483: Chapter 485 The Enemy of the Primordial Era

The Lord of Burials fell silent.

That silence grew like a wound that would never heal, stretching into the fissures splitting the sky above the Burial Land, where the dripping dark red liquid dried and hardened completely, becoming an ugly scab upon the firmament.

It grew until the spiderweb-like cracks on the charred earth ceased to spread, as if the very act of "shattering" had exhausted its strength.

It grew until the breathing of the Sky Burial Beast, sounding like an ancient bellows, became as thin as a gossamer thread, ready to return to eternal silence in the next second.

Then, it spoke.

The voice was as light as a withered leaf, rippling out the final circle on dead, windless, and waveless water.

Yet every word was terrifyingly heavy—like mountains forged from the wreckage of extinguished Primordial stars, crashing down upon the spine of the world, causing the Void Realm to groan and the Law to wail.

"Yes."

That single word drained away the Qi it seemed to have accumulated for hundreds of millions of years.

"The enemy of the Primordial Era... is not the Void Clan." The voice began to tremble, a shudder that soaked into the marrow of the Soul and could not be smoothed away even by time. "The Void Clan... is the sickle. Cold, mechanical, swinging along a predetermined trajectory. The sickle has no will, no good or evil, no right or wrong."

"It does not care whether it cuts down wheat or weeds, flowers or thorns."

"It is merely a tool held in a hand, a blade swung toward patches of... crops... that have long been marked and await harvesting."

"The real enemy—"

The voice of the Lord of Burials snapped here!

It was not hoarseness, but rather like a string stretched to the end of space and time, emitting a sharp, silent scream before snapping!

Its gray, blurred figure began to tremble uncontrollably, the light composing its body flickering on and off like a dying lamp swaying in a world-ending storm, the oil boiled dry, the wick turned to ash, with only a shred of obsession left struggling to burn.

It trembled, as if every word was tearing at its remaining Origin, and every syllable was awakening nightmares long dead deep within the Burial Land.

"It is the hand that holds the sickle..."

"It is that... which has existed since before the birth of the world, sitting high above all concepts and logic, which we, exhausting all our wisdom and imagination, could not understand, could not describe, and could not even truly name—"

The voice was choked by an invisible, immense fear, struggling for a long time before finally squeezing out from the deepest part of the Soul those two words, heavy as eternity, the mere utterance of which triggered a cataclysm in the world:

"The... Shepherd..."

Boom!!!

The instant these two words were arduously uttered, the entire Burial Land—no, even this world temporarily protected by the World Tree—was trembling!

It was not a resonance of power, nor submission to the supreme.

It was fear.

The most primitive, deepest, engraved into the most minute structure of every particle of matter, written into the most basic code of every Law, a visceral shudder when facing something irresistible, incomprehensible, and inescapable!

Above the firmament, that already solidified ugly fissure seemed to be violently torn open again by an invisible giant hand!

More, thicker, dark red liquid that seemed to contain the wails and rusted blood of endless eras, like a waterfall of blood and tears suppressed for hundreds of millions of years, poured down with a roar!

They poured onto the scorched earth, emitting a "Sizzle!!!" sound, not like burning, but more like the final scream of living beings when they are erased.

These liquids crazily seeped into every crack in the ground, seeped into the bottomless abyss below, seeped into the deepest corners of the Burial Land that even time dared not touch—it did not look like flowing, but rather like a sacrifice and prayer spanning endless years, humble to the dust and desperate to the end of the Soul.

Praying that the possibly existing "Gaze" might look away slightly.

Or praying that the "Harvest" which would eventually arrive might be delayed for one more instant.

"Woooo!!!"

The mountain-sized body of the Sky Burial Beast curled up, emitting a whimper as low as muffled thunder, yet soaked in endless fear and sorrow. Every one of its bones, comparable to divine metal, ground violently, making a "crack, crack" sound as if it were about to shatter in the next moment.

It buried its ferocious head deep into the scorched earth, into the ashes of billions of living beings, into the remains of those dead Souls that had long lost all marks—as if by doing so, it could escape that... indifferent glance, which existed in the nether, perhaps never truly cast, yet omnipresent.

Deep within the fissures, those existences that were sealed, suppressed, and represented the deepest nightmares of the Primordial Era, all simultaneously let out a suffocating whimper filled with extreme despair, as if all their throats were choked by the same invisible hand.

Then, there was a silence more terrifying than death, absolute and chilling.

Even the abyss that devoured everything dared not make a sound at this moment.

The figure of the Lord of Burials, amidst the shivering fear that this world itself could not control, became more transparent and scattered. The gray-white light dust composing its body, like a sand sculpture weathered for hundreds of millions of years, was peeling off, drifting away, and finally dissipating into the air filled with despair and blood, piece by piece, strand by strand.

Its voice was intermittent, like an ancient clock about to stop, its gears jammed with the rust of time.

"Taichu..."

"You ask... what the enemy of the Primordial Era... is..."

"I will now... tell you—"

It used its last strength to condense its voice, but the sound suddenly became extremely soft, eerily soft, as light as an invisible needle forged from the coldest despair, falling from an unimaginably high place, piercing through the dust of hundreds of millions of years of time and the whispers of dead Souls, accurately, slowly, little by little... stabbing into the deepest part of the listener's Dao Heart.

"The enemy of the Primordial Era... is not the Void Clan. Not that Shepherd. And even... not any 'existence' or 'concept' that can be defined, described, or named."

"The true enemy of the Primordial Era—"

"Is despair."

"It is that kind... when you have burned civilizations for hundreds of millions of years, sacrificed Heavenly Gods and demons, exhausted your last shred of hope, and finally stood at the end of the battlefield, only to suddenly discover—the torrent of destruction you were fighting against was merely a routine 'weeding' in some existence's farm."

"The light of civilization you swore to protect was merely a patch of 'crops' that grew a bit more lushly in that farm."

"The justice, glory, sacrifice, Legacy... the meaning of everything you believed in, was merely 'fertilizer' and 'lies' that the existence unintentionally scattered or deliberately wove to make the 'Harvest' go more smoothly—"

"The... bone-chilling... despair... born... from... that... time."

Every word was like a cold meteorite burning with the embers of the Primordial Era, carrying the silent screams of billions of dead Souls, crashing heavily onto the scorched earth, making the Burial Land wail; crashing onto the listener's Divine Soul, causing their spiritual light to scatter.

"We united the Myriad Heavens and Worlds... gathered billions of races... concentrated all known and unknown power from the past to the present... We thought we were waging an ultimate holy war concerning 'existence' and 'void,' protecting the last spark of life and civilization."

"We fought until the stars went out, eras collapsed, the Divine Realm sank, the Immortal Realm crumbled, fought until we ourselves... drained our last drop of blood, exhausted our last bit of Soul, cut off our last path..."

"Until the end... until that final moment..."

In the voice of the Lord of Burials, there emerged a sorrow more hollow than the void, more dead than death.

"Only then did we... 'see' clearly."

"We didn't even... see the face of our enemy."

"We never truly felt... a single finger, a wisp of breath, or the most casual glance of that 'Shepherd'."

"All our blood, all our sacrifices, all our roars and glory... were merely splattered onto... the cold edge of the 'sickle' in its hand."

"And it... that possibly existing, true one, the one behind everything..."

"It didn't even... look at us once."

"In its 'field of vision,' we might not even count as 'crops'... just a patch of... 'weeds' that needed to be periodically cleared."

"Or perhaps, not even 'weeds'..."

The voice grew lower, like the final flicker of a dying candle.

Above the Burial Land, the gray-white bone dust raised by an invisible force drifted down slowly, like a sorrowful, silent snow burying an entire era.

Cold, piercing, carrying the implication of the end of all things.

Chu Changsheng stood under the ancient, vast World Tree. Behind him, that giant tree which connected the past and present, with countless worlds birthing and dying among its branches and leaves, also seemed to have solidified. The birth and death of the miniature worlds stagnated, the flow of ancient runes froze, and even time seemed to hesitate to move forward at this moment.

Only his eyes, that pair of pupils deep as the beginning of Chaos and suffused with purple, were still slowly rotating.

Calmly, indifferently, reflecting the Lord of Burials who was about to dissipate, reflecting the wailing and trembling Burial Land, reflecting the bleeding wound in the firmament, reflecting this entire narrative of despair.

Then, he spoke.

The voice was not loud, but it was clear enough to cut through the pervasive dust of despair, like the first ray of light splitting the darkness in Chaos, or like the final, absolutely cold edge of a sword before it is drawn at the peak.

"So,"

"The Primordial Era, exhausting everything, betting everything, in the end... didn't even see the face of the true enemy, and... was completely wiped out, turning into this scorched earth."

No questions, no sighs, no fear, and no mockery.

Just the most concise, coldest, and most direct statement of fact.

Like the most demanding historian, dipping a brush in the blood-ink of history, leaving the most ruthless mark.

The gray-white figure of the Lord of Burials, which was almost about to completely dissipate, trembled violently.

Silence seemed to be stretched to eternity once again.

For a long, long time.

Only then did it slowly, and extremely heavily, nod its blurred head.

This action seemed to exhaust the last bit of substance it had retained from the Primordial Era to this day.

"Yes..."

"We... didn't even... see the face of our enemy."

"We can't even... be sure if the 'Shepherd' really 'exists'... Perhaps it is just an Incarnation of 'Void,' a grander and more unknowable entity that we imagined because we couldn't accept our absurd failure."

"The only thing we can be sure of... is one thing."

The voice of the Lord of Burials suddenly became faint again, but in this faintness, a strange thing tenaciously shone through—this was not hope; hope had long died at the end of the Primordial Era. This was more like an obsession, a cold spark of near-instinct, forged and tempered at the bottom of the abyss of despair by the remnants and unwillingness of trillions of dead Souls.

Its "gaze," which was about to dissipate, seemed to pierce through Chu Changsheng and cast itself into the more distant, more immeasurable depths of space and time, casting itself toward those... who were or would soon be "stepping into the Primordial Era" and pursuing the truth.

"Taichu..."

"Your path... has already stepped into the forbidden Domain. What you have touched is a scar that even 'despair' itself tries to cover up."

"What is buried beneath this scorched earth is not just dead Souls and eras, but also... the 'traces' that 'they' absolutely do not want latecomers to discover."

"Finding you... for 'them,' is merely a matter of time."

"Whether it is you, or those around you, the masses you protect, or the lineage you are tied to..."

"Will eventually..."

Its voice grew lower and lower, finally turning into a sigh that was almost impossible to catch, melting into the bone-dust snow falling all over the sky.

But that final warning, clearer than any thunderous roar, was carved into the space and time of this moment:

"...face the reckoning."

Hum—

The branches and leaves of the World Tree moved without wind, emitting a low and distant hum, as if it were the first and only response to this desperate warning and cold prophecy that spanned eras.

The purple in Chu Changsheng's eyes seemed to deepen by a fraction. He stood quietly, like a reef that had existed since eternity, facing the raging waves of "truth" and "despair" that were about to swallow everything.

And that gray-white snow was still falling silently, burying the past and covering... the unpredictable path of the future.