Chapter 693 — The Supreme Sovereign of the Netherworld

The aged god's face contorted; he made to flee. Shen Mu gave the Book of Life and Death a shake, and the old god halted on the instant, his gaze nailed to the book in Shen Mu's hand, not daring to stir.

Shen Mu grew all the more certain: the Book of Life and Death was the bane of these corpse-ghosts.

"You say we are corpse-ghosts, and you are not wrong."

The aged god finally spoke, and with a chuckle: "The Tianyin Realm's origins are unimaginably ancient. Long ago, at the very dawn of the opening of Heaven and Earth, after the Gloom Capital and the Mystic Capital were born, the Tianyin Realm came into being. In those days, before there were any so-called humans, it was the ancient gods who ruled the cosmos and the universe, forming the Celestial Court of the Old Gods, and Lady Tianyin was one of those ancient deities."

Shen Mu was shaken to the core, but betrayed nothing. "Then Lady Tianyin, like Lord Earth and Lord Heaven, is a god born of Heaven and reared by Earth."

The aged god shook his head. "Lady Tianyin is far beneath those two. The Tianyin Realm is the darkness beneath Lord Heaven's feet; it cannot compare. But the Tianyin Realm has one advantage: it answers neither to Lord Heaven nor to Lord Earth. Lord Heaven, Lord Earth, neither of them can come here. This is a world without law and without Heaven. Which is to say..."

"Which is to say," Shen Mu said, "that the souls of the living things in the Tianyin Realm never fall into the Gloom Capital, and so they are undying and imperishable. Have I understood correctly?"

The aged god roared with laughter, though there was no true joy in it, as though he laughed merely for the sake of laughing. He shook his head. "Undying and imperishable? Heh heh. A pretty thought. But the Tianyin Realm is not undying in the way you imagine. Our souls here truly do not perish, and that is precisely why, once the bodies of the Tianyin Realm's creatures die, their souls only multiply. For gods and demons it hardly matters; they can keep their bodies from dying. But the other creatures die in droves."

"With more and more dead souls," Shen Mu asked, curious, "would this place not become another Gloom Capital?"

"I told you, the Tianyin Realm is not under Lord Earth's jurisdiction. Lord Earth cannot reach this place. How could it become a Gloom Capital?"

The aged god shook his head. "This place will never become a Gloom Capital, nor ever a Mystic Capital. To Lord Earth and Lord Heaven alike, it is a blind spot, a place their feet cannot tread. But the Tianyin Realm accumulated too many souls, and the souls began to do evil. How could the dead bear to watch the living savor their lives? And so war broke out between the souls and the living."

Shen Mu was baffled. "How can souls wage war on the living? A person with both body and soul is immeasurably stronger than a mere soul. Dead ghosts cannot possibly defeat the living."

The aged god smiled. "But a body must rot one day, and the souls of the Tianyin Realm do not die. Even a god cannot wholly annihilate a soul of the Tianyin Realm; here, even a soul shattered to the winds does not fully perish. In that great war between men and ghosts, far too many souls were shattered and scattered, and those broken souls in the end became black sand."

His eyes abruptly turned utterly dark, like countless grains of black sand ground finer than thought.

Clearly, he too was no living man, but a grotesque monster formed when black sand took possession of a human skin.

"Black sand, that is our shattered souls."

The aged god showed a grotesque smile. "Because we are shattered too fine, no one can see us clearly, no one can touch us. You are one of the rare exceptions, one who can touch us and see us. Once we had bodies, we felt hunger, unbearable hunger, a mad craving to eat. And so we began to eat."

He did not speak of that history; he only said, "Soon, we had eaten every living person in the Tianyin Realm."

A chill ran through Shen Mu. Though the aged god had not described that history, he could well imagine how horrifying that uprising must have been.

"And Lady Tianyin?" Shen Mu said in a low voice. "Why did Lady Tianyin not stop you?"

The aged god did not answer, but went on. "We ate and ate, until we found there were no living people left in the Tianyin Realm. Then we began to eat ourselves, our own flesh and blood, our bones, our divine treasury, our primal spirit. In the end, all that remained of us was our skins. We had nothing left to eat, and we were so terribly hungry, and at last we turned our eyes upon Lady Tianyin..."

Shen Mu shuddered again and again. The aged god spoke such words as though they were only natural, and the demonic nature hidden in them filled him with dread.

The aged god said, "But we were no match for Lady Tianyin. Luckily, we were many. Yet even in numbers we could not bite her to death. She beat us savagely, but we cannot die; we were souls already shattered past all further shattering, and she could not kill us, nor could we devour her. Until at last a stranger came. An outsider. One who, like you, could see us, hear us, touch us, and even wound us."

Heh heh, he laughed. "The outsider joined hands with us, and so we ate Lady Tianyin. Once Lady Tianyin was eaten, there was nothing left in the Tianyin Realm to eat. And still we were so hungry—"

He smacked his lips, as though recalling some delicious thing.

"Ate Lady Tianyin?" A chill ran through Shen Mu. He narrowed his eyes and said in a low voice, "This outsider, was he the Black Emperor of the Nether Capital?"

"You call him the Black Emperor of the Nether Capital?" The aged god shook his head. "We do not call him that. We call him the Yin Son of Heaven."

Shen Mu was slightly taken aback. "The Yin Son of Heaven? The Son of Heaven of the Tianyin Realm?"

The aged god nodded. "Though Lady Tianyin was an ancient god born of Heaven and reared by Earth in the Tianyin Realm, the Great Dao set limits upon her, and she could not subdue us. But the Yin Son of Heaven possessed wondrous arts that could. So we followed the Yin Son of Heaven, campaigning with him north and south, through age after age. In time he founded the Nether Capital, and the Book of Life and Death in your hand is the Yin Son of Heaven's treasure, which is why it can restrain us. Since we are all of one household..."

"One household?" Shen Mu gave a light laugh, and raised the Book of Life and Death to shine upon him.

The aged god's face changed drastically, contorting horribly; he let out a piercing shriek, black smoke poured from his every feature, and he swiftly shriveled.

Shen Mu sat upon the throne, leaning to one side, one hand propping up his chin, sunk in thought.

"The Black Emperor of the Nether Capital, the Yin Son of Heaven. So then, the dark incursion is black sand formed from the souls of the Tianyin Realm shattered and scattered; and those monsters within the black sand are in truth human skins, and inside the skins are ghosts ground to powder."

"The Yin Son of Heaven joined the Tianyin Realm to the Wasteland, letting the black sand of the Tianyin Realm invade it. This black sand, and the monsters within it, greatly fear the divine radiance of the gods; and so when a god enters the darkness of the Wasteland, the darkness dares not come near."

"But there is one thing that does not fit, and that is the faces in the darkness. At Xuane Pass I once saw the face of a demon god pressing against the darkness as it invaded, only to be blocked by the divine soldiers of a resurrected goddess; and in the Wasteland such sights are everywhere. So where do the demon gods in the darkness come from?"

He looked at the skins strewn across the town. These corpse-ghosts could come and go through the darkness swift as lightning, but their strength was hardly impressive; plainly they were not those demon gods of the darkness.