Only when all living beings had been saved could one attain bodhi; until hell was empty, one would swear never to become a Buddha.
This was the vow made by Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva.
Setting aside the profound principles contained within it for now, in Black Myth, both this vow and Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva himself had already been heavily distorted by the rules.
Truthfully, Ksitigarbha's appearance this time had little to do with Black Spirit Mountain coming under a full-scale assault. The crucial trigger was Cheng Tian—or, more precisely, his use of the Ghost Gauntlet, which activated Mad Ksitigarbha's spawn mechanism while the Three-Party Allied Army was ravaging Lesser Western Heaven.
Under the normal process, after the monsters of Lesser Western Heaven were killed, aside from a few individuals whose spiritual essence and souls were so tightly fused that they remained in the mortal world as "wandering ghosts," the souls of all other living beings would enter hell. And since Lesser Western Heaven had been created as a close imitation of the Western Heaven, the souls here would basically be received by Ksitigarbha.
Those capable of forming Essence Spirits were ultimately few. The vast majority of souls entered hell normally and proceeded through reincarnation.
But the problem lay with Cheng Tian. From the instant the Great Expedition officially began, his Ghost Gauntlet had scarcely stopped, turning souls that should have descended into hell into Cheng Tian's reserve resources. As a result, the batch of souls that should have entered hell simply vanished.
When Cheng Tian followed the main force to attack the Black Heavenly Court, he had quieted down for a while, since the souls absorbed there were either under the jurisdiction of the underworld or had signed contracts long ago and would not enter reincarnation.
However, once the battle at the Black