Chapter 1803 — The Sacred Land Becomes a Prison

The Moon Heavenly Venerate, the Nether Heavenly Venerate, Xu Shenghua, Lan Yutian and the rest seized the moment to break free, alighting one after another upon the Golden Ship of Salvation, gazing with surging hearts at the middle-aged man standing at the prow. The term of forty-two years had come due; Kaihuang Shen Ye had at last emerged from the Golden Ship of Salvation!

Kaihuang Shen Ye stood at the prow, and behind him the Daluo Heaven of the Sword Dao reappeared, displaying a sword-Dao grandeur more magnificent than ever!

Within that Daluo Heaven of the Sword Dao, ten thousand sword-lights converged and straightway formed the Dao Tree of the sword path!

The speed with which this Daluo Heaven took shape made the Heavenly Emperor Haotian, watching from afar, stare dumbstruck.

Like Kaihuang Shen Ye, he too had suffered his Daluo Heaven destroyed and his Dao Tree extinguished.

When the Cloud Heavenly Venerate burned the Second Young Master's incarnation to death, his Daluo Heaven and Dao Tree had been destroyed by the Cloud Heavenly Venerate along with it; if he wished to rebuild the Daluo Heaven and attain the Dao through force, he must polish it without cease, branding the void with his own power.

And that took time. To this day, several days having passed, he had still not rebuilt his Daluo Heaven a second time.

Kaihuang, by contrast, had had everything destroyed by the Fourth Young Master Zixiao, leaving only his Dao Flower to drift into the Golden Ship of Salvation.

By rights, even had Kaihuang survived and rebuilt his Daluo Heaven, he should have been far slower than him!

Yet the instant Kaihuang Shen Ye appeared, he branded the void with the cultivation of the thirty-sixth heaven of the Dao realm and once more achieved the Daluo Heaven of the Sword Dao; so swift was he that Haotian was struck dumb, left gasping in the dust! And more to the point, had Kaihuang not already died?

The string of the Fourth Young Master Zixiao's zither had been drawn by the Heavenly Emperor Haotian himself from the long river of chaos in the Jade Capital City of the Ancestral Court and tethered to an artifact of creation; in the battle of the Nether Capital he had meant to use that single string to annihilate every one of his foes at a stroke! The greatest prize of all was to kill the Ling Heavenly Venerate!

In the end it was Kaihuang Shen Ye who bore the full might of that string in the Ling Heavenly Venerate's place, who went to his death in the Ling Heavenly Venerate's stead!

Even if Kaihuang Shen Ye could preserve a Dao Flower, there was no conceivable way he could appear before them so whole. The Heavenly Emperor Haotian had seen with his own eyes Kaihuang Shen Ye die before him; there could be no mistake!

One slain by the Fourth Young Master Zixiao could never rise again!

Then how had Kaihuang Shen Ye come back to life?

Who could have rescued him from the divine power of the Fourth Young Master Zixiao and delivered him back to this day, forty-two years on? The Heavenly Emperor Haotian could not help but shiver; the shadow of Shen Mu rose before his eyes, as though he need only lift his head to behold Shen Mu's towering figure, and on Shen Mu's face that cold smile, the smile of one regarding a puppet.

"The Seventh Young Master, Shen Mu, is pulling every string from the shadows!

" Haotian shivered again and again; a chill ran through him to the bone. That the Seventh Young Master Shen Mu had rescued Kaihuang Shen Ye right under the Fourth Young Master Zixiao's nose, without the Fourth Young Master sensing a thing, showed that after his return to the past, Shen Mu's cultivation, his strength and the profundities of his divine powers had already surpassed the Fourth Young Master's!

In the battle of the Nether Capital all those years ago, the Heavenly Court had seemed to win a sweeping victory; though the Fourth Young Master Zixiao never descended in person, with a single zither string he had dictated the whole future course of the Seventeenth Epoch. In truth, however, the Seventh Young Master Shen Mu had already been playing a hidden game against the Fourth Young Master, and holding the upper hand!

The course of events after the Seventeenth Epoch made this plain.

After the Heavenly Court took the Nether Capital, it unified all the heavens and the ten thousand worlds, its power reaching an unprecedented peak; thereupon it raised its entire host and marched against the Yuan World.

In that war the Heavenly Court first lost the Southern Heaven Granary, then had its Earth Master destroyed in the battle of the Land of No Sorrow, and suffered defeat after defeat in the Western Lands, the Northern Frontier, the Eastern Sea and the Southern Sea, before being crushed at last in the battle of the Misty Maple Valley! From that time on the Heavenly Court never recovered; it lost the Mystic Capital and the Nether Capital and fled back to the Ancestral Court!

And now every force of the Heavenly Court has crumbled to nothing! On the surface this is a struggle between the Heavenly Court and Jingping, but beneath the surface it is in all likelihood a game between the Seventh Young Master on one side and the Third and Fourth Young Masters on the other! The Third and Fourth Young Masters know nothing of the future, whereas the Seventh Young Master Shen Mu knows what is to come; and so Shen Mu could lay his pieces long in advance and gamble for a better future!

Just as these thoughts came crowding in upon him, Kaihuang's Daluo Heaven and Dao Tree had already been reborn, the sword Dao so highly condensed that it became a Dao Flower; the Dao Flower revolved and congealed into a Dao Fruit.

His Dao Fruit spun, sword paths interweaving and crisscrossing, like bricks and tiles, screens and jade pillars, flying dragons, forming within the Daluo Heaven a sacred hall of the sword Dao!

The sacred hall of the sword Dao took shape at furious speed, and the faces of the three Hall Masters, Hehuan, Phoenix and Zhaoyang, turned grave. At the center of the Zhaoyang Hall Master's brow appeared a wound that let light through from front to back: the wound dealt him by a single stroke of Kaihuang's sword.

Within that wound the power of the sword Dao was still spreading, destroying the functions of his flesh and his primordial-spirit Dao.

For those who attain the Dao through the Dao realm, the Dao realm is divided into thirty-six heavens; after the thirty-sixth heaven of the Dao realm one may brand the ultimate void, and the thirty-sixth heaven is the Daluo Heaven.

Yet the Dao realm can go further: one may cultivate the thirty-seventh heaven, which is the Dao Tree.

Should the Dao-achiever possess some extraordinary comprehension, he may cultivate the thirty-eighth heaven, which is the Dao Flower. Further still lies the thirty-ninth heaven, the Dao Fruit.

When a Dao-achiever of the Dao realm reaches this step, no road remains ahead; he has reached the summit. Such was the path of cultivation for Dao-achievers throughout the past sixteen cosmic epochs.

But the wound Kaihuang's sword dealt him held the fortieth heaven of the Dao realm, forcing him to summon his whole cultivation to suppress the Dao-wound of that sword Dao!

The fortieth heaven of the Dao realm is a realm only the ancient beings of the Miluo Palace and the Celestial Capital can attain.

In the Miluo Palace, seventy-two have attained the fortieth heaven, and those seventy-two are honored as the seventy-two Hall Masters. The Celestial Capital has thirty-six, known as the Thirty-Six Heaven-Openers, who in that year opened the universe of the Seventh Epoch together with the Lord of the Celestial Capital.