Deathly silence engulfed the entire continent.
Billions of living beings raised their heads, their souls seemingly caught in the grip of an invisible giant hand. Merely gazing at the heavens exhausted all their courage, leaving only the insignificance and terror of ants looking up at a sea of stars!
The Divine List! An existence above even the Immortal List!
There were no names upon it, only three terrifying manifestations powerful enough to make true immortals bow their heads:
A thirty-six-petaled World-Cleansing Ice Lotus slowly unfurled. Its petals were condensed from an eternity of cold, radiating an everlasting deathly chill that could seal galaxies in ice and freeze time and space!
Even this mere manifestation of its Dao aura sent temperatures plunging across the continent's four regions. Countless rivers, lakes, and seas froze instantly. Low-level cultivators felt as though they had fallen into an icy hell, their souls nearly torn apart by the cold piercing through the void!
Only when a vast starry sky descended and enveloped the ice lotus did the cultivators begin to recover from their frozen stupor.
On closer inspection, they realized it was not a real starry sky, but a Zhou Tian Star-Dipper Fate Formation Disc woven from countless stellar trajectories! The Formation Disc ceaselessly calculated, the sun and moon cycling within it, the karma of all living beings arising, perishing, rising, and falling. It exuded a profound aura of calculating the fate of every creature and holding destiny in its grasp.
As they gazed upon it, many cultivators screamed. They seemed to see scene after scene of their own past and future, like a play performed by ants, and an overwhelming terror of being ruled by "fate" welled up within them!
Suddenly! A blazing Radiant Sun savagely tore through the starry sky, its sovereign majesty resplendent!
It burned away all evil and suppressed the azure heavens through Ten Thousand Ages! Even as a mere phantom, it made all things bow and all laws retreat!
Its transcendent majesty instinctively compelled all living things to prostrate themselves in worship!
Across the heavens, three terrifying Dao auras intertwined into a strange, magnificent spectacle.
The blazing sun hung high, ruling the starry sky alone; the Formation Disc circled it, calculating the lives of all beings; the ice lotus drifted and revolved within its frozen prison!
The three manifestations had already faintly established their order of precedence!
"Wh-what list is this? Why are there no names, only these world-shaking manifestations?"
"An ice lotus, a Formation Disc, a great sun... could these be Primordial Deities manifesting their divinity?"
"But doesn't the Azure Cloud List only record young prodigies with immortal ages below three hundred?!"
Ordinary cultivators paled in horror, their discussions erupting everywhere. Even the knowledgeable elders of the great sects furrowed their brows, unable to fathom the mysteries hidden within this "Divine List" that had appeared so abruptly.
Yet within the inner sanctums of those powers whose legacies stretched back to antiquity, an entirely different scene unfolded.
The rulers and ancestors of the Four Ancient Clans and the Three Sects and Two Dynasties, collectively known as the "Nine Heavens Divine Palaces," all rose in horror, their minds violently shaken!
"The thirty-six-petaled World-Cleansing Ice Lotus... it's that 'Ice Lord' sleeping deep within the North Pole Divine Palace! She... is she truly going to use the fortune of this era to 'return'?!" An ancestor of the Jiang Clan who had secluded himself until death cried out involuntarily. He was already practically a living fossil of the Jiang Clan.
"The Zhou Tian Star-Dipper Fate Disc... the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion! No wonder none of this generation's Dao scions made it onto the Immortal List. So this was where their hidden reserves and schemes lay! Are they trying to steal this world's fortune to help that 'Star Seer' advance another step?!" Feng Ling'er, the Feng Clan's holy maiden, widened her beautiful eyes and covered her red lips.
"This blazing Radiant Sun... could it be the one recorded in our clan's secret canon?! Yue'er, go ask the ancestor to emerge from seclusion immediately!" the Ji Clan's patriarch ordered sharply, his face stricken with horror.
They understood! The three manifestations on this list represented no young prodigies of the present era, but three ancient beings who had long stood at the pinnacle of this world, and might even have transcended the past.
Through heaven-defying means, they had anchored the symbols of their own origins within the fortune of this era, forcing their way into the contest for the Nine Heavens Azure Cloud List! This was a heaven-defying act of stealing the creative power of heaven and earth and interfering with the course of an epoch!
Had the Azure Cloud List not revealed its divine manifestations, who knew how many people would still have been kept in the dark?
Whatever they sought behind all this sent a bone-deep chill through everyone who knew the truth!
Just as every faction reeled in terror and speculation ran wild-
The Eastern Region, the Yun Clan, before Perching Phoenix Hall.
Yun Huang stood with his hands behind his back, his black robes gleaming with a cold, dark-golden sheen beneath the Divine List's radiance. He raised his head toward the great sun hanging high in the void, and bone-chilling anger flashed through his pale-golden eyes!
In an instant, high above the nine heavens, the blazing Radiant Sun that had been incomparably domineering, forcing every law to retreat, flickered violently. Then an invisible giant hand forcibly erased it from the list!
The starry curtain was instantly left empty! Only a scorching, warped scar in space remained to prove it had ever existed.
The abrupt change cut short the uproar across the entire continent, plunging it into an even deeper deathly silence!
Yun Huang had actually erased his own manifestation from the Divine List?!
At the same time, beyond the Three Thousand Realms, within an ancient palace built from endless stars and fate.
A man wearing a robe of the Star River, his eyes covered with white gauze, sat at the center of billions of Star Tracks. His fingertips lightly plucked at the star disc floating before him, and countless stars shifted with them.
As though sensing something, he turned his blindfold, embroidered with a celestial star formation, toward the Divine List. His "gaze" seemed to pierce through boundless space.
An ethereal sigh, like the flowing of the Star River, rang out. "After enduring countless tribulations, that one's temper is still as fiery as ever... very well."
Hum- on the Divine List, the manifestation of the "Zhou Tian Star-Dipper Fate Disc" likewise dissolved into specks of silver starlight, scattering down upon the mortal world.
In the polar reaches of the Northern Border, beneath ten thousand fathoms of profound ice.
The lashes of the "perfect" maiden sealed within eternal profound ice trembled like ice butterflies.
A silent thought emanated from her.
The petals of the "thirty-six-petaled World-Cleansing Ice Lotus" closed, drawing its utmost cold within. As though sinking into a deep pool, it calmly vanished.
They had appeared abruptly, and withdrew even faster.
Within mere breaths, the three forbidden manifestations that had struck terror even into the Elder Aristocratic Clans disappeared one after another. Yun Huang's fury came first, and the other two supreme beings tacitly withdrew in its wake!
Upon the empty list, only the solitary word "Divine" remained, as though the spectacle that had just shaken the three worlds had been nothing more than a grand dream shared by all living beings.
Yet the lingering supreme pressure, towering above every law, told everyone unmistakably-all of it had been real!
The entire continent erupted into unprecedented uproar and speculation. The mysteries and shock brought by the Divine List's brief appearance far surpassed those of the Immortal List before it!
Before Perching Phoenix Hall, Yun Qing looked up at the empty Divine List and drew in a sharp breath!
An immense sense of absurdity engulfed him. His Double Pupils filled with unprecedented shock and dread.
The Yun Clan had marshaled the strength of its entire clan to receive a Reincarnated Immortal Emperor-already a heaven-defying feat that shook the world! He had never imagined there were two more such mad beings!
"...The Heavenly Secrets Pavilion and the North Pole Ice God Palace actually dared to attempt something this insane too!"
Moreover, the Nine Heavens Azure Cloud List only recorded those whose immortal ages were below three hundred...
"This means these 'old monsters' must all have descended into this world again within the last three hundred years!" The horror in Yun Qing's eyes deepened. All these supreme powers had only recently undertaken their heaven-defying acts!
What was about to happen to this continent, to make so many powers stop at nothing?!
"This Nine Heavens Azure Cloud List may well be the most formidable, and most terrifying, in all of history!" An absurd thought even arose in his mind:
They... weren't really going to enter the fray themselves and compete for places on this list, were they?!
Before you continue