Taoist Master Xuanhuang

It is a cruel thing for a person to know that everything they do will eventually fail.

That's the kind of person the Star Lord is.

He wanted to take revenge on Xuanhuang, but he also understood that his revenge would only be a way to vent his anger and would have no effect on Xuanhuang Daoist.

Even his own carefully crafted plans remained unknown to Xuanhuang Daoist in the end.

Nothing could be more heartbreaking than this.

Your greatest enemy is completely unaware of your actions, which is tantamount to taking revenge on loneliness.

But what can I do?

He felt this deeply.

It was as if the enemy Xuanhuang they were facing was not a fourth-order being, but an eighth-order being, twice as powerful.

Everything exists in a cyclical pattern of cause and effect. Dealing with such an enemy is incredibly frustrating. Since cause and effect are intertwined, there is no such thing as failure. The worst-case scenario is simply a reshuffling of the deck and starting all over again.

And for the one who occupies the causal loop, there is no such thing as failure.

Even the worst outcome wouldn't matter to him.

This premonition was not only felt by him, but also transmitted to him by the very origin of the starry sky realm.

Defeating such an enemy is simply impossible, unless one is a ninth-order inconceivable conceptual being.

Therefore, even if his efforts were magnified tenfold, they would only have some impact on the cultivators under the Xuanhuang Sect, and would be completely ineffective for others.

He felt very disappointed whenever he thought about such an ending.

The grudges against the Starry Sky Realm cannot go unavenged, nor can the deaths of so many of our kind who perished before even being born go unavenged.

Everything was pushing him to seek revenge, even if it was just like fireworks attracting Xuanhuang's attention, it was all worth it.

"Hoo!" The Star Lord took a deep breath and said, "As expected of someone who has fallen into demonic possession, the resentment is already affecting me."

He knew perfectly well that the smartest thing to do was not to seek revenge, but to gradually integrate himself into the system created by the Xuanhuang Dao Master.

Being a carefree saint or immortal is a great choice.

The world of the Xuanhuang Dao Master is accommodating to an existence like himself.

This is the smartest approach.

But the reality is that, whether it's hatred, demonic possession caused by the resentment of heaven and earth, or tribulations of the Dao heart, it's all the same.

They were all guiding him to overestimate his abilities and fight back.

He understood his situation.

The core of the "Innate Star God Refining Spirit Diagram" is to imitate the Xuanhuang's refining intent. It refines both spirit and intent, but its level is not as powerful as the Xuanhuang's refining intent method.

However, they do possess the ability to refine their will.

This is the strongest part of the Star Lord's "Innate Star God Refining Divine Diagram"—he did not spread the ability to refine intent.

His divine subordinates only know how to cultivate divine techniques, not mental techniques.

How could someone who can refine their will not be able to sense their own situation, calamities, inner demons, resentment, etc.?

He could even shield himself from these calamities by relying on his strong will.

He can do it.

As for why this wasn't done, it's still due to cause and effect.

Even if one shields himself from the influence of tribulations such as mental afflictions, demonic possession, and resentment, it will still slow down his progress and cultivation, and affect his opportunities and destiny.

This is a mutually reinforcing relationship.

The downside is that the calamity is affecting one's mind, but the upside is that it brings opportunities and good fortune.

Without these calamities, he would not have the good fortune and opportunities he has now.

Therefore, he had to enter the tribulation alone, which was a decision made after careful consideration.

To put it more mysteriously, his hatred for Xuanhuang also stemmed from the fact that it deepened after he entered the calamity alone.

Isn't this a kind of gamble?

They gamble that they will eventually jump out, reap all the benefits, and then jump out at the moment of complete ruin.

The Star Lord is experiencing such adventurous behavior.

Logically speaking, when faced with an existence that is at least causally linked, most people would avoid it like the plague, so who would be so brainless as to provoke it?

But the Star Lord went and provoked it anyway, and under the influence of the calamity, he became more and more entangled, and his hatred for Xuanhuang grew stronger and stronger.

Let's change the perspective again.

As a deity, does he have so much affection for his own kind?
Does the Star Lord truly have feelings for his fellow race whom he has never even met, whether it be the Star Mother or the many Star Gods?

Is it really worth fighting against Xuanhuang for these beings we've never seen before?

Not at all, not at all.

He now acts with great benevolence, righteousness, and magnanimity, sparing no expense for colleagues he has never met and giving his all for the Starry Sky Realm.

This is all an illusion.

It is caused by the influence of resentment and mental anguish after actively entering into a tribulation.

He believes in the saying, "No madness, no life," and that's his mindset.

The most painful moments are when you are fully awake.

Because when he is sober, he knows that he is no match for the enemy he is facing. He is a being with a cause and effect chain, and everything about him is real.

Once he no longer wants this kind of reality, he will restart everything.

In other words, Xuanhuang, in order to define reality, personally participated in the creation process and established everything that exists today.

Once Xuanhuang withdraws, all of this will be like a false history, an illusory bubble, and everything will return to the historical trajectory desired by the Heavenly Dao.

Because of the existence of Xuanhuang, it is defining this reality itself.

Once reality is defined, then the historical trajectory before that is an illusion, a false history, and everything created by Xuanhuang is real.

It's about wresting the right to define reality from the will of Heaven.

One can imagine that without the existence of Xuanhuang, the current cultivation world, despite its strength, would be utterly powerless to resist.

The will of Heaven and Earth could completely erase this period of time, or create a fictional boundary, or even extract it from the long river of time to block the future and arbitrarily control the past.

It will be like a closed loop, with no past, no illusory present, and no severed future.

At that time, everything in the cultivation world was fake, like a dreamlike bubble that would burst at the slightest touch.

The Xia Kingdom on Blue Star will instantly revert to the bizarre and rampant era of the beginning.

The group of cultivators suddenly realized that they had been having a wonderful dream while they were asleep. In the dream, cultivators rose up, suppressed the strange phenomena, and ushered in an era of cultivation.

But this is just a dream. Dreams are beautiful, but reality is cruel. We still have to strive to survive. It will definitely be like this.

Do not underestimate the power of heaven and earth. As long as the Xuanhuang (a mythical creature) is not fixed here to define reality, everything that cultivators have now will become a dream. When they wake up, the world will still be cruel.

Others may not understand it, even Confucius and others only had a superficial understanding.

However, the Star Lord, being a special deity, can sense some mysterious power struggles.

After all, his experience was too special. He entered the tribulation alone in a declining top realm, cultivated his will to strengthen his will, but was actively corrupted by self-isolation.

There are moments of clarity, and there are moments of being in a state of calamity.

All of this gave him a realization that ordinary saints could not understand.

"Alas, on the other hand, if it weren't for Xuanhuang, I would be nothing but a bubble!"

It's hard to stay awake all the time, so it's better to live in a daze.

This is the state of the Star Lord.

He knew all too well that without the existence of the Xuanhuang Dao Lord, he would have been nothing more than a bubble conjured by the will of heaven and earth, destined to be a strange enemy even before he was born.

Born into a privileged family, he was destined to engage in a bizarre and life-or-death struggle with this enemy, eventually emerging victorious and becoming the protagonist of the so-called bizarre era followed by the era of gods and demons.

Then, without knowing which new enemy nurtured by heaven and earth defeated it and buried it in the long river of time.

If Xuanhuang didn't exist, this trajectory would definitely be followed.

His existence is real because Xuanhuang illuminates and defines reality with himself.

"Headache!"

The Star Lord slapped his head in frustration.

Immediately, he changed completely.

"Xuanhuang, look at the evidence of your crimes! You are the biggest cancer in this world!"

The Star Lord's face became somewhat distorted as he returned from a state of lucidity to one of tribulation.

Looking at the devastated and weakening Starry Sky Realm, his hatred for Xuanhuang intensified at this moment.

How could he not be angry that his beautiful homeland had been ravaged like this by Xuanhuang?

This strengthened his resolve to take revenge on Xuanhuang, even at the cost of his life.

I hope my plan will succeed; it all depends on Magic Light and those alien ants.

…………

The world ends here, and chaos begins here.

There are no clear boundaries, only a vast, boundless, eternally pulsating wall of chaos.

It is not a physical entity, but rather like space itself being boiled to its extreme state.

On one side, there are still clear laws, a star-studded night sky, the desolate outline of the continent's edge, and the lingering traces of the Daoist spirit in the heavens and earth.

On the other side, only a primordial cauldron remained, churning, roaring, and devouring all color and sound—the Chaos Sea.

This borderland is both the ethereal womb and the furnace of creation.

The basic primordial energy of blue, white, red, and black that constitute the world is completely shattered, confused, and settled here.

Looking around, all that could be seen was a thick, unyielding black mass, like the desperate embers of countless corpses of various colors being thrown into an incinerator and finally burned and solidified.

This dense, dark black was not silent; within it surged indescribable dark purple undercurrents, enormous, sickly green bubbles, and scarlet, blood-red lightning-like patterns that flickered and then merged into the viscous darkness. These were the remnants of the collapse of the Dao and the embers of the annihilation of order.

Occasionally, a ray of spiritual energy emanating from within the world would collide with it, like a spark falling into an oil sea, instantly triggering a massive, silent, and deathly white burst of light that illuminated the boundless, despairing chaos for a fleeting moment before vanishing completely.

Space itself is like boiling syrup, violently twisting, expanding, and collapsing.

Enormous geometric illusions—broken city skeletons, distorted reflections of the Milky Way, and bizarre outlines that were neither bird nor beast—appeared out of thin air, only to be crushed and torn into shapeless, wispy streams of light by an invisible force in the next instant.

Sound is a luxurious fragment here, with only a deep, relentless "humming" sound that reaches the deepest part of the soul, like the snoring of a giant who has never woken up, suppressed in the deepest part of his chest, and the space may be mixed with the piercing shriek of the tearing apart of the structure of spacetime itself.

On one side of the world, there is an extremely thin yet incredibly resilient membrane of light that flows continuously.

It presents a wondrous state between glass and liquid, woven together by countless fine, rapidly flowing runes of law, sometimes radiating a cool moonlight, and sometimes spreading out a warm and gentle sunlight.

Whenever a terrifying, filthy wave rises from the chaotic sea, crashing down with a suffocating force capable of annihilating all laws, the light membrane is blasted into a massive, breathtaking dent. Countless runes flash wildly under the impact, breaking and instantly mending themselves, as if a tireless giant is using its spine to firmly hold back the apocalyptic collapse pressing down from nothingness.

At the absolute forefront of this fierce battle between order and chaos, this eternal tug-of-war between collapse and rebirth, a gray-white boulder, barely formed from shattered star remains and ancient spiritual veins, floats like an isolated island outside the light membrane, yet is shrouded in the faint protective light emanating from it, half-suspended above the boiling chaos.

A person sits on it.

The Xuanhuang Daoist robe had long since lost its original color, with one side stained with black spots from the solidified Chaos Mystic Liquid, heavy as lead; the other side flowed with the glow of the world's barrier.

His topknot was slightly loose, and a few strands of white hair danced silently in the invisible, chaotic winds.

His face was calm, like ancient, unmelted ice. Despite the fragments of the world around him tearing through the sky like meteors and the chaotic turmoil devouring the heavens like a giant beast, his eyes seemed to be closed but not closed. Only a tiny, pure, primordial aura, as small as a bean, flickered between his brows, like a spark of life buried deep beneath the permafrost.

His very existence is the most incredible anchor point on the edge of this madness.

The palms are formed into a mudra and placed lightly on the knees, neither to invoke chaos nor to draw upon the energy of chaos.

On the contrary, he transformed himself into the hub, bridge, and millstone of this ultimate battlefield.

He painstakingly extracted wisps of primordial energy, thin yet incredibly pure, from the edge of the chaotic sea, from the primordial violence that had not yet fully degenerated into malice.

As soon as this primordial energy left the chaos, it was neutralized and tamed by another stream of laws flowing from the world's barrier, carrying a protective will.

With each impact of the chaotic waves, his body remained unmoved, while the massive stellar rock beneath him groaned under the unbearable weight. The flickering primordial energy suddenly intensified, accelerating its flow, forcefully repelling, grinding down, and ultimately dissipating the chaotic remnants containing the will to annihilate that had seeped into the cracks of the rock, turning them into a wisp of harmless black smoke.

Each time the world's crystal wall was impacted, it trembled violently, and fragments of the law runes shattered and scattered like broken gold (law fragments).

His acupoints subtly pulsated in response, as if capturing those fragmented traces of light and incorporating the true meaning of order they contained into the trajectory of the wisp of primordial yellow energy within his body.

With each complete flow of energy, the lead-black, chaotic spots on the Taoist robe faded a little, while the flowing rosy light condensed a little more.

His presence provided a calm outlet and a point of convergence for the violent forces pulling and tugging in this desolate place.

Chaos is not the enemy, the world is not the shield, everything returns to the Tao.

He sits here not to transcend, but to subdue the sea with his own body.

"Interesting, interesting!"

"Rare, rare!"

It was Xuanhuang who was cultivating in seclusion amidst chaos.

He sensed something in the darkness, which was the result of his willpower advancing further, reaching the late stage of the fourth tier.

A powerful will has uncovered the secrets hidden behind layers of world barriers.

"To have such insights is truly a testament to the many hardships one has endured. As I always say, only through hardship can one achieve brilliance. Even true cultivators and saints ultimately haven't undergone enough trials."

Xuanhuang wanted to put more pressure on his disciples and the saints who had sided with humanity.

...(End of chapter)