chsdbacks Chapter 374 Suirenshi
Chapter 374 Suirenshi
Qingfeng leaned on his broken sword and looked up at the phantom. Every cut on the broken sword, made by the extraterrestrial god, healed itself in the light of the phantom.
He glanced down at his broken sword; the blade was visibly growing back.
"Laojun, this sword is being repaired."
"Not just your sword. The aftershocks of the laws governing the return of the gods will repair all the primordial creations damaged by the incomplete Heavenly Dao."
"Your weapons, your armor, your wounds—anything left from guarding the Heavenly Dao—will benefit from this return to your rightful place."
The Primordial Celestial Venerable pointed to each brick on the ruins of the South Heavenly Gate that had grown pale gold patterns.
The golden patterns on the city bricks are taking root deep into the brick body, and new white law slurry is gushing out from the brick joints. After the slurry fills the gaps, it solidifies quickly, and the hardness after solidification is far greater than that of the original city brick material.
The entire Nantianmen city wall is being rebuilt on its own.
Lao Jun looked down at his whisk, and the whisk strands were lighting up again one by one, turning from grayish-white back to silvery-white. One hundred and eight burned runes reappeared on the whisk strands one by one.
In the center of the ruins of the Suiming site, Su Fan watched as the completed runes slowly descended from above the wooden spikes.
The runes hovered in mid-air in front of him; once fully formed, they were no longer mere symbols of laws.
Inside the rune is a picture, recorded by the sound of a bell when Taiyi inscribed the rune.
In the scene, Suirenshi stands in front of the flint that has just produced its first flame, holding a still-burning splinter in his hand, and is handing the splinter to another person.
The man's figure was shrouded in backlight, making his features indistinct; only his right hand could be seen receiving the wooden spike handed to him by Suirenshi.
His right fingernails were old, and there was a scabbed scar in the center of his palm.
Su Fan opened his left palm, and the location of the '人' character scar completely overlapped with the scar on the palm of the person in the picture.
Xu stood behind Su Fan and saw the image projected by the runes.
Xu's pale golden pupils contracted slightly. The hand features of the person who received the wooden spike in the picture were about 70% similar to its structure.
"The person who received the first spark of fire from Suirenshi also had a scar on his palm. It wasn't the three cuts from the path of all living beings, but a scar from even earlier times."
Xu crouched down and peered closely into the runes suspended in mid-air.
With each beat of the complete heart in the Void's chest, the image inside the runes became clearer.
In the scene, the person who received the wooden spikes is raising the flames above their head, illuminating everyone's faces.
The person had no facial features, and his face was blurred, but the three-in-one heart in the void's chest cavity responded to the fire with a pulse that did not belong to the Eastern Emperor's Mother Liquid or the Law of Returning to the Void.
Xu removed his right hand from the pale gold line on his chest, stretched it to the center of the image, and touched the flame in the image through the runes. The flame burned his fingertips without any hindrance, without causing any burns.
"This fire recognizes me. I wasn't the first seed condensed from the Eastern Emperor's Mother Liquid. Before that, on the same day that Suirenshi drilled out the first cluster of fire, Pangu used the Heaven-Opening Axe to smash a reef at the bottom of the Ruins and took me out from it."
"He placed me in Suirenshi's palm. The first thing I held was not the Eastern Emperor Bell, nor the core of Guixu, but this ball of fire. I was the one who took the wooden spike."
"When Pangu took me out, he called me Xu, but after Suirenshi took me, he gave me another name."
Xu pulled his finger out of the image, a tiny cluster of dark red flames still flickering on his fingertip.
The flame flickered three times on my fingertip before going out on its own, leaving a very faint scorch mark.
Xu looked at the scorch mark and said that name.
"The name was given to me by the Human Emperor Suirenshi himself. He called me Xu. Xu was the first ancient slag that was dredged from the bottom of the Ruins by the Human Emperor, but Pangu did not treat me as slag, nor did Suirenshi. They handed me fire so that I could remember the temperature of the fire."
Nezha walked over carrying a gun, looking down at the scorch mark on Xu's finger.
Why did Suirenshi hand you fire?
"When the first humans were created from clay by Nuwa in the primordial era, they did not know how to use fire. Suirenshi drilled wood to make fire and taught the humans how to use fire for warmth, to drive away beasts, and to burn wasteland for farming. But he himself was a god, and the humans could not handle the fire in his hands; the temperature was too high and would burn mortals to ashes."
"Someone needs to transform the divine fire into fire that mortals can use. Pangu took me out from the bottom of the Void. I was not tainted by any divine laws; I was a blank slate."
"Suirenshi handed me the first spark of fire, instructing me to use my blank body to lower the temperature of the divine fire to a level that a mortal could handle. That's how I learned to hold fire. The same principle applies to receiving the first bell core in the ruins of Donghuang 30,000 years later."
After hearing this, Nezha looked down at the time-twisting wound on his left arm that was still writhing.
He unwrapped the bandages from the wound, and the fragments of the laws of time at the edge of the wound were attracted by the residual warmth of the laws emanating from the flint, all of them floating out of the flesh and shattering into dark green powder in the air.
Without the interference of the laws of time, the wound begins to heal normally, with new granulation tissue filling the wound surface layer by layer.
"This fire can even burn the fragments of the Time Hunter's laws."
Nezha clenched his left fist, his knuckles making a crisp sound, and the last bit of dark green powder at the edge of the wound was evaporated by the red light of the flint.
Su Fan stood up from the base of the flintwood, holding the engraved bell core in his palm.
The dark golden light on the surface of the bell core had faded, turning it into an ordinary dark golden pebble.
But the stone's temperature didn't drop. He held it between his fingers and could feel the complete rune inside the stone core still beating in sync with the heart in Xu's chest cavity.
"The runes are finished, the Human Emperor Star shines, and the gods are returning to their places. The flint is still stuck in the ruins, its roots still weighed down by the chaotic sediment. Ruins, how long has this fire in your hand burned?"
Xu stood up and walked to the front of the flint.
It stretched out its right hand and pressed it on the dead bark of the flint tree, the veins of its intact heart flowing through its palm into the trunk.
Stimulated by the heart's vascular network, the long-dead wood fibers inside the tree trunk begin to regrow from the roots, producing extremely fine, pale golden new roots.
New roots burrow deep into the chaotic sediment, pushing aside the layers of sediment that have been pressing down on the tree roots for 30,000 years, one by one.
The first new bud sprouted from the withered branch of the flint.
"I have guarded the Ruins of Return for thirty thousand years, and this tree has waited for me for thirty thousand years in the time rift. The fire that I received has burned without going out since it was first extinguished. The core has finished carving the runes for you, and I will revive this tree. It will take a little while longer. The roots are already alive, so you can go and take care of other matters first."
Su Fan put the bell core into his pocket and slung the Pangu Axe over his shoulder.
"Nezha, let's go. Back to the South Heavenly Gate. Laozi just sent a message from his Dao Heart. The aftershocks of the laws of the gods returning to their places are repairing the creations of the primordial world, but the repair only extends up to the South Heavenly Gate."
"Outside the South Heavenly Gate, the remaining limbs of Rahu on the other side of the Tai Sui Crack are still approaching the crack. The Great Sage is carrying three limbs by himself, and half of the Ninefold Mountain-Protecting Formation of the Guardian Gods has been shattered."
Nezha pulled the Fire-Tipped Spear from the ground; the surface of the newly healed wound on his left arm was still a pale pink.
Did Laozi say how badly the Great Sage was injured?
"The Dao Heart's transmission was intermittent, and the last message only came back with one sentence—'The Great Sage is still laughing.' The fact that he can still laugh means he hasn't been killed."
"But Rahu's right arm, left leg, and right leg have all pressed against the outer edge of the Tai Sui crack. The Great Sage's seventy-two transformations destiny lines are becoming increasingly tightly bound by the aftershocks of the great calamity. If the fighting continues, his transformation techniques will not be able to hold up."
Su Fan strode across the chaotic sediment pile at the edge of the Suiming Ruins, with Nezha close behind.
The two followed the route they had taken, traversing the White Rock Plain and the chaotic gray mist shattered by the sound of bells, and hurried toward the South Heavenly Gate.
Xu remained under the flint, one hand pressed against the trunk, his heartbeat continuously flowing into the depths of the tree roots through the veins in his chest.
A second new bud sprouted on the withered branch of flint, then a third, and a fourth.
Along the outer edge of the Tai Sui crack, the chaotic gray fog was so thick that one could not see their own hand in front of their face.
The guardian deity's nine-layered mountain-protecting array seals were only holding on with the last two layers remaining.
The seventh layer of the array seal shattered completely during Luo Hou's knee strike to the right leg. The fragments hit his own chest, creating a dent in his breastplate.
Seventy percent of the protective runes on his arms were broken, and the remaining runes flickered constantly in the gray mist, sometimes bright and sometimes dim.
Sun Wukong squatted on a piece of rubble at the very edge of the crack.
That piece of rubble was a fragment of a stone pillar that had been knocked away when Luo Hou swept his left leg over; it was now stuck upside down in the gray mist, serving as a temporary foothold.
The claw mark on his left shoulder stretched from his shoulder blade all the way to his upper arm. The flesh around the wound was turned inside out, and the blood had congealed. The congealed scab was dark red and mixed with Rahu's law fluid, making it impossible to distinguish which was which.
Most of his golden armor was shattered, with only his breastplate and right leg armor barely clinging to his body.
The electric arc armor woven from the aftershocks of the great calamity had been corroded by the liquid of Rahu's laws, leaving only a thin layer clinging to the charred monkey fur and emitting tiny wisps of white smoke.
"Old Shi, which layer of array seals is it now?"
Sun Wukong placed his golden cudgel across his lap, his monkey eyes peering through the thick fog at three enormous, dark purple outlines ahead.
"Eighth level. It can't withstand the next wave of attacks. You just blasted a hole through Luo Hou's right arm, but after it retracted, the wound healed after soaking in the bottomless pool of law for half an incense stick's time."
"The three limbs are now gathering power simultaneously, and the next combined attack will strike the same point of the crack at the same time. The density of the laws at that point cannot withstand the simultaneous impact of the three Rahu limbs, and the crack will be torn open with a permanent gap."
The voice of the gatekeeper came through the crack.
Sun Wukong took the golden cudgel off his lap, slammed it onto the gravel, and stood up.
What are the consequences of a permanent gap?
"The Tai Sui rift will become a fixed passage for the Chaos Ancient God to enter the primordial world. At that time, what will flood into Tai Sui Star will no longer be scattered Time Hunters and Rahu's remnants, but the true form of the Chaos Ancient God."
"Of the nine ancient stars on the Kunlun Ruins, I only ignited seven. The remaining two can only be ignited after the mountain-protecting array is completely reconstructed. But right now, without the mountain-protecting array, if I forcibly ignite the last two stars, I won't be able to withstand the backlash. Not only will the foundation of the ancient Kunlun's laws be burned through, and the ruins will never be repaired."
"Then don't activate it. You guard the rift, and I, Old Sun, will lure those three limbs away. After you've lured them away, take the opportunity to seal the chaotic gray mist around the rift with array seals. Seal it for as long as you can."
Sun Wukong, carrying his golden cudgel, took a step out of the crack.
The gatekeeper turned his head, and a complex light flashed in the deep-set eyes on his stone face.
That light contained the heart of stone and the intestines of wood, cultivated over 30,000 years of guarding the mountain gate, as well as a momentary wavering caused by the monkey.
His voice was very low, so low that it was almost drowned out by the roar of the churning gray fog.
"Go out and distract the three limbs of Rahu, and the law slurry in the chaotic gray mist will directly flow into your spiritual platform."
"Your destiny of seventy-two transformations is already tangled up by the aftershocks of the great calamity. If it is further eroded by Rahu's demonic laws, you will lose the foundation of your transformation techniques and may not even be able to transform back into your original stone form from Flower Fruit Mountain. This is equivalent to being trapped in this battle forever, and you will not be able to go home after the battle is over."
Sun Wukong turned around and glanced at the gatekeeper.
"I, Old Sun, was imprisoned under the Five Elements Mountain for five hundred years, squatted on the edge of the Ruins of Return for five hundred years, and had my fate line changed hundreds of times in the cage."
"Every time I was pinned down, someone would tell me, 'You can't do this, you'll never be able to go home.'"
"I only have one sentence: Home is built through fighting, not returned to. The Tai Sui crack cannot be broken, for if it is, the primordial wilderness will face the ancient gods directly. My mother's Flower Fruit Mountain is still in the primordial wilderness, and my junior brother's Guanjiang Estuary is still there."
"You ancient Kunlun roughnecks have guarded the mountain gate for 30,000 years, and you're still holding out today. You're tough enough. I, Old Sun, will lead this final wave for you. Once you've sealed the formation, you'll treat me to peaches of immortality later."
He slung the golden cudgel over his shoulder, and before the gatekeeper could answer, he somersaulted out of the crack.
His figure was instantly swallowed up by the gray fog.
The gatekeeper gazed silently in the direction where the monkey had disappeared for a moment, then crossed his arms over his chest again, compressing the last two remaining array seals to their limit in his palms, preparing to seal the crack immediately after Rahu's limbs were lured away.
Outside the crack, Rahu's right arm, left leg, and right leg floated in a triangular shape in the chaotic gray mist.
Each limb was hundreds of feet long, and its dark purple skin was covered with patterns of the Demon Ancestor's laws. Black law liquid gushed from the depths of the patterns and dripped into the gray mist, each drop corroding a hole in the gray mist.
The hole that Sun Wukong blasted through the center of his right fist has healed. The new skin is lighter in color than the original skin, appearing as a very pale purple. The law patterns have not yet fully grown on the new skin, which is a sign that Rahu's physical body has not yet fully awakened.
Sun Wukong burst out of the gray mist, stepping on a black floating stone formed from solidified law slurry. His golden cudgel grew longer and thicker, sweeping across the battlefield and simultaneously smashing into the joints of his three limbs.
The right elbow, left knee, and right ankle were all hit simultaneously.
The aftershocks of the great calamity exploded into three blinding white lights, each creating a crack on the surface of one of the three joints. Rahu's three limbs simultaneously twisted and turned towards him.
"Just three arms and legs, not even a head, yet you try to surround me from three sides. When I, Old Sun, wreaked havoc in the Heavenly Palace, even with 100,000 heavenly soldiers of Li Jing, the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King, plus the Four Heavenly Kings and Nezha, the Third Prince, we couldn't surround me. You three cripples together will save me the trouble of searching for you one by one."
Luo Hou's right fist came crashing down.
This time, Sun Wukong neither blocked nor clashed with the fist. Instead, he dodged to the side and ran up the side of the fist, inserting the golden cudgel into the fist as he ran.
Each time a stick is inserted, a hole is pierced in the fist, and the residual energy at the edge of the hole will prevent the wound from healing.
He inserted seven clubs in one go, from the knuckles to the wrist joint, leaving seven parallel holes on the surface of his right fist, each hole spurting out law-based liquid.
His right arm recoiled in pain, and at the same time, his left knee slammed into him.
Sun Wukong pulled out his staff and jumped up, flipped in mid-air, placed his feet on his kneecaps, and used the momentum to spring up again.
The golden cudgel thinned and sharpened, piercing into the old injury on the right ankle joint, the spot where the three blows had ruptured and hadn't healed yet.
The tip of the rod precisely wedged into the depths of the tear, penetrating directly into the serosa cavity inside the ankle joint.
The slurry cavity was pierced, and black law slurry gushed out, pouring onto half of Sun Wukong's body.
His arc armor was burned through to the last layer, and the slurry was poured directly onto the monkey's fur.
The monkey hair on his left arm and left rib was burned black and curled, and his skin was covered with a dense layer of burn blisters.
The surface of the blister was still covered with undried fluid, which continued to seep downwards and into the subcutaneous tissue.
"The corrosive speed of this slurry is even faster than the Time Hunter's Time Warp Law."
Sun Wukong glanced down at the blister on his left arm and ignored it.
He pulled the golden cudgel from his ankle joint. The cudgel was covered in black liquid, which dripped down the cudgel to the tip and into the gray mist.
He hoisted the stick onto his shoulder, jumped back onto the floating rock, and grinned at the three limbs.
"My old body isn't worth much anyway. I was refined in Laozi's Eight Trigrams Furnace for forty-nine days and still couldn't be refined. Your little bit of slurry is far inferior to the Eight Trigrams Furnace."
The three limbs ceased their attack, hovering in the gray mist and slowly adjusting their angle, changing from a triangular formation to a straight line, with the right arm in the center, the left leg on the left, and the right leg on the right.
After being lined up in a row, the Demon Ancestor Law patterns on the three limbs began to flow at an accelerated pace, and the liquid gushing out from the depths of the patterns became more and more abundant and thicker.
The liquid gathered in front of his limbs, condensing into a huge, dark purple ball of law.
The Law Sphere contained countless fragments of ancient remnant souls that had been devoured by Rahu. The fragments surged and roared within the sphere, emitting muffled and hoarse howls.
This ball of laws is the famous law used by Rahu and Hongjun when they faced off 30,000 years ago—Demon Ancestor Devouring Heaven.
Back then, Hongjun used the Jade Tablet of Creation to block this attack, but the Jade Tablet of Creation was shattered into three pieces as a result.
Now Rahu only has three severed limbs left, but the Demon Ancestor Devouring Heaven released by the three severed limbs together, although far less powerful than its complete form in the past, is still enough to blast open the entire chaotic gray mist surrounding the Tai Sui Crack along with the crack itself.
The gatekeeper saw this scene from inside the crack.
The protective runes on his arms flickered violently, not because they were being eroded, but because the sensed shockwaves of the laws had prematurely triggered the highest warning of the Kunlun Array Seal.
He had witnessed the power of this move firsthand.
Thirty thousand years ago, after Luo Hou was scattered by Hongjun, the fragments of the Demon Ancestor's Devouring Heaven Law, sealed in the Bottomless Law Pool, were suppressed by the Kunlun Mountain Sect with the power of nine stars.
Now that the seal has just been shattered by the sound of the bell, the remnants of Rahu immediately began to reassemble into this technique, indicating that at the same moment the bell awakened Rahu's limbs, the prototype of the Demon Ancestor's Devouring Heaven Law was also activated from the deepest part of the seal by the sound of the bell.
"Great Sage! This attack cannot be taken head-on. The fragments of the Jade Tablet of Creation are sealed beneath the Purple Cloud Palace. Without the Jade Tablet of Creation, no one can stop the fully formed Demon Ancestor Devouring Heaven!"
The gatekeeper roared towards the outside of the crack.
Sun Wukong held his golden cudgel horizontally in front of him.
The monkey's eyes reflected the rapidly expanding dark purple sphere of law. The ancient remnant soul fragments inside the sphere were so dense that they were about to burst through the sphere's walls, and soul light shone out from the cracks.
"Damn, that ball is really ugly. You said you can't just try to catch it, so give me some advice."
The gatekeeper remained silent for a moment.
He raised his right palm and placed it on the core array eye on his chest, which was protected by the heart-protecting stone armor.
Inside the array's core lies the last line of defense of the ancient Kunlun Mountain Protector Array—the largest piece of stone on the old Kunlun ruins, an ancient Kunlun mother rock that has not yet been shattered by the aftershocks of the Great Calamity.
The mother rock is engraved with the self-destruction formation incantation left by the first generation of the mountain guardian general of Kunlun before his death.
Once the array is activated, the law-based impact generated by the explosion of the mother rock will freeze him, the chaotic gray mist along the outer edge of the Tai Sui crack, and everything within the gray mist, within the time fracture for three thousand years.
The price is that the guardian spirit will be assimilated with the mother rock, forever remaining in place as a stone core.
"I can activate the self-destruct array on the mother rock. Once activated, the entire outer 100-mile radius of the Tai Sui rift will freeze, and Rahu's three limbs will be locked into the time rift. However, the frozen area will cover your current location. Can you retreat back into the rift in time?"
The gatekeeper's voice was very low.
"Three thousand years frozen. You've frozen yourself in too."
Sun Wukong turned around and looked at the gatekeeper.
"I am the stone heart of Kunlun Mountain. The mountain gate still stands, and the stone heart will never die. If the Tai Sui crack is reopened by future generations three thousand years later, I can still take form from the mother rock."
"But I'm not sure if you can retreat before the freezing wave arrives, Great Sage. Once Rahu's three-limbed law orbs detonate, the shockwave will travel much faster than the freezing wave."
Sun Wukong turned towards the direction of the Tai Sui crack and hoisted the golden cudgel onto his shoulder.
"You don't need to freeze yourself. I have a better way."
He took the golden cudgel off his shoulder, gripped it with both hands, and the cudgel thickened, standing upright in front of him.
He released all the residual effects of the great calamity deep within his spiritual platform. White arcs of electricity surged from the depths of his spiritual platform, no longer weaving into armor, but instead pouring into the Golden Cudgel.
After the aftershocks of the Great Calamity poured in, the Golden Cudgel began to tremble violently. The frequency of the tremors increased, and a very faint layer of chaotic law patterns appeared on the surface of the cudgel. These were the original forging laws of the Golden Cudgel.
Sun Wukong held his golden cudgel horizontally in front of him, pointing the cudgel directly at the sphere of the Demon Ancestor's Devouring Heaven Law that was condensing to its limit.
"This stick of mine was the one used by Yu the Great to stabilize the sea when he was controlling the floods. Laozi recast it in the Eight Trigrams Furnace with celestial iron."
"It withstood the immense pressure of the East Sea, the Samadhi Fire of Laozi, the crushing weight of the Five Elements Mountain for five hundred years, and the karmic cage from beyond the realm. This thing is, at its core, the most resilient divine weapon in the primordial world."
"No matter how fierce the laws of the Demon Ancestor are, they are not as fierce as the pillar of light that struck down from the Chaos Calamity. I have survived the calamity, and I can catch this ball as well."
"I caught the ball with the stick, and the aftershocks of the calamity exploded outward from the inside of the stick, shattering the ball. After it shattered, the ancient remnant soul fragments inside the ball would go out of control—those remnant souls were fragments of the divine thoughts of innocent people who were devoured by Rahu back then. They had been suppressed for countless years, and once they exploded out, they would run around everywhere and attack indiscriminately."
"You must take this opportunity to use the mountain-protecting array's gravity net to trap them and separate the remnant soul fragments from the Law of Rahu."
After hearing this, the gatekeeper slowly clenched his stone hand into a fist.
"The separation of the remnant soul takes time. During the separation, Rahu's three limbs will not stop."
"So you have to be quick. The instant I catch the ball and it explodes, you use the eighth layer of array seals to catch the remnant soul fragments, and leave the ninth layer of array seals on the crack to seal the entrance. Don't worry about me. I'll retreat as soon as I've destroyed the ball. Be fast, you'll make it in time."
After saying that, Sun Wukong held his golden cudgel horizontally in front of him.
The aftershocks of the great calamity exploded to their limit around him, and the phantom of an eight-armed ape emerged from his body, intertwining with the white lightning arcs.
He stepped on the broken floating stones and deliberately headed towards the sphere of the Demon Ancestor's Devouring Heaven Law.