With the demise of the Fire Virtue Potentate, his curse instantly flew apart. Very few in the Hongmeng detected it, but the entire chaos started to tremble.
Clarity blew upon the chaos creatures, sweeping away a layer of smog that’d clung to their bodies for as long as they could remember. The energy of the worlds that they’d been so terrified by and could only coexist through the power of immortal dao suddenly turned into a gentle brook, no longer offering any harm to them.
Even…
“The chaos tribulations are finally over.” Seated within the chaos sea and safeguarding the chaos sun and moon, Lu Qing tilted his head up at the two celestial bodies overhead. “From this moment forth, there will be no more chaos tribulations in the chaos!” His voice traveled through the second realm.
After a stunned silence, the entire realm erupted in jubilation!
Chaos tribulations were a horrific event of extinction to all chaos creatures!
When even sovereigns ran the risk of perishing in one; there was no hope for ordinary chaos creatures to survive.
The great calamity that constantly hung over everyone’s head like a dangling sword was… gone? Never to be experienced again?
The Purple King was as if a god in the second realm. No one dared doubt his words. Endless goodwill collected in the void and streamed toward him as virtuous merit.
“Eh… ah… this must be father’s work. I’m his son, so the merit comes to me instead. He purposefully left it for me!” The Purple King quickly understood what was taking place.
While others might not know what goodwill and merit were, the Purple King had been paying close attention to Lu Yun’s growth. He knew that his father could deploy merit in the form of energy. By now, Lu Qing’s cultivation had bottlenecked at peak true king and he was only a tiny step away from becoming a potentate.
However, that tiny step was turning into a chasm impossible to cross. There was no being in this Hongmeng, chaos, and worlds that could reach the level of potentate through their own strength alone.
But when goodwill from the entire chaos collected as merit and converged onto him, he could use it for cultivation. This merit was untouched in its most pristine form, not yet refined by the Karmic Tree. It could eliminate all retribution and break all shackles!
Goodwill and merit could help living beings negate heavenly tribulations, but the effects were especially astounding when merit reached certain levels. An ordinary life form could spontaneously become an immortal, a saint, or any unparalleled existence.
And now, the Purple King was breaking through with the help of boundless merit!
Granted, it wouldn’t be the work of a singular night to ascend as a potentate. Thanks to virtuous merit, however, he could now see the path.
……
“What a pity. If it wasn’t for that chaos tribulation, the amount of merit created would’ve helped Lu Qing break straight through to potentate.” Lu Yun knew what had happened in the second realm despite sitting in the Longshan treasury.
The earlier chaos tribulation that’d swept through the realm had destroyed more than ninety percent of its denizens. Though the second realm was slowly returning to prosperity with the immortal dao’s nurturing, things were still a far cry from times before.
The goodwill and merit from the chaos creatures fell just a little short of enabling the Purple King to directly break through.
But that was fine. With his talents, it was only a matter of time before he became a potentate.
The Hongmeng Pearl floated in front of Lu Yun. Previously purple, it was now pure silver and a tiny tree sapling was unfurling in the silver bead.
“This is… a Karmic Tree!” Lu Yun frowned at it.
The silver pearl was the embryonic form of the hell of order. The hellfire of order burned gently within it, and it was quite unexpected that there was a Karmic Tree seed inside it!
“It’s not just the tree, there’s another life growing by its roots!” Upon careful observation, he noted another life form next to the tree. “Great Peak of the Five Hells… the god of Mount Tai!”
His eyes widened. The god of Mount Tai was Tianqi, his third disciple.
“No, this is the actual god and not Tianqi. What… the… ah. What a marvelous plan!” Pieces of the puzzle fell into place as Lu Yun further observed the budding mountain god.
“The god of Mount Tai is hailed as the greatest peak of the five hells—he’s stolen the strength of the five hells through certain methods. If I allow him to continue growing like this, he’ll take my hell of order as well.
“The Great Peak of the Five Hells will become the Great Peak of the Six Hells!” Lu Yun’s eyes narrowed. “But the reincarnation of the mountain god is my disciple. Since his past self is here, I can utilize the power of reincarnation to combine Tianqi with the core essence of his past self and strengthen him!”
Lu Yun’s nascent spirit twitched, injecting a tiny amount of reincarnation and Tianqi’s soul force into the budding god of Mount Tai. He then sent power from the Tome of Life and Death into the hell of order and carefully isolated the Karmic Tree and fetus from the hellfire of order.
He didn’t know what this Karmic Tree was and whose plan it all belonged to, but it was better to be prepared.
Hellfire was supposed to blaze on the Karmic Tree, but since Lu Yun’s hellfire of order was built off of the other five hellfires and risen from the Hongmeng Pearl, it didn’t need the tree.
The Hongmeng Pearl had become just another developing Hongmeng world. If no one had refined it, it would’ve become another prison in the fourth realm in due course. By now, it’d become the embryonic hell of order.
The other five hells had first seen their hellfires ignite on the Karmic Tree, then slowly built themselves up, but the hell of order was different.
“I’m finally on my own path,” Lu Yun heaved a long sigh of relief. “But the hell of order is used to imprison existences that violate order, so the name doesn’t really fit what’s inside it…
“Hmm, I got it, let’s call it the Disordered Hell!
“That’s right, anything that violates order is disorder, so that’s what this hell should be called. The hellfire of order should also be called the disordered hellfire instead!”
Hummm.
The silver Disordered Hell resonated with Lu Yun’s words, seemingly agreeing with him.
