"An unsettled heart, unbalanced emotions—even after entering the mortal world and reincarnating through it, breaking and accepting precepts again, how could one hope to behold the Tathagata?"
Sorrowful sighs seeped from the pits and cracks in the ground, vast and desolate, as though they had come from before the dawn of time. Before Meng Qi and the others, they seemed to conjure the image of a monk with a bitter expression, his back burdened by layer upon layer of invisible shackles.
One of the Buddha's ten foremost disciples, a Great Arhat—Venerable Ananda!
Within Ananda Pure Land in the Time-Space Shard, Meng Qi had followed Master Lu and Abbot Kong Wen through the seventh level to the mountaintop. There, they had seen a withered Golden Lotus Platform and a trace of Overlord's lingering aura, yet they had heard no sigh from Ananda and discovered nothing else. The difference now should lie in the distinction between the true body and the entity born from the Time-Space Shard.
"Amitabha Buddha. Even Venerable Ananda wavered. It seems that entering the mortal world, traversing the Sea of Suffering, and bearing the precepts in order to temper one's heart and illuminate one's own Buddha-nature is something only a person of great resolve and wisdom can accomplish." Xuan Bei pressed his palms together and sighed with feeling.
Does the unsettled emotion refer to the Demon Saintess? Does Ananda still harbor feelings for Fengxi? But the Demon Saintess's inheritor claimed that the Demon Saintess was born at the beginning of heaven and earth and had lived through multiple eras. How could she have suddenly fallen for Ananda at the end of the Primordial Age...? Yet the hatred in the message, "Kill the faithless and heartless," had endured through the ages and did not seem false... Meng Qi lowered