Essence Devouring Art

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH~

Astral winds raged, threaded with strands of Chaos.

Wu Dao strolled through a Garrison City. All around him, armored soldiers bustled about, weapons in hand. Above, a Star Sea of suns and moons hung in the sky, interwoven with dense Killing Arrays.

Within the greater Magnetic Field, wisps of disordered Chaotic Qi Flow seeped in from the Celestial Defect, disrupting the Law Order of spacetime.

A vast, sky-like pressure would periodically rise from unknown lands to patrol every inch of spacetime. Armies from the countless Eternal Sand Worlds were stationed everywhere, and the security was as tight as it could possibly be.

There was no other reason. This place was simply Buzhou Mountain!

The Hongyuan fissure.

It was separated from Shanhai Pass by only a single mountain.

”Viewing the heavens from a place of insignificance, a grain of dust is like a world.”

Before the World Core Star Hub,

Wu Dao glanced back, gazing at the immeasurable Eternal Sand Worlds outside the realm. Even when he strained his perception to its limits, he couldn’t catch the slightest glimpse of Buzhou Mountain, which they all revolved around.

This Incarnation had appeared here

not for a hunt,

nor for any other purpose.

He simply wanted to witness the divine majesty of Buzhou Mountain, the very first Dao Artifact from the Heaven Opening of Hongyuan.

Unfortunately,

in the end...

it was like a frog in a well, overestimating its own abilities.

Buzhou Mountain.

The origin of the Ten Thousand Races, the spine of the heavens.

Its sheer scale was so magnificent that it transcended the limits of imagination Wu Dao had known in both his lives.

Forget about glimpsing its true form; even traversing the immeasurable Eternal Sand Worlds that swirled around the Divine Mountain from foot to peak like a misty sea would be an immense task.

Without a Star Hub for transport,

with his current strength,

it would take him countless years just to cross the outermost ’Mountain and Sea Realm’.

An Emperor gazes at Buzhou, but cannot see the Mountain!

This single saying, a truth passed down through All Tribulations for innumerable ages, was enough to illustrate the divine magnificence of Buzhou Mountain.

It was a recognized fact in Hongyuan.

Only an All Heavens Great Emperor, whose Dao Essence could ripple through the All Heavens and Myriad Realms, could pierce the Mountain and Sea Realm and catch a glimpse of Buzhou Mountain’s true appearance.

Anyone below the rank of an All Heavens Great Emperor

could not perceive even the slightest contour of the Divine Mountain.

’The Slaughter Emperor is now confirmed to be alive. Perhaps... his true body’s location has something to do with Buzhou Mountain.’

Wu Dao retracted his gaze.

His thoughts stirred as he recalled the Slaughter Emperor, whose fate had been ceaselessly entangled with his own.

At the end of the Five Tribulations,

the Slaughter Emperor failed in his Attainment Dao. He was hunted by All Heavens, with no path to the sky and no gate into the earth.

At the final moment,

the histories of the Myriad Realms record that

the Luotian Sword Emperor slew the Slaughter Emperor at Buzhou Mountain. The Great Dao responded, transforming tribulation into fortune, allowing him to achieve Attainment Dao and transcend in a single stroke.

Buzhou Mountain.

It was the place where the Luotian Sword Emperor achieved his Attainment Dao.

It was also the place where the Slaughter Emperor supposedly met his end.

Whether this was true or not,

later generations could never be sure.

There was also another story.

It was said that the Mountain and Sea Realm had tried to protect the Slaughter Emperor, and the final battle between the two sides took place on the Chaos Battlefield outside Shanhai Pass.

’Shanhai Pass, the Mountain and Sea Realm... no need to rush...’

Suppressing the burgeoning impulse in his heart,

Wu Dao followed a group of Celestial Prides withdrawing from the battlefield, riding a Star Hub out of the Mountain and Sea Realm.

Shanhai Pass.

It was a gathering place for the All Heavens Venerables, heroes, and Celestial Prides.

A place where only the strong survived.

Moreover, the aggressors in the war were the Alien Species of Mountain and Sea.

For his own development,

it offered countless benefits.

But now was not the time.

Shanhai Pass was not like the rest of Hongyuan. As the central hub of a war between the civilizations of two realms, it was a place where Saint Realm experts were a dime a dozen, and only those in the Emperor Realm could be considered true powerhouses.

Right now,

he was still far from being impressive enough.

He had to hide his tracks and watch his every step even in the relative stability of Hongyuan, let alone the war-torn Shanhai Pass.

One careless mistake,

and all his efforts would go up in smoke.

It was not yet time to leap out of the ’greenhouse’ and into the cruel wilderness.

...

Time flowed by quickly.

The hunt across All Heavens continued.

Every day, Wu Dao acquired a varying number of Emperor Scriptures, covering the Transverse Cultivation of Qi, Spirit, and Divinity—the three great Extraordinary Basic Powers of Essence, Qi, and Spirit.

This time, his operation

was conducted under the name of the Human World.

Relatively speaking,

it did not cause as much turmoil across All Heavens as the time he had borrowed the name of the Dragon Hunting Tower.

Taking people’s money to solve their problems for them.

The Human World was a mysterious assassin organization that never had contact with the outside world. Any hatred would be directed at the person who paid for the hit.

Furthermore,

the Primordial Demon and the Incarnations were clean and efficient.

They usually killed in a single strike. If they couldn’t escape, they would self-destruct on the spot after obtaining the Emperor Scripture, which was consistent with the style of the Human World’s Dead Guests.

The Dead Guests of the Human World.

Once their missions failed, they would all self-destruct, leaving no information behind.

Rumor had it

that to ensure the mystery of the Human World,

the lives of all Dead Guests were controlled by the Book of Death, their fates not their own. The moment there was a risk of exposure, they would be immediately cut off and abandoned.

To this day,

no one had ever learned the location of the Human World’s headquarters from a Dead Guest. It seemed that, much like the Dragon Hunting Tower, the Human World had a great secret that absolutely could not be known by outsiders.

For all these reasons,

the Human World was the perfect, silent scapegoat for Wu Dao.

However,

the hunt was not entirely without restraint.

While a Grotto Heaven might not be much to an Emperor’s Lineage, when the victims were all figures of the Daoist Child level, it was a different matter entirely.

After the first wave caught them by surprise,

the All Heavens Emperor’s Lineages took precautions and once again strengthened the protective forces guarding their Daoist Children, causing Wu Dao’s hunting plan to gradually slow down.

However,

he was in no hurry.

There’s an old saying: a thief can be a thief for a thousand days,

but who can guard against a thief for a thousand days?

Besides, he had indeed been a bit too brazen lately. Going too far was as bad as not going far enough, so he simply took the opportunity to slow down the hunt, ensuring a steady income was enough.

As for the Human World,

it was just as he had predicted.

No high-ranking members came forward to clarify anything.

There was a deathly silence, as if nothing had happened at all. Numerous Dead Guests and Living Guests remained active throughout All Heavens.

The Imperial Influences of All Heavens

merely strengthened their defenses.

They showed no inclination to investigate the matter to the very end.

On second thought, this was quite normal.

The number of reserve Celestial Prides at every level within a major Imperial Influence was far beyond what the world could imagine.

Grotto Heaven Daoists could cultivate Emperor Scriptures.

And among the Daoist Children who cultivated Emperor Scriptures,

there were various ranks and grades serving as reserves for Creation Realm Celestial Prides. Every year, due to various grudges and feuds, an unknown number of Grotto Heaven Daoists would die across All Heavens.

And an unknown number would rise to fill their places.

The number of Grotto Heaven Daoists Wu Dao hunted seemed large, but spread across the Hongyuan Heavenly Realms, it was merely a drop in the ocean.

This was the compromising nature of humanity.

Back at Cosmic Mountain,

his attacks often wiped out everyone in one fell swoop. It was no less than a panic-inducing massacre, and the emotional impact on outsiders was infinitely magnified.

But now,

by capturing them one by one,

taking just one scoop from the three thousand weak streams,

many people felt it was no big deal.

After all, they weren’t the ones on the chopping block. For a Celestial Pride from some power to die at some time and place was perfectly normal in the vastness of Hongyuan.

It was just something to talk about after dinner.

A small ripple that would soon fade away.

It was because he understood this principle

that Wu Dao was not in a hurry to bite off more than he could chew. After taking a fat bite in the first great hunt, he ordered his forces to slow down.

He planned to let things flow like a small stream, prioritizing caution.

There was another reason.

Recently, the Bitter Dust Robe’s warnings had become very frequent. It seemed that more than one power among All Heavens was trying to reverse-deduce karma to find information about him.

The Dragon Hunting Tower? The Human World?

Or other powers, magnates, great figures, or perhaps all of them?

This served as a wake-up call for Wu Dao.

As the saying goes,

”The only way to keep a secret is to not do it in the first place.”

In the Primordial World, where Extraordinary Civilization had flourished to its peak, there were no absolute secrets, only matters of whether they were worth uncovering.

The Bitter Dust Robe was only an Emperor’s Artifact.

Above it, there were Dao Artifacts!

Before he had truly grown to his full potential,

Wu Dao could not let himself become a secret that others would stop at nothing to uncover.

WHOOSH~

Deep within Nirvana Valley,

Wu Dao’s consciousness returned. As he sensed the Bitter Dust Robe frequently obscuring his karmic information, he felt a sense of detachment, but couldn’t help but sigh at the workings of fate.

Without that fateful encounter in Broken Clothes Alley,

perhaps,

even to this day,

he would not have dared to take a single step into Hongyuan.

All that I have gained is my fortune; my fortune is my strength.

Wu Dao never had any pedantic ideas about looking down on external objects or external power.

To him,

anything that could create benefits for him was a part of his power. If you have a gun and choose to use your fists, what is that if not stupidity?

After shifting his focus to the Bitter Dust Robe,

Wu Dao began to inspect the haul from his hunt so far, and his mood brightened once again.

The operation had been ongoing for two months now.

But in this fleeting period, the number of Emperor Scriptures Wu Dao had obtained reached a terrifying seven hundred!

And the number was still increasing every day!

From the Heaven Opening of Hongyuan to the present day,

Daoists were as rare as a phoenix feather or a qilin’s horn.

Below the level of Attainment Dao were the three stages of the Emperor Realm: Mixed Yuan Tao Emperor, All Heavens Great Emperor, and Emperor.

The lower the stage, the more numerous they were.

Across the countless ages of the Five Tribulations,

they came and went, lived and died.

The total number of recorded Emperor Realm experts, the lineages passed down through the world from ancient to modern times, definitely exceeded three thousand.

However,

a lineage was a lineage,

and an Emperor Realm expert was an Emperor Realm expert.

The number of Emperor Dao lineages a power possessed did not mean it had that many Emperor Realm experts watching over it.

Any single Emperor

was an existence that could only stand out from the massive population of immeasurable living beings across the Eternal Sand Worlds.

One could imagine how difficult it was to achieve this realm.

Several thousand Emperor Realm experts might seem like a lot,

but compared to the total number of countless contenders across the ages of the Hongyuan Five Tribulations, it was less than a drop in the ocean.

The Saint Realm wielded rules.

The Emperor Realm controlled the Dao.

Once one achieved the Emperor Realm, their own Dao would become a constituent element of the Hongyuan Great Dao.

Placed within the Primordial Magnetic Tree Diagram,

it would be at the level of the ”myriad things” branches beneath the three fundamental Extraordinary Dao Sources.

One could imagine

how much of Hongyuan’s total volume the Dao of a single Emperor accounted for.

Wu Dao’s ”All Things Arise from the Three”

was all about collecting these elements of the Great Dao.

He would fuse them in a single furnace to refine a Supreme Great Pill that would benefit his Primordial Magnetic Dao Source, allowing it to transition from its ’milk-drinking’ infancy to a phase of independent growth and evolution.

Seven hundred Emperor Scriptures in hand!

Once he cultivated them all into branches,

he would be one-third of the way through this stage.

WHOOSH~

His thoughts settled.

Wu Dao’s consciousness swept over the resources stored in his treasury, and his mood became even more cheerful.

Thanks to him slapping Guang Jun to death last time, as well as driving away Elder Ji of the Heaven-Burying Alliance,

Nirvana City had become completely famous in the Burial Realm.

Even the distant Border Wilderness had heard that a Peaceful Sacred Land had appeared in the Burial Realm, and its Holy Land Master was suspected to be an Ancient Saint Master who possessed the great power to dissolve calamities and devour tribulations.

In just one short month,

Nirvana City had grown by more than a hundredfold.

The number of Demon Cultivators who gathered there was in the countless trillions, and the Soul Coin System had begun to affect almost every aspect of the Burial Realm.

In the shadows,

more than one old monster of a Saint Realm Great Power from the Burial Realm had grown covetous, taking out their life savings to invest in Soul Coins. For a time, Nirvana City’s scale swelled dramatically.

As for the Heaven-Burying Alliance,

even they could not resist the temptation.

The three major competitors and a host of Realm Masters intervened, investing to carve up pieces of the pie, and in doing so, they invisibly formed a community of shared interest with Nirvana Valley.

However, they might make a small profit,

but the lion’s share would always belong to Wu Dao.

Every day, endless streams of Tribulation Crossers and Soul Coin Hunters converged on Nirvana City, creating a continuous supply of pure Celestial Tribulation Dao Source and Soul Coins for Wu Dao.

The treasury within his Dao Source.

The stored Celestial Tribulation Dao Source and Soul Coins had piled up into vast oceans.

The best kind of exploitation

is when I exploit you, and you still have to thank me!

Wu Dao had come to understand the path to wealth.

He felt that his previous methods of collecting resources and Divine Souls by fighting and killing were simply too crude.

Unlike now,

where he could rake in a Treasure Mountain and Treasure Sea every day just by lying down.

He and the Star Mother could eat and drink to their heart’s content without any problem whatsoever.