The God Realm's Taboo-tier elder stood face to face with Kaguya Ji and Lin Qing'er.
With nowhere else to turn, he could only call upon a forbidden artifact.
"Summon the blood of the heavens—release the forbidden device!"
"Kill, kill, kill!"
"The ancestors are mighty!"
What he lifted was a withered, horned spear, caked with blackened blood, roughly two meters long.
The moment it was offered in sacrifice, the void shrieked.
A mantle of storm-dark cloud converged overhead as innumerable droplets of divine blood streamed into the war spear.
The world dimmed.
Hundreds of millions of living beings cried out.
This was a weapon forged from the flesh and blood of a world's dead.
Cruel. Ruthless.
The old man wielding it was named Cang Tianhao.
He was one of several Taboo-tier beings of the God Realm—an awakener whose duty was to suppress these goddesses from beyond.
Flushed to the ears, eyes locked on Kaguya, he spoke in a voice as cold as iron: "Extraterrestrial evil god—die for me!"
Boom.
He merely pricked forward with the spear.
Time and space fractured.
A curse borne by all spirits howled for Kaguya Ji.
Before the strike even arrived, the world within that arc had already blanched to ashen gray.
Vital force withered and drew tight.
Countless dead souls—and a tide of the Unknown—wailed toward Kaguya.
The God Realm and the Unknown had long since formed an alliance.
To dare to act against the Eternal taught meant they were backed by a potent Unknown power indeed.
Once upon a time, even the Three Heavenly Emperors had fallen to the Unknown.
How could a handful of gods from beyond the skies hope for anything better?!
"This is the power you're banking on?" Kaguya Ji's gaze skimmed the tens of millions of Unknown entities, pure disdain in her eyes.
The Unknown was chaos and anomaly.
How could it invade her?
She merely stood still.
Let the Unknown rabble and their dreadful miasma come flooding in.
When they were within a single meter, a torrent of golden radiance spilled out around her. The Unknown was scythed down in an instant.
The true Dharma does not admit defilement.
"No… impossible…"
Cries erupted from the God Realm's ranks.
This was a forbidden artifact that even the Three Heavenly Emperors could not weather.
How could this woman stand unscathed?
"Impossible?" Kaguya curled her lip and pointed at the ancestor of the God Realm, her tone as flat as a blade: "Then watch—and learn what real destructive power is."
"Ten Thousand Fates—Total Killing Curse."
No one even saw Kaguya move.
But in the next heartbeat, everything for tens of thousands of li around that God Realm ancestor turned into a gray, forbidden dead zone.
A true killing art.
Ash-to-ash, dust-to-dust—by the curse's guidance.
Millions perished in a blink.
Under the curse's erosion, that ancestor withered on his feet—skin sloughing away in flakes.
"Help! What… what is this—"
"Darkness Devours—Coiling Serpent!"
At some point, Orochimaru had slipped behind a cosmic-level opponent and sank his fangs into the man's neck.
Everywhere, the battlefield boiled over.
Here, Kaguya Ji alone toppling the balance had lit the fuse; all across the lower realms, countless believers surged skyward, washing the heavens in blood.
Chu Dashan flew above, barking orders to the faithful: "Form into squares! Front rank the goddesses, second rank the priests—advance slowly!"
As he spoke, Lin Qing'er's immortal clay figures on the other front, having soaked in oceans of blood, grew stronger and stronger.
Some even kindled spiritual wisdom, becoming new lifeforms.
Their skin was a pale, earthen yellow.
Their strength was bottomless.
Even when bodies shattered and crumbled to dust, they re-knit themselves in a flash.
They could not be killed at all.
Because their origin was Lin Qing'er herself.
Her vitality was boundless.
So long as she did not die, these clay figures were a terror with no end.
"Roar! For the Eternal God Realm…"
After butchering thousands, the first clay figure finally managed speech.
Then the second.
Once the undying clay figures numbered past a thousand, they began to show tactics.
Their evolutions even diverged along different paths.
"No… where did these monsters come from? Even the Reincarnation Patrollers can't handle them!"
"These mud fiends are more dreadful than cosmic-level evolvers!"
"Run—"
When the Unknown on which the God Realm relied could do nothing to the Eternal faith, the outcome was already written.
The hundreds of millions drawn from other worlds collapsed with laughable ease.
And waiting for their rout—was a black-scaled Candle Dragon.
"Dragon-Soul Art—Annihilating the Tainted Blood!"
Bai Suzhen threw back her head and roared.
The Dragon-Soul Art unfurled.
Space-time shattered; the soundwave stacked and stacked, millions of times over.
The routed soldiers were wiped out where they fled.
Blood sheeted everywhere.
The faithful were wild with exultation.
"Good thing I joined early—if the goddesses get mad, they'll slap you into a paste."
"Ha! We're punching holes through the sky here, and over there they're still kneeling and licking boots!"
"These 'gods' are the ones who cut off the path of ascension. Only a fool dog would follow them!"
"Right—better to follow the Eternal."
…
Most of those who had joined the faith were not individually strong.
But evolvers at the cosmic level—once graced with divine power—were each one of them terrifying.
By now many had broken through into the Taboo tier.
Not that they felt proud of it; from the moment the goddesses descended, their old fantasies had been shattered to dust.
A "goddess," to put it plainly, was a handmaiden.
Even a "god" stood at no more than the priestly rank.
Such beings could snuff out hundreds of millions with a flick of the wrist. As for true gods—would they not, with a single thought, erase whole worlds?
With the first Taboo-tier elder dead, the remaining Taboo powerhouses went mad.
They bunched together, intent on smashing this world even if it meant dying with it.
"If we're all dying anyway, then let's die together!"
"Come on!"
They hoisted three forbidden artifacts; countless living beings were seized as sacrifices.
One was a battered, dark-red tripod.
One, a hideous striped mask.
The last, a bronze sword.
The God Realm buckled.
Time and space fell into chaos.
Cause and effect churned and reversed.
Everything proclaimed the end of the world.
The God Realm's Taboos had not wanted this either.
But absent the resolve to die, they had no chance at all!
In just a short span, a whole world face-on collapsed.
That ancient place—the home where the immortals of antiquity had once dwelled—was reduced to history's dust.
A wasteland.
Kaguya Ji looked across the surviving Taboos, pressed her palms together, and prayed in silence: "I petition the gods for a Daoist instrument—to utterly slay these villains who throw the world into turmoil."
No sooner had she finished than a dazzle of light blossomed in her hand.
Ripples fanned outward.
Time across the entire world froze still.
The Sword of Shinto.
A grant of divine authority from Liu Che.
A blade smelted of countless supernatural powers, fashioned upon the law of time.
He himself did not appear.
But this weapon was his presence made manifest.
It was the Eternal God Realm's will.
The three Taboo-tier elders went pale with horror. They had never expected a weapon more terrifying than their own to still exist within this world. Though their minds could think, the power within their souls could not so much as twitch.
Time in this world had been locked in amber.
By trying to shatter everything, they had handed Kaguya the opening to strike.
············Ask for flowers·····
Otherwise, the world's backlash would have made even her hesitant to employ a Shinto weapon.
"This is Amber—this is the Sword of Divine Light, the weapon bestowed upon me, Kaguya, by God. It is the highest authority at present, drawn out of the long river of time and tempered across uncounted years…
You cholera-mongers of the human world—are you ready to die?"
Kaguya murmured to herself.
Shhh.
With a simple downward cut, the world went silent.
Everything in the God Realm for hundreds of millions of li was erased by the power of time.
Past, future, present—
All of it died within time.
It fell short of severing pure causality.
But the sword had already surpassed the limits of this world.
And so—
The God Realm shattered.
The billions who had transcended into the God Realm were swept away by that one stroke.
That strike even sheared through the barrier between the two worlds.
The God Realm fell in pieces.
In the Yang Realm, people looked up in horror at a collapsing sky and fell headlong into panic.
In that moment, they tasted true despair.
Kaguya Ji, watching the God Realm fall to ruin, calmed the power roaring through her body. She turned to the others and said, "The rest is yours. I'm being constrained by the will of the world."
....0
She could no longer wield her full might.
Any further and she would trigger the world's counterstrike.
The God Realm's forces had been routed.
From here, it would be up to Chu Xuanfeng and the others.
On the other front, Lin Qing'er remained in strong shape; without calling upon divine weapons, she could still press the assault with her clay figures alone.
Watching Kaguya drift away like a feather, everyone traded looks.
"As expected of the first goddess—her strength is terrifying."
"She's exhausted the world's veil—how could it not be terrifying?"
"Besides, that wasn't even her own strength—it was the power of time. She must have borrowed a god's authority!"
"In any case, the war is over. Get ready to reap the field!"
…
That day, Liu Che harvested an ocean of spoils.
He lost a million units of supernatural power—
—but gained back a full thirty percent more.
The God Realm's demise sent shockwaves through the Yang Realm.
The number of believers surged beyond counting.
Tributes poured in without end.
Liu Che converted all of it into points-exchange commodities and placed them in the Eternal God Realm's points shop.
To structure such a system was child's play.
Points would be tied to how diligently each believer labored.
Even ordinary believers could earn them.
For instance, Sedum and Yoya Shiki, who managed whole planets, each drew one hundred thousand points per year.
It wasn't much—but it could be traded for powerful weapons, and even stronger bloodlines.
As for chief priests, they could accrue far more points on the planes' battlefields.
Seated within the Ziwei Palace, Liu Che gazed upon his divine dominion, which had just expanded by another fifth.
He could not help but be delighted.
"It seems that once I gather the statuses of the Saints' Tomb, I can move to the next step! Surpassing the current world… is no longer far off at all."
Once upon a time, to comprehend the law of light, he had needed external aid.
Now, as higher worlds were folded under his sway, he no longer lacked such trifles. There would always be laws enough to master.
…
In the World of Fighting Flame—
The state-city of Xun'er had fallen under divine administration.
After receiving the Eternal Meditation Method—
—her clan had produced three new Dou Emperors and two Dou Sages.
Xun'er wore a sheer-veiled dress of pale pink.
"How are the offerings coming?"
"Reporting to the High Priestess: we have gathered ten different Heavenly Flames, and captured three beauties besides."
"Mm. Good. Prepare the sacrifice."