Heavenly Crescent Moon, the True Lord Descends

At the center of the heavens, the blood-soaked crescent moon still hung high. Dark-red moonlight, like congealed blood, slowly flowed across the cracked earth.

The wind still swept dry, cold sand and soil over shattered stones and withered grass, its monotonous wail drifting on. Yet at the instant Qi Baiyu and Su Yunniang's divine souls collapsed, there was neither earth-shaking upheaval nor thunderous force upon the barren mountain.

Only deathly silence remained.

The Dream Dao bore obsession with the body and carried delusion with the soul. Throughout their lives, its cultivators scattered their consciousness across ten thousand layers of dreams. While alive, they were like smoke and mist, with no root to be found.

Yet when the moment of Death of Dao truly arrived, the delusions built over centuries lost their host and instead returned the most fundamental "trace of existence" to heaven and earth.

When delusion reached its limit, it became no different from reality; when dreams shattered to their limit, they became even heavier than reality.

When ordinary cultivators fell, what scattered was spiritual energy, remnant souls, and fragments of their Dao foundations. Though precious, those things were ultimately objects circulating between heaven and earth. They returned to heaven and earth after death—nothing unusual.

Dream Dao cultivators were different. They expelled all the "delusions" that had steeped into their divine souls over hundreds of years.

They were not spiritual energy, but "thought," "obsession," and "dream"—the remnants of limitless dreams they had woven with their own hands, then destroyed with their own hands.

These things had never belonged to heaven and earth. They had been created from nothingness, and now that they had lost their hosts, they became foreign objects with nowhere in heaven and earth to settle.

The barren mountain began to change.

Gray-white mist seeped from the