Chapter 1534

Chapter 1534: Past and Future

Lu Yun had pierced through the barrier around the Hongmeng and could do so even without the two great dragons. Nothing in the realm mattered to him anymore. Next on his agenda was to seek out the undefined fourth realm and its boundless reaches.

But for now, he remained in the third realm. He was still a Hongmeng potentate and showed no signs of a legendary fourth realm cultivation.

......

With a karmic fruit as the base, Lu Yun forged a new body for the spirit of disorder. Karmic energy was the most marvelous power in existence. A body made from it was suitable for any spirit to reside in.

Delighted beyond belief, the spirit of disorder found that karmic energy was even more suited to the Disordered Hell.

Lu Yun then combined the two Fire Virtue Orbs as one, turning the one from the fourth realm into pure fire virtue and sending it into the life form inside the second one he found. He placed the life form under the Karmic Tree in the kingdom of hell and used the power of karma to nurture its development.

......

The Disordered Hell continued to develop and expand. As the Hongmeng Pearl was a fragment of the original Hongmeng, it would eventually grow into a real Hongmeng world if it gathered sufficient strength to do so. It was currently the medium for the Disordered Hell.

Lu Yun sat face-to-face with the mistress of the Hongmeng. The Dao King was also present in the Disordered Hell to keep her company.

She’d completely severed her ties to the past and relinquished all of her previous strength. All of it had been distilled into a tiny seed and gifted to the little fox. Mo Yi was in the chaos cultivation realm under the immortal dao and an overseer of one of the thirty-three facets in the world of immortals.

However, that didn’t amount to much in the Hongmeng.

Coming back to help Lu Yun complete the Disordered Hell was her final act at having anything to do with her ancient ties to the third realm. The mistress of the Hongmeng was now known as Mo Yi, one of the overseers of the nine hells in the world of immortals.

“The Hongmeng Tower is the first ultimate treasure of the original Hongmeng, and the first ultimate treasure in existence,” Mo Yi explained seriously to Lu Yun. “The eleven keys to the tower is the only way to open it. However, the keys are the same as that brush of reincarnation—they exist in the past, present, and future. There are thirty-three in total.

“The keys that those eleven potentates hold are of the past. The ones appearing now are of the present. As for the future... I’m sure that people in the future will claim them.”

Her clear eyes looked unblinkingly at Lu Yun while, next to her, the Dao King stared steadily at her cheeks. He didn’t interrupt their conversation.

“Mmhmm.” Lu Yun nodded. “The future eleven keys are suppressed beneath Mount Cloudcover. The brush of the future formed a spirit inside it when it traveled to this day and age, becoming a life form. The same thing happened to those eleven keys.

“My future self allowed Meng to suppress him because he wanted to suppress the eleven keys in turn. But in the future...” Lu Yun frowned at Mo Yi. After his future dao fruit returned, he’d received the memories of the future.

Much would happen in the future.

“How is the future?” Mo Yi asked curiously. No one could help but feel a bit of curiosity about what was to come. Though she’d created the cultivation method of three lives and used it to journey through the past, present, and future, she’d hadn’t reached the era that Lu Yun had gone to. She’d never seen the end of the future and the era of great devastation.

“The Hongmeng Tower breaks,” answered Lu Yun. “The period I went to was right before the great devastation. I witnessed it all and experienced the destruction of everything. Life withers away, divine spirits keen, powerhouses lament...”

“Are we all dead too?” Mo Yi looked at the Dao King.

Lu Yun shook his head. “That future has no relationship with the present. Prior to the great devastation, heaven and earth, the great dao, orders, and rules all undergo significant changes.

“Immortal dao will be long lost in the river of time and a brand new dao rules over existence. There will be a new cultivation system, and perhaps the beings under the immortal dao ceased to exist long ago.”

The immortal dao would ultimately shrivel up and disperse into the void of existence.

“That’s true, the great devastation is so far away from present time that if I were to stand in the river of time and look into the distance, I wouldn’t even see its shadow.” Mo Yi nodded. “It’s said that our era only formed after undergoing a great devastation as well. Such is what is meant by the initial stage of everything stemming from one starting point to refresh life anew.”

Lu Yun’s future self had once said a similar thing over the Azure Dragon Lake. Everything returns to the origin, everything comes again to the starting point.

That sentence had described the reason for the great devastation. If the world teeming with life was deemed “everything”, then the great devastation was the act of returning to one starting point. Everything reaches the end to return to the origin, revisiting the nothingness of the beginning.

Everything stemming from one starting point to refresh life anew was the inception of a new era, a new lease on life. The era they were in was the initial stage of a new period after the great devastation.

“To be frank...” sighed Lu Yun. “My future self is clear of mind and sees through all karma. He was the only thing still alive after the great devastation and the only life form present at the beginning.”

“What?!” Mo Yi and the Dao King gasped. Countless heavyweights of the original Hongmeng had once derived the events of the grand beginning and learned of the existence of the great devastation.

“My future self cultivates demonic dao and did so before the great devastation. The era before the final end is one of demonic dao.

“Everyone seeks to become a demon then and slaughter reigns beneath the heavens. Order will be defeated by disorder—all of that is a sign of the great devastation to come.

“What is meant by destruction isn’t that of order or life, but of all objective and subjective existence,” murmured Lu Yun. “But my future self constantly felt that the great devastation wasn’t a part of the cycle of the grand beginning. That the operation of reincarnation... was a subjective notion.”

Subjectivity meant thought and opinion. Only life would form such things. Everything in the realms was objective—including life forms. They were born out of the objectivity of existence itself.

What Lu Yun meant was clear— the great devastation was facilitated by some sort of living being.

Mo Yi and the Dao King sank into stunned silence.

......

“It’s all simply too far away,” Mo Yi suddenly sighed. “What we need to do now is to help the immortal dao grow and develop so that our home flourishes once again. It needs to stand firm in the fourth realm as it once did.

“The great devastation is so removed from us that we will have long disintegrated into dust and drift away in the river of time when it arrives.” She smiled gently.

“My future self went to the past,” Lu Yun continued in the same vein. “The period of the grand beginning.”

Mo Yi’s eyes widened, as did the Dao King’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline.