Chapter 134: The Shrouded Truth, Resentment of the Entire Purple Mansion Holy Land
Chapter 134 – The Shrouded Truth, Resentment of the Entire Purple Mansion Holy Land
“In the primordial epoch of the Golden Core, the Limitless Heavenly Venerable deduced the Golden Core laws to bear the Heaven’s Mandate.”
“On the eve of claiming the Heaven’s Mandate, the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable challenged the Limitless Heavenly Venerable to a death match before the borders of the Sacred Ruins Forbidden Land.”
“Mountains shattered, the earth sundered, and the very heavens collapsed. The victor of this apocalyptic clash remains unknown to mortal history.”
“By dawn, the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable vanished without a trace. The Limitless Heavenly Venerable seized the Heaven’s Mandate, suppressing the Sacred Ruins Forbidden Land into a stagnant peace for ten thousand years!”
Reading these ancient words, the corner of Chen Changsheng’s mouth twitched.
He had never anticipated unearthing traces of the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable in these buried texts.
He initially calculated the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable to be a specter from merely a few millennia ago.
Yet, deducing the laws of this timeline, the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable walked the earth thirty thousand years ago!
To think the Venerable possessed the terrifying might to cross blades with a sovereign destined for the Heaven’s Mandate. This revelation struck like a physical blow.
Suppressing the turbulent waves within his Dao heart, Chen Changsheng muttered, “This lifespan defies the very laws of heaven.”
“When the Emperor Zuo was but a youth, he had already heard the myths of the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable.”
“By that era, nearly thirty thousand years had bled away since the Limitless Heavenly Venerable seized the Heaven’s Mandate.”
“Or perhaps, it was only during that epoch that the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable began forging his own coffin.”
“Could an entity hovering infinitely close to the Heaven’s Mandate truly cheat death for so long?”
Shrewdly weighing these fated paths, Chen Changsheng continued to scour the primordial texts.
The stone chamber housed no heaven-defying cultivation arts or taboo secrets.
Instead, it safeguarded “unremarkable” chronicles that coldly recorded the flow of time.
Some catastrophic events were dismissed in a single, passing sentence. Whether one could glean the blood-soaked truth from these dry words depended entirely on the reader’s own spiritual resonance and predatory cunning.
……
The sands of time trickled away. Chen Changsheng entrenched himself within the claustrophobic stone chamber for two full months.
The texts were sparse, numbering scarcely a hundred scattered volumes.
Yet, absorbing the immense karmic weight within these hundred books devoured two months of his relentless focus.
Returning the final beast-skin tome to its resting place, the heavy furrow between Chen Changsheng’s brows remained locked.
This tomb-like chamber chronicled the ascension of three distinct sovereigns who bore the Heaven’s Mandate.
The deeper he peered into the ancient epochs, the more obscured the truths became.
Beyond this, Chen Changsheng’s calculating gaze unearthed a chilling pattern: the lifespans of these supreme sovereigns were brutally truncating.
Chronicles dating back a hundred thousand years dictated that the Heaven’s Mandate Bearer of that primordial age boasted a terrifying lifespan, reigning for a full thirty thousand years.
After that sovereign Perished, the timeline fractured. The next unbroken record emerged twenty thousand years later.
The sovereign of that subsequent epoch reigned for a mere ten thousand years before the records severed once more.
However, the abyss between eras shrank. In less than three thousand years, a new Heaven’s Mandate Bearer clawed his way to supremacy.
This entity was the Limitless Heavenly Venerable, the architect of the Golden Core Dao.
Yet, a mere five thousand years after shouldering the heavens, this sovereign abruptly vanished into the void.
With his erasure, the Heaven’s Mandate fractured, plunging the entire cultivation realm into a desperate, chaotic struggle that persisted to this day.
Contemplating this grim reality, Chen Changsheng’s mouth twitched once more.
“What catastrophic horrors unfolded during these fractured epochs? Why does a sovereign Holy Land lack even a single whisper of these eras?”
“And these supreme sovereigns… why did the heavens continually strip away their longevity? Was it the wrath of the Dao, or the machinations of predators?”
“Before claiming the Heaven’s Mandate, an apocalyptic war invariably ignites.”
“Who, or what, were these nascent sovereigns warring against?”
Here, Chen Changsheng fell into a cold silence. Some terrifying deductions could not be breathed aloud within the confines of the Purple Mansion Holy Land.
The Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable abandoned a stone coffin in the Boundless Secret Realm; an ancient bronze palace materialized in the Desolate Ancient Forbidden Land; the Inauspicious Energy of unknown origin was ground down by the flesh and blood of countless living beings.
Every single one of these anomalies was a heaven-shaking calamity.
Yet, the Purple Mansion Holy Land’s archives remained utterly mute, as though they were genuinely blind to these apocalyptic shifts.
Chen Changsheng fundamentally rejected this facade of ignorance.
The Middle Heavens also harbored an ancient bronze palace, though it had rotted into desolate ruin across uncounted ages.
A Holy Land earned its sovereign title entirely through its terrifying, unbroken longevity.
The Purple Mansion Holy Land hoarded memories stretching back a hundred thousand years.
Across that vast ocean of time, it was impossible for the ancient bronze palace to have never sent ripples through the heavens.
The only logical deduction was that an entity was deliberately erasing the ancient bronze palace from history.
Whether this invisible hand belonged to the Holy Lands themselves, or to some unspeakable, primordial terror, he could not currently deduce.
Ruthlessly tempering the chaotic deductions swirling in his mind, Chen Changsheng exhaled a stale breath and stepped out of the stone chamber.
The deeper he clawed toward the truth, the denser the suffocating fog became.
Even more maddening was the realization that the Heaven’s Mandate Bearers were the bloody nexus of all these mysteries.
During his two-month seclusion, Chen Changsheng perceived a uniform action among all three sovereigns.
After shouldering the Heaven’s Mandate, each sovereign vanished from the heavens without warning. Upon their return, these invincible beings were inevitably stained with their own blood, suffering severe wounds.
Though the archives remained blind to their exact whereabouts, Chen Changsheng shrewdly deduced an undeniable link to the ancient bronze palaces.
After all, the sovereigns had already carved their paths through every major forbidden land prior to seizing the mandate.
There was no logical impetus to breach those lethal domains again, let alone under the shroud of absolute secrecy.
……
“Sir, save us! The Purple Mansion Holy Land is trampling on us!”
His mind still weighed with apocalyptic secrets, Chen Changsheng had barely crossed the threshold of the Xuehai Pavilion when Gongsun Huaiyu’s desperate wail pierced the air.
Lifting his gaze, he witnessed Gongsun Huaiyu, Zi Ning, and their entourage completely barricaded by a horde of infuriated disciples from the Purple Mansion Holy Land.
Catching sight of Chen Changsheng’s arrival, the swarming disciples forcibly smothered their boiling killing intent and bowed respectfully.
“Greetings, Saint Son!”
Confronted with this absurd standoff, Chen Changsheng’s mind filled with cold confusion.
For Gongsun Huaiyu and her kin to ignite friction as outsiders was a natural law of the sect.
But for Zi Ning, a native Saintess, to be ensnared in this hostility defied basic logic.
“Zi Ning, speak. What is this farce?”
Under Chen Changsheng’s chilling gaze, a deep flush stained Zi Ning’s face. She bowed her head, utterly devoid of her usual arrogance, not daring to utter a syllable.
Sensing the shift in pressure, a male disciple stepped from the blockade.
“Saint Son, you must dispense sovereign justice for us!”
“The Saintess and these three outsiders have pillaged seventy percent of all the edicts within the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion! If this drought continues, we will have absolutely no tasks left to temper our paths.”
Chen Changsheng: ???
Absorbing this sheer audacity, Chen Changsheng threw a look of visceral shock toward Gongsun Huaiyu.
“You four stripped the Purple Mansion Holy Land of seventy percent of its edicts?”
Basking in Chen Changsheng’s rare astonishment, Gongsun Huaiyu rubbed her hands together with a predatory grin. “Sir, those with power must shoulder heavier burdens.”
“I merely sought to bleed for the Purple Mansion Holy Land’s glory. Yet, the brunt of this chaos falls on Zi Ning’s shoulders.”
“Had she not forcefully inserted herself into the hunt, the three of us would have only pillaged a mere fifty percent of the edicts.”
“But she ruthlessly snatched an additional twenty percent, bleeding the registry dry for the rest.”
As Gongsun Huaiyu concluded her shameless defense, every surrounding disciple turned pathetic, pleading eyes toward Chen Changsheng.
Failing to meet their annual edict quotas meant suffering a brutal demotion in their sect standing.
If their cultivation proved too weak, they would swallow the loss in silence. But being systematically starved of opportunities to even fight for their fates? How was this the Dao?
“This… for grievances of this nature, you must petition the Elders!”
“What did the Elders decree?”
“The Elders decreed that until the Holy Master graces us with her return, all sect affairs fall under the absolute domain of the Saint Son.”
“Saint Son, you must uphold justice for us!”
Chen Changsheng: “…”
Even with a mind honed to calculate the heavens, he had utterly failed to predict a farce of this magnitude.
……