Many children, many blessings; the twelve ancestral witches forced marriages throughout the primordi

The Heavenly Court, outside the South Heavenly Gate.

The once magnificent, nine-zhang-tall archway, adorned with carved dragons and phoenixes and gleaming with gold, has long been reduced to a bare shell by the mischievous children of the Pangu Temple.

Several bare white marble pillars never see the sun, covered with a thick layer of slippery green moss, emitting an extremely unpleasant fishy smell.

At this moment, under these broken pillars, a dozen or so bald, sweating men with their backsides sticking out were lined up.

These people were none other than the Taiyi Golden Immortal level envoys of the Western Sect who were forcibly stuffed into the [Investiture of the Gods] by Lin Xuan using physical means.

They were now all with their trouser legs rolled up above their knees, barefoot on the waterlogged brick floor. Holding rags and stiff brushes they had picked up from who-knows-where, they were performing an extremely humiliating manual cleaning of the moss on the pillars.

These people are like living gods in the mortal realm, wielding power and receiving offerings from countless mortals.

Now that his physical body is completely destroyed, he is stuck with a inferior incense-burning divine body that is not even as good as a terrestrial immortal. He gets out of breath and his vision goes black after doing any heavy work.

At the very front of the crowd, the large, fat monk who looked like a foreman stood out.

It is none other than Maitreya Buddha, the future leader of the Western religion and the beloved son of the Sage Zhunti!

The current Maitreya Buddha has none of the grandeur of the future Buddha.

His once bulging, prosperous belly has shrunk considerably in the past few days due to the meager diet provided by the Heavenly Court.

A layer of excess fat hung loosely around his waist, swaying as he ran. He struggled to carry a leaky, broken wooden bucket, wobbling as he fetched water from the stinking ditch outside the South Heavenly Gate.

"Hurry up! Haven't you eaten enough? Stop dawdling and embroidering for me!"

An extremely angry shout rang out from behind.

Mo Liqing held a rusty iron spear upside down in his hand and kicked Maitreya's fat buttocks hard.

He kicked Maitreya so hard that he fell face-first into a puddle, the broken wooden bucket in his hand shattering into three pieces, splashing dirty water all over his head and face.

"Ouch! Great Demon Lord, please have mercy!" Maitreya scrambled over, clutching his aching back, a forced, obsequious smile plastered on his face. "My incense-burning body is too weak. For the past two weeks, the Heavenly Court's canteen has been serving us nothing but thin rice porridge made from dishwater every day. I really don't have the strength to carry this bucket of water. Can't you let me rest for a bit?"

"Take a break? You think this is Mount Sumeru for you to meditate and chant sutras?" Mo Lihai chimed in without any politeness.

He stepped forward and slammed the butt of his iron spear hard against Maitreya's bald head. "The Jade Emperor has given a death order! If these eight pillars at the South Heavenly Gate don't produce a reflective image by nightfall today, you won't get your thin rice porridge for dinner tonight! You'll all be sent to the northwest wind tunnel to drink the cold wind!"

The Four Heavenly Kings used to be low-level security guards at the gates of Heaven.

Having endured the disdain of those high-ranking deities every day, he had long harbored a burning resentment. Now that he had finally caught a group of fallen disciples of a sage, he unleashed his arrogant and domineering attitude to the fullest, venting all the anger he had accumulated over tens of thousands of years on these bald monks.

Maitreya cursed the ancestors of these four watchdogs to the eighteenth generation in his heart, but on the surface he didn't dare to utter a single word.

He knew all too well the saying, "When you're under someone's roof, you have to bow your head." He could only get up in humiliation and try to pick at the green mold on the pillar with his hands.

Maitreya's ability to endure does not mean that others can.

These dozen or so Western missionaries were used to lording it over everyone in the lower realms; they had never suffered such inhuman humiliation.

A messenger named Jintai, who was standing nearby, could no longer bear the torment. He suddenly exerted all his strength and, in a fit of extreme agitation, slammed the stiff-bristled brush in his hands against the pillar, shattering it into pieces on the spot.

"I quit!" Jin Tai straightened up, pointed at Mo Liqing's nose, and cursed, "I'm a legitimate envoy of the Western Sect at the Taiyi realm! Even if my physical body is gone, my true spirit is on your lousy Investiture of the Gods list, so I'm still a rightful god of Heaven! What are you watchdogs?! Why do you force me to shovel manure and clean pillars every day?! Is there no law in this Heavenly Court?!"

The voice was extremely loud, echoing directly across the empty Nantianmen Square.

The other messengers, who had been harboring resentment for a long time, saw someone leading the disturbance and dropped their rags, joining in the loud clamor. They looked as if they were about to overthrow the Heavenly Court and violently resist the law.

The Mo brothers were stunned by this sudden resistance and were about to raise their iron spears to suppress it.

In the void, in an extremely dark corner, an extremely thin figure suddenly appeared.

It is Haotian, the only current head of this broken Heavenly Court.

Haotian has been having a blast these past few days!

For tens of thousands of years, he served as a puppet and a punching bag in the Heavenly Court, constantly smiling obsequiously at the disciples of the Chan and Jie sects.

Now that he holds the ultimate weapon that Lin Xuan gave him to suppress true spirits, his greatest pleasure every day is to hide in the shadows and watch these once high and mighty bald monks suffer a setback.

The moment he saw someone dare to lead the charge against Mao, his twisted desire for revenge surged to its maximum! Finally, someone had delivered themselves to his doorstep to establish his authority!

Haotian stood with his hands behind his back, dragging a tattered, dark yellow wooden stick in his arms. He swayed as he stepped out of the shadows, a sneer of extreme arrogance and malice on his face.

"You want to talk about the law? I'll teach you today what the laws of Heaven really look like!"

Before Haotian could finish speaking, he suddenly swung his right hand.

The dark yellow [God-Slaying Whip] left an extremely dazzling yellow afterimage in mid-air. It tore through the air with a brutal "crack!"

The God-Slaying Whip ignored all physical distance and struck the Golden Terrace Messenger hard and with extreme precision on the back!

"ah--!!!"

A heart-wrenching, agonizing scream shattered the tranquility of Nantianmen.

The Golden Platform Messenger was utterly powerless against this magical artifact specifically designed to counter the true spirits on the list. He felt as if tens of thousands of red-hot steel saws were simultaneously and frantically cutting through the depths of his soul! This pain pierced right through his inferior incense-burning divine body.

He was sent flying more than three zhang into the air by the blow, crashing heavily onto the hard cloud bricks. His incense-burning divine body flickered violently due to the intense pain, and his true spirit became extremely transparent, on the verge of losing his balance and dissipating.

The audience was silent.

Those Western missionaries who had just been stirring up trouble trembled with fear, their legs buckling as they knelt on the ground. Maitreya was even more terrified, pressing his face to the puddle and not daring to breathe.

"How dare you yell on my turf!" Haotian stepped forward, stomping heavily on the bald head of the Golden Platform Envoy, distorting his face. "Once you're on the Investiture of the Gods, you're my ox in life and my horse in death! Don't even mention making you clean the pillars; even if I made you eat the green hairs from those pillars every day, you'd still have to swallow them!"

Haotian raised the God-Slaying Whip and lashed it down three more times with extreme brutality.

With each lash of the whip, a bloodcurdling scream, as if the soul were being torn apart, echoed through the air of Heaven.

After the three lashes, the Jintai envoy was too exhausted to even roll around, and lay on the ground foaming at the mouth like a dead dog.

"Listen up, all of you!" Haotian roared with immense satisfaction, now fully experiencing the ultimate thrill of being the master of his own destiny. "If you don't finish your work before sunset today, I'll assign you all to the Tushita Palace tomorrow! Every day you'll be shoveling ash from Laozi's alchemy furnace at thousands of degrees Celsius!"

Upon hearing this, all the bald monks were terrified. The ashes from the furnace in the Tushita Palace could melt their very souls!

Everyone scrambled to grab rags and broken brushes from the ground and scrubbed the pillar with all their might, as if they wanted to peel off a layer of the pillar's outer layer.

Haotian looked at the group of laborers with great satisfaction, dragged his God-Slaying Whip backward, and swaggered towards the Lingxiao Palace. He was humming an unknown tune, pondering what excuse he should come up with tomorrow to make Maitreya clean the horse manure in the Heavenly Horse Pen.