Chapter 1671 — I Held a Dream: The Youth Chapter
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 4
Throughout the Yuji Heavens, Shen Mu and the Haotian Emperor stood beyond the sky, with a hundred or so great ministers of the Heavenly Court at their backs, and looked down. The Yuji Heavens, once so incomparably rich, were now everywhere ravaged by war.
The Yuji Heavens could well be called one of the rare wealthy great worlds among the myriad heavens. This heaven had once been famed for its forging and supplied the Heavenly Court with divine weapons. The celestial artisans of Yuji forged with exquisite beauty; their divine weapons reached the highest artistic attainment, while their practical worth was heavily discounted.
The great and powerful of the Heavenly Court took pride in owning a divine weapon from the Yuji Heavens. Yet once Jingping's forging trade rose, it smashed the iron rice bowl of the Yuji Heavens.
Jingping's divine weapons were mighty, and no whit inferior in artistic achievement—all the more since the Painting Sage of Jingping took painting as his Dao and had disciples by the tens of thousands; in every academy and hall of learning in Jingping, cultivating the Dao of painting had become a required course.
After all, a better-looking divine weapon fetched a higher price.
What mattered more: Jingping's divine weapons were cheap!
And so, within a few decades, no small number of the Yuji Heavens' imperial foundries were squeezed out of business. When the various powers of the Heavenly Court commissioned divine weapons, they usually chose Jingping first; only the Zaofu Heavenly Palace would now and then hand some unimportant work to the Yuji Heavens, keeping a handful of Yuji foundries on life support.
But then the Ancestral Jade Capital City appeared, and Shi Qiluo "died" within the Jade Capital. The Zaofu Heavenly Palace was left without a master, and the Yuji Heavens' only source of wealth was severed.
From Shi Qiluo's "death" to this day, a mere thirty-odd years, and the Yuji Heavens had collapsed at a stroke.
The Yuji Heavens had long been hard to sustain; the people could barely live, and gods and demons ran amok everywhere. Once the pillars of the Yuji Heavens had utterly fallen, the divine generals and divine officials who had formerly upheld the Ruler of Yuji saw that the people's wrath could not be quelled, and so they simply rebelled, killed the Ruler of Yuji, and raised the banner of revolt.
The Heavenly Court had long known of the turmoil in the Yuji Heavens, but the Haotian Emperor had not long ascended the throne and taken the title of emperor, and naturally those below reported only glad tidings and no ill; the turmoil in the Yuji Heavens was suppressed and never reported to the Haotian Emperor.
The Ruler of Yuji was a member of the Heaven Alliance. His murder could no longer be suppressed.
More terrifying still, the rebellion of the Yuji Heavens was only one corner of the myriad heavens. Riot had erupted at the very same time in Shixiu, Lingshu, and Lingyuan, and the other heavens too were faintly showing signs of disorder.
If it were suppressed any further, and the Haotian Emperor found out, heads would surely roll; and so the Chief Minister came forward at last to report it to the Haotian Emperor.
"This realm is destined to become an unequaled golden age, far surpassing all that came before! Yet these obstinate commoners cannot bear even this little hardship."
The Haotian Emperor stepped first into the Yuji Heavens. Everywhere in the Yuji Heavens were starving folk and refugees; most of the races of the Yuji Heavens were demigods, yet now all was in chaos.
Demons and monsters ran wild everywhere, burning, killing, and plundering; some gods and devils unleashed their divine powers, conjuring seas of fire ten thousand li wide, or raising monstrous waves to drown their enemies' cities.
When two rebel armies went to war, they might even summon stars from beyond the sky and hurl them down into the heavens, like the end of days!