1054 Her Being Pursued (2/2)

Although the disappearance of those extremely powerful made the entire human world restless, life had to continue in the world. So did the war. The severe winter was finally gone and spring followed. The Tang Empire was besieged by the entire world. But it stayed firmly against their attacks.

The war in Yan was at a stalemate. The Tang army was short of warhorses and the number of their cavalrymen had declined tremendously. They could not risk for a full attack. The Wild Tribe was blocked in their way to the south. The declining Left Royal Court managed to keep their final territory under the protection of the Divine Halls, particularly with Long Qing and his two thousand cavalrymen from the West-Hill. The Helan City in the heart of the Tianqi Mountain was never captured. The mysterious Yu Lian never showed up in the Golden Tribe. All these were interconnected.

The only comfort to the Tang people was that Taoism seemed to be confronted with more troubles. Ye Hongyu, the former Great Divine Priest of Judgment was still alive and kept welcoming more and more followers in the Great River Kingdom. It threw Taoism into chaos. With the support of the Great River Kingdom, Ye Hongyu started fostering the New Stream. She censured Xiong Chumo, the Hierarch and all the divine priests and deacons in the Divine Hall of West-Hill for being shameless and sinful traitors in claiming themselves as the representatives of Haotian.

The New Stream prospered right after a brief pause. With the support from Tang and the Great River Kingdom, as well as the secret shield of the Divine Hall of Judgment, it spread rapidly to every kingdom in the world.

Ye Su's students and Cheng Ziqing led the disciples of the Sword Garret traveling and preaching throughout the world. The formerly weak and tiny flames had grown into huge fires. More and more Taoist believers were converted to the New Stream and enshrined Ye Su at their homes. As for if Ye Su would approve such worship, no one seemed to care any more.

The Divine Halls of West-Hill were enraged. They sent out a series of edicts to deny Ye Hongyu's identity. But the former Great Divine Priest of Judgment acted on her own no matter what. The Hierarch could do nothing but constantly trying to bring shame on her morality and faith.

Of course they never stopped the extinction. But Ye Hongyu had prepared well. Her loyal subordinates had concealed their identities and could never be found again. The bloody extinction turned out to be meaningless. It was not until then that everyone in Taoism including the Hierarch started to realize how wrong they were to have forced Ye Hongyu to defect from them.

Taoism was disrupting. The Divine Halls of West-Hill could not stay calm in the turbulence. They reinforced the extinction to a horrifying level.

Many were being killed everywhere. The bodies of the New Stream followers were nailed on crosses along the road. The ravens cawed while the human world was flooded by blood.

However, faith was like the wild grass. The harder people cut them, the higher and thicker they grew in the next spring. Taoism was fully aware of the danger behind their bloody extinction. In order to completely solve the problem, they had to kill Ye Hongyu and wipe out Tang and the Great River Kingdom.

Thousands of cavalrymen from the Divine Halls and even more soldiers from South Jin were stationed by the Great River facing the Great River Kingdom on the other side. The person in charge was Zhao Nanhai. The middle-aged priest was not there. People guessed that he had returned to the Zhishou Abbey.

The war was launched long ago. But the final battle was yet to come. Many were waiting. They waited for a result of the battle between the Golden Tribe Royal Court and the Northern Battlefront Army of Tang, as well as the return of those most powerful.

The breath-taking tension made people silent and helpless. No one noticed that in a small town in South Jin, a new butcher's shop was opened. It faced to the north.

Let alone the importance of a result between Tang and the Golden Tribe, people could never forgot about the most powerful figures who disappeared from the world. They left in pursuit of some possibility. The Abbey Dean was certain about it. Therefore they were determined to find that person.

What if they could find that person? Some wanted to kill her, others wanted to protect her, while the rest had not made up their minds. They had different purposes. But as long as they were still away, it meant they had not located her so far. Indeed, even if they were the greatest cultivators of Distanceless, it was never an easy task to find her.

...

...

In the very north there was a snow peak. It was far away from the Central Plains and the human world. More precisely, it was the remotest place in the human world. No matter where people started they would eventually reach here as long as they kept walking to the north. It was a frozen land by the Thermal Sea.

It was the coldest place in the world. Once people breathed out it turned into frost. Even the firmest steel would not last long when being frozen here. It used to the home of the Wild Tribe. When they migrated to the south the cottages they left had become the shelters for many animals in the extreme coldness, such as snow foxes and long-tail rodents.

There was no spring down at the foot of the snow peak. Snow storm roared as previously and thick clouds covered the dark sky. When no stars nor the moon could be seen, everything was enveloped in darkness, including the snow peak.

In a cottage abandoned by the Wild People, a lamp was lit suddenly and seemed distinctive in the darkness. A long-tail rodent was chewing on some smelly fruit by a cedar but it did not dare to come any closer, as if something horrible lived inside the cottage.

The lamp light penetrated the window and brightened the ice-covered path in front of the cottage. After a while, some footsteps were heard. A woman was coming to the cottage with a heavy bucket of water.

The woman walked with her hand supporting her waist and seemed clumsy. Water was sprinkled along the way and immediately turned into frozen drops due to the severe coldness. But it seemed strange that the water inside the bucket was not frozen, nor even with a layer of ice on top. It was even steamed and blurred the dim lamp light.

More surprisingly, the woman was wearing very thin clothes. On her worn-out green dress, delicately embroidered flowers were fading. But she seemed ignorant of the chillness and kept walking.

Entering into the cottage, the woman placed the bucket in a corner, then walked to the table by the window and stared at somewhere blankly and silently.

She was plump, or more precisely chubby. Her big waist made her seem clumsy. It was unreasonably big.

The lamp light fell on her eyes and eyebrows. She still looked young, as she had always been throughout the tens of thousands of years. She still seemed indifferent. Even when she looked at the snow peak she looked down upon it with pride.

She was of course Sangsang, namely Haotian.

...

...