Chapter 1312 — Great Calamity Lurks in the Ancestral Veins
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 3
" The youth Taiyi said, "Yet some among them are frightful beyond measure. Back then, had I not been driven to it, I would never have cut down the World Tree and set it ablaze.
Even so, I only delayed them for a time; I could not stop them from descending. " Shen Mu clenched his fist, then abruptly let it go.
"Perhaps their coming in is no bad thing. Every living thing has the instinct to survive; these people have passed through the destruction of a universe, so perhaps they will be reasonable, and will not act wildly.
" "You are wrong again. " The youth Taiyi said, "The reason I call them borers is this.
Look at the first ring of the World Tree: it endured eight hundred billion years. By the outermost ring, only some six hundred million years remain, each ring shorter than the one before.
It is precisely these accursed undying beings who make a new universe perish the faster.
" Shen Mu fell silent. The youth Taiyi went on, "I call one cosmic year an epoch. All these undying old monsters crammed into one epoch will surely be more than the new epoch can bear.
To enter here, for instance, they used the World Tree to steal the ancient behemoths of this place and made Void Beasts, which they released into it. With Void Beasts they manufacture death and steal away this universe's mass and energy, to ease their own entry into this epoch. " Shen Mu was startled.
"The Void Beasts were made by them?
Wait—if the Void Beasts were made by them, how did they fall under Taidi's control? Could it be that Taidi. . .
" "Taidi is a man of ambition; the beings of the last epoch merely exploited his ambition to command the Void Beasts and manufacture more death, so that they might descend the sooner.
" The youth Taiyi said, "Taidi knew nothing of this. He was conquered by his own desires, and came to dread his own clansmen, fearing they would create a new Taidi, and more Taidis besides. So he commanded the Void Beasts to slaughter his own people, and that massacre. . . " He shook his head.
"The Ancestral Court was all but destroyed by it. The undying monsters of the last epoch received offerings enough and more; the Hundred Thousand Great Mountains of the Great Black Wood became a place of unspeakable terror.
They are about to descend, every one of them! " Shen Mu felt, deep in his soul, a dread that clutched at him.
Last night, a single dreadful being preparing to descend had nearly annihilated them all; if mightier undying beings were to descend together. . . He did not dare picture it.
"Later, seeing the situation collapse, I transformed into dao and told all the ancient gods that the Creator had to be destroyed. If the Creator were not destroyed, the whole universe would perish because of it. " The youth Taiyi said calmly, "Taichu, Tiengong, Tubo, Dimu—every ancient god heard my summons.
And so the war between the Creator and the ancient gods broke out.
" Shen Mu stared at him, wide-eyed and dazed. "The battlefield was not the Ancestral Court but the starry void beyond, for I feared the dead would become nourishment for the Great Black Wood.
That war's savagery stands first in all history; no battle afterward—not the war of Longhan's merging, nor the war of Chiming's fall, nor the war of Shanghuang's annihilation—comes anywhere near it.
" The youth Taiyi said, cold and remote, "In the end the Creator was defeated and perished, and the surviving Creators migrated to the Great Void. I told Taichu and the rest that a great terror lay within the Ancestral Court and might not be entered, and bade them seal the Ancestral Court.
They left that holy land, sealed the Ancestral Court, and imprisoned the Void Beasts. Only I remained here.
It took me several hundred thousand years to seal those undying beings away, so that they could not enter the Ancestral Court.