Meanwhile, in the Nether God Hall.
Hundreds upon thousands of candle flames burned ceaselessly in the dim hall. The ancestral tablets of Taishu Dan, He Xiu, Wei Yunya, Chen Yishan, and the others flickered between light and shadow beneath a five-colored radiance.
Cloaked, Sikong Tianyuan knelt on one knee outside the enormous Bronze Gate engraved with Witch Ancestor Zhu Man. Directly overhead, five spheres of light-white, green, black, red, and yellow-revolved silently like five suns, sending strands of the spiritual charm of heaven and earth seeping through the gate.
On the Bronze Gate, the dark-red relief of a bird-headed, human-bodied figure glimmered with spiritual light under the stimulation of the origin of heaven and earth. Its eyes looked down upon the hundreds of ancestral tablets in the hall and the cloaked old man kneeling on the floor, as though gazing upon descendants a thousand years removed.
As for Zhu Man, the world knew only that he was one of the founders of the Witch Cult, worshipped by its northern and southern branches, and the founder of the Gu Poison Sect.
Sikong Tianyuan, however, had heard a few little-known stories about Zhu Man from his elders.
Before the Human Emperor, founding a sect and becoming a patriarch had not been difficult for cultivators. Yet whether they were fish, insects, and vermin or Seventh Realm patriarchs, there was no difference before heaven and earth. Their lifespans were ordained by heaven; when their time came, they had to die.
Thus, almost everyone who had founded a sect and become a patriarch in ancient times had sought ways to attain everlasting life. Witch Ancestor Zhu Man had naturally been among them. He had drawn upon Gold Mother's and Yuan Zhi's methods, but since both had ended in failure, he had also made improvements.
His