In the vast Long River of history, there had once been an era in The Present World when the Divine Path flourished greatly.
In those days, all that was imagined could be seen. Cultivators created myths, and myths often shone into reality.
Lesser gods covered the land, and a hundred ghosts ran rampant.
Day and night were reversed; heaven and earth were thrown into confusion.
It had been an age of dazzling colors, but also one of chaos and bewilderment.
Many rules had been shattered, and people followed a logic of life utterly different from that of The Present World.
Though that era had ended by now, many of its myths had been passed down by word of mouth.
Naturally, myths were myths, passed from mouth to ear rather than carved into history or set down in books and scriptures, precisely because they could not be equated with reality.
For example, there had never been any hell, and reincarnation had never been as simple as the myths claimed.
There truly was a Netherworld, of course, but the Netherworld was merely a passage through reincarnation.
The six paths of rebirth, being reborn as an ox or horse in the Next Life, suffering too bitterly in this life and becoming a tree in the next—these had all been delusions of the age of the Divine Path, and in the end, none had become real.
The more profound one's cultivation, the more one understood—
Death was death. Death was the most absolute thing in this world.
After souls entered the Netherworld, their final fate was to return to nothingness. There were no Yamas, no Judges, no rewards for good and punishments for evil... Those were merely methods of Divine Path cultivators, no different from the puppets wielded by cultivators of The Present World.