Chapter 158: Trapped for One Hundred and Eighty Years, Chen Changsheng You Just Wait
Chapter 158 – Trapped for One Hundred and Eighty Years, Chen Changsheng You Just Wait
The Demon Beasts prowling the Nether Forest were undeniably formidable; not only were their hides as thick as ancient bark, but their flesh possessed heaven-shaking strength.
Yet, to Chen Changsheng, this raw power was barely an inconvenience.
His own physical vessel was forged to be no weaker than theirs, and his arsenal brimmed with countless methods of slaughter.
The true nightmare lay in the sheer, suffocating volume of the horde, coupled with the labyrinthine chokeholds of the ancient trees.
To advance a mere hundred paces meant winding through dozens of agonizing detours.
In some stretches, the timber had woven shut like a sealed tomb, forcing him to carve entirely new paths just to pass through.
Naturally, his momentum would crawl to an agonizing halt.
And the moment his pace faltered, the forest’s denions would fall upon him in a frenzied, rabid tide.
Once swallowed by that sea of claws and fangs, advancing even half a step became a myth.
True, these brutish beasts—devoid of divine abilities or the mystic arts of Qi—could not legitimately threaten his immortal life.
But their most sickening trait was their sheer, stubborn refusal to die.
Worse still, every twelve shichen, the very bones of this domain would shift and realign.
If he failed to breach the central depths within that exact cycle, the world would swallow his progress, forcing him to begin anew.
At this thought, the corner of Chen Changsheng’s mouth twitched violently; he wiped a streak of viscous Demon Beast blood from his jaw and muttered.
“I refuse to believe it. I, Chen Changsheng, will not be walled in by a heap of deadwood and mindless livestock.”
“Let’s see exactly how much slaughter this Nether Forest can stomach.”
Rolling up his blood-soaked sleeves, he summoned the Taotie Root Bone into his left hand, while his right gripped the hilt of the True Martial Sword.
The macabre illusion of an ancient graveyard unfurled at his back, and a bronze life-lamp ignited, hovering above his crown.
“Boom!”
Unleashing his cultivation to the absolute limit, Chen Changsheng shattered over a dozen heaven-reaching trunks, surging toward the forest’s heart with a Peerless, unstoppable momentum.
……
Six shichen later.
His robes thoroughly heavy with gore, Chen Changsheng found himself standing right back at the foot of the starting stele.
Staring blankly at the stone monument, he was utterly rendered speechless.
He could swear to the high heavens that in the bloodbath just now, he had burned through every ounce of his strength.
It was, without a doubt, the most savage and desperate charge he had mounted in this current era of his long life.
Yet, the Nether Forest remained an unyielding maw; barely five hundred paces out, the endless wave of Demon Beasts had battered him back to his starting point.
Furthermore, it felt as though the very earth was conspiring against him; the deeper he waded, the tighter the suffocating pathways grew.
Locked in endless carnage with the horde, he simply could not spare a sliver of Qi to shatter the iron-hard timber blocking his way.
Just as he was inwardly cursing the unfairness of it all, the scenery warped and blurred around him.
The twelve-shichen cycle had concluded.
This time, Chen Changsheng was deposited atop a low, grassy knoll—a staggering eighty miles away from the central zone.
Taking in the view, his brow twitched in a relentless spasm.
“Giving me the high ground for a scenic overlook? You’ve got to be pulling my leg… this Nether Forest is deliberately trying to piss me off.”
“Fine. If you want to play games, I will play with you until the very end.”
“I simply don’t believe your stock of Demon Beasts is infinite.”
With those words, Chen Changsheng hurled himself back into the fray—a bloody siege that would last an entire, grueling century.
……
“Boom!”
Pulverizing a saber-toothed tiger’s skull with a single, indifferent punch, Chen Changsheng stoically set about peeling its hide and dismantling its bones.
Slabs of fresh meat sizzled over a spit, while the ground encircling the stele had long been carpeted by Chen Changsheng in a thick, luxurious layer of monster pelts.
Lounging atop the blood-stained furs, Chen Changsheng had completely abandoned the delusion of reaching the center.
Endless. The gluttonous tide of Demon Beasts in this cursed wood was truly endless.
For the first fifty years, he had genuinely believed he could butcher his way to an empty forest.
But then came the day he witnessed a scene so profoundly absurd it stripped him of words entirely.
A pitiful, weak Demon Beast had limped into view, only for the earth to rupture as a sapling shot upward, instantly bearing a plump, glowing fruit.
The creature swallowed the fruit, and its aura explosively mutated, swelling until it possessed the raw might to trade heavy blows with him.
Bearing witness to that brazen cheating, Chen Changsheng stood up, pointed a finger at the canopy, and unleashed a three-day torrent of unfiltered, venomous curses at the Nether Forest.
That single miracle proved it: the Nether Forest possessed a will, and its sole desire was to grind his bones to dust, trapping him for eternity.
Once his voice grew hoarse after three days of swearing, he pivoted his strategy.
So what if the forest’s supply of Demon Beasts was a bottomless void?
He would simply turn inward, cultivating his Dao until his sheer, overwhelming power could crush the entire domain flat.
In the face of absolute, tyrannical strength, numbers were nothing but ash on the wind.
It was a flawless theory, and he dedicated himself to it body and soul.
Yet, after another fifty bitter years, Chen Changsheng realized a horrifying truth: as his strength grew, the Nether Forest and its monstrous denions evolved to match him.
And it was maliciously specific; once, he had meticulously carved a grand Formation to incinerate a vast swath of the horde.
Three days later, the newly spawned Demon Beasts strode through the embers, their hides glistening with fire-resistant scales.
By the fifth day, more than half the horde was immune to the flames, and even the iron-barked trees refused to scorch.
A hundred years of bloody, futile war flashed through his ancient eyes, and facing this impeccable, adapting cage, Chen Changsheng let out a weary, helpless sigh.
“No wonder Zhang Bairen tossed this location to me. This isn’t a trial; it’s a natural, inescapable prison!”
“Unless a supreme celestial entity descends to obliterate this space with a Peerless strike, no mortal soul is ever walking out of here.”
Murmuring this, he shifted his gaze to the side, where Little Black rested, frozen within the amber depths of a Lifeblood Stone.
As the decades bled away, the Heaven-Mending Paste had lost its miraculous grip on the creature’s fading essence, forcing Chen Changsheng to seal Little Black away in the stone.
“Ah, Little Black…”
“It looks like I’m truly chained to this rock. Were I a normal cultivator, my grave would already be dug.”
“But I am an anomaly. I have grasped eternal life; the rot of time cannot claim my soul.”
“Doesn’t that just mean I’ll be trapped here for a very, very long time?”
Met with silence, the sealed beast offered no comfort to his sardonic complaints.
Shaking his head, Chen Changsheng closed his eyes and sank into meditation, letting the slow grind of cultivation chew away the maddening boredom.
The Lifeblood Stone was a miracle, but it only dammed the river of time; it could not freeze it forever.
In its current frayed state, Little Black had perhaps six thousand years left before the stone’s sanctuary failed.
If he couldn’t tear down the Nether Forest by then, his companion would have only one path left: death.
……
Another eighty silent, heavy years drifted past; save for cultivating his Dao and studying ancient texts, Chen Changsheng never raised his blade against the Nether Forest again.
His six-hundred-and-forty-year cycle of wakefulness was drawing to its twilight, signaling the approaching descent into his inevitable slumber.
Sitting upright within the cold, oppressive confines of the Hundred Defeats Immortal Venerable’s stone coffin, he stared out into the mocking timber and spoke.
“You’ve kept me locked in your belly for a hundred and eighty years. And for every breathing second of that time, I have been turning over ways to rip you apart.”
“Unfortunately for you, I actually struck upon a method.”
“If you have even a sliver of sense, you’ll warp me to the center right now. Otherwise, the consequences will fall on your own head.”
His voice echoed into the gloom. The woods remained deadly still; not a single leaf trembled in surrender.
Chen Changsheng’s lips curled into a glacial sneer. “Fine. We will pick this up in six hundred and forty years.”
“I sincerely hope you don’t regret this!”
With a heavy, echoing thud, Chen Changsheng dragged the coffin lid shut, sealing himself away for a long, dark slumber that would last six hundred and forty years.
……