Chapter 1790: The God of Mount Tai Appears
Jiang Chen whipped his head around and narrowed his eyes at the blue-clad girl.
“Who are you?” he asked warily. The girl seemed harmless. There were no ripples of energy from her and she appeared to be an ordinary person.
Yet here she stood, a normal person appearing where they shouldn’t be.
The corpse demon remained motionless, frozen on the spot like she was a sculpture. Instead, it was the abruptly appearing girl that made one’s heart quail with fear.
……
Hidden in a pocket of special space, Lu Yun and the others looked at each other.
“Who is she?” Hongjun turned around and leveled his gaze at Yin Jiuying and Jiangchen Xie.
Yin Jiuying was equally baffled. He’d guessed that the god of Mount Tai would appear to prevent Jiang Chen from refining the corpse demon, but who would’ve thought that a benign young girl would come instead?
She spoke the words that should’ve come from the mountain god, but the god of Mount Tai was male!
“She’s… me!” Violetgrave suddenly spoke from her place of hiding. A trace of fear edged her words. “She’s me, she’s Bluegrave. She’s supposed to be my replica, what is she…”
She dissolved into stammering incoherently, unable to understand the sight before her. Lu Yun’s hairs also rose on the back of his neck. Violetgrave and Bluegrave should’ve looked exactly the same, but the Bluegrave in front of them appeared completely different!
Well, not entirely different. There were tiny similarities between the two that weren’t readily apparent.
“Look…” Jiangchen Xie raised a shaking finger. His entire body was trembling—he was holding himself back with extreme effort to refrain from charging Jiang Chen and ripping at the latter’s throat with bare teeth. “Combine that woman’s appearance with the corpse demon… don’t they become Bluegrave?”
His words jogged Hongjun’s memory and he said slowly, “That… corpse demon… seems to look like… the mountain god’s… dao partner.”
It’d been so many eons and so many reincarnation cycles that he wasn’t entirely sure of many things anymore. Plus, he’d never seen the god’s dao partner for himself.
“That… is her,” Yin Jiuying confirmed. “The so-called owner of the Land of Reincarnation, the one who killed the god of Mount Tai… is his dao partner.”
Lu Yun squinted in thought. Dao partners were one’s partner in the pursuit of dao and thus closer to each other than the married couples of the mortal world. Rather than finding joy with each other for a scant few hundred years, it was the accompaniment of eternity.
Lu Yun and Qing Yu’s feelings and thoughts for each other ran deep, ultimately leading them to become dao partners. The little fox sent a soul replica to journey with Lu Yun’s past self for endless eons, slowly making her way into his heart through innumerable troubles and trials.
He would protect his two dao partners with his life, but the god of Mount Tai had killed his for his own gain!
“That explains everything.” Though fury blazed in Hongjun’s eyes, he managed to calm himself down and refrain from brash action.
So the mountain god has been by my side all this time. Violetgrave and Bluegrave are of the same body—Bluegrave’s thoughts are Violetgrave’s. The person who met me in the dao palace was Bluegrave, and the one who met me before I set out for the Hongmeng, telling me to bring the five hells with me and to coalesce the sixth… was also Bluegrave!
Lu Yun suddenly understood everything in this moment. Bluegrave had convinced him with the excuse that all of that was for Tianqi. That once Tianqi grew into his own, he would become the god of Mount Tai once more and the five hells would return to his hand.
But in reality, Tianqi had always been Tianqi and never changed. He’d even voluntarily severed his karmic connections with his past life as the mountain god, leaving behind only his current life and identity!
Bluegrave had used someone else’s form to meet Lu Yun—not Violetgrave. Perhaps Violetgrave had still been in control of Bluegrave then, but she was already being affected by her replica.
Violetgrave was Bluegrave, but Bluegrave was not Violetgrave.
Violetgrave clutched her head and crouched painfully on the ground. It’d been Bluegrave who told Lu Yun to devour the underworld, the other three hells, and the land of darkness to make the Disordered Hell whole! It wasn’t Violetgrave who’d refined the Sanguine, Nihil, and Abyssal Hells that she’d given to Lu Yun, but Bluegrave!
Bluegrave was the god of Mount Tai—a tiny wisp of lingering will that’d attached itself to Violetgrave. She’d gradually recovered her former strength and emerged from Violetgrave’s body, fully returning to being the mountain god.
Bluegrave turned around and bestowed a small smile at the corner of space the others were in. She walked up to the corpse demon and gently caressed her face.
Pinpricks of horror traveled down Jiang Chen’s spine and he cautiously backed away.
“I’d thought that I could sit back and stay out of sight, effortlessly reaping the spoils when all of you had handled everything. Why did you have to be so smart? Why did you have to find the only flaw and walk out of my setup? Now I have to take action myself,” sighed Blue—the god of Mount Tai.
“There didn’t need to be so much death and my dear friends—Hongjun, Pangu, and God—could’ve survived all of this. But you just had to fancy yourself to be so clever and break out of my arrangements. Well, now all of you have to die.” Bluegrave was still Violetgrave’s replica and thus, they shared the same mind and thoughts. Anything Violetgrave saw, she could see.
Thus… everything that’d happened before had all taken place under Bluegrave’s watchful eyes.
“I thought that I could revive you when my hell dao reached great perfection.” The mountain god continued to caress the corpse demon’s face. Though the latter remained expressionless, the scarlet light in her eyes glinted more keenly, as if expressing rage.
“God of Mount Tai!” Jiang Chen also confirmed the girl’s identity in this moment. “To think that the vaunted god of the great mountain, the Great Peak of the Five Hells, has turned into a woman!”
“So what of a man and what of a woman? Those are but the delineations of yin and yang. Is there a difference between them?” Black light flashed over the mountain god’s body before a towering, muscular man who looked the same as Tianqi stood in front of Jiang Chen.
Jiang Chen hastily backed up some more. It really was the god of Mount Tai!
The mountain god casually waved his head and shattered the crimson chain confining the corpse demon.
ROAR!!
An ear-piercing shriek reverberated in the air as the corpse demon pounced where Lu Yun and the others were, as if under a compulsion.
“The battle flag!” Hongjun whistled, summoning blazing sword light from his purple short sword and bringing it down on the enemy.
