Chapter 1751: Fortune Dynasty, the Dao of Earth Immortals

Kaoshan Village gradually returned to peace.

Yu Yong, Zhou Xiaocui, and the demons and devils had caused tremendous destruction; many villagers had died, every household wore mourning, and the entire village was steeped in grief.

Still, life had to go on.

No matter what, farmers had to till the land to survive—rising early, returning late, sweating buckets as they toiled over the soil, all to obtain grain for worshipping the gods and for their own bellies, and so life went on.

Day after day passed, and Kaoshan Village gradually became utterly ordinary.

Nothing special.

This remote village had always been this way; even dynastic changes had nothing to do with this little hamlet. No matter how stormy the outside world became, no matter how many heroes and champions arose, it had nothing to do with the people here who farmed the land.

In fact,

many stirring events had indeed taken place in the outside world.

……

Jiang Ding's gaze pierced through the vast expanse of space, and through the Great Sun Immortal-Mortal Sword Intent rooted in Yu Yong's divine soul, he saw certain things.

This was a battlefield.

On one side was a horde of demons and devils—feral dragons, starving wolves, bloodthirsty lizards, flying eagles, fang-bared demonic bears, and the like. Among these demons and devils, banners were raised, bearing the emblems of tigers, leopards, and wolves, all sharing one common character: 'Yu,' the Yu of the Great Yu Dynasty.

Gathered together, these demons and devils somehow gave rise to a strange 'fortune'!

This fortune forbade all dharmas; the fortune of the human Dao truly revealed its marvels, capable of suppressing the power of incense and faith. The fortune divine dynasty of the human race was beginning to show hints of itself here.

It was precisely this materially manifested dynastic fortune that granted these demons and devils their tremendous power; they were now attacking the original kingdom, 'Chen Kingdom.'

This Chen Kingdom appeared to be on the side of righteousness.

Every soldier of Chen Kingdom was a human, each wielding a golden spear, blessed with the divine power of incense and faith, possessed of boundless strength. With every attack they launched, gods would manifest in the surrounding sky—Earth Gods, River Gods, Mountain Gods, City Gods, Earl of the River… The gods of the four directions coordinated with Chen Kingdom's great army to resist these invading demons and devils.

The two armies roared and clashed, fighting and killing; every moment brought fresh deaths, and the intensity of the battlefield was comparable to that of a Nascent Soul-level battlefield.

This was truly inconceivable.

One had to remember that merely a few years ago, the king of these demons and devils, King Yu 'Yu Yong,' had been nothing more than a runaway slave with only Qi-Refining cultivation. For such earth-shaking changes to occur within just a few years was utterly contrary to the common sense of cultivation.

In just a few years, even if the prodigies of every world-cluster in existence came here, they could not advance from Qi Refining to Nascent Soul—there simply wouldn't be enough time to sit in meditation and accumulate spiritual power.

Yet this Yu Yong had managed to do exactly that.

Jiang Ding carefully examined the demon army.

These demons were, shockingly, all human cultivators.

Only in the world-cluster of the Gods-and-Buddhas Great Thousand Worlds, within

the incense-and-faith web of the supreme gods, had their outward forms been forcibly transformed into demons and devils, accompanied by bloodthirsty killing and loss of control. In the eyes of the vast majority of common folk, they were nothing but demons and devils, viewed with utter terror and impossible to be accepted.

"How could there be so many cultivators?"

"The miracles and coincidences of the human Dao's Heaven are not that numerous."

Jiang Ding reviewed the memories of Yu Yong, this reincarnated god of the Dao Court, and quickly learned the answer.

Enlightenment.

Yu Yong had once encountered a stroke of fortune and obtained the inheritance of an ancient human-fortune dynasty, called the 'Xiang Wang Ju Ding Huang Chao Jing' (The Scripture of King Xiang Lifting the Cauldron of the Imperial Dynasty).

In this world where the human Dao was brutally suppressed, the ancient human race had launched numerous revolts and uprisings, especially during the period tens of millions of years ago when the Dao Court was first established and its systems were not yet perfected. Many earth-shaking great figures had emerged, wreaking havoc across the land and causing tremendous trouble for the Dao Court.

The strongest among them had even shaken the position of the Supreme.

Among them was a human-Dao sovereign named King Xiang. The Heavenly Chu Dynasty he once founded had slaughtered god after god of the Dao Court, its power spreading across many world-clusters and reaching its zenith, until it was ultimately suppressed by the Supreme Emperor, and the dynasty perished.

But all that was a matter of the very distant past.

As the Dao Court gradually stabilized, such powerful human-Dao dynasties vanished from sight.

In the most recent tens of millions of years, there had only been periodic, localized human-Dao dynasties of regional separatism—blooming briefly like an evening flower, each one exterminated by kings blessed by the gods. These kings would ultimately dedicate the entire human-Dao fortune of their dynasty to the Dao Court, and their clans prospered for ten thousand generations.

What Yu Yong had obtained was precisely such a remnant chapter of a human-Dao dynasty, the 'Xiang Wang Ju Ding Huang Cheng Jing' (The Scripture of King Xiang Lifting the Cauldron of the Imperial City).

Within this human-Dao dynasty scripture there was a technique called the Art of Enlightenment.

It could expend a certain price to enlighten human beings whose divine souls had become solidified and blocked from years of chanting the gods' scriptures, granting them magic power once more and restoring part of their lifespan. Although the enlightened human cultivators had no path of advancement, it was still enough to drive them into a frenzy.

To leap from mortal to wielding tremendous power in a single bound!

This was the reason so many demons and devils had appeared here.

As for why Yu Yong had gained Nascent Soul-level power within just a few years, the answer likewise lay in the so-called human-fortune dynasty.

"Fortune Dynasty?"

"Gathering the power of Heaven and Earth, mastering the power of Heaven and Earth, substituting one's own heart for the heart of Heaven—this is called the Dao of Earth Immortals."

"Heavens! One can still do it this way?"

Jiang Ding read the contents of the 'Xiang Wang Ju Ding Huang Cheng Jing' and felt his horizons greatly broadened.

Fortune Dynasty, the Dao of Earth Immortals.

This seemed to be another branch of human inheritance, similar to the Divine Dao yet vastly different. This Fortune Dynasty placed enormous emphasis on the hearts of the people, gathering the fortune of all living beings upon itself, thereby possessing tremendous power—able to cause earth-shaking transformations in a mere mortal within a very short time.

Naturally, there was a price.

Most Fortune Dynasty cultivators had lifespans of at most one-tenth that of ordinary cultivators.

Even the lord of the dynasty could live no more than ten thousand years before being compelled to die and pass the throne to a new king; their lifespans were extremely brief.

Beyond this, Fortune Dynasty cultivators were also bound by numerous dynastic laws and decrees, from which even the king himself could not escape.

These defects were staggeringly great, and for this reason many cultivators regarded the path as unorthodox.

In this cultivation method, the cultivator was not actually the vessel of power, only its outward appearance. The true power of the Fortune Dynasty was in fact contained within each official rank: ninth-rank officials corresponded to Qi Refining, eighth-rank to Foundation Establishment, seventh-rank to Jin Dan… and so on, layer upon layer ascending upward.

Lose the official rank, and a Fortune Dynasty cultivator would instantly lose their power, lose their lifespan, and be unable to act on their own.

Even the lord of the dynasty, the king, was merely the outward appearance of the Fortune Dynasty. He might look majestic and imposing, the Son of Heaven, sovereign of all beneath the sky, but in reality he was merely a materialized expression of the people's hearts, and rarely possessed a self of his own.

Nevertheless, no matter how many flaws the Fortune Dynasty had, it did possess one tremendous advantage.

Rapid cultivation!

Even if you are merely a mortal, gathering the people's will and fortune for a single day allows you to ascend in one step to become a Qi Refining cultivator or a Foundation Establishment cultivator; even if your lifespan is much the same as an ordinary person's, who would dare say this is not a tremendous blessing?

Cultivators endure hardship and grind their magic power, requiring talent, opportunity, and comprehension, climbing up step by step with great difficulty, yet a cultivator of a Fortune Dynasty reaches that height in a single leap.

How could this not stir the heart?

Therefore, although the Earth Immortal Path of Fortune Dynasties is said to be a heterodox side path, it must not be underestimated; it is likewise one of the paths of cultivation.

Now, something very interesting has appeared.

This deity named Yu Yong, having been reborn, has actually cultivated the Earth Immortal Path of Fortune Dynasties, currently sweeping across all directions, slaughtering deities, and establishing a dynasty belonging to the Human Dao.