Chapter 1056 — The Incense Hall Descends Upon the Mortal World
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 3 of 5
Hundreds of Heavenly River streams poured toward every corner of the Southern Pole Heaven; tower-ships and great vessels followed these branches straight into the Southern Pole Heaven, the river water quenching its raging fires, and countless gods and demons of the Southern Pole Heaven were slaughtered.
It was a one-sided massacre.
The Heavenly Court's war machine had started up; to knock out the Southern Pole Heaven from among the Four Pole Heavens had cost it hardly any effort at all!
This was the foundation the Heavenly Court had gathered over a million years!
Dozens more Heavenly River branches rushed out ahead of Shen Mu; tower-ships and great vessels descended from the sky and hurled themselves at the place where the Southern Pole Heaven's flames burned brightest.
Shen Mu withdrew his gaze.
At last the palanquin came to the Southern Pole Forbidden Zone. Ahead, the radiance of the Great Way rose in billows; seen from afar it was like a vast altar of flame thrust up from the horizon — yet it was no altar, but a vision wrought of that radiance.
The radiance of the Great Way formed a nest-like structure above, a nest of immense size; from afar the flaming clouds and holy fire seemed to shape a Vermilion Bird rising with wings spread. When the Celestial Dragon Palanquin reached this place it felt the scorching heat; so high was the temperature that even those six Celestial Dragons of the Jade Capital Realm dared not draw near.
Yet the heat here had already fallen greatly, for the Heavenly River Navy had just passed this way; as many as thirty-six broad branches of the Heavenly River flowed into the forbidden zone of the Southern Pole Heaven.
The Heavenly River Navy had marshaled the power of the Heavenly River to suppress this forbidden zone of the Great Way, and many tower-ships and great vessels had already sailed within it, hunting down the gods and demons of the Southern Pole Heaven who had fled here. Not a few gods and demons had taken refuge in the forbidden zone; born in the Southern Pole Heaven, they relied on the advantages of terrain and bloodline to hold off the Heavenly Court's Heavenly River Navy, and the fighting was savagely bitter.
Dragon Qilin drove on, into the radiance of the Great Way of the Southern Pole Heaven. The four emperors of the ancient gods of the Four Pole Heavens all held the places of their birth in the highest regard, and never lightly revealed them to others.
Shen Mu had been to the Eastern Pole, the Western Pole, and the Northern Pole, yet he had never seen the birthplaces of those three ancient god emperors; not even the Western Emperor, who seemed so simple and endearing, had shown him the forbidden zone where the Western Emperor was born. The four ancient god emperors had hidden their birthplaces away, for the forbidden zones held the rules of the Great Way that gave them birth, and they must guard them carefully lest others study them through and through and find their weaknesses.
Yet now this Southern Pole Forbidden Zone had surfaced; even from outside, Shen Mu and the others could feel wave upon wave of terrible palpitations of the Great Way surging out from within it! The six Celestial Dragons drew the palanquin into the forbidden zone, cautious, unknowingly slowing their pace; the heat here was extreme, the radiance more perilous still.
From outside, the forbidden zone had looked like an altar built of radiance; yet driving into it, they found another world within. The radiance of the Great Way that made up the forbidden zone formed mountain ranges tens of thousands of li long; the courses of these ranges shaped natural runes of immense complexity, while finer radiance formed patterns of differing grain inlaid upon the mountains, the ground, and even the air.