through the chaos mist, Shen Mu's form sat there in hazy authority.

The great hand reaching out from the chaos aura was his hand!

When the bell's peal died away, the myriad Dao in front of the great bell suddenly spun and contracted, and Kaihuang and the others immediately withdrew.

The great bell that had suppressed the sixteen Chaos Rivers contracted layer by layer, and the World Tree roots controlled by the Boundless Elder also drew back.

The prehistoric masters on those roots hurriedly fled along them, not daring to pause.

Soon Kaihuang and the others reached the first Chaos River, leaped, and landed before the Chaos Hall.

By then, the great bell had contracted into the state of the Five Ultimates. A clear chime rang out, the state of the Five Ultimates vanished, and the bell became a Chaos Bell more than a man's height, held in Shen Mu's palm.

Shen Mu rose, hung the great bell beneath the eaves of the Chaos Hall, waved his sleeve to disperse the chaos aura, and said with a smile, "Granny, you've finally come. "