After I stopped trying, a rich woman trained me into a demon emperor.

Deep within the spinal canal, a chilling wind, carrying the scents of decay and new life, filled the nostrils.

Zhou Ran's knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the grayish-white bone wall.

He gripped the bone gap with both hands, his fingernails digging into the sticky membrane, and his pupils suddenly dilated.

He wanted to resist, but it was like an ant trying to shake a tree.

The Heavenly Corpse's pulse directly cleaved through the sea of ​​consciousness.

The first painting.

There was no sky, no earth.

A thick gray fog blanketed the sky, with countless fragments suspended within it.

Broken mountains, dried-up oceans, half-built city walls, and collapsed temples.

The fragments rotated slowly, unconnected to each other, their edges being gnawed away little by little by something.

On the largest fragment, a woman stood.

His silver hair reached his waist, and his gray robe fluttered in the wind.

There was no wind, yet the ends of her hair were blowing upwards.

She turned her back to the camera, raised her hand, and pointed her index finger forward.

A powerful suction force was generated out of nowhere.

A planet was drawn to her fingertips.

Blue Star.

Blue Star 30,000 years ago.

There wasn't a single blade of grass on the wasteland, the seawater was a murky gray-green, and lava flowed out from the cracks in the ground.

The woman looked down at the planet, her lips moving.

"Too small."

The second painting.

A black crack appeared in the sky.

A body fell through the crack.

His limbs flailed wildly in the air, his gray eyes bulged as if they were about to pop out, their pupils reflecting the distant void.

The speed of the fall increased, and the gray scales on its body began to peel off and burn, turning into countless shooting stars falling to the earth.

Wherever a scale lands, a bottomless hole collapses in the ground.

The main body of the body crashed right in the center of the continent.

The shockwave overturned half of the tectonic plate, seawater flooded in, and lava erupted.

When the dust settled, the body was already buried deep underground.

My heart is still beating.

The gray lines emerged from the chest cavity, burrowed into the earth's crust, and wrapped around every vein of the earth.

The third painting.

Time is ticking.

A thousand years.

Three thousand years.

Five thousand years.

The heartbeat underground never stops.

With each jump, the earth gains another mineral vein, another wisp of spiritual energy, and another law of heaven.

The cultivation civilization of Blue Star was nurtured step by step, heartbeat by heartbeat.

When the first batch of cultivators ascended to heaven on spiritual energy, no one knew what was buried beneath their feet.

They believed that spiritual energy was a gift from heaven, and that the way of heaven was a just and just order.

Little did they know that the entire planet's rules and regulations were merely the aftershocks of a physical body in the Tribulation Transcending stage.

The fourth painting.

The silver-haired woman's clone stood at the edge of the void, looking down at the blue planet.

Her face turned to face for the first time.

It was that familiar yet cold face.

Ji Yue, the ruler of the Void Realm.

She stared at her own body, which she had thrown away 30,000 years ago, her eyes devoid of any warmth.

A slit appeared at the location of the lips, from which a string of silent words uttered.

Zhou Ran carefully identified each character.

"Wait a little longer."

"Wait until it ripens."

The screen exploded into fragments.

Zhou Ran took a deep breath.

The sweat on his forehead splattered onto his bone walls and evaporated in a moment.

Li Zhiyao held his arm with her hand.

The fingertips were as cold as if they had been pulled from ice water, and the ancient runes on the cuffs shimmered slightly.

"What did you see?"

Zhou Ran remained silent.

He closed his eyes and went through the rewinding of the pulse in his mind three times.

The Heavenly Corpse is not a weapon.

It wasn't debris from an accidental fall.

The Heavenly Corpse was a seed that Ji Yue herself threw down.

For 30,000 years

The spiritual energy, the Dao of Heaven, the cultivation system, and the underworld of Blue Star are all byproducts of this seed.

The entire planet is nothing more than soil spread in a flowerpot.

When the seeds mature, Ji Yue will come to harvest them.

The Heavenly Corpse instinctively fed him these images.

This is by no means a well-intentioned attempt at popular science.

It is a verdict.

You can't change anything.

Zhou Ran opened her eyes.

The six gray lines on the golden core were burning hot, but his eyes were more somber than ever before.

"Walk."

He leaned against the wall and stood up.

"Go to the heart."

"you!"

"We'll talk about it on the way."

As you walk further, the passage narrows, and the frequency of bone wall peristalsis increases.

A gray wind rushed in from the front, carrying an indescribable smell of decay and new life.

As Zhou Ran walked, he whispered the contents of the scene to the four people behind him.

After hearing this, the color drained from Wang Pangzi's face.

So the ball we're standing on...

Is that someone else's flowerpot?

"almost."

"Then what are we?"

Maggots in the flowerpot?

Zhou Ran didn't reply, and Bai Xuan trembled on his shoulder.

The characters carved by the mycelium are crooked and distorted:

"The standard for a seed to mature is when its heart is fully restored and gray lines cover the entire planet..."

Zhou Ran nodded.

"Yama, the King of Hell, wants to awaken the Heavenly Corpse, which is tantamount to watering Ji Yue."

"The Song emperor's attempt to suppress the Heavenly Corpse was like burying a seed in the soil to delay its germination."

"Penglai Pavilion has guarded it for 30,000 years, not just to protect the celestial corpses, but to prevent the entire planet from being taken away, pot and all."

He stopped and looked back.

The sea of ​​red spider lilies has disappeared into the distance.

"But regardless of which side,"

Zhou Ran turned around and continued walking.

"They didn't even ask for my opinion."

The bone walls beneath my feet suddenly convulsed violently.

My heart was pounding in my ears.

It was no longer a muffled thunderclap, but a shockwave with a real impact.

Fatty Wang was pushed out three steps.

Xiao Rou held the horizontal flute in front of her, while Li Zhiyao's sleeves fluttered.

After the gust of air passed, the passage ahead suddenly opened up.

A gray light shot into the sky.

A vast space unfolded before my eyes.

The spinal canal leads to the head, and the heart is just ahead.

The space is ridiculously large.

Even with Zhou Ran's Purple-Gold Demon Eyes fully activated, it would still take him three breaths to scan the entire area.

The grayish-red flesh beneath my feet twitched and contracted every seven seconds, while the blood vessels on my head crisscrossed into a network, and gray liquid slowly swirled within the tubes.

The four bone walls curved into a dome, enclosing a huge cavity.

In the very center of the cavity, a semi-transparent gray film cuts the space in two.

Behind the membrane, the heart of the celestial corpse floated in mid-air.

The gray fleshy ball, over a hundred feet in diameter, was covered with cracks on its surface, and the gray light seeping from the cracks flickered on and off as it pulsated.

Countless gray lines descend from the bottom of the heart, piercing through the flesh and heading towards the mortal realm.

Zhou Ran glanced at it.

More than 6,300.

But he didn't have time to count them in detail.

Because the open space in front of the heart was crowded with people.

On the left, five figures each carried different colored Yin Law runes.

At the very front was an old man, sitting cross-legged in mid-air, with a three-zhang-tall phantom image supporting him from behind.

Emperor Song.

Beside him stood the Dharma body of King Qin Guang, whose magical power was stable.

The three people in the back row are the judges acting for the First, Second, and Ninth Halls, respectively, with cultivation levels ranging from the late Golden Core stage to the Great Perfection of the Golden Core stage.

The five main halls of the Zhengtong era are now complete.

On the right, the lineup is deeper.

Yama, the King of Hell, stood at the very front, clad in a black and gold python robe, with his repaired judge's pen held horizontally across his chest.

The oppressive aura of a half-step Nascent Soul cultivator was undisguised, like an iron wall blocking the space.

Three rows of ghost soldiers lined up behind him, with the closest row consisting of six Golden Core Ghost Generals in black armor and red tassels standing on either side.

In the middle row, Zhao Tao wore a high-ranking ghost robe from the Fifth Hall, with a Yin Iron Token hanging from his waist and a Judge's Pen in his hand.

Zhao Shijiang stood beside him, his eyes gleaming with a sinister fire.

Zhao Tao was looking up, staring in the direction Zhou Ran had appeared, his expression as if he had been sitting still for three thousand years.

The last row.

Zhou Ran's gaze was fixed on that spot.

A statue larger than Yama, the King of Hell, slowly rose from the back row.

With a blue face and fangs, three heads and six arms, each hand clutching a torture device.

Behind the image of the Buddha, dark green ghost flames burned, and within the flames, the faces of countless dead souls vaguely floated.

The Ghost Emperor of the South.

Du Ziren.

Transformation stage.