Questioning Heaven, Desiring the Way - Chapter 182

Gu Suihan and the Huangquan Evil Ghost felt their entire world spinning, and a terrible feeling of nauseous hit them as they jumped into the well. It was so bad they felt like vomiting.

Bam! Their ears were constantly assaulted by the sound of banging, roaring, and angry howls. Those sounds were accompanied by a colliding force that kept coming upwards toward them.

The Evil Ghost used its claws to grab Gu Suihan tightly, afraid that the colliding force would throw it off the young man’s body. As it felt the swooshing past its ears, it did its best to say to Gu Suihan via telepathy, “The Devil Abyss…is actually a different spacetime!”

“I expected as much,” replied Gu Suihan flatly after hearing what the Evil Ghost said. He didn’t exert any force and allowed himself to freefall into the abyss.

Back when he started his plan, he was very sure that this Devil Abyss had something to do with that legend. The Devil Abyss could be said to be the dark and depressing gathering place of living creatures.

In other words, this thing was created by those creatures who took pride in being intelligent beings.

There was no such thing as good or bad, goodness and evil, right or wrong. But those pathetic, pitiful living creatures insisted on doing this to themselves.

They insisted on defining what was true and false, what was right and wrong. Then when the living creatures deep inside the Devil Abyss broke out, they started crying and saying that they were weak but righteous.

Was that something to be sad about? To feel pitiful about? To feel angry about?

Gu Suihan merely smiled at such things. From the moment one decided to become a cultivator, it meant that one was no longer going to exist as a lowly ordinary human.

He had left all of this behind a very long time ago.

What was this about humanity and the human race? Such narrow and stupid thoughts were only respected by those who had to be incredibly dumb.

If Gu Suihan felt unhappy, he could go on a massacre, pile up a millions of dead bodies and allow their blood to flow for a thousand miles. His heart wouldn’t feel depressed or feel anything at all.

If he felt like it, he could do supernatural things and bless all living things.

Everything depended on his mood. There was no such thing as good and bad or goodness and evil.

For someone who could cultivate to his level of enlightenment, the concept of disregarding life was already deeply buried in their hearts.

As those good guys who chose to help others and lived for the sake of other people in the world…they had turned into dry bones a long time ago and even their bones had been chewed to nothing by wild dogs.

As for what people described as karma and retribution.

At the end of the day, it was just one of the many laws of nature.

You could do something to earn bad karma, but if you could deal with the consequences, then that action wouldn’t be considered consequential.

But ordinary humans were too small and weak, so they couldn’t possibly hold up against the powers of the laws of nature.

That’s why there was such a thing as retribution.

The best example of this were people like Gu Suihan.

He despised living creatures and had no regard for life. The amount of blood on his hands was enough to fill an entire world. The bad karma he had accumulated was enough to actually form a fiendish spirit of sorts. Yet, he was still living well.

“A human?”

Just when Gu Suihan and the Evil Ghost were quietly recuperating, a soundwave suddenly reverberated through the air and forced the noisy roaring and howling to become silent. The noise was replaced by a thick, authoritative and lofty voice instead.

“A devil’s spirit?” Gu Suihan opened his eyes and spoke calmly. “Or…a devil?”

“This is merely a place created by the desires and evil thoughts of you living creatures. We…are just living creatures that happen to be born out of this.” The voice remained just as authoritative. The soundwaves echoed continuously in this pitch black tunnel as loudly as a landslide or a tsunami.

Gu Suihan’s lips curled upwards soundlessly as he said, “What do you want?”

“Do you know why all of us continue to watch you humans?” The voice did not answer Gu Suihan’s question, but continued speaking as though it were ranting, “The place where all of you live flows with unending life and laws of nature amongst other things. But here, we have nothing but darkness. Reincarnation is a complete mess and the Way has collapsed. There is absolutely nothing we could even consider as a Way of any sort. We…we just want to survive.”

Towards the end, the voice became quieter. It sounded rather sad and tragic, and it would have made someone tremble a little inside.

But Gu Suihan wasn’t quite human. Even after hearing such a touching soliloquy, he merely smiled silently and repeated his earlier question, “What…do you want?”

“I want to work together with you. I can see that you have already formed your spirit, so you’re considered pretty good among humans but you’ve still ended up in such a situation. So I wanted to see if I could work out a deal with you.” The voice slowly calmed down and was as gentle as the spring breeze, like a drizzle on one’s shoulder.

Pfft! As though something had been stabbed into, Gu Suihan and the Evil Ghost suddenly felt cold all over as the darkness around them slowly faded. It was replaced by the scene of a barren land covered in corpses and destruction.

There was a moon in the sky, but it was blood-red and void of warmth.

There was a river running through the ground, but it was completely black and stank of decay.

There was wind around them, but it felt like icy knives cutting into them.

They were surrounded by devils, devils with fierce and nasty faces.

Gu Suihan’s blood-red robe made from solidified fiendish qi flapped loudly in the cold wind that felt like a thousand knives in the air. His black hair was a mess, and his cheeks were pale. His almost flawless facial features reflected the faint sense of death in the blood-red moonlight.

That was an aura that was shapeless, but it felt very real. As it entered the bodies of the creatures around Gu Suihan, they felt a heavy pressure weighing on their hearts.

“You were the one who spoke earlier?” Gu Suihan’s gaze landed on a creature wearing royal robes and thick armor over its three-meter-tall body. Its greenish face had sharp teeth, and it held a gleaming metal spear in its hands.

“That’s right. I was surprised to see you, but I could also sort of understand how you ended up in this plight.” The voice of the creature was like the beating of war drums.

“Why?”

“You….have killed too many. The amount of karma your body bears makes it almost impossible for anyone to look at you straight in the eye. Ordinary people cannot kill you at all, because that person would not dare to take over the karma you have!” The creature looked down at Gu Suihan and the Evil Ghost and stretched an extremely thick finger out to point at the bloodied robe around Gu Suihan that flapped in the wind.

What he was saying was that given how dangerous it was, the creatures living in the Devil Abyss would not try to kill Gu Suihan. This particular creature was no exception.

“I like making deals because that benefits both sides!” Gu Suihan smiled and swallowed a few dozen pills nonchalantly.

“Excellent! Up there…there’s a Divine Soul cultivator up there. Kill him, and you might be able to recover a little faster. Your injuries are too serious right now.”

The devil had a pleased smile as it calmly looked up at the giant crack in the sky. There was no cautiousness in its eyes. A Divine Soul cultivator was clearly not someone difficult for it to kill.

As for why it didn’t kill Gu Suihan, one reason was that it was afraid of inheriting that immense amount of bad karma from Gu Suihan. The reason was that killing him would be of no use to the devil. It was better to sit down and strike a deal that could benefit both sides. Anybody with a brain could understand that logic.

All that talk about how humans and devils were on opposing sides, or how they had a longstanding feud with one another, or how they could not trust someone who wasn’t from the same race as themselves – that was just horseshit.

To the two parties here, that sort of thing wasn’t even worth one spiritual stone.

At the end of it all, devils were also a sort of living creature. It was just that their habitat was a little poorer than other creatures and it wanted to get a better place to live in. But in doing so, they threatened the interests of other races.

But here came another problem. If you talked about demons, humans and all that, it was impossible for them to fight the devils one on one. After all, any living creature with a brain and intelligence would have evil thoughts in their minds, and that was exactly how the devils existed and survived. How could one fight such a creature?

And so, in order to protect their own interests, the other races came up with this thing called righteousness and combined forces to keep the devils in check.

“I await your good news!” Gu Suihan smiled, then threw a few bottles of pills to the Evil Ghost before dragging him aside.

The devil knew that it was time to prove what it had to offer.

Before this, Gu Suihan had already broken the seal over the Devil Abyss, opened it up and agreed to a deal. That was Gu Suihan’s end of the deal.

After the devil left, Gu Suihan slowly looked away and turned to observe the group of devils who came in all shapes and sizes, but emanated a strong aura.

His lips curled upwards slightly. He had noticed a burning look in these devils’ eyes when he had given the Evil Ghost those pills.

That was a look of sheer greed.

Gu Suihan bent down and grabbed a handful of sand from the ground that was as hard as metal. He scanned the sand with his spiritual sense and couldn’t help but murmur, “They’re really…really poor!”

This soil was dead soil. Soil that had no signs of life at all was dead soil.

The soil in the world where humans lived was spirit soil. It could give new life and enable reproduction of life, and it could work with and convert to the other four elements to keep the world in balance.

According to legend, there was soil in the nether world too. That was underworld soil which could nourish the soul, absorb yin energy and store fiendish qi. It was considered a type of spirit soil too.

But in the Devil Abyss, this was all dead soil. There was no sign of the laws of nature in it at all, never mind work with the other four elements. You could say that this stuff was completely useless.