Arrival at the Battlefield, the Little Guy Was So Excited

The Three Pure Ones rode auspicious clouds at breakneck speed.

They all understood that Taishang Laojun's decision to bring Lin Shen out was by no means a whim. The little disciple had been unsettled by the Calamity Fiend Qi; blocking it was worse than guiding it. Letting him see and experience it firsthand might help untangle the knot in his heart.

On a deeper level, Lin Shen was an Innate Spiritual Root, born of the same source as heaven and earth. His very existence was a kind of "Dao." Exposing him to this Calamity Fiend Qi might trigger changes none of them could foresee.

This was both training and a gamble.

They were betting that the three brothers could protect the greatest variable in the primordial world.

The auspicious clouds passed through endless space, swiftly leaving the spirit-energy-rich eastern continent and entering the western lands, where fiend qi filled the air.

The spiritual energy in the air grew thin and violent. The ground was no longer lush and green, but a dark red as though soaked in blood. The mountains stood bare, the rivers had dried up, and everywhere exuded desolation and deathly stillness.

"Eeya?"

Cradled in Tongtian Jiaozhu's arms, Lin Shen blinked his big eyes curiously.

He stretched out his little nose and took a deep sniff of the air.

The "rusty" smell that had made him feel stifled and irritated back on Kunlun Mountain was a thousand times stronger here. Yet strangely, once he was truly immersed in that aura, the oppressive feeling disappeared.

It was replaced by something novel, carrying a faint thrill.

It was like... like someone accustomed to bland food suddenly catching the scent of chili peppers.

Choking, yet somehow... appetizing?

The worried expression vanished from Lin Shen's little face, replaced by barely concealed excitement. He wriggled his tiny body, pointed toward the direction where the fiend qi was densest, and urged them on with repeated cries of "Eeya, eeya!"

"Beloved Disciple, what is it?" Tongtian Jiaozhu lowered his head, utterly puzzled.

He had looked as though the sky were falling back on Kunlun Mountain. Why was he happy now that they had arrived in this godforsaken place?

"Looking at him, he seems to have found something fun." Yuanshi Tianzun frowned slightly, equally perplexed. He reached out and checked Lin Shen's forehead, circulating his mana gently through him to confirm that his little disciple was unharmed.

Taishang Laojun stroked his long beard, his profound gaze fixed on the distant horizon. There, blood-red light and black qi entwined as they soared into the sky, accompanied by the faint thunderous roar of colliding laws.

"It seems we have arrived."

The auspicious clouds slowly came to a halt atop an unremarkable mountain peak. The Three Pure Ones concealed themselves with mana, and from here, they could take in the entire battlefield of Blood Maple Plain, tens of thousands of miles away.

The sight before him left Lin Shen completely dumbfounded.

Though he possessed an adult soul, he had only seen warfare in movies in his previous life. Compared with the epic battle before him, where gods and demons ran rampant, those movie special effects were nothing more than children playing house.

Colossal dragons tens of thousands of feet long churned through the skies, breathing dragon fire that split the earth and sent magma surging forth. Phoenixes with wings that blotted out the sun soared through the heavens, their Southern Bright Leaving Fire burning everything to ash and warping even space itself.

A Dragon Clan expert clad in golden dragon-scale armor and wielding a halberd swept his weapon once, cutting thousands of birds in half at the waist. Blood rained from the sky.

"Ao Lie! How dare you slaughter my Phoenix Clan warriors!"

A breathtakingly beautiful female immortal of the Phoenix Clan let out a piercing shriek. Seven-Colored Divine Light flashed in her hand, transforming into a rainbow ribbon that instantly wrapped around the halberd.

"Feng Yao! Today will be the day you fall!" Ao Lie roared. The two instantly clashed, divine abilities and magical treasures crashing against one another. Every collision split the void with spiderweb-like cracks.

The ground below was covered in corpses, with blood flowing like rivers.

A giant crab the size of a house had just severed a blue luan's wings with its enormous claws. Before it could celebrate, a massive foot descending from the sky crushed it into pulp. The owner of that foot was a qilin a thousand feet tall, covered from head to toe in earth-yellow scales.

Yet the qilin did not escape unscathed either. It had barely crushed the giant crab when dozens of water-barrel-thick tentacles burst from the ground and wrapped tightly around it. They belonged to experts of the East Sea Octopus Clan.

Countless living beings fell across this land. Their unwillingness, resentment, fury, and terror at the moment of death transformed into incomparably pure fiend qi and karmic force, rising into the heavens like billowing smoke.

That black fiend qi made both Yuanshi Tianzun and Tongtian Jiaozhu feel deeply uncomfortable. The qi of calamity was especially corrosive to one's cultivation; cultivators all avoided it like the plague.

But Lin Shen, held in their arms, reacted completely differently.

As he watched the fiend qi surge into the sky, his eyes grew brighter and brighter. His little mouth fell open unconsciously, and a glistening thread of drool even trickled down.

"Eeya! Eeya!"

He stretched out his chubby little hand and pointed at the battlefield, then turned to look at his three Masters, his small face full of yearning.

He looked like a starving ghost who had spotted a table full of delicacies.

"This..." Tongtian Jiaozhu was completely bewildered. "Big Brother, Second Brother, look at him. He... he seems to want to eat that?"

Yuanshi Tianzun's face darkened. "Nonsense! That is Calamity Fiend Qi, a highly toxic thing. How could it possibly be eaten?"

He believed that his little disciple had either been frightened or was simply curious by nature about such destructive power.

"Lin Shen, don't be afraid. Master is here. Those things cannot hurt you." Yuanshi Tianzun comforted him softly.

But Lin Shen could not hear a word of it.

There was only one thought in his mind: I want to eat! I really want to eat!

That black smoke smelled so "delicious"!

Seeing that his three Masters completely failed to understand him made him frantic.

How can I make them understand that I want to eat something?

Right!

An idea flashed through his mind, and he remembered his new divine ability, which worked sometimes and failed at others—Words Manifest Reality!

Last time, he had said "grow" to the character "forest," and it had turned into a grove of trees.

Then this time, if he said "eat" to that black smoke, could he eat it into his mouth?

Once that thought arose, he could no longer suppress it.

Lin Shen gathered all his strength and poked his little head out from Yuanshi Tianzun's arms.

His round eyes locked onto the most concentrated cloud of fiend qi above the battlefield, formed from the deaths of tens of thousands of living beings.

Then he opened his little mouth and, using every ounce of strength in his body, uttered a single word in a babyish yet incomparably clear voice.

"Eat!"