After leaving Mount Buzhou, with its rich spiritual energy and naturally formed Daoist aura, Di Jiang headed west. For the first time, he truly understood what it meant to be utterly destitute.
The farther west he traveled, the more desolate the landscape became. The earth was parched and cracked, vegetation sparse, and the air filled with an indescribable sense of decay and deathly stillness. Spiritual energy was pitifully thin, and now and then he could sense faint, mournful cries rising from deep underground, caused by broken spiritual veins. Compared to Mount Buzhou, this place was the difference between a wilderness and a celestial paradise.
"Are these the wounds left by the Dragon-Han Calamity and the Dao-Devil War? The devastation is truly dreadful."
As Di Jiang walked among the barren mountains, he sighed inwardly. The pure bloodline of Pangu's True Lineage within him seemed to respond to some kind of pull. It began to grow faintly warm, stirring an instinctive urge to mend the damaged veins of the land, soothe its wounds, and restore the world formed from Pangu to wholeness and vitality!
A vast, weighty aura of the Earth Law circulated faintly around him. It seemed that, if he wished, he could call upon the power of the earth at any moment and try to reconnect the broken spiritual veins.
Di Jiang's steps slowed, and a flicker of temptation passed through his eyes. As an inheritor of Pangu's bloodline, seeing the world formed from Pangu's body so ruined stirred a powerful sense of responsibility and compassion in him.
"If I spend some time and magical power repairing the land as I go, perhaps I can restore some vitality to the Western Land!" The thought was deeply tempting.
But the next moment, Di Jiang drew a deep breath and forcibly suppressed the agitation in his bloodline and the impulse it stirred.
"No. The time isn't right."
Di Jiang shook his head, his gaze clearing and growing calm again. Repairing the land's veins—especially damage so extensive and fundamental across the Western Land—would be no easy task. It would surely consume enormous resources and might even undermine his foundations, delaying his cultivation.
Di Jiang knew the foremost purpose of his journey: to test the Great Formation of the Myriad Heavens! That was the key to greatly increasing his combat strength in the near term and his influence in the future. Strength was the foundation for establishing himself in the Primordial World and achieving all his ambitions.
Protecting the Primordial World also required sufficient power. If he lost sight of the bigger picture, delaying the improvement of his own strength to repair a small part of the land, then became unable to prevent a greater calamity in the future, that would be like refusing food for fear of choking—and a betrayal of Pangu's bloodline.
Besides, once Di Jiang's cultivation reached a higher level—say, the realm of a Primordial Origin Golden Immortal—and he had a deeper grasp of the laws, he might find a more efficient and thorough way to repair the West, perhaps even solving its problems at the source.
Having thought it through, Di Jiang no longer hesitated or deliberately slowed his pace to dwell on the devastation around him. He reined in the law aura unconsciously radiating from his body and temporarily buried his pity for the Western Land, along with his sense of responsibility, deep in his heart.
"For now, finding a source of sufficiently concentrated fiendish qi is what matters."
As far as the eye could see, the Western Land was nothing but desolation. Even a decent gathering place for living beings was rare, let alone scenery worth lingering over. Di Jiang had completely lost his interest in sightseeing.
"I'll go straight to the source and take a look."
At a thought, Di Jiang fully set the Space Law in motion. This time, he wasn't taking a leisurely stroll. He was truly traversing space!
His figure blurred in an instant, merging with the ever-present dimensions of space. With a single step, countless miles of mountains and rivers fell behind him. Space in the West seemed more fragile and unstable than in the east, but for Di Jiang, who wielded the Space Law, this only made his journey smoother.
After roughly one primordial epoch, Di Jiang sensed a mountain ahead. Though it was also in ruins, he could still feel the grandeur of its former foundations: the ancient ancestral vein of the West!
At the request of our readers, we are introducing an ad-free feature for VIP members.
Click to view
Before long, Di Jiang stood before the ruined Mount Sumeru and swept his divine sense carefully across what had once been the West's ancestral domain. Huge fissures and signs of collapse still scarred the mountain, bearing witness to the devastation of the explosion in ages past. But what made Di Jiang frown was that the concentration of fiendish qi here was practically nonexistent.
Di Jiang sensed the area carefully, then suddenly understood!
Mount Sumeru had once been the core of the West's ancestral vein. Even though its spiritual veins had been destroyed, the mountain itself still retained the source Daoist aura of a sacred mountain of the Primordial World and possessed the ability to purify itself.
What's more, many primordial epochs had passed since the Dragon-Han Calamity. The most violent and obvious fiendish qi had long since faded with time or been gradually worn down and buried by the laws of heaven and earth. What remained was mostly a deep-seated Dao wound of barrenness, not a vast amount of fiendish qi floating on the surface, ready to be drawn in directly.
This meager fiendish qi was a drop in the ocean compared to the enormous amount needed to test the Great Formation of the Myriad Heavens.
"It seems Mount Sumeru isn't an ideal place to gather it."
Di Jiang shook his head, somewhat disappointed. He glanced at the mountains, which still had a fair amount of life in them, and couldn't be bothered to search for Jieyin and Zhunti, who might or might not have taken form yet and could be somewhere in the area. He had little interest in those two future sages, at least for now.
His goal was clear and singular: to find sufficiently concentrated fiendish qi!
Di Jiang spread his divine sense once more, scanning the entire Western Land for the source of that utterly yin and turbid aura, where all filth and slaughter gathered.
Soon, his senses locked onto a direction: the farthest reaches of the West. From there came an aura of filth, blood, and slaughter—the final destination of all negative energy in the world, an endless sea of pollution formed from Pangu's navel: the Netherworld Blood Sea!
"Of course! The Blood Sea! It's where the Primordial World sends its waste, where all the fiendish qi, baleful energy, vengeful spirits, and foul blood since the world's creation gather. The fiendish qi there must be the densest and purest in the Primordial World!" A flash of light appeared in Di Jiang's eyes. He had found the perfect target.
Without the slightest hesitation, Di Jiang merged into space again and made an extremely long-range leap toward the Netherworld Blood Sea, deep in the West.
The Blood Sea lay at the border between the far western reaches of the Primordial World and the shadowed side of the land. It was hard for ordinary powerful beings to find, but locating it was no challenge for Di Jiang, who wielded space and could sense the veins of heaven and earth.
After a few more flashes, the scene before Di Jiang changed completely! An immense Blood Sea stretched beyond the horizon. Its waters were thick as syrup and dark red, nearly black. As they churned, they gave off a nauseating stench and a chill that sank into the bones.
Countless vengeful spirits and fierce ghosts wailed and struggled on the surface, unable to escape the Blood Sea's grasp. Fiendish qi so dense it seemed impossible to disperse, the aura of slaughter, and the power of filth intertwined, forming an absolute death zone that could twist and devour even light!
Just standing at the edge of the Blood Sea, the terrifying fiendish qi was enough to shatter the Primordial Spirit and corrode the body of any being below the Golden Immortal realm.
Yet when Di Jiang felt the overwhelming fiendish qi, he was delighted rather than alarmed!
"This is the place! There's enough fiendish qi here to let me test the Great Formation of the Myriad Heavens to my heart's content!"
Di Jiang stared intently at the most polluted place in the Primordial World, as though he were looking at an inexhaustible treasure trove. As for the Blood Sea's native inhabitant, Minghe, Di Jiang didn't take him seriously at all.
Before a Primordial Origin Golden Immortal and Ancestral Witch like him, Minghe at this point was no different in essence from a single drop of blood in the Blood Sea.
At the request of our readers, we are introducing an ad-free feature for VIP members.
Click to view
Before you continue