Chapter 683: The Nether Emperor
The aged deity’s face twisted in agony, and he tried to flee. Qin Mu shook the Book of Life and Death, and the old god immediately halted, his gaze locked onto the book in Qin Mu’s hands, daring not to move.
Qin Mu grew even more certain. The Book of Life and Death was the bane of these starving ghosts.
“You’re not wrong to call us starving ghosts.”
The aged deity finally spoke, chuckling darkly. “The origins of the Netherworld are ancient beyond measure. It was born after the creation of the Netherworld and the Heavenly Realm, at the very dawn of heaven and earth. Before what you call ‘humans’ existed, ancient gods ruled the cosmos, forming the Heavenly Court of the Old Gods. The Nether Lady was one of those ancient deities.”
Qin Mu’s heart shook violently. He kept his composure and said, “So the Nether Lady, like Lord Tu Bo and Lord Heaven, was a deity born of heaven and earth.”
The aged deity shook his head. “The Nether Lady was far inferior to those two. The Netherworld is the darkness beneath Lord Heaven’s feet—it can’t compare. But it has one advantage: it answers to neither Lord Heaven nor Lord Tu Bo. Lord Heaven and Lord Tu Bo cannot set foot here. This is a lawless world. That is to say…”
Qin Mu said, “That is to say, the souls of beings living in the Netherworld will never fall into the Netherworld, so they can be immortal and indestructible. Am I understanding this correctly?”
The aged deity laughed loudly, but there was no joy in his laughter—it was laughter for its own sake. He shook his head. “Immortal and indestructible? Heh, a nice thought. But the Netherworld isn’t the kind of immortality you imagine. It’s true that our souls are immortal here, but that also means that after the physical bodies of the Netherworld’s beings die, their souls keep accumulating. If they were gods or demons, they could keep their bodies from dying, but other beings die in droves.”
Qin Mu asked curiously, “If more and more dead souls accumulate, wouldn’t this place become another Netherworld?”
“I told you, the Netherworld isn’t under Lord Tu Bo’s jurisdiction. He can’t reach here, so how could it become the Netherworld?”
The aged deity shook his head. “It can never become the Netherworld, nor can it become the Heavenly Realm. Both Lord Tu Bo and Lord Heaven are blind to this place—it’s a domain they cannot tread. But the Netherworld accumulated too many souls, and those souls began to do evil. How could the dead bear to see the living enjoying themselves? So war broke out between the souls and the living.”
Qin Mu was puzzled. “How can souls wage war against the living? Those with bodies and souls are far stronger than mere souls. Dead ghosts can never defeat the living.”
The aged deity smiled. “But bodies always decay, while the souls of the Netherworld are immortal. Even gods cannot completely destroy the souls here. Even if a soul is scattered to the winds, it doesn’t fully perish. In that war between humans and ghosts, so many souls were shattered that the fragments eventually formed black sand.”
His eyes suddenly turned pitch black, as if filled with countless, infinitesimally small grains of black sand.
Clearly, he was no longer a living person either. He was a bizarre monster formed when black sand had invaded human skin.
“Black sand—that’s our shattered souls.”
The aged deity revealed a sinister grin. “Because we were shattered so finely, no one could see us or touch us. You are one of the rare exceptions who can see and touch us. Once we had bodies, we felt hunger—an unbearable hunger, a maddening urge to eat. So we began to eat.”
He didn’t elaborate on that history, only saying, “Soon, all the living in the Netherworld were devoured.”
A chill ran down Qin Mu’s spine. Even though the aged deity hadn’t described it, he could imagine how terrifying that uprising must have been.
“What about the Nether Lady, then?”
Qin Mu asked gravely, “Why didn’t the Nether Lady stop you?”
The aged deity didn’t answer, continuing instead, “We ate and ate, until there were no living beings left in the Netherworld. Then we started eating ourselves—our flesh, our bones, our divine repositories, our primordial spirits. In the end, all that was left were our skins. We had nothing left to eat, and we were so hungry. Finally, we set our sights on the Nether Lady…”
Qin Mu shuddered several times. The aged deity spoke of this as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and the demonic nature within it filled him with dread.
The aged deity went on, “But we were no match for the Nether Lady. At least we had numbers. Yet even with numbers, we couldn’t bite her to death. She beat us badly, but we were immortal—we were already souls shattered beyond repair. She couldn’t kill us, and we couldn’t eat her. Until a stranger came. Someone like you, who could see us, hear us, touch us, and even harm us.”
He chuckled. “The stranger joined forces with us, and so we devoured the Nether Lady. After that, there was nothing left to eat in the Netherworld. But we were still so hungry—”
He smacked his lips, as if recalling something delicious.
“Devoured the Nether Lady?”
Qin Mu felt a chill deep in his bones. He narrowed his eyes and asked solemnly, “Was that stranger the Netherworld Black Emperor?”
“You call him the Netherworld Black Emperor?”
The aged deity shook his head. “We don’t call him that. We call him the Nether Emperor.”
Qin Mu was taken aback. “The Nether Emperor? The emperor of the Netherworld?”
The aged deity nodded. “The Nether Lady was a primordial god born of the Netherworld, but her path was limited—she couldn’t subdue us. The Nether Emperor, however, had miraculous arts that could control us. So we followed him, campaigned with him, and passed through era after era. Later, he established the Netherworld. The Book of Life and Death in your hand is his treasure, which is why it can restrain us. Since you’re one of us…”
“One of us?”
Qin Mu let out a light laugh, raising the Book of Life and Death and shining it upon him.
The aged deity’s face twisted horribly, and he let out a piercing shriek. Black smoke spewed from his facial orifices, and he quickly shriveled up.
Qin Mu sat back on the throne, leaning to one side, propping his chin on his hand, deep in thought.
“The Netherworld Black Emperor, the Nether Emperor. So the dark invasion is the black sand formed from the shattered souls of the Netherworld. The monsters in that black sand are actually human skins, each filled with pulverized ghost souls.”
“The Nether Emperor connected the Netherworld to the Great Ruins, letting the black sand invade. The black sand and its monsters are terrified of divine light, which is why gods entering the darkness of the Great Ruins are not approached by the dark.”
“But there’s still something off—the faces in the darkness. At Goddess Pass, I saw a demon god’s face pressing against the darkness to invade, only to be blocked by the divine weapon of the resurrected goddess. Similar scenes are everywhere in the Great Ruins. So where do those demon gods in the darkness come from?”
He glanced at the skins scattered across the town. These starving ghosts could move like lightning in the dark, but their strength was unremarkable. They clearly weren’t the demon gods of the darkness.
Strangely, those demon gods came with the dark and left with it. When dawn broke, they vanished without a trace in the Great Ruins.
The aged deity hadn’t answered these questions for him.
Qin Mu sat on the throne. The aged deity must have held a high position in the Netherworld. He could clearly recount its history, which meant he had participated in the war between the Nether Emperor and the Nether Lady.
Moreover, he had never been shattered since then, so he could retain his memories from that time.
Now that Qin Mu had shone the Book of Life and Death on him, his body was composed of countless soul particles, and his skin had its own name. When the book’s light struck, these soul particles, which didn’t belong to the skin, were expelled.
In effect, Qin Mu had killed him once.
Even if the black sand of his soul returned to the skin, it would no longer be the same person.
“The Book of Life and Death is truly astonishing. The Netherworld Black Emperor—or rather, the Nether Emperor—must have been a peerless genius to forge such a treasure.”
Just as he thought this, a rustling sound came. Qin Mu’s heart stirred, and he looked up to see the Kai Huang deity who had first drawn him here reappear, standing on a long, winding bridge and beckoning to him.
Qin Mu’s mind raced. Thinking back, among the starving ghosts who had tried to eat him, this Kai Huang deity had not been present.
“Could he still retain his memories from life? That seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”
Qin Mu quickly rose and, in a few steps, leaped onto the long bridge. Beneath it was a stretch of water, its surface rippling. The bridge extended from the town, spanning a lake, and its other end disappeared into the vast grayness.
The Kai Huang deity saw him following and continued forward. Qin Mu raced along the bridge to keep up.
After they left, black sand gathered again in the town, slipping across the ground and burrowing into the facial orifices of the skins on the ground. Soon, all the deities stood up again, lifelike, walking around the city as if nothing had happened, with no memory of the events.
The length of the bridge startled Qin Mu. It rose and fell, stretching into the gloom without breaking, continuing across the lake.
The lake below couldn’t be called a lake—it was more like a sea, its color murky and indistinct.
Qin Mu followed him for a long time without reaching the end. Suddenly, he stopped and said calmly, “Senior, you’ve been leading me forward. What is it you want? Why can’t you speak plainly? That aged deity could talk, so you should be able to as well, shouldn’t you?”
In the gloom, the Kai Huang deity halted and turned around. His hollow eyes fixed on Qin Mu for a moment, then he removed his upper garment.
Qin Mu was startled. He stepped forward and examined the deity’s chest closely. The skin was branded with strange patterns.
These patterns were composed of extremely fine and complex runes, forming characters.
The character “Seal.”
His chest and back were covered with the character “Seal”!
“The Creation Demon Art—that’s the work of Teacher Woodcutter.”
Qin Mu stood stunned, then tears suddenly fell, and a faint smile appeared on his face. “Senior, it’s enough. Let’s keep going.”
The Kai Huang deity put his garment back on and continued forward.
The “Seal” characters on his body were traces left by the Creation Demon Art from the Great Cultivation Demon Scripture. The Woodcutter Sage had used the Creation Demon Art to seal his soul within his skin. The starving ghosts wouldn’t eat the skin, so he could preserve his soul and memories.
But his physical body could never be saved—the starving ghosts would devour it.
Qin Mu wept out of respect, emotion, and above all, gratitude.
This Kai Huang deity had known that entering the Netherworld meant certain death, yet he had still come without hesitation, to explore the truth of the darkness.
—Like and comment section. Zhai Zhu and his wife, Ming Hua You Zhu, clicked about three thousand likes yesterday. Let’s keep it up today. By the way, all of Zhu’s books (except for Water Margin’s Immortal Path, which has no VIP chapters) have entered the premium category. Scatter flowers.