Chapter 387: Humans (1/2)
The luopan’s golden light sectioned the dragon palace into nine parts, each with a divine vault at its center.
“This is….” Lu Yun suddenly halted his movements. He could discern the dragon palace’s true structure through the compass’ light—a giant feng shui layout, one not even he could recognize!
In fact, he couldn’t discern the gaps or weaknesses of this layout, even with the help of the compass.
“What the hell is this!” Shock creased his face. With a tight frown, he began frantically deducing the layout’s structure.
So the era three hundred million years ago was the golden age of feng shui! Such was the eventual conclusion he arrived at. This layout is wholly different from the palace’s architecture, and there are no signs of draconic involvement within it. Perhaps the palace wasn’t built by a dragon expert after all?
He suddenly registered the absence of the usual telltale signs associated with dragons. Although the era three hundred million years ago was vastly different from present age, dragons were powerful, long-lived creatures with unchanging habits.
As a proud race, they were wont to leave racial marks on their formations, combat arts, pills, formations, and treasures, so that everyone would know they were dragon-made. However, there were no such marks in the feng shui layout in front of him, a detail that ran entirely contrary to draconic custom.
“So the one who left the dragon palace behind wasn’t a dragon after all?” Lu Yun mumbled to himself.
“Of course it wasn’t a dragon.” A voice, alien yet familiar, reached his ears.
He didn’t turn back, nor was he surprised. The merging of the Cosmic Sea with the netherworld had reinforced his connection to hell and greatly increased his control over the world of the dead.
A pair of white eyes had appeared behind him. It was just the pair of eyes and no other body parts, as if someone had punched two holes in the void and lined their eyes up with the openings to look at the other side.
Lu Yun had seen similar eyes before. He’d once injured such a pair of eyes while perfecting his sword art in the depths of hell. Afterward, a similar pair had appeared after he’d fended off Donglin Taihuang inside the North Sea skydragon tomb.
And now, this was the third pair.
This time, however, the voice sounding from the owner of the eyes sounded somewhat familiar to his ears.
“I had thought you’d turned traitor, but it turns out it’s the world that has changed considerably.” The voice suddenly turned helpless and world-weary. “Immortal dao? What is the immortal dao? Ah… so everything’s long gone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust….”
Two lines of clear teardrops trickled down from the white eyes and landed on the ground on the other side of the void.
“You’re the existence within Qi Hai’s spirit.” Lu Yun took a deep breath, his tone unhurried as he continued, “So can you tell me just what is going on? The curse on the dragons and the divines, the great immortal war a hundred thousand years ago, the severing of the immortal dao, the withering of the Dao Flower…. Was everything the doing of your people?”
He fired off a quick barrage of questions in a single breath, voicing all of his accumulated doubts.
“Do you know why current monster spirits, dragons, divines and other races take on human form? Why divine spirits born from nature appear in the shape of a human?” The master of the eyes said after a long moment of silence.
“Because humans embody and are the shape of the dao?” Lu Yun answered subconsciously. Such was the mainstream assumption in the current world of immortals. Humans were the form of the grand dao, the shape most suited to cultivation. Therefore, all other races chose to take on human form.
“Humans embody the dao?” The owner of eyes burst out in hearty laughter. “The shape of the dao? Do you know how the character ‘dao’ is written?”