Pillar of Heaven...
Li Dalong had never felt this way before. Ever since finding the ancestral tablet of the Old Ancestor, he had been a dutiful descendant blessed by his ancestors' grace. During the family's first twelve hundred-odd years of striving onward, he had still been a dutiful descendant basking in joy beneath the Old Ancestor's knee.
It seemed that even now, though the Old Ancestor had vanished for over a thousand years, there was only one true Pillar of Heaven in his heart—the Old Ancestor still.
That was why he had come.
At the edge where heaven and earth met, Li Dalong stood with one hand braced against the upright Death-Stilling Heavenly Coffin. Now that he truly stood at the birthplace of world civilization, amidst the glorious power forged from piece after piece of the Old Ancestor's remains, even under the watchful eyes of every powerhouse in the world, even surrounded by Eastern Yi Mahayana cultivators and facing the inexplicable killing intent of Wanrong, the Fire God, Li Dalong instead found an extravagant serenity upon this road of no return.
Gone were the choices of so-called "good and evil" from the Old Ancestor's past that he had heard from Longevity's perspective in the sky; gone too was the guilt he had carried for centuries and millennia over losing the Old Ancestor before the Human Emperor. There remained only the resolve to bring the Old Ancestor home—
To bring him home by any means.
Jiechang stood with his back to Li Dalong, his back to the mighty heaven and earth formed from the Seven Tribulations. Within that dark world hung the Blood Moon, while the vast River of the Dead resounded with waves that only an ocean could make. Tombstones stood one after another upon the river, ghostly shadows