Turmoil in the Netherworld

Jinhua Mountain.

Auspicious rosy light shone as Qingyang hung in the sky.

Shimmering light draped the eighteen-hundred-li mountain range like a curtain of water. Within it, spiritual energy rose and churned into mist, while a vast sea of clouds rolled like an ocean in the heavens.

Immortal palaces and divine halls rose in tiers among the peaks, while white cranes and bright-plumed birds wheeled overhead.

People in Lingyou Prefecture said Jinhua Mountain was a place of clear skies and spiritual earth, blessed with beauty and fit for immortals.

Most who came and went were true cultivators in blue or black robes. They either rode auspicious clouds into the azure heavens or traveled through the sky in Cloud Carriages.

Ever since Jinhua Mountain had held that magnificent Luotian Grand Offering, its renown in Lingyou Prefecture and across the southeastern Mountain Sea Realm had grown more extraordinary still.

More than three months had passed since the offering, yet cultivators and common folk nearby still spoke of it with relish.

That gathering had reached across tens of millions of li and touched hundreds of millions of lives. It had not only shaken the mortal world; legend said it had stirred the boundless Netherworld and startled the distant starry heavens, all because of a Grand Unity Golden Immortal who had vanished from the Mountain Sea Realm for untold ages.

After investing gods on Heaven's behalf, that Grand Unity Golden Immortal had returned to Heaven Beyond Heaven. The Immortal Deities he had appointed, however, remained and began investing ghost-gods in turn.

Jinhua Mountain now had more than two hundred thousand cultivators. The vast majority were in the Foundation Establishment Realm or Purple Mansion Realm, but it also had over ten thousand True Persons of the Golden Core Realm and several of the Nascent Soul Realm.