Chapter 1664 — Boundless Magic Power
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 1 of 5
Beyond the grudge he harbored in his heart, Shen Mu had a further reason: the resurrection of the Earth Lord. Should the Earth Lord appear before others and word of it reach the Heavenly Court, then the Heavenly Court would know that he had not lost his Dao heart at all, but was plotting a counterattack. And at that point the Heavenly Court would hasten its strike against Jingping!
He was trying to buy time now, and so of course he did not wish to resurrect the Earth Lord Achou.
Yet the reincarnations of Taichu could likely be found by none but the Earth Lord, and so he had no choice but to bring Achou back ahead of time.
Once the Earth Lord was revived, he would have to hold Achou in check and keep him from ever appearing before others, or it would bring boundless calamity down upon Jingping! As the god who governed the realm of the dead, the Earth Lord's soul was matchless in its might; the mere summoning of the black sands of his soul had taken several days.
That the black sands of the Earth Lord's soul had been claimed by the Tianyin Realm was not because the Tianyin Realm was mightier than Youdu, nor because the Lady of Tianyin was stronger than the Earth Lord, but because the ancient gods born of the Dao stand to one another in a relation of mutual completion. The Lord of Heaven governed the workings of the heavenly Dao in the world of the living, the Earth Lord governed the world after death, and the Lady of Tianyin governed where souls went once they were shattered out of being.
In recent years, as the wars grew fiercer, more and more gods, demons, and mortals were struck until their souls scattered to the winds, and so the Tianyin Realm had been expanding without cease, the power of its Dao arts and divine abilities rising ever higher. Though the Lady of Tianyin was no longer an ancient god, because she held the Tianyin Realm her cultivation and strength increased with every passing day and month, advancing swiftly.
Another two or three days passed. Shen Mu finished his rites, so spent he was gasping for breath, his body swaying as though about to fall. Ling Yuxiu stepped forward to steady him; Shen Mu waved her off, steadied his footing, and saw Achou the Earth Lord slowly waking before him.
The instant Achou the Earth Lord woke, layer upon layer of karmic fire kindled within his body, each layer deeper than the last, and within that fire surfaced the phantom shapes of countless beings in their agony, the karma of a million years of living things, gathered upon Achou alone! Achou was no longer the Earth Lord; he had shed the great Dao of Youdu and become that ordinary, ugly father, husband, and son who had once struggled to survive in the mortal world.
The karmic fire he bore became heaven upon heaven, thirty-five heavens in all; yet just as the thirty-sixth heaven was about to form, the fire was suddenly extinguished, and he was not perfected. Shen Mu frowned slightly. Both the Lord of Heaven and the Earth Lord had begun laying out the road to their own attainment of the Dao a million years ago.
The Lord of Heaven had refined the reincarnation of the Great Emperor, Dahong, into the Hong Heavenly Venerable, making him one of the Ten Heavenly Venerables. Had he truly been able, through the Hong Heavenly Venerable, to break free of the shackles of the heavenly Dao and win a great victory in the battle of Xuandu, then he might indeed have attained the Dao by that road.
But the Hong Heavenly Venerable turned his back on the heavenly Dao, and for a tangle of reasons ended by dying at the hand of his own son, the Ancestral God King.