Three Goat Temple had been built atop the mountain. It was now completely shrouded in dense gray fog, which wrapped around it airtight. Here, the fog had already thickened to its utmost limit.
The Taoist palaces, pavilions, and towers faintly revealed within the fog looked like a wonderland from afar.
Yet from the sky, what drew the most attention was not the so-called Three Goat Temple, but a huge black tree that appeared and vanished within the fog atop the cliff.
It was a massive tree without a single leaf. Its trunk was extraordinarily thick, while its densely tangled roots coiled across the earth and covered the entire ground. The tree stood dozens of meters tall, and its branches resembled countless ghostly hands reaching out. Countless vines grew from those ghost hands, like whips clutched by demons from hell.
Although Three Goat Temple had a long history, it was not some major Taoist sect. It merely had a certain reputation in the local area, though its incense offerings were still fairly abundant.
There were only a dozen or so Taoists within the temple. Aside from the abbot and his two disciples, most were professional Taoists, while the rest—the rest were temporary workers.
The Taoists all wore dark blue robes with straight collars, overlapping fronts, right-side closures, wide sleeves gathered at the cuffs, and white protective collars sewn around the necks. They wore Taoist caps and straw sandals. They were not as handsome as Fang Xiu, but they looked much more formal, carrying that genuine ancient charm.
At that moment, all the Taoists of Three Goat Temple surrounded the enormous black monster tree and frantically danced some strange dance. They used both hands and feet, looking completely mad, as though they had lost their minds while continuously muttering bizarre words.
Those words seemed impossible for human throats to produce. When they came from the Taoists' mouths, they sounded like blades scraping against their throats, grating out a chilling noise.
"Great Lord of Death, the destination of all things in death, the master of all life!"
"O great Lord of Death..."
"Ha ha ha ha!"
"I pray to you. I pray for your..."
Every person's eye sockets were sunken and darkened. Several had already begun foaming at the mouth, their eyes rolled back, yet they remained immersed in their own delight and madness.
They seemed to be holding some sort of frenzied ritual, summoning an existence from another world.
The strange black tree stood dozens of meters tall. Its huge trunk looked like the shadow of a devil, while its branches resembled undead claws reaching out from hell. Countless vines writhed like tentacles.
It could also be seen growing frantically at a speed visible to the naked eye. Everything here was permeated by a strange atmosphere. The air was filled with the terrifying wails of evil ghosts and aggrieved spirits, as though tens of thousands of people were screaming beside one's ears.
Even ordinary people could see the dense blackness within the earth—a mass that could not disperse, gradually devouring the ground and spreading outward. This horrifying scene was enough to drive anyone who witnessed it completely mad.
At that moment, a radiance descended from the heavens and landed atop the mountain. It was a figure dressed in a moon-white Taoist robe. His robe and silver-white hair moved without wind, while white light flowed down from his body, dragging out a long shadow like white flames burning behind him.
Light spread from his body, scattering the dense gray fog that blanketed the mountaintop. Like a shockwave of light, it cleared a vast area of open ground while sweeping the dozen or so Taoists inside.
The black monster fog and strange forces wrapped around them were dispersed at the same time. Five of the dozen Taoists fainted, while the remaining few finally broke free from the frenzied ritual controlling them.
The nearly ten remaining Taoists woke in an instant. They all collapsed onto the ground, their eyes gradually regaining clarity.
"How did we get to the mountaintop?"
"What happened? What is that?" An old Taoist who looked to be in his fifties and wore a Taoist crown was helped to his feet by a disciple fawning at his side. The moment he rose, however, the sight before him frightened him into a scream.
"Ah! Monster! Monster!" Several Taoists turned and ran for their lives, not even bothering with their unconscious fellow disciples.
"Monster! Run! Run!"
They had only just escaped the control, yet the sight before them scared the shit out of them. They scrambled up from the ground, rolling and crawling as though they had seen hell itself, then fled downhill without looking back.
A Taoist who had just awakened stared forward in a daze, bewildered by the shouting. Then he saw an utterly terrifying sight: a towering, exceptionally sturdy monster tree had spread countless vines and was closing in around them. Vines hundreds, even thousands of meters long blotted out the sky as they surrounded them.
He immediately collapsed to the ground again in terror. His entire body trembled, and liquid dripped from his crotch, filling the air with a pungent reek.
At the same time, they noticed a Taoist standing beneath the tree. They could not see his face, only his back.
That back did not look imposing, but he stood proudly atop the mountain like a drawn sword. Facing the black demon tree, which towered dozens of meters high and waved countless vines that blotted out the sky, he remained utterly unmoved.
The White-Robed Taoist turned around. His long sleeve swept across, and a streak of white radiance surged toward them, immediately sweeping the dozen people off the mountaintop. The force wrapped around them and gently carried them down, dropping them onto the mountainside hundreds of meters below.
At the same time, tens of thousands of vines wrapped around the White-Robed Taoist. The densely tangled vines formed a huge sphere that writhed without pause. The bizarre vines looked as though they were made from twisted flesh and blood, resembling an enormous boil.
"Buzz!"
But then a sword ray pierced through the vines. Radiance soared into the sky and erupted in an instant, illuminating the mountaintop in silver-white.
"Rumble!"
Then the Taoist leaped hundreds of meters through the air, guiding a bolt of thunder down from the heavens. It struck the mountaintop directly and blasted the entire summit flat.
At that moment, the ten Taoists who were still conscious on the mountainside below stared at the mountaintop in stunned silence. Even movie special effects could not make such a shocking scene look so real.
They had just been fleeing in terror, crawling and scrambling across the ground, but now they suddenly fell silent.
Yet the silence lasted less than a second. Every person then became wildly excited, waving their hands and feet as though their hearts had exploded, pointing incessantly at the mountaintop. Their faces flushed crimson as blood rushed to their heads.
"Founding Ancestor! Founding Ancestor has manifested!" The old Taoist in the Taoist crown trembled all over with excitement. He immediately fell forward and kowtowed, then raised his head and gazed at the White-Robed Taoist atop the mountain, tears streaming from his aged eyes.
"There really are immortals! This is an immortal!" A professional Taoist in his thirties had reluctantly memorized quite a few Taoist scriptures in the past, but he had absolutely never believed in gods or immortals. Now, he truly believed.
A group of temporary laborer Taoists followed him and knelt on the ground, yearning in their eyes. "So there really are gods and immortals?"
"If immortals really exist, then... can people really cultivate?"
"Damn! This is our Founding Ancestor. Then does that mean the cultivation methods hidden in all those scriptures at our temple are real too?"
"Can I, a temporary worker, become a permanent employee?" A young Taoist whose hat had fallen off wiped the dirt from his face. He suddenly felt that becoming a Taoist was actually a pretty good choice.
At that moment, all the Taoists of Three Goat Temple were shaken, and all sorts of thoughts surfaced in their minds.
By this time, the sky had begun to brighten. The park was surrounded by a large crowd of onlookers and nearby residents who had risen early. Even reporters from Wei Port City's newspapers and radio stations had hurried over, while more police and fire engines arrived at the various road entrances to Yellow Goat Mountain.
But before they could even get into position, fierce activity erupted from the mountaintop. The dense fog that had blanketed the entire summit was scattered in an instant. Then a beam of light shot into the sky, and its explosive sound, accompanied by a buzzing resonance, reached everyone's ears.
Everyone looked up at the mountain in confusion. They immediately saw the fog disperse, revealing the pavilions and towers atop the mountain, as well as the enormous monster tree dozens of meters tall.
Yet what drew their attention even more was the black monster tree, waving countless vines that stretched toward the sky. Their target was a white figure in the heavens, too indistinct to make out clearly.
"Monster! There's a monster!" shouted a child sitting on his father's shoulders, waving excitedly.
"There's a monster! No, wait, there's someone in the sky too! There's another person!" A reporter unloading equipment from a vehicle immediately raised his camera.
"What person? That's an immortal!"
"I told you this fog was strange. It was the work of a monster!" An old man who had watched the entire incident nearby yesterday excitedly clapped his hands and told everyone who had just arrived.
"An immortal! The immortal who entered the mountain earlier!" The family member of a missing person who had previously seen Fang Xiu enter the mountain pointed at the White-Robed Taoist and shouted repeatedly.
As the White-Robed Taoist leaped into the sky and guided a bolt of lightning down from above, blasting the mountaintop flat, the entire scene spiraled out of control.
"Tree demon? Divine Firmament Lightning Method? Five Thunders Rectification Method?" A bespectacled otaku held up his phone, but he froze in a daze. Even when the phone slipped from his hand and hit the ground, he failed to notice.
Tens of thousands of people below the mountain witnessed the scene. Unlike the blurry sight of the fire being extinguished in the darkness at the hotel before, it was already daylight now, and everyone—and every camera—could clearly see Fang Xiu's figure.
But Fang Xiu was locked in a fierce battle with Eramon's Tree and had no time whatsoever to care what the people below thought.
At that moment, Fang Xiu was in soul form, fused with Saint's Ring, and fully displaying all the power of Saintly Posture. He blasted Eramon's Tree's entire trunk apart. When the extraordinary artifact gifted by the Dominator of Time and Space from another spacetime unleashed its full power, it was even more terrifying than Fang Xiu had imagined.
But after destroying Eramon's Tree, Fang Xiu discovered that it had not been destroyed for good. It began growing continuously from the remains, rapidly regenerating. In the blink of an eye, half of it had grown back, and it was about to recover its complete form.
Fang Xiu immediately noticed the ink-black color within the earth. In Saintly Posture, he could instantly see the scene hidden within that blackness.
It was a black door. Within it, the mountains, earth, and lake shrouded in dense fog were reflected, like a projection of the real world.
It was a completely Illusory World—a world formed from the area occupied by Eramon's Tree's fog, an illusory soul world evolved from Gaia Consciousness.
Fang Xiu could see that beneath Eramon's Tree on the surface, another Eramon's Tree, like a reflection on water, was growing within that Illusory World.
"So that's its true body!"
Fang Xiu suddenly understood. His entire body fell from the sky and transformed into a streak of white light, passing through the distance between heaven and earth like lightning.
Taking advantage of the instant before the Necro Tree had fully recovered, he charged into the black door with the speed of thunder, breaking into that world belonging solely to death and souls.
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