Chapter Thirty-Seven: Heaven's Ancient Tremor

Who had carved out this stone chamber, none could say. Within it stood a desk of unknown age, upon which rested an ancient scroll untouched by the slightest speck of dust—a scene so disharmonious as to seem almost unreal. The old adage, “Curiosity killed the cat,” came to mind, but after a brief moment of hesitation, Luo Hao stepped forward and gently lifted the scroll from the desk.

“How light!” he exclaimed in astonishment. The scroll, which looked thick and substantial, was in fact as weightless as a feather. He could not tell what material it was made of. Luo Hao ran his fingers lightly over its surface; though the scroll’s shafts bore no visible marks or records, the material shimmered with a metallic luster, yet felt as soft and warm as jade.

“I have traversed the world, my life devoted to the pursuit of martial supremacy. After countless battles, great and small, I stood unrivaled at the peak, looking down upon the heavens. My path, paved with blood and bone, led me to solitary heights—yet when I turned to look behind me, I found nothing but endless corpses; my loneliness, who could possibly understand? I have searched the world seeking defeat, but none could grant it. Alas! Written by Cang Qiubai.”

As Luo Hao unfurled the ancient scroll, a mighty and chilling aura surged forth, as though a primordial beast had been resurrected, or a divine mountain from bygone ages had come crashing down. In that instant, it felt as if an infinite number of divine peaks pressed down upon him. His body cracked open on the spot, blood gushing forth, and a soul-rending agony nearly drowned his consciousness.

Blood streamed from his eyes. Were it not for the ancient mirror in his dantian, which at that critical moment radiated a hazy, chaotic light to shield him from the scroll’s power, he would surely have died on the spot.

“Pfft—cough, cough—what devilish thing is this? How can a single scroll possess such terrifying power?” Spitting blood, Luo Hao glanced uneasily at the scroll now lying on the ground.

Though wounded by its force, what shocked Luo Hao even more was the one who had left those words upon its surface. The age of the stone chamber was impossible to discern, but that the scroll’s power could only be withstood by invoking the ancient mirror spoke volumes of the strength of its author. With his current knowledge, Luo Hao could no longer fathom such power.

“Cang Qiubai!” With the mirror’s protection, Luo Hao once more picked up the fallen scroll. As he opened it again, the same dreadful aura erupted, but the ancient mirror’s power surged up to block it.

Unbeknownst to Luo Hao, the moment he unrolled the scroll again, the skies of the outer world roiled with turbulent winds and clouds. Vast swathes of bloody lightning raged, stretching for hundreds of thousands of miles; colossal thunder dragons, tens of thousands of feet long, roared at the heavens. Within that endless sea of lightning, some forbidden power seemed to stir from slumber.

All the Northwest trembled beneath the lightning sea. All living beings were seized by terror; even the ancient, mighty beasts dwelling in the Tian Cang Mountains were forced to kneel in submission before this sudden and overwhelming might.

“What is this? Could it be him?” Deep within a forbidden realm at the heart of the Tian Cang Mountains, where mortals dared not tread, a voice drifted forth, heavy with awe and dread.

“What power is this?” As the Northwest shuddered, a shocked voice rang out from the depths of the Tianhai Sect’s forbidden grounds. A pair of eyes pierced through endless layers of void, striving to trace the source of that terrifying aura.

Suddenly, a sharp sound of blood being coughed up echoed in the darkness. The probing gaze was struck down as if by divine thunder, and then all fell silent within the Tianhai Sect’s forbidden land.

Far to the east of the ancient continent, atop a divine peak ten thousand feet high, stood a crumbling, timeworn temple. It was a place shunned by all races—a land of no return, said to be the site of a cataclysmic battle in ages past, where rivers of blood had once drowned the very mountain.

The patriarchs and ancestors of the continent’s strongest clans lay buried within this mountain. Just as Luo Hao reopened the scroll, a golden light suddenly flared from the heart of the temple’s primordial chaos, piercing the endless void.

At the same moment, in the dark forests of the far west, a man as robust as a wild dragon stood draped in a blue-black robe of myriad beasts, wielding a massive white bone club. Upon the club were etched the life marks of countless legendary monsters and mighty beings—Nine Infant, Xiangliu, Great Wind, Black Dragon—each a terror from primordial times.

His hair hung loose, his face inscrutable. In one hand, he dragged the corpse of a giant beast the size of a mountain peak. Any knowledgeable onlooker would have been horrified, for this was a Shan Sao—a creature with a human face and the body of a giant ape, said to be the descendant of the ancient War Ape, the peerless champion of the primordial era. Shan Sao, too, were born with boundless strength, able to shatter mountains and rivers with a single blow; their bodies were the very image of their ancestor’s might.

To kill a Shan Sao was a feat beyond imagining. Yet the wild-haired man, armed with his bone club, paused, set everything aside, and stood with hands clasped behind his back. From beneath his flowing hair, his eyes gazed through the void toward a distant place.

“Old fellow, is that you? Such a familiar aura—how nostalgic!” Far away, at the edge of the Northern Sea, a voice echoed.

There lay a land shrouded in eternal darkness, a place few knew existed at the world’s end. What was most chilling was the countless, nameless graves rising from the lightless earth.

Beside one such grave, a skeletal old man, bald and bent nearly double, swept the dustless ground with a broom. His fleshless frame radiated the scent of death; his sunken eyes, clouded and dim, yet at this moment stared into the void as if traversing the rivers of time and space.

Luo Hao, in his stone chamber, had no inkling that his casual perusal of the ancient scroll had disturbed countless terrifying beings across the world. Shielded by the ancient mirror, he struggled to decipher the scroll, yet after half an hour, fresh blood still streamed from his eyes. Gritting his teeth, Luo Hao vowed to see the words clearly. Suddenly, the scroll burst into light.

Boom!

An inexplicable force surged through the stone chamber. In the next instant, a scene appeared upon one of the polished stone walls—a vision that would remain forever seared into Luo Hao’s memory, filling his veins with fire.

In the image, a slender figure stood atop a low, swelling peak. Though not physically imposing, his back seemed to prop up the very heavens, like an eternal deity.

Above him, the sky was torn by raging thunder. Ten thousand thunder beasts roared and howled, as if to annihilate the world itself. Alongside them came countless ancient wild beasts: the Blue-flame Bi Fang set the sky ablaze for thousands of miles; the black-winged Yingzhao split the sky with a single beat; the primordial fiend Xiangliu, its body stretching for miles, crushed the void like a dark cloud blotting out the sun; entire flocks of Gu Diao pierced spatial barriers with lightning gaze.

Luo Hao was terrified. Such a host would spell doom even for gods reborn or sovereigns returned to life.

This was a power no mere strength could withstand. Yet the slender figure faced it all without fear, as calm as a drifting cloud, as if the world already lay within his grasp—he had become the world itself.

The ancient beasts roared, and a stampede of ten thousand monsters swept toward the solitary figure, their combined might enough to shatter space, rend the very laws of existence, and make the universe tremble.

Faced with this apocalyptic force, the figure simply raised one hand, clenched his fist, and struck out. No embellishments, no wasted motion—just a plain, straightforward punch. Yet, in that instant, the force that could slay gods and destroy heavens dissolved into nothingness beneath his fist.

With that first blow, the figure struck again, just as calmly. Heaven and earth shook, a billion stars shifted, multitudes of beings howled in despair. Like a twilight of the gods, the ancient beasts and thunder creatures were obliterated in an instant, leaving not even time for a scream—only a mist of blood.

Staring in awe at the vision on the stone wall, Luo Hao felt his mind go blank. What dominance, what majesty! Against a sea of foes, he stood undaunted—this, then, was true might, a fist that could shake the world.

“Cang Qiubai, Cang Qiubai—seeking defeat in all the heavens!” Luo Hao repeated the name, his heart unable to calm for a long, long time.