Chapter 367: Traces of the Past

Having pinpointed the weakness, Du En unleashed his killing blow, beginning to slice layer by layer along the invisible seams between the evil, the demon, and the human that made up the great demon, the Greed Beast, before him.

"This is where your vital point lies. It looks like it's combined quite well, but in the end, it is merely another failed work of the True Monarch."

"True... Monarch...?"

The Greed Beast struggled bitterly in the wind, unable to escape.

However, it still persisted, because it did not believe that Du En truly lacked greed.

Before, it had clearly smelled the scent of greed; there was absolutely no mistake in that, which was why it hadn't suspected that what it had swallowed was merely a mass of mana.

Therefore, it was now waiting, waiting for the moment he would stop his hand out of greed, just as it had imagined, so that it could launch a desperate counterattack!

However, even so, hearing the term "True Monarch" at this moment made it involuntarily concerned.

Perhaps it was because it was being sliced apart and ravaged by the wind that some noisy, fragmented voices appeared in its mind—very untimely, yet appearing quite logically.

That was someone's obsession, emerging from beneath the rolling tides of greed.

Lou Miyue! That ambitious woman who plotted in the shadows, thinking she could usurp the gods—even though she ultimately failed and was instead devoured, becoming the final and most important puzzle piece in the birth of the Greed Beast, she still hadn't been completely digested like the others.

The previous dregs and the evil-shaped outlines all indicated that she actually still retained something.

Obsession!

"Why..."

"What?"

The Greed Beast did not understand.

"Why is it you and not me?"

The noise in its mind began to take shape, and it couldn't help but widen its eyes, for that was a dust-covered memory it hadn't actually tasted before.

Images emerged, set in a pitch-black night.

Lou Miyue was holding a torch, as always, bewitching those who were of use, yet upon turning around, she abruptly saw a similar face.

Lou Shuyue, her younger sister!

She was unable to control herself immediately, venting the jealousy and hatred in her heart.

"My sister, do you really think my experiences were such wonderful things?"

Lou Shuyue only sighed as she spoke, her tone filled with helplessness toward her country-bumpkin sister, appearing quite bored and subtly mocking, yet revealing a trace of deep powerlessness.

"... What do you mean? And why are you only at the early stage of Nascent Soul?"

Lou Miyue was silent for a moment, then calmed down.

She discovered something was wrong.

Although she had struggled constantly and used every scheme to climb to her current status and cultivation, reaching the perfection of the Nascent Soul stage.

But before, she had never dared to relax, and the jealousy and hatred in her heart had grown increasingly intense, believing that her sister must be stronger than her, likely having reached the limit of these underground lands—the level where the Lord of the Queguang Sect resided.

Spirit Severing!

However, upon truly seeing her sister again, she only saw an early-stage Nascent Soul.

"A clone? A projection? Or something else?"

"No need to be so hesitant. Given your jealousy of me, the moment I stood before you, you shouldn't have been able to mistake me, right, my sister?"

"... Why?"

There were many meanings: why was her cultivation only at this level, why had she appeared again, why had she appeared at this time, and why was it like this?

All these "whys" eventually converged into three words.

Lou Shuyue understood and smiled: "Perhaps the True Monarch felt that putting the two of us sisters together would be too uncontrollable, which is why it ended up like this."

One harbored dreams of supremacy, feeling from a young age that it was only natural for her to sit in that chair.

The other harbored jealousy and hatred, thinking from a young age only of killing her sister; if a god stood in her way, she would find a way to rebel and slay them.

Putting these two sisters together and letting them develop in these Queguang ancestral lands was indeed too uncontrollable and could easily affect the layout and plans here.

Therefore, taking the younger sister away early made the older sister even more insane.

"The True Monarch, is that... the High God?"

Lou Miyue asked, but received no response.

Because her sister only smiled and pointed behind her.

"The prey has secretly run away; aren't you going to chase it?"

"... As expected, I must eliminate you, you hateful sister!"

Without another word, the sisters were about to fight.

Then, Lou Shuyue decisively ran away.

She was only at the early stage of Nascent Soul, while her sister had gone mad and reached perfection; both were geniuses, so how could she possibly win? She had come to warn the other party, not to get beaten up by her!

"Hmph! Running away so fast... Wanting to stop me? It couldn't be out of kindness; it's more like being forced by necessity, so she had to seek potential allies and factions... True Monarch High God, is everything under your control?"

Lou Miyue muttered to herself, extinguished the torch, and immersed herself in the darkness.

The blood-red light deep in the tunnel behind her flickered faintly.

A moment later, she seemed to have made a decision.

"Chi-chi~ Ridiculous!"

At this very moment, the Greed Beast mocked her from within its heart.

Because until the very end, she hadn't escaped at all!

But then it was stunned, suddenly realizing that it, too, was merely an existence under control...

"Not right? You, the True Monarch above your head, who is that?"

"To have the spare time to ask this now, it seems you still have some strength left."

Du En said only this, making it shudder, feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

Sure enough, the next thing I heard was him saying: "Perfect. Just now, by borrowing this Impermanent Nether Wind, I have successfully cultivated another Daoist technique. I can use you to test it out."

Having said that, without giving the Greed Beast any room to speak, he had already unleashed the new Daoist technique. Killing Wind Turns to Sand! The so-called Killing Wind is a wind of stern slaughter, most ruthless and most cruel. It is dry and parched, capable of dehydrating, draining magic, and stripping away consciousness. Then, it causes the physical form to completely turn to sand. It is the embodiment of the principle of wind turning into sand, a Daoist technique that follows the Sandstorm Art.

At this moment, as it blew, the dry Killing Wind passed by, and even the fifth-tier spirit ore began to weather, with fine grains of sand drifting up. Once a single grain touched the Greed Beast, it would wither by a fraction, and its spirit and magic would accelerate their layering and detachment.

"Wait, wait, you..."

Before the Greed Beast could say anything more, it was already engulfed and submerged by the wind and sand rushing toward its face, while simultaneously, the Impermanent Wind pushed and fanned the flames from both inside and out.

Magic power, dried up, turned to sand and emerged.

Demon power, dried up, turned to sand and emerged.

Evil nature, also dried up, ground down and weathered bit by bit, and finally likewise turned to sand and emerged.

Initially, there was only one gust, blowing past the Greed Beast. Then, it was a full-scale sandstorm sweeping rapidly, filling that outpost camp and burying the many places deeper and further behind.

It, unsurprisingly, died.

Du En did not stop or reveal any flaws as it had imagined; he only thought about killing it completely so that it could be considered free of future trouble, allowing him to stop and think.

Of course, at present, it had not actually reached the point of thinking; he still had to finish the aftermath.

Using the Phoenix Crimson True Flame, revealed for the first time and of peerless power, he completely turned these sands, the ruins of that outpost camp, and even the more vast underground area into flying ash, leaving only a huge cavity with edges covered in crimson magma.

He completely erased that Greed Beast, temporarily contained the demon beasts here, burned that spatial fulcrum, and even the tentacles the Spirit Mother had reached over, as well as any parts that might exist in the dark, all were destroyed by the True Flame to the best of his ability.

Along the way, he also refined and melted away the impurities of the fifth-tier refined steel ore here, causing them to successfully shrink to one percent of their original size, solidifying into pieces of fifth-tier mid-grade spirit material, which he directly collected into his pouch to be used as materials.

"It should be dead through and through. Moreover, I have reduced as much as possible the other handiwork that True Monarch Huaiqing left on it... As for what comes next, first I will go find the Law-Storing Grotto that Lou Miyue mentioned, then go solve that spatial fulcrum in the north."

Confirming that he had finished cleaning up the loose ends, Du En then turned around and stepped away from here.

Returning to the Floating Stone Nether Abyss, he picked up the small stone statue again.

Then he leaped, stepping on the diluted Impermanent Nether Wind, and drifted gently down toward the bottom of the Nether Abyss.

In this place where there were clearly no Spirit Mother tentacles, his divine sense was finally cautiously released a little, mainly because the Nether Abyss was too deep and vast, and the environment restricted other senses.

And very soon, he found traces.

Or rather, it should be said that these were the few guides Lou Miyue had intentionally left behind! After she met her younger sister again, and later discovered the Law-Storing Grotto, she did not choose to destroy it and monopolize everything herself, but instead let it remain and left guides in obscure places.

What her specific thoughts were at that time, no one knows now.

Du En could only speculate that there were some other changes, otherwise, with Lou Miyue's performance as an ambitious person, it would be impossible for her to be so kind-hearted.

Following this guidance, he drifted all the way through the darkness and finally landed on a plank road on the abyss wall at a very deep position.

The plank road was ancient and dilapidated, but still walkable.

Following this plank road forward was the Law-Storing Grotto.

Or rather, an Ancient Cultivator's Cave Abode! It was such a standard cave abode layout, extremely similar to the cave abode gate Du En had in the Southern Pivot City.

He raised his hand and waved, and the Dragon-Severing Stone rumbled upward.

Gravel kept falling, appearing to be in disrepair, already on the verge of gradually turning into the dust of history.

It was not big inside either. Walking through a corridor, one reached the guest area. On the left and right sides were two passages leading to rooms with different functions. Du En glanced at them and saw rusted pill furnaces, extinguished earth-fire vents, and other related broken and useless conditions.

There was no danger. His pace did not stop, and he drove straight in, arriving at the critical cultivation meditation room.

Here, there was a bookshelf displaying many ancient books, but it was not full; one-third was empty. It should be that Lou Miyue had taken away all the books related to her schemes, or even destroyed them, to avoid others knowing the origins and loopholes of her techniques.

Even so, she had left the remaining two-thirds.

Du En flipped through them and found that most of this part was local gazetteers from many years ago. A past Queguang Star Realm thus came into view, which was also content that Lou Miyue felt was mostly nonsense.

"'Queguang' means to reject the light of others!"

"Even if my star is not the true pivot of the Ancestral Star, it can still have its own radiance; it will absolutely not be inferior to them!"

The confidence and high spirits of the Queguang ancestors leaped off the paper, making this ancient, dilapidated book, which had been flipped through countless times and would now easily shatter with the slightest external cause, seem to carry a sense of weight.

Du En read it seriously, looking at it word by word.

He read quickly, finishing all these past records until the very last one.

A journal.

"Thirty thousand years ago, the world suddenly fell into great chaos. The King Venerable was worried about this and ordered us to make plans early underground, beginning to gradually lead the Queguang Myriad Spirits to relocate."

King Venerable, a Venerable with a King title, should be the ruler of the Queguang Star Realm at that time.

Du En thought this and continued reading.

"Who would have expected that the action had just begun when it was affected by the disaster. The King Venerable broke through the void and left, and since then, his whereabouts have been unknown. Only we could hurry to lead the masses to turtle up and wait for a result."

At that time, the Path to Ascension had just been severed, and the struggle for hegemony among the Immortal Sects was still far off. Even the Myriad Spirits and Myriad Races were in a state of confusion, and they should have still been in an adaptation period. How could disaster have already sprouted?

Du En compared it with the information he knew and realized that the various anomalies of today might have to be traced back to that even more distant time. It was some major event that happened then that caused the subsequent Myriad Spirits to compete, until the Immortal Sects officially fought for hegemony ten thousand years ago, finally leading the situation to the state it was in now.

"Twenty-three thousand years ago, we struggled to survive, but in the end, we could no longer advance. Thus, our lifespan limit was approaching. With the technique taught by..., we planted the Dao in our clan, only hoping it could last long. Afterward, we risked going out to try to track the whereabouts of the King Venerable and find out why the disaster occurred!"

That generation's True Monarch, facing the limit of their lifespan, ultimately made such a choice.

Thus, the pattern of the Queguang Star's underground world completed its first cycle, ending the initial era.

The ancestors left behind a basic foundation and, using the technique of Planting the Dao, turned everyone into beings naturally possessing cultivation. That was to prevent them from regressing and losing their original appearance and form, falling into the ranks of demon beasts or branches of strange humans.

In short, it was for the correct inheritance of racial civilization!

"It wasn't done by the True Monarchs of our sect, which makes sense. It's just that looking at what the Queguang ancestors described, what kind of person or force taught this technique? Were there other people from strange stars active here at that time?"

He seemed concerned about this. Unfortunately, this part was damaged and not very natural. It might have been torn out by Lou Miyue. As for her purpose, she probably wanted to monopolize this information so that when she completed her plan and killed her way to the Upper Realm, she could seek allies to join forces with.

A single tree is hard to support, let alone facing the Immortal Sect True Monarchs who could completely control this realm?

It just added quite a bit of trouble for Du En.

"The key is, is this person or force an enemy or a friend? If it is actually the Five Great Immortal Sects, then it is quite subtle. But if there are truly others outside the Immortal Sects, then one can have some expectations. Hmm, I also have to hope that the other party hasn't been wiped out long ago. So, this variable is truly not small. Later, I have to ask Jueyi, or let him go investigate."

Du En thought calmly and continued reading.

The person writing the journal had clearly changed, and changed quite frequently. It no longer narrated in an orderly fashion, but was more like venting pent-up frustration, so it appeared messy and clearly had different time intervals.

(End of this chapter)