bullyxtreme Chapter 10 Time is running out for me
Chapter 10 Time is running out for me
Yongjie Town is a human city in Shu that is closest to the Ghost Realm of Fengdu.
If you travel a few more miles west, you will find the important landmark that marks the boundary between the human and ghost realms—the Gate of Hell.
In Eternal Calamity Town, all living beings in the world who want to enter the Netherworld Ghost Realm gather, including mortals, cultivators, demons, and spirits... In such a place, encountering any rare creature is not unusual.
The closer one gets to the gates of hell, the more mixed the auras of all living things become, and the heavier the yin energy becomes.
When Li Tingyun woke up, he felt short of breath. The system's AI voice was buzzing in his head, and he could hear every word clearly, but he couldn't understand the meaning of a sentence.
My mind is blank and I'm in a daze.
It wasn't until Wang Laoliu mentioned Mei Shiyu that he regained some clarity.
Useless, truly useless...
[Fortunately, host, you had a stroke of luck. Fortunately, Mei Shiyu is an upright person. You said you were ugly and disliked by everyone, so he respected your self-esteem and didn't arbitrarily remove your mask.]
In this world, people's hearts have changed, and good people are a rare sight indeed.
"I heard everything, please don't yell, it's giving me a headache."
Li Tingyun struggled to sit up in bed and looked around. It was a simple but clean inn.
He spotted it almost immediately: next to the wooden table in the center of the room, the Azure Frost Sword rested quietly against the table leg, surrounded by a soft, pale blue light.
Just as moonlight filters through a frosty gauze curtain and spills onto a white marble platform, only then can such a refined and elegant color be achieved.
Li Tingyun walked to the wooden table, picked up Qing Shuang, and felt an inexplicable sense of loss.
"He left me...where did he go?"
He then confidently asserted, "He must not have gone far, otherwise he wouldn't have left his sword here."
With a creak, the door behind him was pushed open. Li Tingyun turned around and met Mei Shiyu's calm gaze. The emptiness in his heart was instantly filled, and he called out, "Master?!"
Mei Shiyu placed the black and silver brocade pouch she was carrying on the table and softly called out, "Yuanbao."
Li Tingyun's heart stirred.
"Master, what's in this Qiankun bag...?"
"During the hour you were unconscious, I wandered around Yongjie Town several times and prepared the magical artifacts needed to enter the Netherworld."
Mei Shiyu used magic to shake out a table full of strange and unusual things.
“Eternal Town is located at the boundary between Yin and Yang. Demons and monsters roam here, and ghostly energy and demonic breath surround it. It is a place completely opposite to the human world.”
"Here, whether you are a mortal or a cultivator, your yang energy will stand out too much and make it difficult to hide your presence. Therefore, we need to use some magical artifacts from the underworld to conceal our true appearance."
Li Tingyun nodded in agreement. Yongjie Town was a place of trouble and chaos, a melting pot of all sorts of people. Whether they were human, ghost, demon, or immortal, most of them did not show their true faces, and even their names were often disguised. It was a place where the real and the fake were indistinguishable, and people and ghosts could not be told.
"The matter of purchasing magical artifacts and procuring equipment is something that Master can leave to his disciples to do. There is no need for you to do it yourself."
"This trip was rushed, and I almost missed the three-day deadline when the gates of hell are wide open during the Ghost Festival. Tonight at midnight is the last chance, and I don't have much time left."
Mei Shiyu regarded his "disciple" as a reborn person just like himself, and knew that he could understand. Therefore, he could speak directly without any preamble or explanation.
"I must go to the Ghost Realm to retrieve the Sect Master's Dividing Scenery Sword."
"Master is going to the mortal realm to retrieve the Dividing Scenery Sword. He wants to bring it back to the Dao Xuan Sect and return it to the Sect Master. He hopes it can help him transcend his tribulation and ascend to the Great Dao, instead of dying in a thunderbolt like in his previous life. Is that right?"
Mei Shiyu nodded gently, and Li Tingyun remained silent, naturally understanding how anxious he was.
In the original text, Ren Pingsheng, the sect leader of Dao Xuan Sect, was a highly respected figure in the cultivation world. In terms of seniority, age, cultivation, and character, he was someone that others could hardly match.
We admire the lofty mountains and follow the virtuous path.
He is the backbone of the Dao Xuan Sect, a pillar admired by all sects of the immortal world, and the person most likely to ascend to immortality in the past thousand years.
But even such a person died in the final tribulation of heavenly lightning in his life.
It's like the progress bar is already 99% loaded, but just one step away, I still can't connect to the internet.
At the end of the road, all previous efforts were in vain, and the mission was a complete failure.
Li Tingyun thought of Wang Laoliu's words again, pondering the phrase "failure at the last moment," which truly made one feel regretful.
One can't help but sigh: everything is predestined, and nothing is up to us.
The way of Heaven is constant; in all things in the world, the ending is often one of incompleteness and regret.
Ren Pingsheng's death greatly shook Dao Xuan Sect's leading position in the cultivation world.
After his death, the thirteen peak masters of the Dao Xuan Sect, who were his thirteen most favored disciples, began to fight for power among themselves, creating a despicable vortex of infighting.
The Dao Xuan Sect, which had flourished for over a thousand years, gradually declined in power.
The righteous path fell into chaos, and evil forces took advantage of the situation.
The Taiji Palace, founded by Li Tingyun, rose to prominence by taking advantage of this favorable wind, gathering forces from all the demonic sects under heaven, and propelling the Taiji Palace to its zenith, like the sun at its zenith.
Just at this time, the news that Mei Shiyu, the peak master of Cangjian Peak, had submitted to Taiji Hall spread throughout the cultivation world, and the righteous forces of the cultivation sects were declining day by day.
In this cultivation world where dark clouds shun the sun and sunlight never shines, the protagonist struggles to survive, develops his skills in a "stealthy" manner, and shoulders the great responsibility of reforming the cultivation path.
Having read the entire text, Li Tingyun knew what would happen next, and he could naturally guess Mei Shiyu's thoughts at this moment.
If Mei Shiyu were to be reborn, what she would least want to see is the death of her master who had raised and nurtured her for many years, the decline of the Dao Xuan Sect, and the plunging of the cultivation world into chaos, leaving behind endless regrets.
Therefore, he wants to reclaim the sect leader's token that Ren Pingsheng left behind in the Ghost Realm of Fengdu many years ago—the Fenjing Sword.
The Fenjing Sword is a divine object, a treasure left to the mortal world by the primordial goddess Xi Wangmu. It was once obtained by the first sect leader of the Daoxuan Sect and used as a token to signify the sect leader's identity, passed down from generation to generation.
Until several hundred years ago, the Emperor of Fengdu and the Ten Kings of Hell led countless ghost cultivators to invade the human world, attempting to devour the yang energy of the human world, open up territories and demonic cultivation grounds, and start a bloody war.
To maintain peace in the Three Realms, Dao Xuan Sect and other immortal sects gathered numerous cultivators and wandering immortals to launch a siege in Fengdu, with the righteous and evil factions battling it out at the Gates of Hell.
At that time, Ren Pingsheng and the Emperor of Fengdu were respectively top-tier experts in the ghost realm and the immortal cultivation world.
The two fought so fiercely that the sky darkened and the sun and moon lost their light. Ren Pingsheng pierced through the eighteenth level of hell with his sword, almost destroying the entire cycle of reincarnation, which nearly led to a major disaster as peacekeeping failed.
People do not frivolously despise young people.
At that time, Ren Pingsheng was still a "young" cultivator who had reached the peak at the age of several hundred.
Acting without considering the consequences is indeed ruthless.
After that battle, the Emperor of Fengdu clearly behaved much better.
It is said that he is still leading people in the area to repair the reincarnation channel.
The Dao Xuanzong sect provides funding every year, which is essentially a form of humanitarian aid.
After all, the underworld is one of the three realms, and the Ghost Realm of Fengdu has its necessity for existence and cannot be destroyed in an instant.
Yin and Yang give rise to each other, and good and evil complement each other. The relationship between the two paths of good and evil has never been a simple matter of who destroys whom or who wins. Rather, it is a delicate balance that must be maintained at all times.
The Dao Xuan Sect's token, the Fen Jing Sword, was accidentally lost in the Ghost Realm Demon Abyss during that battle, and the Fengdu Emperor refused to return it.
Furthermore, as Ren Pingsheng's cultivation level increased, he underwent tribulations more frequently, and he went into seclusion to cultivate many times over the past few hundred years. He no longer had the leisure to go to Fengdu to settle scores and collect debts.
However, the others in the Dao Xuan Sect had not forgotten this old incident.
Ren Pingsheng's disciples negotiated with the Ghost King multiple times, but the Ghost King remained adamant. Moreover, the Emperor of Fengdu never showed himself, only sending his Ten Kings of Hell to respond.
Most likely, he felt that the younger generation was ignorant and that it was beneath his dignity to deal with such a young person. Although the Ghost King's palace was about to collapse, he still had to maintain his dignity.
The disciples of Daoxuan Sect were also self-aware, knowing that their cultivation was not as profound as their master's and that they could not defeat the Demon Emperor of Fengdu, so they had no choice but to accept it.
The matter of retrieving the Fenjing Sword was thus delayed.
In his previous life, after Ren Pingsheng failed to transcend his tribulation, the thirteen peak masters fought tooth and nail for the position of sect leader, eventually even splitting the Dao Xuan Sect into two factions: the Dao Sect and the Xuan Sect.
Amidst this absurd situation, Mei Shiyu, the master of Cangjian Peak, arrived alone in the Ghost Realm of Fengdu, carrying his sword.
He ventured alone into the eighteenth level of hell and retrieved the Dividing Scene Sword from the bottomless abyss of demons.
The original text of "The First Sword of Immortals" describes this matter rather briefly.
After all, this is just a supporting subplot, and the protagonist is not personally involved. From the protagonist's perspective, it is just a past event, so the author naturally doesn't need to elaborate on it.
Wang Laoliu created this plot simply to highlight Mei Shiyu's high level of cultivation and upright character.
This highlights the impact of his betrayal of the righteous path, serving as both a selling point and a hidden theme.
This implies that someone like him would not easily succumb to evil.
After Li Tingyun transmigrated into the book, some characters in the book had already awakened their own consciousness and either actively or passively changed the original plot significantly, causing Mei Shiyu's adventure into the Ghost Realm to seize the sword to happen ahead of schedule.
Moreover, the villains got involved, and so did the protagonist.
The original story's thin subplots and supporting characters gradually became richer and more substantial.
This seemingly insignificant side story is now truly unfolding before Li Tingyun.
"Master, you still plan to go and retrieve the sword alone, right?"
When he heard Mei Shiyu say, "I don't have much time left," he understood that although Mei Shiyu had brought him to Shu and to Yongjie Town, she did not intend to enter the territory with him.
A strange feeling stirred within Li Tingyun.