The Goddess's body trembled violently.
Her face began to change; her gentle, radiant features twisted as her skin grew dry and wrinkled. It looked like a piece of crumpled paper being repeatedly folded and forcibly smoothed out by a pair of invisible hands.
Her hair fell out in clumps, drifting into the rain and being swept away by the murky floodwaters.
The skin on her forehead became parched, clinging tightly to her skull until its very shape was clearly visible.
Her eyes grew sunken, her sockets darkening. Her lips cracked, and from the fissures, threads of blood seeped out, quickly turning black.
The moisture within her body was rapidly vanishing.
Chen Zhou could see the Goddess's body shriveling at a rate visible to the naked eye.
Time within the vision began to flow with incredible speed.
It was as if someone had pressed a fast-forward button.
The Goddess's body began to emit an aura of desolation. This strange aura dispersed the red rain, and the floods gradually receded.
Once the natural disaster passed, less than half of the Ancient Kingdom's people remained alive.
But another catastrophe followed immediately. Because of the Goddess's transformation, the Ancient Kingdom turned into a parched wasteland.
One year, two years, three years... ten years passed.
The rain never fell again.
The sun beat down mercilessly upon the earth. The ground cracked into jagged pieces, revealing deep fissures in the soil. Even the earth deep below was dry, crumbling into powder at the slightest touch.
The crops failed completely. Countless people starved to death. To survive, the remaining population began to eat tree bark, grass roots, and mud. Eventually, they turned to cannibalism.
The people of the Ancient Kingdom died in waves, their corpses consumed by their starving kin.
The persistent drought even began to affect a vast area of neighboring lands. They too became arid and rainless, their grain production plummeted, and the people fell into abject misery.
As Chen Zhou watched these images, an indescribable chill suddenly welled up in his heart.
It wasn't because the scenes were cruel; he had seen things far more horrific than this.
The blood sacrifice of White Jade City, the mountain of corpses in Kushi County, the dream massacre in Lantao City, and the Path of Hungry Ghosts in the Gloomlight Province capital.
Which of those was not more tragic than these images?
The reason he felt this chill was because he realized the passage of time in the vision was becoming faster and faster.
It grew so fast that the images transformed into a blurry river of light, flowing past his eyes at such a speed that he could no longer make out specific details.
He could only catch faint glimpses of fragments.
The cracked earth.
Collapsed houses.
Rotting corpses.
White bones.
Hunger.
Despair.
Chen Zhou tried to control his divination to slow the images down and restore everything to normal.
But he found that he could no longer control it.
Star Orbit Deduction and Peering into Heaven's Karma were still active, but they were operating incorrectly.
It was as if something was manipulating these two talents in reverse. Following the channel they had established, something was crawling toward him from the other side of the vision.
Chen Zhou's heart jolted.
He wanted to cut off the divination and break his connection with that dim star.
But it was already too late.
Within the vision, that blurry river of light suddenly stopped.
Every fragment froze in an instant, settling on a single image.
In the image, the Goddess lay on a dried-up riverbed. Her body was completely desiccated, her eyes had been gouged out, and her mouth was sewn shut.
Her body no longer resembled that of a living person. She looked more like a mummy that had been air-dried for thousands of years—her skin black and hard, clinging tightly to her bones.
Yet, her chest was still slightly rising and falling.
She wasn't dead yet.
As Chen Zhou stared at the image, he suddenly felt that something within it was looking back at him.
It likely wasn't the Goddess; she was on the verge of death and lacked the strength to look at anyone.
It was something else.
It was the vision itself.
It was that frozen moment of time.
It was some existence that had been forgotten in the dust of history.
Chen Zhou felt it.
Something had awakened within that image and was watching him.
Through the causal lines he had established, the entity had followed his gaze and found him in reverse.
Chen Zhou's pupils constricted violently.
He tried to sever the causal lines.
But the lines were no longer under his control.
The dense web of threads extended from the star, entangling him like a spiderweb before beginning to retract.
They were pulling him toward the vision, toward that frozen time, toward the Goddess lying on the riverbed.
The hair on Chen Zhou's body stood on end.
He wanted to stand up, to leave the high platform, and to exit the state of divination.
But his body would not move.
Something was pressing down on him—something invisible, intangible, and untouchable that had reached out from the vision, yet it was undeniably real.
It weighed on his body, on his divine soul, and on his causal lines.
Chen Zhou bit his lip and activated Cloud Sea Resplendence. With his current ability, he could completely immunize himself against the backlash of a single divination.
The authority took effect.
Mist rose within his consciousness, obscuring the causal lines and blocking the invasion of that aura.
But in the next second, Chen Zhou's expression changed. That entity seemed incredibly powerful. He couldn't sense its rank; it didn't seem to belong to any ranking system at all, as if it were something outside the rules.
The aura met no resistance whatsoever.
It pierced through the shroud of Cloud Sea Resplendence as easily as if it were passing through a thin sheet of paper.
Before it, his authority was practically non-existent.
Chen Zhou's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
Cloud Sea Resplendence was a Divine Path Authority capable of obscuring heavenly secrets and countering divination backlash.
In Gloomlight Province, he had used this authority to trap the divine sense of Central Province's Zhu Pan, causing that expert—who was at least at the ninth-stage—to suffer a major loss.
Yet against this aura, Cloud Sea Resplendence hadn't even lasted for a single breath.
Instinctively, he knew he couldn't let this thing touch him.
Otherwise, he would be finished.
His very existence would be eroded by that thing. His body and his divine soul would no longer belong to him.
His past, his present, and his future would all be erased bit by bit by that power.
He would then become another entity, just like that Goddess—polluted and twisted.
Chen Zhou frantically mobilized every scrap of power he could reach.
Death qi, divinity, his godhead, faith, and authorities.
He used them all.
But none of them could stop that aura.
The aura had already surged along the causal lines to reach him. It was like a black snake, flicking its tongue as it prepared to bore into his body.
At that critical moment, Chen Zhou felt something within him awaken.
That thing had been inside him since he had transmigrated, never leaving his side.
The Golden Light of Merit within Chen Zhou suddenly exploded, forming a vast, brilliant sea of golden light like a radiant sun.
The golden light was pure, primal, and ancient. It felt like the sliver of majestic noble spirit left behind from the dawn of creation, when chaos first split and all things were born, and the first ray of light pierced the darkness.
It was warm and bright, carrying an indescribable sense of majesty and compassion.
It was as if heaven and earth themselves were watching over him and protecting him.
As soon as the Golden Light of Merit surged from his body, it illuminated the entire starry sky, the high platform, and the entirety of the City of the Wrongfully Dead.
The Golden Light of Merit surged backward along the causal lines, chasing that eerie aura all the way into the vision.
Chen Zhou faintly heard a resonant dragon roar, a sound so powerful it made the entire starry sky tremble.
At the same time, Chen Zhou's Cloud Sea Resplendence authority was involuntarily reactivated.
Mist billowed from his body, hundreds and thousands of times thicker than usual.
The rolling clouds obscured the causal lines, blocked the path of that eerie aura, and shrouded every trace of Chen Zhou's presence.
Chen Zhou felt the gaze that had been fixed on him suddenly lose its target.
The entity within the vision continued to search with frantic rage.
It knew someone had peered at it, knew someone had seen things they shouldn't have, and knew someone had nearly been polluted by it.
But it could no longer find Chen Zhou.
Chen Zhou's aura had completely vanished, hidden perfectly by the mist fueled by the Golden Light of Merit, leaving not a single trace behind.
The aura surged wildly at the other end of the causal lines like an enraged giant serpent thrashing about in the darkness.
It tried to lock onto Chen Zhou again, but every attempt failed.
Chen Zhou stood there, watching the aura struggle frantically before him, feeling an indescribable sense of shock.
He didn't know how the Golden Light of Merit had done it, nor how Cloud Sea Resplendence had been triggered in such a way.
But he knew he had just narrowly escaped death.
The aura searched for a long time.
Perhaps it was for a few breaths, perhaps for several hours, or perhaps for years.
In the starry sky, time had no meaning.
Eventually, the aura finally gave up.
It retracted unwillingly, retreating along the causal lines back into the vision, back to that parched earth, and back into the body of the polluted Goddess.
Then it fell into a slumber, vanishing from sight as it waited for the next reckless peeper.
Chen Zhou stood there motionless, his back completely drenched in cold sweat.
He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.
That was close.
Chen Zhou inhaled deeply, struggling to calm himself.
He looked at the vision again. The aura had gone to sleep, and the image became clear once more.
However, a long time had passed within the vision.
A very, very long time.
The Goddess lay on a dried riverbed, her body desiccated like an air-dried corpse.
Her eyes had been gouged out, leaving hollow sockets where dried tissue could be seen.
Her mouth was sewn shut with coarse hemp thread that pierced through her lips and was tied into several knots, which were stained with black blood.
The clay she always carried had been lost somewhere. Her hands were empty; she had nothing left.
In the Ancient Kingdom, the auspicious beasts that had gathered earlier had either died in battle or fled.
Nothing remained.
Yet, the last small group of the Goddess's followers finally found her in a scorching, dry salt flat within the kingdom.
They knelt before the Goddess, kowtowing and weeping as they spoke to her.
The Goddess wanted to respond, but she had no strength left.
Someone stepped out from the crowd, took off their clothes, and covered the Goddess with them.
Another person unfastened their waterskin and poured the last precious drops of water onto the Goddess's parched lips.
The water seeped in through the gaps in the hemp thread. A faint sound emerged from the Goddess's throat, like a sigh or perhaps a sob.
Then, the last believers of the Ancient Kingdom carried the dying Goddess away from the salt flats.
They traveled a great distance.
They crossed mountains, forded rivers, traversed deserts, and trekked through forests.
They kept walking and walking, not knowing where they were headed.
The Ancient Kingdom perished from that moment on.
Cities collapsed, houses rotted away, farmlands were abandoned, and no signs of human life remained.
Only ruins were left, buried by wind and sand, forgotten by time.
Subsequently, Chen Zhou's consciousness withdrew from the starry sky.
He opened his eyes and found himself still on the high platform. The merit on his body had faded.
A blinding white light surrounded him.
The light from the bronze mirror was so intense that it made the entire platform look like a small sun.
The wings of the Mingchan were still vibrating, their buzzing forming a sound like an invisible river flowing above the platform.
However, the frequency of their wing vibrations was wrong.
Chen Zhou looked around and saw that many Mingchan had collapsed on the ground. Their wings were still flapping mechanically, but their bodies were exhausted; they couldn't even stand up.
Duke Wu leaned on his cane, standing at the lowest level of the platform, looking at him with an expression of intense anxiety.
Seeing Chen Zhou open his eyes, Duke Wu breathed a sigh of relief and quickly hurried up the platform.
"My Lord, are you alright?"
Chen Zhou did not answer.
He looked down at his own body.
On his robe, there was a very small black spot.
The spot was only about the size of a fingernail, located on the edge of his hem. One wouldn't even notice it without looking closely.
The fabric around the black spot was distorted.
It was as if that piece of cloth had been transformed from three-dimensional to two-dimensional by something, and then from two-dimensional into an indescribable mass.
Chen Zhou stared at the black spot for a few breaths before reaching out and tearing that small piece of his robe away.
The fragment of the robe fell to the ground with a soft hissing sound before transforming into a wisp of black smoke.
The black smoke did not dissipate. Instead, it twisted a few times in the air, wriggling like a worm, before suddenly lunging toward Chen Zhou.
Chen Zhou was prepared.
The Golden Light of Merit shone on his body. The moment the black smoke touched the golden light, it let out a sharp screech and vanished.
But Chen Zhou knew that wasn't the smoke's true form.
It was merely a sliver of aura left behind by the entity.
The true pollution was on the causal lines. The moment he had peered into those memories, he had already been tainted.
It was only being suppressed by his merit and authorities.
Chen Zhou recalled the images he had seen during the divination. The feeling of being targeted by that eerie energy was still fresh in his mind, making his heart race. What on earth was that thing?
It could actually ignore the authority of Cloud Sea Resplendence to pollute him.
Chen Zhou thought to himself that in the images he saw, many ancient kingdoms were adjacent to each other, which meant that the outer provinces had not yet split apart at that time.
In other words, the Battle of Qingtian had not yet occurred. Those memories must be from an even more distant era.
Before the Battle of Qingtian, what was it that caused the Divine Path to suddenly fall into ruin?
In the Fallen Dream, A Yao had told him it was the Heavenly Tribulation.
That was something even the God Emperor of that time could not resist—something indescribable and unspeakable.
"The Heavenly Tribulation... cannot be spoken of."
"You can think of the Heavenly Tribulation as a form of pollution. Heaven and earth lose their balance, spiritual energy runs wild, death qi flows in reverse, and causality collapses."
"An eon has passed since It descended, but It is still there. Heaven and earth are still under Its gaze."
"If you speak of it too much, the Heavenly Tribulation will fix its gaze upon you."
At the time, Chen Zhou thought that "speaking of it too much" referred to verbal mentions.
Now he finally understood that it wasn't.
If you touch the traces left by the Heavenly Tribulation, you are targeted by it.
If you peer into the past polluted by the Heavenly Tribulation, you are polluted by it.
If you establish a connection with that cursed history, you become a part of that history.
That was Chen Zhou's current situation.
He had peered into the Goddess's past, witnessed the process of her being polluted by the Heavenly Tribulation, and seen every moment of her transformation from the Emperor's Daughter into a monster.
Within those moments, there was the aura of the Heavenly Tribulation.
Therefore, that aura had followed the causal lines and found him.
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