Backlash (Bonus Chapter for Monthly Votes)

In a daze, Fang Qing seemed to hear a wail steeped in pain and sorrow...

His Sea of Consciousness froze, leaving only a sheet of white light before his eyes.

The clear and turbid qi converged, seeming to form an invisible gate leading somewhere else. In the darkness, an indescribably colossal being writhed and wailed...

Countless ghosts and gods transformed into forms of great terror were likewise shrieking and sobbing...

The weeping of ghosts and gods answered the heavens and earth's shock!

,??9

Crash!

By the time Fang Qing came back to himself, he was already lying atop an enormous lotus leaf.

Lotus Blessed Land was deathly silent. The countless grave mounds and the white-bone Dharma manifestations that had blotted out the sky had all vanished without a trace... as though everything he had experienced before had merely been a dream of golden splendor.

He sat up and saw the corpse of a dead white bat beside him.

It was gaunt and skeletal, more than half the fur on its body having fallen away. Bone after bone jutted straight through its skin, as though it had simply aged to death...

"It wasn't a dream of golden splendor... It was real!"

"Lord of the Charnel Ground tried to seize my body with the emptiness of [Maiden Earth], but suffered backlash from the Dao Birth Pearl..."

As Fang Qing recalled the earlier fragments, unease crept into his heart. He feared that, the very next moment, a great skeletal hand might rip open Lotus Blessed Land, seize him in one grasp, and refine him in an instant...

But in only a moment, he understood.

"If another True Lord were making a move, then during the brief time I was unconscious, who knows how many would have already come..."

"Since nothing has happened