The Great Millstone of Heaven and Earth

Even the desolate death world had reached its final extremity. A bleak scene unfolded: mountains had long since ceased to exist, and a dark age had fallen. Ice sealed the earth, and the shattered rivers and mountains lay in a deathly stillness of utter desolation.

If not for the thirty-odd sovereigns standing behind the Great Dread Nether King, they too would have turned to dust.

It was as if they had traveled back to the dawn of creation. The ruined mountains and rivers were vanishing, and heaven and earth themselves had transformed into a great millstone—grinding all living things, annihilating every soul.

The Great Dread Nether King and his followers stood on the millstone's axle, the only place of safety. And the Corpse Fiend was within the great millstone, enduring reincarnation, resisting death, bearing the crushing torment, tasting the bitter agony of the death world's final exhaustion.

Black gales scarred the land. Shards of ice were shattered. The entire death world was a scene of desolate ruin.

“When the death world reaches its end, when worlds revolve, within my domain even the gods cannot defy my command.” The Great Dread Nether King stood atop the black celestial wind, looking down upon the frozen earth. “One day, my kingdom will cover the Death World, dominate the Eight Wastes, replace the myriad realms, and become the sole sacred land.”

“Let the Ice Age descend!” As his cold voice fell, the great millstone of heaven and earth spun faster. Heaven and earth converged, crushing everything in the world.

The black millstone shattered all things.

The Great Dread Nether King’s skin was white as snow—truly ice-jade flesh, fairer than a woman’s. But now, standing high in the sky, looking down upon the land like a sovereign, his anger was regal without being displayed. His peerless face gradually showed a trace of blood-tinged flush. He roared up at the heavens: “I shall rule the Death World!”

At the same time, the thirty-odd sovereigns behind him all released soul-shaking howls. The broken netherworld trembled.

The dark ice age blanketed the scarred land.

“Even the Ancestral Gods are not beyond grinding,” he said. “This is my new beginning to rule the world.” The Great Dread Nether King Ruisio looked down upon heaven and earth, his hollow eyes as unfathomable as an abyss.

The dark celestial wind gradually ceased. The great millstone of heaven and earth stopped turning. The shattered netherworld was entirely covered by the dark ice age.

“He never knew I had the Ancestral God’s supreme treasure—the Dark Millstone, which can kill even him.”

Light flickered in the Great Dread Nether King’s hollow eyes. He descended to the ground and walked forward step by step, thirty-odd powerful sovereigns following closely behind.

A cold wind howled. Black snow danced wildly, blinding all. The Great Dread Nether King and his party pressed deeper into the netherworld, intending to collect the Corpse Fiend’s broken body.

Their feet left cracking sounds on the black ice. Chilly currents surged.

But soon, the Great Dread Nether King’s expression froze. In the distant depths of the netherworld, a withered figure stood alone in the wind and snow, its back to him—skin and bones wrapped in yellowed skin, its disheveled yellow hair flying wildly in the gale.

The Great Dread Nether King’s face turned ashen. He turned and fled. The thirty-odd powerful sovereigns behind him braced themselves like facing a great enemy, tensely watching the Corpse Fiend, guarding Ruisio’s retreat.

But where could they go? This was the netherworld space—the Great Dread Nether King’s own world. No matter where they fled, they were doomed to face the Corpse Fiend.

“The great millstone of heaven and earth… not bad. I’ll take it.” The Corpse Fiend’s faint voice came as he slowly turned to face the thirty-odd sovereigns.

He reached into the void and grasped. The sky of this realm rapidly contracted as the great millstone of heaven and earth manifested once more.

“Just now… it was you… it was you!” The Great Dread Nether King’s face showed terror, as if he had realized something horrific. He trembled, pointing at the Corpse Fiend. “Just now, were you the one turning the great millstone?”

The Corpse Fiend paid him no heed. With a thunderous roar, he ripped out the soul of heaven and earth itself, merging them into one to form a black millstone.

“No! You can’t!” the Great Dread Nether King roared in panic. “The great millstone has already fused with my netherworld, become its very fabric! You cannot withdraw it, or my netherworld kingdom will collapse!”

Boom!

The netherworld collapsed entirely. Dark forces ran rampant.

Countless black holes appeared, devouring everything in the netherworld.

Boom!

A tremor shook the sky. The entire celestial palace nearly shattered. Though it could reform, for now it was nothing but a true ruin.

“He’s out!” Hero Bear cried. “Let Ruisio be crushed!”

Violent energy took a long time to dissipate. As the corpse aura slowly drained, the Corpse Fiend stood there silently. The Great Dread Nether King lay prostrate on the ground, exhausted and covered in blood. His wave-like black hair covered half his beautiful face, but he could still be seen coughing blood, seeming to be at his last gasp.

He struggled to lift a hand but lacked even the strength to raise it. The destruction of his netherworld had clearly dealt him a devastating blow. That he had not been annihilated body and soul was already a mercy.

Using all his remaining strength, he lifted his left hand from the ground, trembling as he pointed at the Corpse Fiend, his teeth chattering as he barely forced out a single word: “You…”

The thirty-odd sovereigns all lay beaten behind him, their lives uncertain. The scene was utterly shocking.

“Good! Good!” Hero Bear shouted again and again. “Ruisio, keep on being arrogant! Come on, come on, Bear Lord here will fight you three hundred rounds! Rush over! I won’t move a muscle. If you can break a single hair on my head, I’ll change my name!”

That fellow was a typical troublemaker. He had suffered endlessly for fifty years but never submitted. Now, of course, he wouldn’t miss the chance to provoke.

The Great Dread Nether King swept his hollow eyes toward him, but Hero Bear was unafraid. “What are you looking at, you bastard? You deserve this! Karma’s a bitch!”

“Ahem.” Heaven Beyond Heaven coughed lightly and whispered to him, “He’s not looking at a bird—he’s looking at you.”

Hero Bear: “Da#%…”

“Silence!” The Corpse Fiend’s voice was very faint, as if he might expire at any moment. Yet even so, when the words ‘silence’ were spoken, the entire celestial palace turned icy and bone-chilling.

This place fell silent again. No one dared to speak.

No joke—a being one foot into the Ancestral God realm had been beaten nearly to death by him. Who would dare court trouble? In the deathly stillness, the withered Corpse Fiend floated close to the Great Dread Nether King.

“You…” Ruisio showed a look of utter despair.

The Corpse Fiend’s expression was ancient and emotionless. He crouched down and placed his withered hand on the Nether King’s skull.

Rolling black fog surged out, drowning everything. The entire celestial palace was filled with a murderous atmosphere.

Xiao Chen, Heaven Beyond Heaven, Person Beyond Man, Hero Bear, and the three Treant Sovereigns watched in astonishment.

The Corpse Fiend’s ghostly claws seemed to possess boundless magic. They made the Nether King’s corpse aura boil violently, and then slowly extracted a crystal-clear thread.

It was a strand of essence—Ancestral God essence.

“You… are already an Ancestral God… why… why still need it?” The Great Dread Nether King’s beautiful face was filled with bitterness. Fury was insufficient to describe his mood.

“Everything in the celestial palace is mine to take. Why need your permission?” The Corpse Fiend’s voice was flat, yet it unintentionally revealed an air of sovereign authority.

The Great Dread Nether King had three strands of Ancestral God essence within him, but the Corpse Fiend only took one. This surprised Ruisio and gave him a faint, bitter sense of relief.

“I understand. Your foundation is damaged, so you took a strand of essence.”

Now unable to move even a little and with his divine sense severely wounded, he could only accept the reality.

“I spare your life for the sake of your hard-won cultivation. One strand of essence is enough for you.” The Corpse Fiend spoke a few words, which was rare for him. “The sun at noon must move; the full moon must wane; when things flourish, they must decline.”

Person Beyond Man and the others were itching with anger. Why didn’t the Corpse Fiend simply kill Ruisio? Leaving him alive would surely be a great future threat. And their own situation was now precarious.

The Corpse Fiend moved like a ghost, disappearing into the darkness.

“Ancestral God, you can’t leave! You accepted our offerings—you must repay!” a Treant Sovereign shouted.

Heaven Beyond Heaven, Person Beyond Man, and Hero Bear all steeled themselves and shouted as well. If the Corpse Fiend left, their fate was predictable. He was their only lifeline.

“We gave you the three oracle bone diagrams. Will you watch us die?”

“You old bastard, you don’t know right from wrong! You even let that bastard Nether King go but pushed us into the fire!”

At the brink of death, people fear nothing. Seeing the Corpse Fiend about to vanish, the six men roared without ceremony.

The Corpse Fiend stopped in the darkness and waved his hand, instantly releasing their seals.

“Thank you, Ancestral God!”

“Senior, please stay! Take us with you!”

“Finish the job, Senior. If you don’t take us out, it’s as good as handing us to our deaths.”

But the Corpse Fiend disappeared in the blink of an eye.

The six changed expression.

“Never mind. He left us a way out. The path he walked, the grey mist cannot approach.”

Person Beyond Man had noticed this. A ‘passage’ free of mist remained in the celestial palace.

“Damn it, we can’t leave like this!” Hero Bear strode up to the Great Dread Nether King and punched him in the head, trying to crush it.

Thud! The Nether King rolled away, but his skull didn’t break. He only spat a few more mouthfuls of blood.

The six were shocked. Ruisio was almost spent, yet he still wouldn’t die—able to withstand a sovereign’s blow. He was truly terrifying.

Heaven Beyond Heaven and Person Beyond Man were notorious rogues among the human half-ancestors. They wouldn’t miss this chance. They cartwheeled forward and both aimed kicks right between the Nether King’s legs. They were as vicious as could be. Even Hero Bear winced and instinctively crossed his legs.

The Great Dread Nether King grunted, his hollow eyes fixated on them with venomous intent.

“What are you looking at, you bastard?” Hero Bear seemed to realize he had cursed himself again. He charged over furiously and joined the assault.

The three Treant Sovereigns, normally good-natured, had been tortured beyond endurance for over a decade and held deep resentment. They couldn’t help joining in.

The six men beat the Great Dread Nether King—a being one foot into the Ancestral God realm—within an inch of his life.

They hit wherever it felt good.

“I’ll paint your face like a flower!”

Slap! Slap! Hero Bear ruthlessly slapped Ruisio across the face, each blow landing with a thunderous crack. That peerlessly beautiful face, though impervious to blades and fire, soon swelled up under the onslaught.

“I’ll make you a rainbow-colored mess!”

Heaven Beyond Heaven, the notorious street-punk among the human half-ancestors, had a streak of wickedness. Having suffered humiliation for fifty years, his resentment nearly broke the heavens. He rained fist after fist on the Nether King’s face, turning it a riot of colors, with blood and spittle flying everywhere.

Yet no matter how hard the six struggled, during the fifty years of torment, most of their soul energy and blood power had been burned away. They had fallen from the half-ancestor realm and could not seriously damage the Nether King’s body.

“I say, you miser! Hurry up and use the War Sword to kill him!” Hero Bear turned and saw Xiao Chen collecting the puddle of Ancestral God blood on the ground. The broken sword was already in his hand, and the Ancestral God battle armor had been neatly folded, clearly to be taken away.

Xiao Chen was the only one who hadn’t been tortured, so his combat power remained. Hearing this, he approached and swung the War Sword down.

Splat!

The razor-sharp War Sword only opened a small gash on the Nether King’s body, failing to cut him in two.

It showed how terrifying a being one foot into the Ancestral God realm truly was.

“So sturdy! Hack him good, or I won’t feel satisfied!” Heaven Beyond Heaven took the War Sword and began to experimentally slash the Nether King wildly.

At that moment, the group had turned into a mob of thugs. The inhuman torture of over fifty years had left them with too much resentment.

“Can’t cut him? No problem! I have an idea. Plant trees on him!” Heaven Beyond Heaven and Hero Bear turned to see one of the three Treant Sovereigns, and immediately laughed. Truly, it takes a silent one to come up with a savage trick.

The Treant Sovereign quickly inserted branches into the wounds on the Nether King’s body, letting the roots take hold and drain his power.

“Good! You three old tree-men handle him first. I’m going to have some fun with the others.”

Hero Bear strode to where the thirty-odd fallen sovereigns lay and dragged out a muscular devil.

“Damn it, he’s my own kin! I’ll beat him to a pulp!” He swung his fists in a frenzy while shouting, “Still a relative of mine—and the one who hit me the hardest! Fifty years ago, you made me black and blue! I’ll tear you apart!”

On the other side, Xiao Chen took out the Seven-Colored Sacred Tree and planted it on the Nether King’s body.

Seven-colored divine light soared into the sky. Before long, the group was astonished to see a crystal-clear thread flow out of Ruisio’s body and be absorbed by the tree’s roots.

Pfft!

Seeing this, the Great Dread Nether King Ruisio spat three mouthfuls of blood and nearly passed out from fury.

“Excellent! That’s Ancestral God qi! Keep going! Absorb more threads!”

Person Beyond Man and Heaven Beyond Heaven shouted joyfully.

But then a Treant Sovereign cried out, “Damn! We need to leave now! The passage is fading! If we don’t go, we’ll be trapped here forever!”

They all turned to see the grey mist about to swallow the hazy passage.

The grey mist was the remnant soul-force of a long-dead Ancestral God, transformed from his shattered spirit. Even a sovereign trapped within would be imprisoned forever.

Seeing this, the group all rushed out of the celestial palace, fleeing frantically along the increasingly blurry passage.

“Hurry! We’re out of time!”

“Damn it! We can’t break space here!”

“We have to get out!”

The seven were desperate. If they didn’t make it, their fate was sealed.

The passage grew ever more indistinct—almost impossible to discern the true path. By the end, it was completely invisible.

They nearly gave up hope.

“Look! Faint light ahead! We’re at the exit! We’re still on the passage!” In their despair, a glimmer of light rekindled hope and light in their hearts.

“It’s the exit! It really is the exit!”

Seeing the exit just ahead, their faces showed true joy.

“You cannot escape the arrangement of fate,” came the Great Dread Nether King’s voice from deep within the grey mist. “Even if you escape for a time, one day you will return here to be my sacrifice. All things follow the rails of destiny.”

His voice was cold and bone-chilling, sending a shiver down their spines.

“Then wait until the death world grows old!”

In that instant, the group burst out of the grey mist.

Light flickered. They reappeared in the Death World.

Though this world was not bright—indeed, filled with deathly killing intent—to them at that moment, it seemed to shine with ten thousand rays of multicolored light. The Death World now appeared sacred and peaceful, every breath alive.

Heaven Beyond Heaven shouted up to the sky, a streak of demonic energy shooting from the crown of his head, stirring the leaden clouds above.

“We made it out!”

“Awooo! Lord Bear returns!” Hero Bear bellowed with joy.

All seven were deeply moved. Survival after a disaster made them cherish everything they had.

When they turned to look behind them, there was nothing but empty space. The grey mist was gone, as if it had never existed.

“It must have hidden itself in some strange small realm…”

The grey mist appeared only once every few hundred years, so it seemed that was indeed the case. If it raged across the Death Continent daily, the entire world would know no peace.

Hero Bear waved his hand grandly and stood up like a bear. “No need to say more. We’ve shared life and death. Come to the Devil Kingdom—be my guests. Recover your cultivation slowly.”

Several sovereign-level experts had all fallen from the half-ancestor realm and urgently needed to repair their soul bodies and restore their spiritual power.

They didn’t stand on ceremony and followed him in flight.

“This is the Great Death Rift. I once killed a Death Angel here,” Hero Bear said, pointing out various landmark mountains and rivers along the way.

“That’s the River Styx. It flows from the deepest part of the Death World. No one has ever found its source.”

The group looked where he pointed and saw a great black river roaring and surging. They could not tell how many miles it stretched. It rolled with towering waves, black mist billowing, eerie winds howling—an indescribably desolate scene.

“Truly sinister,” Person Beyond Man sighed.

Even at their extreme speed, it took half a day to reach the Devil Kingdom.

But what they saw before them filled Hero Bear with utter disappointment. The once-flourishing sovereign’s capital of the Devil Kingdom was now a complete wasteland. No devils could be seen. Only a few skeletons occasionally appeared on the great death plain. The silence was almost terrifying.

Ruined cities, shattered remains—they told a tale of desolation. The once-mighty sovereign’s great city had long been destroyed, leaving only broken foundations.

“Gone… My kingdom is destroyed. Where are my people?” He shouted at the sky.

Then he turned into a shooting star, charging deep into the plain. He grabbed a few wandering skeletons and demanded, “Where is the Devil Kingdom? Why is it gone?”

The bone creatures trembled in fear. “It fell ten thousand years ago.”

Ten thousand years—enough for a great empire to be destroyed a hundred times over. Under the force of time, nothing is eternal.

During the ten thousand years that Hero Bear was missing, too many things had happened. All had changed beyond recognition. Everything of the past was no more.

“My wife! My child!” Hero Bear roared to the heavens in grief, then fainted outright.

The others caught him quickly, fully understanding his feelings.

Trapped in the grey mist for ten millennia, hoping for a miracle, yearning to return to his kingdom and reunite with his family—only to find this.

“Let’s go. To the Divine Village,” Heaven Beyond Heaven decided.

In their current state, they could not possibly continue exploring the depths of the Death Continent. They had to find a safe place to restore their cultivation. Having fallen from the half-ancestor realm, they were in danger if they did not recover quickly.

The three Treant Sovereigns had nowhere better to go. Having shared hardships, they trusted these companions and decided to travel together.

On the way back, they were extremely cautious, steering clear of any sovereign city. In their condition, they could not afford battle.

Looking back on the experience, it was too bitter to recall.

They had been trapped in the grey mist for a hundred and fifty years—a century and a half that passed in a flash. An ordinary man’s life was not that long. A whole mortal generation had ended.

Heaven Beyond Heaven, Person Beyond Man, and the Treant Sovereigns had experienced so much that this period was but a fleeting moment to them. Of course, the process had been filled with torment. But for Xiao Chen, that hundred-odd years occupied the greater part of his life, leaving him with a feeling of being reborn, his heart full of a thousand emotions he could not express.

It was hard to imagine what had happened in the Nine Provinces and the Four Worlds during those hundred years. For Xiao Chen, it was truly a long stretch of time.

A hundred and fifty years. Many would have forgotten him by now.

In the chaotic Nine Provinces, countless things must have occurred. Perhaps some old acquaintances had already passed away.

At the very least, all his mortal contemporaries had long since departed.

Though he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, just thinking of it stirred a profound sadness. Life was so insignificant—in the long river of history, an entire generation might not even raise a single ripple.

“The age I knew is gone. Those who lived alongside me are no more,” Xiao Chen murmured to himself.

He wondered how many old friends remained. An era had ended.

“We’ll rest a while at the Divine Village, then return to the Nine Provinces at once,” Person Beyond Man said, seeming even more burdened than Xiao Chen, a vague worry in his heart.