Chapter 140: The Human Emperor Resolve!!

Chapter 140: The Human Emperor Resolve!!

Lu Yuan's ritual tools appeared one after another, and every single one was a supreme treasure capable of suppressing a sect's fortune.

Not to mention the Taoists from various schools who had just met Lu Yuan for the first time.

Even Celestial Master He Xun, who knew Lu Yuan inside and out, was utterly stupefied at this moment.

He knew Lu Yuan had tricks up his sleeve.

But were those tricks wildly excessive to the point of lawlessness?!

The things Lu Yuan had just used — the Purple Firmament Lightning-Struck Jujube Wood Sword, the All-Penetrating Golden Light Mirror, the Five Thunders Command Token, the Xuanming Summon Soul Banner — each one alone was enough to make the entire Taoist community tremble.

Yet Lu Yuan had produced them one after another, as casually as a wealthy merchant pulling coins from his sleeve at a market.

Like a nouveau riche showing off his collection.

Like shopping during a festival.

And this was precisely what was strange.

Every top-tier ritual tool had been used only once — a single strike, a single activation — and then immediately abandoned for the next.

This behavior, aside from being thoroughly wasteful, made no strategic sense whatsoever.

If you truly risked your life, if you truly sought that one-in-ten-thousand chance against an opponent like Shen Jizhou, you would pour everything into a single overwhelming assault.

You would not taste each weapon lightly, as if sampling dishes at a banquet.

The strangeness of it was not only apparent to Celestial Master He Xun. Every sharp-eyed old cultivator around the arena had also noticed.

From the ring platform, Shen Jizhou naturally had the clearest view of all.

He too found it strange, utterly unable to figure out what this junior was hiding up his sleeve.

However...

It didn't matter.

Before absolute power, any trick is futile.

For now, Shen Jizhou was more curious to see what other ritual tools Lu Yuan could produce. Just from what had already been shown, Shen Jizhou was very interested indeed.

If it weren't for the ongoing "Questioning Heaven Challenge," Shen Jizhou would have loved to bring Lu Yuan over immediately and examine him closely.

At this moment, Lu Yuan's new round of offense had already arrived.

He held the Purple Firmament Lightning-Struck Jujube Wood Sword in his right hand, still crackling with purple lightning, and in his left hand he supported the Nine Heavens Mystic Maiden Seven Star Lamp.

Lu Yuan's feet began performing the Yu Steps.

The ancient禹步 — the shamanic walking pattern said to have been created by the Great Yu himself when he surveyed and tamed the primordial floods. Each step landed as heavy as a mountain sinking into earth, yet light as a feather lifting from water. The steps seemed chaotic to the eye, without rhythm or pattern.

But each step produced a hollow resonance against the arena's stone surface, as if striking a drum at the heart of the earth.

Lu Yuan's lips moved:

"North Dipper Seven Sovereigns, Expel the demonic pose, set fire to the impure..."

The incantation fell in a low murmur, and from the vault of heaven above — that darkness which the Seven Star Lamp had called into being — seven formations condensed into reality, each one aligned with one of the seven stars of the Big Dipper, each one channeling power directly into the lamp in Lu Yuan's left hand.

Those were the Big Dipper constellation's sovereign formations.

The seven star sovereigns' divine authority poured simultaneously into the lamp's chamber.

The flame in the lamp, which had been no larger than a bean, suddenly surged.

The flame sprouted upward, tiny as a seed becoming a sapling becoming a great tree in the span of a single breath.

Conflagration rose, turning the surrounding darkness into blazing noon.

The light blazed into a seven-colored inferno shooting into the sky.

The golden giant net that had previously been cast was also stained with seven-colored radiance when struck by the cascading light. Each strand of the net began to burn, transforming into chains forged from seven-colored flames, descending to cover Shen Jizhou's head from every direction.

Everyone in the audience felt a blinding white before their eyes, unable to see anything.

That seven-colored divine fire was far too intense, too brilliant. The light stung eyes until tears streamed down faces.

At the core of the flames and golden light, Shen Jizhou's silhouette swayed in and out of visibility.

He still carried one hand behind his back.

Still used only the other hand to face the enemy.

But this time, his gaze had finally become a little more serious.

That single hand slowly traced a circle in front of his chest.

A perfect circle.

Within it, the yin-yang twin fish slowly surfaced, chasing one another in their eternal revolution —

A Taiji diagram.

He formed it with his own vital energy alone, no ritual tools, no talisman papers, no incantation.

The Taiji diagram spun, a perfect expression of the principle that within all motion there is stillness, and within all stillness there is motion.

The seven-colored flames collided with it. Sparks scattered in every direction, brilliant and violent, enough to blind anyone standing too close.

But the diagram absorbed the impact the way a deep lake absorbs a stone — with a ripple, then stillness.

And that burning chain-net, descending from above with all the force of seven heavenly bodies behind it, lightly tapped against the diagram's surface.

Precisely at its center point.

"Break."

One word, sketched casually into the air.

That single word was enough to doom the top-tier formations woven by seven star sovereigns. Cracks spread like a spiderweb through the burning net. The chains of seven-colored flame fractured, then dissolved into scattered light that rained harmlessly down across the arena platform.

On the floor below, silence reigned.

Everyone was blinded by what they had witnessed. Not by the light — but by the sheer impossibility of what Shen Jizhou had done.

Lu Yuan's displayed ritual tools had each been legendary. Each had carried the power of a supreme divine artifact. But Shen Jizhou alone, with one hand, had neutralized every single one without breaking a sweat.

This is, after all, the region beyond the Great Wall. This is why Shen Jizhou is called its highest mountain. Not because of reputation. Not because of age.

Because of this.

The seven-colored flame gradually died away.

Lu Yuan stood on the ring platform, breathing heavily, his face visibly pale.

Continuously invoking so many supreme ritual tools had drained nearly half of his true zhen already, and his spirit was exhausted to the marrow.

Yet his attacks, exerted with everything he had, had not caused Shen Jizhou the slightest injury.

By normal logic he should be losing momentum now, despair setting in.

But strangely, there was no fluctuation in Lu Yuan's expression.

No disappointment. No anger. Not even the slightest hint of discouragement.

Only a chilling calm.

He lifted his head slightly and looked at the unscathed Shen Jizhou.

Shen Jizhou still stood with his hands behind his back, looking back with mild interest.

"Anything else?" he asked.

Lu Yuan's mouth split into a grin as he raised his head.

"If you want to see more, of course I have more!"

His chest rose and fell with the effort of breathing. Then his eyes sharpened, and he reached once more into the system space.

This time, what he withdrew was unlike anything that had come before.

A pitch-black crack split open in the air before him, and from it emerged a chill unlike ordinary cold.

Not the cold of winter wind, not the cold of mountain ice.

Cold. The absolute cold of the Nine Nether realms, the cold of a place where the living have no business being.

Where the chill passed, the moisture in the air crystallized instantly into white frost. Temperature plummeted as suddenly as if the seasons had been forcibly reversed — everyone in the audience felt the air around them suddenly fall into midwinter, dropping so fast their breath became visible clouds before they could react.

Some clenched their teeth in fright.

The fissure opened completely.

From it unfurled a banner.

The banner was entirely snow-white.

On the banner, bizarre silver threads embroidered countless complex sigils that moved like living things. Within those sigils, one could vaguely see numerous tormented faces writhing and screaming, mouths open in silent agony — yet no sound escaped.

The banner pole was ink-black, neither metal nor wood. To the touch it felt like ten-thousand-year eternal ice.

At the top of the pole hung three gray-white bells that, on closer inspection, revealed themselves to be three human skulls miniaturized by secret alchemy, their eye sockets packed with silver light.

The banner's appearance created another heavenly anomaly.

The sky, which had briefly brightened from the Seven Star Lamp's conflagration, plunged back into profound darkness.

But this darkness was wholly different from before.

Within it, innumerable twisted wraiths drifted and wandered, gazing down upon the world with their hollow eye sockets. Those phantoms were numerous and bizarre — some humanoid, some beast-shaped — densely covering the vault of heaven as far as the eye could see.

It felt as if the Gate of the Nine Nether Realms had been forcibly torn open.

Ten thousand ghosts poured forth.

"What... what is this?"

Previously, no matter how strange a ritual tool Lu Yuan produced, some erudite old Taoist somewhere in the audience could call out its name. The sight of it was shocking, but at least it was nameable. At least it belonged to the known world.

But now, faced with this snow-white banner and its skull-bells and its screaming silver faces — they could not recognize it. No name came. No text reference surfaced. Nothing in anyone's accumulated knowledge matched what hung in Lu Yuan's hand.

On the ring platform, Shen Jizhou's brow moved slightly.

His eyes narrowed.

This... is wrong.

The aura of this banner was absolutely not something that belonged to the mortal cultivation world. And those things in the sky — those densely packed phantom shapes covering the heavens — were they being drawn by this banner?

Shen Jizhou could clearly sense the answer: yes. They were being summoned from the Nine Nether. Not merely attracted by spiritual resonance. Actively summoned, called forth by name, compelled to appear.

To rely on a single person's power to attract ten thousand ghost lords from the Nine Nether and command them — this should have been impossible for a one-star Celestial Master.

Shen Jizhou's mind raced.

But Lu Yuan had already moved.

He tightened his left hand around the banner pole, every knuckle trembling with the strain of holding a power that dwarfed his cultivation level many times over.

In the audience, an old cultivator suddenly shouted, his voice cracking:

"The North Emperor Manual! This is the North Emperor Manual to summon the divine generals under the North Emperor!!"

The North Emperor Manual was one of the most secret hand formulas of the Dao, reserved for Celestial Masters of the highest rank, requiring a genius cultivator of extraordinary comprehension to employ.

Performing it required profound meditative reverence for the entire pantheon of the North Emperor, and meticulous mastery over one's own true being. The slightest error in either the hand seals or the incantation would cause the divine power to backlash — and such a backlash would not merely injure. It would destroy the practitioner's foundation of the Dao entirely, leaving them a cripple for what remained of their life.

A mere one-star Celestial Master daring to forcibly perform the North Emperor Manual?

Was this madness, or was it something else?

Lu Yuan's face turned deathly white in an instant. His lips also went cyan. A trickle of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth — signs that his zhenran had already been overdrawn to the point of beginning to damage his source.

He rasped the incantation. Each word seemed to come from the Nine Nether itself, carrying endless chill and eerie echoes that resonated in the bones of everyone present rather than merely in their ears:

"North Emperor rescue decree, the ghost gate opens!"

"Xuanming summon souls, ten thousand ghosts heed the summon!"

"Six palace officials, investigators of the hall be called!"

"Nine Nether ten ranks, hasten to the altar!"

The moment the spells were spoken, the dense phantoms across the heavens suddenly erupted into motion.

Countless wandering souls struggled free of whatever had bound them to the sky and dove downward. Their shapes varied wildly — some showed half a skull, some were merely a pair of floating hands, some were distorted beyond any recognizable form. They poured from all directions, converging on the arena platform in a torrential flood.

Yet instinctively they feared the living with strong yang qi, and so their howls, uncontrolled as they were, carried a frequency that bypassed the ears entirely and struck directly at the spirit.

Those howls left the audience stunned.

Some saw visions of their early deaths. Some saw their loved ones fall. Others outright collapsed where they stood, overwhelmed by the concentrated yin energy.

"Hold the spirit platform steady!" An expert of high cultivation bellowed across the crowd. "Do not be taken by these shadow clouds!"

But it was too late. Dozens of young disciples were already clinging to consciousness by threads, barely holding on.

On the ring platform, ten thousand ghosts converged.

Those phantoms targeted the space around Lu Yuan — or more precisely, they targeted the direction he was pointing, which was Shen Jizhou.

Each shadow was not solid, yet they could erode everything solid they passed through. A torrent swept across the platform, and the hard green bricks silently crumbled into dust wherever the phantoms' trailing edges brushed. The flood slid through the void, leaving countless black marks of warped space in its wake.

This was the passage of undead troops.

This was ten thousand ghosts devouring all in their path.

Shen Jizhou finally raised his hand.

But this time, he did not draw a Taiji diagram. He did not form the Five Mountains True-Form Seal or the Three Purities configuration.

He simply brought his index and middle fingers together and gently tapped the void.

The fingertip landed with pinpoint accuracy on the center of the Xuanming Summon Soul Banner itself.

"Stabilize."

One word. Light as a feather, carrying no worldly breath behind it.

Yet it was law enacted as speech, like a decree issued from Heaven itself.

In an instant, those spreading phantom forms — those ten thousand ghosts that had just poured from the Nine Nether Gate — stopped.

They kept flapping their misshapen limbs. They kept opening their soundless mouths.

But they could not advance another inch.

Then the darkness above faded. Light returned. The ten thousand ghosts that had just poured forth, filling the sky from horizon to horizon — all vanished, as if they had never existed.

"Crack."

A barely audible sound.

That Xuanming Summon Soul Banner — the snow-white fabric, the silver-thread sigils, the screaming faces, the skull-bells — fractured down its center as if struck by an invisible blade.

"Phut—"

Lu Yuan felt as if struck by a heavy blow directly to his chest. The backlash from the banner's fracture traveled the length of his arm and into his torso.

Blood touched the banner's fabric as it fell.

At that moment, Lu Yuan finally felt something in his chest that had not been there before.

The ritual tools he had used before — the sword, the mirror, the token, the banner — each had been powerful. Each had been legendary. Each had been more than enough to end the careers of cultivators ten times his level.

But this time, Shen Jizhou had not even formed a full seal.

One finger. One word.

And just broken it.

Lu Yuan's heart sank through the floor of the arena.

He finally began to understand the true meaning of Shen Jizhou's earlier words.

About sitting in a well and looking up at the sky. About shallowness of vision. About the gap between a firefly and the moon.

This man...

Really was unfairly strong.

Was he even human?

On the ring platform, Shen Jizhou's voice sounded again, calm as if commenting on a scroll painting in a quiet study.

"The items are fine," he said, glancing at the destroyed banner. Then he looked at Lu Yuan with an expression that carried, beneath its composure, something approaching genuine appreciation mixed with genuine puzzlement.

"To summon the undead without sufficient cultivation to anchor them — you force this so recklessly." He paused. "The real hundred-thousand-strong formation of the North Emperor Manual requires a Celestial Master of the fourth star at minimum to anchor the gate properly. What you just did was hold open a dam with your bare hands."

Lu Yuan drew breath in great gasps.

But in his eyes — behind the exhaustion, behind the blood, behind the pale death-color of his face — something still burned.

He casually raised a hand.

Shen Jizhou saw the motion and raised an eyebrow slightly.

"Don't know how to use it properly?" he said, with what might have been, from a certain angle, a very slight note of dry humor.

He chuckled twice, a brief sound.

"Then what about this one?"

Before his words finished, Lu Yuan reached into the system space one final time.

This time, the fissure that opened in the air before him was different from all the others.

No cold, no thunder, no yin darkness.

Instead, a supreme presence issued forth.

A sovereignty. The kind of sovereignty that precedes all others — not the sovereignty of a sect, or a lineage, or a divine court. The sovereignty of human civilization itself, at its most primordial and absolute.

A sovereignty as if to dominate the world.

Within the crack, a jade seal appeared.

Immaculate and lustrous like the finest mutton-fat jade. Its knob was carved as a coiling dragon — a five-clawed golden dragon perched upon it, its dragon eyes wide open, gazing down upon all beneath it with majestic, unhurried authority.

The seal face was square, engraved with eight ancient seal-script characters.

Those characters were so archaic that the old cultivators steeped in talismanic script for centuries in the audience could not decipher a single one of them.

With the jade seal's manifesting, heaven and earth paled.

Not light, nor darkness.

A true deprivation of color itself.

The clouds in the sky turned into lifeless gray-white. The platform bricks became lifeless gray-white. The garments and faces of everyone in the audience were drained to lifeless gray-white.

The entire world had its colors forcibly pulled away, leaving only the pure, immaculate white of that jade seal and the blazing golden light emanating from its eight ancient characters.

The pressure from it was terrifying to the extreme. It did not press on the body — it pressed on the bloodline, on the soul. A primal awe and submission that arose not from reason but from the deepest layers of what it meant to be alive facing something that transcended life entirely.

Everyone in the audience felt it simultaneously — that instinct to kneel, to lower the head, to submit without knowing why.

On the ring platform, Shen Jizhou's pupils suddenly contracted.

His feet were rooted to the earth as if they had taken hold of the stone itself. His composure — that millennia-unchanging composure — showed, for the first time, something it had never shown before.

He stared hard at the jade seal in Lu Yuan's hand.

"What on earth is this—"

Lu Yuan did not answer.

He could not answer.

Not from unwillingness. From physical incapacity. Now, to invoke the Xuanming summon had cost him nearly everything. His entire body had been pushed past its limit long ago. He was standing on the arena platform through nothing but will alone.

Lu Yuan poured the last of his strength into the seal formation.

That formation was called the Human Emperor Resolve — a hand posture recorded in the most ancient texts as the gesture of the people's sovereign, the posture of one who rules all under heaven.

He clasped his hands in salute, thumbs tucked in the specific way that no courtier or general had ever been permitted to replicate — only the sovereign himself.

He used every ounce of breath remaining in his body. What emerged from his throat was hoarse, broken, barely a voice at all. Yet it carried a quality that had nothing to do with volume — a quality of absolute, unshakeable certainty:

"Heaven and Earth, Human Emperor rescue decree!"

"Human Emperor Seal present, all laws return to the root!"

After the chant, the Human Emperor Seal trembled violently in the air before him.

A hum — a subtle sound, yet it penetrated to the soul of every person present, like the first thunderclap at the opening of heaven and earth when Pangu split the void.

On the seal's face, the eight golden ancient characters erupted.

Not into light.

Into billions of beams of golden radiance that rewrote the rules of the space they touched.

Wherever the golden light passed, the principles of heaven and earth were forcibly reshaped. The formations that governed how things fell, how energy moved, how the strong overcame the weak — all of it was overwritten, for the duration of that light's passing, by a single higher principle.

The principle of the Human Emperor.

Within the golden radiance, Shen Jizhou's figure finally moved.

Lu Yuan's bloodshot eyes watched.

This man — this impossible, inhuman man who had deflected every legendary artifact with one hand tied behind his back —

Actually moved.

Excellent.

Then let us see, Lu Yuan thought, as the golden light swept toward Shen Jizhou and the two of them entered the final collision that would decide everything.

Let us see if even you can stand unmoved against this.