Chapter 414: The Five Root Vessels Destroyed, The End of the Human World!
[You repelled the tornado and protected this small village.]
[You see the shattered space produced by your punch, and it cannot auto-repair, which proves that this plane of the human world is truly failing.]
[You use your own primordial energy to mend the space, letting the place you smashed slowly recover.]
[You turn to face everyone, bowing your head to look down. Golden light floods around you, your divinity on full display.]
[With your current strength, being called a god in front of the Void Realm’s people doesn’t seem unreasonable.]
[When he recognizes your face, Zhuge Zhujin cries out in shock.]
“Martial God Chen?!”
[You shrink back to normal size and walk up in front of them.]
“It’s me.”
“You—you hadn’t ascended to the Real Realm? How can you still come back?”
[You had visited the Divine Arms Pavilion only a year before you ascended, and it was the place that sent the Four-Eyed Spiritual Monkey on the Path to Immortality, so Zhuge Zhujin remembered you clearly.]
“Pavilion Master Zhuge, I haven’t truly returned. I’m only a projection, not physically present.”
[You stamp your foot lightly. A loose stone is lifted by your force. You wave your hand and let your palm pass through the stone as if you were transparent.]
[Zhuge Zhujin realizes the truth.]
“So that’s the sort of power the Real Realm has, truly unfathomable, utterly unfathomable…”
“Pavilion Master Zhuge, what exactly happened? How did the human world end up like this?”
[At the mention of this, Zhuge Zhujin bursts into tears on the spot.]
“Martial God Chen, the human world is finished…”
[Large-scale imbalance among the Five Elements, followed by all manner of natural disasters, began ten years ago.]
[Before that, there had been scattered abnormalities, but nothing like the present apocalypse.]
[For ten years, living beings in the human world have suffered indescribably, the environment steadily deteriorating, and most regions have become uninhabitable.]
[Plants and animals were devastated on a massive scale. Facing the forces of nature, both humans and demons were as weak as ants, forced to flee continuously toward areas that remained marginally stable.]
“The Three Great Holy Lands were swallowed by tsunamis, the stars in the Starry Domains fell from the sky, massive walls of waves rose overseas, mountains and rivers overturned, the earth split apart. Everything we once knew is gone…”
[Zhuge Zhujin shook his head again and again.]
[Once a Sect Master of one of the Eight Pillars of the Five Regions, so exalted—now his clothes are tattered, his hair unkempt, and before these natural disasters he can do nothing but stand and lament.]
“As far as I know, this kind of chaos in the human plane can only mean the Five Root Vessels were all destroyed.”
“That’s right. It can only be that. I even witnessed it myself—the Nine Provinces Cauldron and the Heaven and Earth Sword fought in the skies above the Five Regions. That single battle ruined the land of seven or eight provinces!”
“Heaven and Earth Sword?”
“Although I don’t know the whole background, it’s not hard to guess that someone controlled the Heaven and Earth Sword.
Among the five Great Dao Immortal Artifacts of the human world, the Heaven and Earth Sword has the most destructive power. It can destroy the other Great Dao Immortal Artifacts.
The mastermind first used the Heaven and Earth Sword to smash the other four Great Dao Immortal Artifacts, and then destroyed the Heaven and Earth Sword itself. Once the Five Root Vessels were gone, there was nothing to stabilize the Five Elements of the human world.
Without the Five Root Vessels holding the elemental balance, the world turned into what we see now.”
“Da Chun…”
[The grand edifice of mysteries is nearly complete; only three dark clouds still float above its roof.]
[One of those clouds is the fate of the Heaven and Earth Sword.]
[When that cloud appeared again, it was the prelude to the human world’s end.]
[You know Da Chun must have been fighting desperately in his final moments.]
[But he was alone, and not even at his peak state, while the enemy wielded the Heaven and Earth Sword—the most destructive weapon—plus the backing of an unseen mastermind.]
[Da Chun couldn’t win.]
[Who destroyed the Five Root Vessels?]
[The Dragon-Men?]
[Their modus operandi doesn’t fit.]
[Look at the Demon World after the Dragon-Men destroyed it; its devastation is of a completely different style than what happened to the human world.]
[Moreover, the Dragon-Men wage world war to seize mundane qi.]
[They would slaughter every living thing; there would be no survivors at all.]
[What about the remnants of the Ancient Wasteland Survivors who weren’t completely eradicated?]
[Doesn’t look like them either.]
[The Five Root Vessels of the human world have had a cursed fate.]
[For thirty thousand years they suffered persecution at the hands of the Ancient Wasteland Survivors, preventing the five root vessels from ever forming five complete vessels.]
[But the Ancient Wasteland Survivors would not go so far as total annihilation.]
[If the human world were to collapse like this, all the small worlds would break down and their own Ancient Wasteland Secret Realm would be doomed as well.]
[Even the Ancient Wasteland Survivors, whose influence once penetrated every corner of the human world, could not achieve the complete destruction of all root vessels. How could their remaining infiltrators accomplish such a feat?]
[Previously, during the confession in the Ancient Wasteland Secret Realm, you thought it was the Ancient Wasteland Survivors who shattered half of the Qiankun Mirror.]
[Now it seems there was a misunderstanding.]
[The Ancient Wasteland Survivors may indeed have persecuted the Qiankun Mirror, but the one who struck half the mirror in Shen Yang’s hands with the Heaven and Earth Sword might not have been them.]
[When the Ancient Wasteland Secret Realm was defeated, the Heaven and Earth Sword did not appear.]
[The mastermind’s goal of destroying the Root Vessels overlaps to some extent with the aims of the Ancient Wasteland Survivors.]
[It’s possible the mastermind used the Ancient Wasteland Survivors during the process.]
“This mastermind didn’t decide to destroy the Great Dao Immortal Artifacts on a whim. He planned this long ago, otherwise he wouldn’t have tried to strike at the Qiankun Mirror in earlier years.
But at that time the Qiankun Mirror was beside Shen Yang and he failed.
The Sun Moon Tower was in the Great Demon’s hands; this person probably couldn’t defeat him either.
The Mountain River Armor was held by Hua Wuyan, so he couldn’t easily move against the human world’s Guardian.
So when the five of us ascended to the Real Realm one by one, leaving only Hua Wuyan to guard the human world, he officially made his move.”
[After hearing your analysis, Zhuge Zhujin found it reasonable.]
“Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Senior Hu in a long time, she—”
“She’s probably already sacrificed herself.”
[When your divine sense scanned the entire continent, the first person you wanted to find was indeed Hua Wuyan.]
[But whether in her frequent haunts in the Southern Borderlands or other places, there was no trace of her.]
[The good news is the enemy doesn’t seem overwhelmingly powerful, otherwise he wouldn’t be acting so cautiously.]
[The bad news is the enemy is hiding so deeply there’s no angle of attack.]
“By the way, Pavilion Master Zhuge, where did that disciple of yours, the Fiery-Eyed Golden Monkey, go?”
[Those two divine monkeys from the Real Realm belong to the Star Apes. As one of the three ancient divine beasts, those monkeys are physically invincible and indestructible.]
[Even in the Real Realm they are impervious to weapons; in the Void Realm they are even more immune to blades, fire, and water.]
[So even in such an apocalyptic disaster, the Fiery-Eyed Golden Monkey should still be alive.]
“When the Starry Domains fell, countless stars crashed to the ground. It was a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.
The Fire Monkey could not bear to see all those lives perish, so he flew alone into the sky and used that Celestial Gold Meteorite Iron staff to shatter many of the falling stars, preventing the continent from being pulverized on the spot.
After that, he vanished.
Strangely, the Celestial Gold Meteorite Iron staff I forged for him became incomprehensibly huge in his hands back then, exceeding the scope of an Immortal Artifact…”