荒墟牧神 - 第683章 陰司至尊 - 簡牘書房

The aged god's face contorted; he made to flee. Shen Mu gave the Book of Life and Death a shake, and the old god halted on the instant, his gaze nailed to the book in Shen Mu's hand, not daring to stir.

Shen Mu grew all the more certain: the Book of Life and Death was the bane of these corpse-ghosts.

"You say we are corpse-ghosts, and you are not wrong."

The aged god finally spoke, and with a chuckle: "The Tianyin Realm's origins are unimaginably ancient. Long ago, at the very dawn of the opening of Heaven and Earth, after the Gloom Capital and the Mystic Capital were born, the Tianyin Realm came into being. In those days, before there were any so-called humans, it was the ancient gods who ruled the cosmos and the universe, forming the Celestial Court of the Old Gods, and Lady Tianyin was one of those ancient deities."

Shen Mu was shaken to the core, but betrayed nothing. "Then Lady Tianyin, like Lord Earth and Lord Heaven, is a god born of Heaven and reared by Earth."

The aged god shook his head. "Lady Tianyin is far beneath those two. The Tianyin Realm is the darkness beneath Lord Heaven's feet; it cannot compare. But the Tianyin Realm has one advantage: it answers neither to Lord Heaven nor to Lord Earth. Lord Heaven, Lord Earth, neither of them can come here. This is a world without law and without Heaven. Which is to say..."

"Which is to say," Shen Mu said, "that the souls of the living things in the Tianyin Realm never fall into the Gloom Capital, and so they are undying and imperishable. Have I understood correctly?"

The aged god roared with laughter, though there was no true joy in it, as though he laughed merely for the sake of laughing. He shook his head. "Undying and imperishable? Heh heh. A pretty thought. But the Tianyin Realm is not undying in the way you imagine. Our souls here truly do not perish, and that is precisely why, once the bodies of the Tianyin Realm's creatures die, their souls only multiply. For gods and demons it hardly matters; they can keep their bodies from dying. But the other creatures die in droves."

"With more and more dead souls," Shen Mu asked, curious, "would this place not become another Gloom Capital?"

"I told you, the Tianyin Realm is not under Lord Earth's jurisdiction. Lord Earth cannot reach this place. How could it become a Gloom Capital?"

The aged god shook his head. "This place will never become a Gloom Capital, nor ever a Mystic Capital. To Lord Earth and Lord Heaven alike, it is a blind spot, a place their feet cannot tread. But the Tianyin Realm accumulated too many souls, and the souls began to do evil. How could the dead bear to watch the living savor their lives? And so war broke out between the souls and the living."

Shen Mu was baffled. "How can souls wage war on the living? A person with both body and soul is immeasurably stronger than a mere soul. Dead ghosts cannot possibly defeat the living."

The aged god smiled. "But a body must rot one day, and the souls of the Tianyin Realm do not die. Even a god cannot wholly annihilate a soul of the Tianyin Realm; here, even a soul shattered to the winds does not fully perish. In that great war between men and ghosts, far too many souls were shattered and scattered, and those broken souls in the end became black sand."

His eyes abruptly turned utterly dark, like countless grains of black sand ground finer than thought.

Clearly, he too was no living man, but a grotesque monster formed when black sand took possession of a human skin.

"Black sand, that is our shattered souls."

The aged god showed a grotesque smile. "Because we are shattered too fine, no one can see us clearly, no one can touch us. You are one of the rare exceptions, one who can touch us and see us. Once we had bodies, we felt hunger, unbearable hunger, a mad craving to eat. And so we began to eat."

He did not speak of that history; he only said, "Soon, we had eaten every living person in the Tianyin Realm."