The luopan’s golden light sectioned the dragon palace into nine parts, each with a divine vault at its center.
“This is….” Lu Yun suddenly halted his movements. He could discern the dragon palace’s true structure through the compass’ light—a giant feng shui layout, one not even he could recognize!
In fact, he couldn’t discern the gaps or weaknesses of this layout, even with the help of the compass.
“What the hell is this!” Shock creased his face. With a tight frown, he began frantically deducing the layout’s structure.
So the era three hundred million years ago was the golden age of feng shui! Such was the eventual conclusion he arrived at. This layout is wholly different from the palace’s architecture, and there are no signs of draconic involvement within it. Perhaps the palace wasn’t built by a dragon expert after all?
He suddenly registered the absence of the usual telltale signs associated with dragons. Although the era three hundred million years ago was vastly different from present age, dragons were powerful, long-lived creatures with unchanging habits.
As a proud race, they were wont to leave racial marks on their formations, combat arts, pills, formations, and treasures, so that everyone would know they were dragon-made. However, there were no such marks in the feng shui layout in front of him, a detail that ran entirely contrary to draconic custom.
“So the one who left the dragon palace behind wasn’t a dragon after all?” Lu Yun mumbled to himself.
“Of course it wasn’t a dragon.” A voice, alien yet familiar, reached his ears.
He didn’t turn back, nor was he surprised. The merging of the Cosmic Sea with the netherworld had reinforced his connection to hell and greatly increased his control over the world of the dead.
A pair of white eyes had appeared behind him. It was just the pair of eyes and no other body parts, as if someone had punched two holes in the void and lined their eyes up with the openings to look at the other side.
Lu Yun had seen similar eyes before. He’d once injured such a pair of eyes while perfecting his sword art in the depths of hell. Afterward, a similar pair had appeared after he’d fended off Donglin Taihuang inside the North Sea skydragon tomb.
And now, this was the third pair.
This time, however, the voice sounding from the owner of the eyes sounded somewhat familiar to his ears.
“I had thought you’d turned traitor, but it turns out it’s the world that has changed considerably.” The voice suddenly turned helpless and world-weary. “Immortal dao? What is the immortal dao? Ah… so everything’s long gone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust….”
Two lines of clear teardrops trickled down from the white eyes and landed on the ground on the other side of the void.
“You’re the existence within Qi Hai’s spirit.” Lu Yun took a deep breath, his tone unhurried as he continued, “So can you tell me just what is going on? The curse on the dragons and the divines, the great immortal war a hundred thousand years ago, the severing of the immortal dao, the withering of the Dao Flower…. Was everything the doing of your people?”
He fired off a quick barrage of questions in a single breath, voicing all of his accumulated doubts.
“Do you know why current monster spirits, dragons, divines and other races take on human form? Why divine spirits born from nature appear in the shape of a human?” The master of the eyes said after a long moment of silence.
“Because humans embody and are the shape of the dao?” Lu Yun answered subconsciously. Such was the mainstream assumption in the current world of immortals. Humans were the form of the grand dao, the shape most suited to cultivation. Therefore, all other races chose to take on human form.
“Humans embody the dao?” The owner of eyes burst out in hearty laughter. “The shape of the dao? Do you know how the character ‘dao’ is written?”
The energy of hell suddenly began flowing in a certain way and solidified in the air as the ‘dao’ character.
“This is the embodiment of dao! The form that all non-connate creatures ought to take!”
This ‘dao’ character was identical in appearance to the members of the Exalted Divine Tribe Lu Yun had previously seen. A human head and a serpentine tail!
“Due to humans shattering the dao, they are the masters of the world and sovereign over every other sentient race! What divines, dragons, phoenixes, and qilins? Preposterous, they all kneel in front of their human masters and cower in fear!
“Between heaven and earth, humans are the one and only truth! Human dao is the only grand dao revered by all living things! That is why the human form is the most noble form in the universe, why every creature transforms into a human, why they venerate humanity!
“Once upon a time, this world, this entire universe... even the netherworld beneath your feet belonged to mankind.” The voice grew more impassioned the longer it spoke, its booming tones reaching every corner of hell.
Those imprisoned inside the unknown void deep in the netherworld all quavered with apprehension, and the three giant coffins inside hell shone with dazzling light, resonating with the voice.
“But in the end, humans were dethroned,” Lu Yun observed.
“Yes.” A hint of sorrow flashed deep inside the eyes. “Humans were vanquished in an utter rout, a thorough defeat.”
“Is that why you people cast malicious curses against the dragons, phoenixes, qilins, turtles, and divines?” Lu Yun’s brow furrowed tightly.
“Hahahaha!” The eyes swiveled with the crazed laughter. “Cursed because they defeated the humans? No, because they are traitors, one and all!
“Humans once consecrated the dragons, phoenixes, qilins, and turtles as the four true spirits—auspicious symbols of good fortune and beings to be worshipped by all beneath the heavens! As for the divines… mankind elevated them to supreme beings second only to humanity.
“But in the final war, they turned on their human masters. They slaughtered the weak among humanity, the old, the women, and the children… they almost extinguished the human bloodline!
“We do not hate those who rose in rebellion. Human civilization was rotting from the inside and decline was inevitable. But we can neither forgive nor tolerate the existence of those sinners!”
Dragons, phoenixes, qilins, tortoises, and the divines were all traitors?
“Do you know?” The voice softened gradually. “Back when human civilization and dao ruled the world, these so-called true spirits were still ripping off pieces of raw flesh and making food out of blood inside their dens, and the divines were naught but nebulous spirits worshipped by primitive tribes in the remote corners of the world.
“The dragon and phoenix nests you visited are nothing more than primitive, backwater dumps!
“This dragon palace came into being as a result of a human king who killed nine Fiend Beasts rampaging through the lands. With the assistance of ten human grandmasters of the supplemental paths, he refined this palace for the dragons to guide them to the light of civilization.
“And yet, those same dragons butchered nearly all human descendents.”
Lu Yun fell silent. What was the appropriate response for a revelation like this? What should he say, how should he feel? Those who’d never lived through that era would never understand the deep-seated hatred burning within the voice.
“Then what about the severing of the immortal dao or those long-haired monsters?” he suddenly asked. “What about the poison curse inside Qing Han? Did you people also do that?”