This wasn't like purifying a bit of lingering baleful energy in Phoenix Fall Valley. This was a genuine fissure in Heaven and Earth!
Ordinary divine abilities and Daoist arts—even those wielded by a Daluo Golden Immortal—could hardly force the Earth Vein to heal beneath the raging might of Heaven and Earth.
Unless...
Lu Changsheng's gaze slowly fell upon his own hands, which glimmered with a faint golden light.
Unless he used the purest, most versatile source of power in this world: Great Dao Merit!
As long as he personally took action and used his Great Dao Merit to put the frenzied Earth Qi in order and stitch the broken laws back together, the Earth Vein could rise from the dead.
But that meant facing a cruel reality.
He had to step outside.
He had to leave the protection of the Three Thousand Layer Mountain Protection Array and stand amid the howling winds and torrential rain, in the blood-soaked, murderous world of the Primordial Land!
"No... No way!"
Lu Changsheng instinctively shrank back and shook his head again and again.
"The sky's already collapsed out there! It's definitely those top-level bigwigs fighting for their lives! With my puny body, the moment I step outside, any random gale could blow me to ash!"
"I'm not going out! I'd rather die than go out!"
Lu Changsheng gritted his teeth, grabbed another handful of immortal stones, and slammed them into the array's control hub.
One year.
Ten years.
Twenty years.
This upheaval of Heaven and Earth lasted far longer than Lu Changsheng had imagined.
Over those twenty years, the several million immortal stones were devoured by the Mountain Protection Array like water flowing away.
The heaps of immortal stones that had once piled up like mountains had dwindled to a few tens of thousands, their spiritual light faintly flickering.
The cave abode had fallen into a pitiful state.
The Cowardly Immortal Vine had curled into a ball, wrapped itself tightly around the Red Sun Fruit Tree, and trembled. The White Jade Cloud Bed had long since been smashed to pieces by falling boulders.
"Crack..."
The last few tens of thousands of immortal stones ran out of spiritual energy and crumbled into pale gray powder across the ground.
At last, the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil at the heart of the array let out a groan of utter exhaustion.
The thousand remaining layers of the Pure Yang Killing Array began to shatter, one after another.
"There's no saving it..."
Lu Changsheng stared at the Earth Vein fissure, now completely severed and stinking of sulfur. His eyes were filled with deep helplessness.
The array was on the verge of collapsing completely.
The lair he'd always been so proud of was about to vanish.
If he didn't go out and mend the Earth Vein, he'd tumble into the endless currents of the void along with the mountain.
Either way, it seemed he was doomed.
"When the nest is overturned, no egg remains unbroken..."
Lu Changsheng gave a bitter laugh. This old, hackneyed saying from his previous life had become the truest description of his predicament.
He slowly stood and brushed the dust off his Daoist robe.
The despair in his gaze gradually gave way to the madness and resolve of a man driven to the brink.
"Since staying home means dying too..."
Lu Changsheng drew a deep breath and clenched his right hand.
"Hum!"
The Mysterious Yellow Shield appeared at once, releasing ten thousand zhang of Mysterious Yellow Qi to wrap him up from head to toe.
Then he slapped every Breath Concealment Talisman and defensive talisman he had onto himself in one go.
"Then I'll go out and fight for a sliver of life!"
"I'm not going out to meddle in karma, and I'm not going to get involved in the Tribulation of Measure."
Lu Changsheng walked up to the heavy stone door, now webbed with cracks, and placed both hands against it.
He frantically talked himself up in his mind.
"I'm just stepping out to fix the road in front of my own house!"
"Rumble!"
With a muffled, grating scrape, the cave abode's door, sealed for thirty thousand years, finally creaked slowly open.
A gale steeped in blood and the laws of destruction poured through the opening like a Primordial Land Fierce Beast off its leash.
"Hum!"
The Innate Merit Mysterious Yellow Shield above Lu Changsheng's head rang out in a long, clear note.
Ten thousand streams of dense Mysterious Yellow Qi cascaded down, holding back the gale—powerful enough to tear apart a True Immortal's body—three feet away.
Lu Changsheng drew a deep breath.
He slowly stepped forward with his right leg, crossing the threshold of the cave abode that had sheltered him for tens of thousands of years.
The sole of his shoe touched the scorched, shattered ground outside with a faint crunch.
He looked up.
The sky had lost its original colors, replaced by a suffocating dark red.
Across the heavens, terrifying fissures stretching for hundreds of millions of miles spread like a spiderweb. Chaos currents from beyond the Ninth Heaven poured through them,
carving bottomless chasms into the Primordial Land.
There was no sun or moon, no stars.
Only endless resentment and bloodlust, rolling and roaring through Heaven and Earth in clouds of blood visible to the naked eye.
"So this is the Primordial Land at the end of the Tribulation of Measure..."
Looking at the apocalyptic scene before him, Lu Changsheng's heart began to pound despite himself.
If the Western Main Spirit Vein hadn't been detonated and the resulting upheaval hadn't affected the Earth Qi beneath his Nameless Low Mountain, threatening to bring his lair down,
he swore he wouldn't have taken a single step outside the array—not even if he'd been bored enough to count every feather in the cave.
"Don't look at the sky. Looking up makes your knees weak. Keep your head down and get to work. Mend the Earth Vein, then go straight home."
Lu Changsheng forcibly tore his gaze away and repeated the Cowardly Path True Words to himself, calming his wildly pounding heart.
He didn't ride an Escape Light. Keeping low to the ground and shielded by the Mysterious Yellow Shield, he cautiously made his way toward the core region where he sensed the Earth Vein had been most severely severed.
The Illusion Array on the outer perimeter of the Three Thousand Layer Mountain Protection Array had completely collapsed, exposing the terrain that it had once concealed.
Less than two hundred li from the low mountain,
a terrifying fissure, ten thousand zhang deep and several hundred li wide, stretched across the land.
Dark red Earth Core Poison Fire surged from its depths, mixed with raging baleful energy. It was visibly eroding the already fragile roots of the Earth Vein.
"This is the place."
Lu Changsheng stood at the edge of the fissure and cautiously sensed it with his divine consciousness.
The damage was even worse than what he'd detected from inside the cave through the array's control hub.
The fissure had cut straight through the point where the underground water vein and Earth Qi beneath Nameless Low Mountain converged. If he left things alone,
his painstakingly built cave abode would sink into the Earth Core Poison Fire in less than ten years.
"Let's begin."
Lu Changsheng didn't dare waste a moment.
He sat cross-legged on the spot, his mind instantly sinking into his dantian.
Over the past thirty thousand years, he had continually refined the Mysterious Yellow Shield. He had also long since mastered the use of his own Great Dao Merit.
He knew that ordinary magical power was useless for mending a wound in Heaven and Earth torn open by the aftermath of a Tribulation of Measure.
Only the most fundamental power of merit could soothe the wounds in the Heavenly Dao's laws and make the repair work.
"Go."
Lu Changsheng formed an abstruse hand seal and gave a low shout.
A strand of golden light, brilliant beyond measure and utterly pure, slowly seeped from his fingertips.
The moment it appeared, the raging Tribulation Sha Qi around them recoiled as though it had met its natural enemy, forcibly clearing a tranquil space amid that desolate place.
The golden light became hundreds and thousands of fine threads. Guided by Lu Changsheng, they slipped into the bottomless fissure.
Mending Heaven and Earth.
Before you continue