Chapter 335 - 312: [All Living Beings]
"Court is dismissed~~!"
The high-pitched, drawn-out cry pierced the thick palace walls and echoed over the Great Cang Imperial City in the faint light of dawn, startling a few roosting crows from the eaves. They flapped away into the lead-gray sky.
Outside the Diligent Governance Hall, below the white jade steps, the civil and military officials bowed like a receding tide before departing in an orderly fashion.
Among them, many faces were not the same as they were sixty years ago. The younger ones now had frosted temples, and the elderly walked with faltering steps.
Time had carved deep marks upon the bricks and stones of this Imperial City, and upon the hearts of its people.
The hall doors slowly opened, and a figure in a bright yellow Dragon Robe emerged, supported by a eunuch.
It was none other than the Great Cang Emperor, Zhao Xuanji.
His once gaunt and majestic face was now crisscrossed with deep lines, his hair and beard as white as snow. Only his deep-set eyes still held the profoundness of accumulated years and a trace of weariness that would not fade.
For a mortal emperor, sixty years was a lifetime of vicissitudes.
In the world of Cang Que, cultivation focused on the Divine Soul over the physical body.
Even though Zhao Xuanji had a certain level of cultivation, he could not stop his physical body’s decay.
He waved the eunuch away and, alone, leaning on a Purple Sandalwood Dragon Head Staff, slowly walked back to the Diligent Governance Hall where he had spent the better part of his life.
Zhao Xuanji’s footsteps were heavy, echoing emptily as they fell upon the mirror-bright golden bricks.
CREAK—
The heavy hall doors were pushed open, and a familiar scent washed over him—a mixture of old scrolls and faint sandalwood.
The hall was dim, with only a few slivers of morning light filtering through the latticed windows, illuminating the motes of dust floating in the air.
He had just taken a single step across the threshold when his form suddenly froze.
His murky, yet still sharp, eyes instantly locked onto the space before the Dragon Desk.
There, at some unknown time, a figure had appeared.
He was dressed in a deep blue Daoist Robe, utterly spotless, as if untouched by the passage of time.
His posture was as upright as ever, his face young and handsome, without the slightest change from when they had first met sixty years ago.
It was as if time had lost its effect on him.
Only the profound depths swirling in his calm eyes held a greater, more immeasurable sense of time-worn gravity and authority than before.
Qi Yun slowly turned, looking at the emperor by the door, who had aged so much. A faint, serene smile touched the corners of his lips.
"We haven’t seen each other in sixty years.
Your Majesty, have you been well?"
His voice was clear and gentle, just as it had been back then, sounding exceptionally distinct in the vast, quiet hall.
Zhao Xuanji’s hand, gripping the Dragon Staff, tightened imperceptibly.
He stared fixedly at the face before him, a face that seemed both like yesterday and a lifetime away, his heart a roil of complex emotions.
For him, sixty years had been day after day of exhausting effort, of covert scheming where every step was fraught with peril.
It was the anxiety of watching his lofty ambitions be slowly eroded by time, and the helplessness of his body’s inevitable decay.
But for the man before him, it seemed to have been but the blink of an eye; not even his temples were touched by frost.
After a long moment, a smile slowly spread across his wrinkled face. His voice, old and raspy, held a trace of relieved ease:
"It has been sixty years... Master, you are as graceful as ever, as if it were only yesterday.
I only wonder..."
He paused, his gaze burning. The desire he had desperately suppressed for decades could finally no longer be contained.
"Master, with your return this time, is... everything ready?"
His voice carried a faint, almost imperceptible tremor.
It was expectation, it was apprehension, and more than that, it was the all-or-nothing gamble of a lifetime, with the very National Fortune of the dynasty on the line.
Qi Yun met his fervent gaze and slowly nodded. His voice was calm, yet every word landed with immense weight, like the tolling of a great bell that settles a nation:
"Indeed."
"Now, all is prepared."
He took a step forward, his gaze seeming to pierce through the palace walls, casting out toward the vast, misty firmament, toward the cold, indifferent will that looked down upon all living beings from the unseen world.
"The Heaven’s Fall begins today."
...
「12:45 AM. All was silent.」
Within the Great Cang Dynasty, from the Central Imperial City to the four corners of the borderlands, across its sixty-three provinces, thirty-seven hundred prefectures, eighteen thousand counties, one hundred thousand towns, and one million villages...
At this very moment, whether in the bustling capital or a remote mountain hamlet, in the deep manors of great clans or the homes of common folk, something began to quietly glow in the silence.
It was not a dazzling, brilliant light, but came from a series of array discs—ancient in style, with dark, intricate patterns—that were placed in the center of ancestral halls, buried beneath old trees at village entrances, hidden beside wells, or embedded in the foundations of city walls.
The array discs varied in size and material. Some resembled bronze, others looked like black stone, and some were merely crude wooden talismans or clay tablets.
But the talismanic patterns carved upon them all shared a single origin, and they pulsed faintly but steadily with a dim light.
This was the Ten Thousand People’s Heart Gathering and Energy Attraction Array, which the Great Cang Royal Family, over dozens of generations and at an incalculable cost of manpower and resources, had silently deployed in every corner of the dynasty under the framework of "Project Hibernation"!
"Activate the array!"
Following a decree issued jointly by Qi Yun and Zhao Xuanji from the central core within the inverted meteorite deep inside the Imperial City, the command spread to every node of the array discs.
VMMMM—!
In sixty-three provinces, thirty-seven hundred prefectures, eighteen thousand counties... countless array discs trembled in unison!
There was no earth-shattering roar, no brilliant light piercing the night sky.
There was only an invisible, yet unimaginably majestic, "qi" that arose from every inch of land ruled and inhabited by the Great Cang Dynasty.
From the very depths of the hearts of every person living upon this land, it was silently drawn, extracted, and gathered!
This was not Spiritual Qi, nor was it Incense and Wish Power.
Instead, it was something more primal, more profound. It was the All Living Beings’ Qi, which contained the most fundamental will to survive of billions of people, their joys and sorrows, their partings and reunions, and even their suppressed resentment toward the injustice of "Heaven" and their faint yearning for human freedom!