After the baptism of that boundless Mythic Echo, the Mount Luofeng Daoist Arena, spanning tens of thousands of miles, had long since shed its initial desolation, giving way to a grim, meticulously ordered netherworld.
Above, dark clouds piled up as heavily as slabs of lead. Yet they were not lifeless; they held a certain ceaseless essence of reincarnation.
Across the landscape, tens of millions of departed souls came and went. Cleansed by the rule that delivered all living beings, they had shed the malice and obsessions of their lives and gathered into a vast current, each fulfilling a role within this realm.
Such scale and organization were enough to rival those small Celestial Circuit Realms with deep foundations, even among the countless worlds of the heavens.
When Everjoy Celestial Lord followed Zhou Yao into this world, her once-light steps grew unconsciously heavier.
She raised her head, her gaze sweeping across the endless plains before settling on the towering mountain at the farthest edge of her vision.
It was Mount Luofeng, ninety thousand ren high, like a heavy black sword thrust from the depths of the netherworld toward the sky, holding dominion over the netherworld's myriad paths for ten thousand miles around.
At its summit, the upturned eaves of the Six Heavens Palace gleamed coldly in the dim light. The authorities that governed the netherworld and decreed its laws intertwined there into a vast, invisible net.
Everjoy Celestial Lord's mind trembled violently. She had once contended with Ghost Assistants and other deities of the Netherworld Bureaucracy and knew just how imposing their authority was.
Yet the depth and completeness of the Six Heavens Palace's laws she sensed now far surpassed anything that half-crippled orthodox deity of the Netherworld Bureaucracy could match.
Every brick and tile, every blade of grass and tree,