Before leaving, Yellow Dragon showered the Ginseng Fruit Tree with Sweet Dew for three days straight.
Finally, he took out a young Ginseng Fruit Tree grown from a side branch, a low-grade acquired specimen, and gave it to Qingfeng Mingyue. "Raise this tree to maturity, and you'll be able to eat Ginseng Fruit often."
Qingfeng Mingyue was both startled and delighted. At the thought of eating Ginseng Fruit whenever he liked, his mouth watered uncontrollably, and he thanked Yellow Dragon again and again.
Qingfeng suddenly called for Yellow Dragon to wait, then hurried to the rear courtyard. Before long, he returned carrying a jade box and handed it over.
"The master left instructions before entering seclusion. He said that if you wanted to leave, Senior Brother, we should give you this."
Yellow Dragon opened the box. Ten Ginseng Fruits lay quietly inside. He accepted them with a helpless smile and bowed toward the temple.
After saying goodbye to Qingfeng Mingyue, Yellow Dragon mounted an Auspicious Cloud and left Wuzhuang Temple.
The Primordial World stretched without end. Since he had come to Longevity Mountain, Yellow Dragon wanted to see just how barren the western region had become after the Demon Ancestor's rampage.
Longevity Mountain happened to stand on the border between the Primordial World's western and central regions.
Yet Yellow Dragon had traveled no more than hundreds of millions of miles west when he left Longevity Mountain's territory.
What appeared before him left even Yellow Dragon, who had seen countless strange regions of the Primordial World, struggling to believe his eyes.
A vast barrier of unknown height, perhaps tens of millions of miles tall, stretched across his path. Like a pane of transparent glass, it divided the two regions. Beyond it, all life had withered, earth, fire, wind, and water were in chaos, and the laws of the Great Dao were in disarray.
Tens of millions of miles farther into the barrier, an even more terrifying world, hellish in its desolation,
came into Yellow Dragon's view.
"So this is the true western Primordial World—a world utterly unlike the rest."
The sight sent a bone-deep chill through even Yellow Dragon's steadfast Dao Heart.
Not a trace of green remained. Black clouds formed from dense baleful energy and the resentment of billions of dead creatures shrouded the sky, hiding the sun, moon, and stars.
Wisps of black gas seeped from the ground, each making Yellow Dragon sense a hint of danger. It was the Demonic Energy left behind by Demon Ancestor Luohu.
The wind swept past, carrying strands of Demonic Energy that struck and ate away at the protective immortal light descending from the Pure World White Lotus above Yellow Dragon's head.
"Hiss, hiss."
"Hiss, hiss."
Watching the Demonic Energy dissipate, Yellow Dragon felt his taut nerves ease a little.
"Good thing I have the Pure World White Lotus. Otherwise, I'd be in trouble."
Extinction!
A dead land!
A true apocalypse! The Penglai Immortal Island destroyed by battle and the vast tract of land devastated by Hong Yun's self-detonation paled beside this place.
Yellow Dragon had thought the claim that Demon Ancestor Luohu's destruction of the Western Ancestral Vein had severed the west's Spirit Veins and wiped out all life was an exaggeration. With a Sage's supreme powers, restoring it should have been easy.
Only now, seeing it for himself, did he understand that "wiped out" meant utterly destroyed.
It had been severed at the root. The Great Dao did not reach this place, its laws did not manifest, and the entire western region seemed abandoned by the Heavenly Dao of the Primordial World.
"And I thought I could bring life back here. What a fantasy."
Yellow Dragon murmured to himself. He had imagined that restoring life to the Primordial World's west would earn enough merit for someone to become a Sage through merit, even without Primordial Violet Qi.
Looking back, he had been too young, too inexperienced, and too naive.
"Restoring the Primordial World's west might be harder than becoming a Sage."
At last, he understood why Jieyin and Zhunti, the two Sages born in the west, had never restored it even after attaining Sagehood. It was not that they would not, but that they could not.
"No wonder they keep going east for handouts, even after becoming Sages..."
The Primordial World's west had become a forgotten domain of despair and death unto itself.
Destruction this complete could only be undone by reopening heaven and earth and setting earth, wind, water, and fire in motion again...!
"Setting earth, wind, water, and fire in motion again...!" The thought struck Yellow Dragon like lightning piercing a heavy fog. At the end of the Investiture of the Gods, the Sages' battle had done just that: they remade the Primordial World, forming the Four Great Continents.
Western Ox-He Continent, held by the two western Sages, was better off than Southern Jambu Continent or Northern Kuru Continent, though it still could not compare to Eastern Victory Continent...!
Yellow Dragon shook his head and buried those thoughts deep. They were not matters he could concern himself with now.
He stood quietly for a long while, observing the land. In the end, he merely sighed, turned, and left.
This was no place to linger.
After crossing the barrier, tens of millions of miles wide, once more, Yellow Dragon headed straight back to Longevity Mountain's territory.
The moment he stepped into the life-filled Primordial World, a weight lifted from his mind. All things still lived here, and the laws of the Great Dao still held.
Rich, pure Innate Spiritual Energy enveloped him at once. He could not help taking a deep breath. The energy was sweet and clean, carrying the fragrance of Immortal Herbs.
"Even the air back home smells sweet!" Yellow Dragon recalled a saying.
He took another deep breath. "It really does smell sweet..."
After a brief pause, Yellow Dragon continued east.
He did not travel at full speed. Instead, he spread out his Primordial Spirit like a finely tuned radar, sweeping every place where spiritual energy was unusually dense.
It suddenly occurred to him that, apart from the five Innate Spiritual Veins of the five elements, he had transplanted all the other Spirit Veins from his Mysterious Yellow World to the place where Hong Yun had fallen.
The Mysterious Yellow World was empty now.
The Primordial World was vast and rich. Though it had endured several great calamities, its reserves remained deep.
Wherever Yellow Dragon passed, immense Spirit Veins and rich veins of precious metals and spiritual iron vanished from their original locations. So did the Immortal Herbs and Medicines growing in blessed mountains rarely visited by immortals and gods.
Whatever he found was fated to be his.
Before long, his Mysterious Yellow World had recovered, even surpassing its former state.
"The Primordial World has plenty to spare. Surely the Heavenly Dao won't blame me for transplanting a little more into the Mysterious Yellow World. I've made contributions, after all...!"
And so he flew and stopped, searching for spiritual treasures and contemplating the laws of heaven and earth. Several hundred years drifted by.
At some point, the scenery Yellow Dragon encountered began to change.
The once-beautiful mountains and ceaseless rivers began to bear enormous claw marks and bottomless craters. Mountains had had half their peaks forcibly erased, and blood had stained rivers dark red.
Now and then, gigantic beast bones covered in teeth marks lay scattered about. Only white bone remained, without a scrap of flesh.
Yellow Dragon picked up a leg bone a hundred zhang long, as hard as divine iron. Judging by the aura it gave off, he concluded that it had belonged to an ox in the Golden Immortal Realm.
Dao patterns covered it. Though much of its spiritual energy had faded, Yellow Dragon still saw it as excellent material for refining a treasure.
"With a little tempering and a few supplementary materials, I could make a fine Spirit Treasure from this. It would work better than some innate divine iron." Yellow Dragon savored the thought.
The farther east he went, the more common such sights became. In some places, though, life had returned. Without looking closely, one might think they had always been that way.
Plants grew ten percent more lush in soil soaked with blood than they did elsewhere.
Before you continue