Chapter 284: Transcendent Order, Awakening of the Second Heavenly Dao

The Underworld Path and the Extraordinary Paths of the Occult Version were fundamentally different in their logic of advancement.

In the Occult Version, one must consume potions and digest them in order to ascend. This was because the extraordinary traits of various paths within the Occult Version were scattered across the world.

Transcendents had to search for these potions step by step, consume them, and then endure the process of digestion to purge the madness and corruption hidden within, aligning themselves more closely with their chosen path in order to avoid the doom of losing control.

But the Underworld Path—created by Lu Yan based on the concept of the Celestial Court and the Netherworld—was a completely new path that had never before existed in this world.

All the roots of the Underworld Path were found within the Celestial Court of the Netherworld. Thus, there was no step of potion consumption required for advancement.

To step into Sequence Nine: Wandering Soul, the sole prerequisite was to obtain an extraordinary trait from the Celestial Court of the Netherworld at the moment of death. This trait would serve as an anchor, allowing the soul to transcend life and death and avoid the cycle of reincarnation, ultimately ascending to the rank of Wandering Soul.

From there, the path diverged.

On one side, if the soul was dominated by intense obsessions from life—especially a deep thirst for vengeance—it would become twisted and fall into corruption, gathering endless resentment through slaughter and thus ascend to the deranged path of Sequence Eight: Vengeful Ghost.

On the other side was the path Anna chose: purifying the soul of resentment and malice, delving into dreams, observing the world, comprehending morality and justice. Upon awakening to her own truth and achieving spiritual sublimation, she would ascend to the orthodox Sequence Eight: Soulbinder.

To step into Sequence Eight meant that the Underworld Path had finally broken away from the frailty and passivity of the Wandering Soul. It now possessed a truly meaningful, reality-interfering, and even life-threatening extraordinary ability.

The core authority of the Soulbinder, as the name implied, was the ability to capture and bind souls.

Whether it was a mortal or another transcendent being, once targeted, the Soulbinder could forcibly extract their soul, sever their consciousness, and either plunge them into eternal slumber or turn them into puppets.

Of course, the power of this ability depended on the relative position in the extraordinary sequence and the difference in rank. But without a doubt, it was a domineering power.

As Anna successfully ascended from Wandering Soul to Sequence Eight: Soulbinder, her previously pure and refined soul body began to change.

A gust of soul-chilling wind—capable of harming spirits and shaking will—gathered behind her, weaving itself into a shadowy cloak filled with an eerie chill.

At the same time, a chain forged from pure soul power materialized in her hands.

Upon closer inspection, every link in the chain seemed to be engraved with ever-shifting fragments of dreams. Once someone was ensnared, they would be pulled into the dreams of all living beings.

The very moment Anna’s soul completely transformed and stabilized at Sequence Eight: Soulbinder, as if a key gear finally clicked into place, the once dormant Celestial Court of the Netherworld—silent since Lu Yan’s arrival in the Occult Version—began to stir.

Back in the Apocalypse Version, in order to refine a powerful magic artifact, Lu Yan had harvested the souls of countless zombies from the battlefield, aiming to forge the legendary Ten Thousand Soul Banner.

However, after obtaining the method to forge a Heavenly Dao Merit Artifact and using the vast merit he accrued from the Apocalypse’s Heavenly Dao to craft the Human Sovereign Banner, he instead stored all those millions of zombie souls within the Netherworld Realm inside the artifact.

These zombie souls were byproducts of the conflict between the Apocalypse Version’s sole existence and the Heavenly Dao. They were born incomplete, lacking both the Heaven Soul and Earth Soul that symbolized consciousness and memory.

In essence, they were fundamentally flawed, barely capable of independent thought, let alone possessing much value. At most, they could be used as raw material to cultivate ghost soldiers or generals.

However, due to Lu Yan’s own limited cultivation and time, he couldn’t refine a large number of ghost troops, leaving millions of zombie souls to wander the corners of the Netherworld Realm like part of the scenery.

Now, with the birth of Anna—the first Soulbinder of the Underworld Sequence—everything began to change.

The Underworld Path that Lu Yan had created started to actively embed itself into the Celestial Court of the Netherworld, becoming a true part of that world.

The Human Sovereign Banner’s inner Netherworld Realm quaked violently.

Order and law began to be woven throughout the Celestial Court. From the once-illusory sky emerged a radiant brilliance akin to a great sun.

That brilliance was the essence of transcendence, born from the very core of the Celestial Court.

Tens of thousands of streams of transcendent essence fell like a meteor shower, precisely striking the zombie souls.

Each streak of light became a cocoon glowing with gentle radiance, enveloping one or more zombie souls.

Within those cocoons, a miracle of the soul began to unfold.

Their previously incomplete soul structures began to reform under the nourishment of the transcendent essence.

The once-missing Heaven and Earth Souls began to gradually take shape.

The phantasmal soul bodies within the cocoons began to solidify at a rapid pace. They were no longer mindless remnants, but were beginning to step onto the path of the Underworld.

Pop!

With a sound like a bursting bubble, the first cocoon exploded.

From within emerged a soul with solid features and a cruel gaze—a middle-aged man.

Unlike his former mindless brethren, his eyes now gleamed with the light of sentience.

Though still carrying a trace of newborn confusion, he had become a complete soul, having ascended to Sequence Nine: Wandering Soul—a true extraordinary being.

His emergence lit the fuse.

Around him, the remaining zombie souls—still lost in mindlessness—began to swarm toward him like moths to a flame.

The man’s eyes swept over his fellows, flashing with greed and violence.

Without hesitation, he reached out and seized a nearby zombie soul, opening his mouth and devouring it.

The powerless soul energy became his nourishment, making his newly formed soul body stronger and clearer.

At the same time, threads of scarlet resentment and killing intent began to coil around him like serpents.

He was not the only one.

Pop! Pop! Pop!

More and more cocoons burst open. Thousands of souls were being born within the transcendent order of the Celestial Court.

Most, upon regaining their sentience, were driven by memories of pain, the violence of their zombie state, or unresolved hatred from life.

Just like the cruel man, they reached for their weaker peers and began to devour, growing stronger through the carnage.

In an instant, this newborn Netherworld Realm became a macabre banquet of souls, the air thick with blood-red resentment.

But not all chose this path.

A small number of newborn souls were different.

When faced with the temptation to devour, their eyes flashed with intense inner conflict. In the end, they resisted the urge to feed on their kind.

These souls, filled with restraint, seemed to receive a silent summons. They lifted their eyes toward the heart of the Netherworld Realm.

There, the Yellow Springs River flowed in a meandering path, exuding the aura of death.

At its end stood a colossal city carved from a hundred towering mountains, radiating supreme majesty.

Fengdu City!

These souls turned against the river’s flow, trudging upstream, step by step, toward the very source of the Celestial Court of the Netherworld.

After much hardship, they arrived at the gates of the towering city.

Those who had not devoured their kind, whose souls remained relatively pure, encountered no obstruction. The gates opened for them, welcoming them into the majestic city.

There, they would undergo deeper cleansing and guidance from the Celestial Court and truly begin walking the path of the Underworld.

But when those shrouded in scarlet resentment—empowered by consuming others—approached and attempted to breach Fengdu City, they met a far different fate.

At the gate stood Yin Soldiers clad in deathly armor, their faces expressionless, wielding long halberds.

They emanated cold, potent auras. And when any resentful soul neared, they struck without mercy.

With a few mournful wails, those once-arrogant souls were easily shattered and fled in pieces.

The Yin Soldiers could have killed them, but they didn’t.

These fallen souls, though deviating from the true path, were still part of the Netherworld. They held immense value for the newly formed transcendent order.

This moment was monumental.

The zombie souls within the Netherworld Realm were given sentience, granted a chance to embark on an extraordinary path. Their destinies now diverged based on their own choices.

The Celestial Court of the Netherworld was no longer just a conceptual backdrop or mirrored vision of the heavens.

It was operating.

It was forging the foundations of its own transcendent system.

A mythic Underworld—complete with inhabitants, laws, and a power structure—was taking shape before one’s very eyes.

Lu Yan’s will hovered above like a god gazing from the nine heavens, witnessing the evolution of this Nether Realm.

He saw newborn souls fall into savagery or strive toward Fengdu.

He heard the endless roar of the Yellow Springs.

He felt the supreme might emanating from Fengdu City.

And more importantly, he sensed that, with this realm’s activation, the feedback power from tens of thousands of new Sequence Nine souls was flowing into him like rivers into the sea.

This feedback—born from transcendent order—bypassed the differences between cultivation and extraordinary systems, affecting his realm directly.

Having formed his Grand Dao Golden Core, Lu Yan didn’t require mana accumulation like normal cultivators. Instead, he understood the world through his core.

He could feel the Golden Core weaving the rules of the Underworld Path within itself. His early-stage Golden Core cultivation instantly broke through with no resistance.

In the blink of an eye, he had stepped firmly into the mid-stage of Golden Core—and the growth wasn’t even finished yet.

Yet this wasn’t the most important transformation.

Even more astonishingly, the second Heavenly Dao authority that had nearly vanished when he left the Great Traversal Version was now reviving with the formation of the transcendent order.

Like a star reigniting after billions of years of slumber, the faint trace of second Heavenly Dao authority began to awaken within the Celestial Court.

Though still incredibly weak—even far inferior to the authority of the King’s Scepter in Lu Yan’s hand—its existence was undeniable.

And between having nothing and having something, there lay an unbridgeable chasm.

To hold even a sliver of the second Heavenly Dao meant he once again had a fulcrum to pry open higher orders of reality. It signaled a fundamental shift in essence.

Moreover, Lu Yan knew this was only the beginning of the Underworld Path.

Even Anna, as a Sequence Eight Soulbinder, had power equivalent only to the late stage—or peak—of Qi Refining in the cultivation system.

To bring the Celestial Court into true form, he would need to push the Underworld Path to the point where it could house the Five Great Ghost Gods and legions of ghost soldiers.

But even the weakest Yin Soldier corresponded to the peak of Foundation Establishment—roughly Sequence Six.

To build a new path from scratch and push it to Sequence Six, even with Lu Yan’s current strength and status, was no easy task.

Let alone the fact that the Celestial Court was meant to hold six hundred Golden Core ghost generals and five Nascent Soul Ghost Gods—meaning it needed to extend at least to Sequence Four.

And in this world, which among the established paths reaching Sequence Four had not endured for thousands of years?

Even with all of Lu Yan’s cards, it would take time.

“In this Occult Version, every one of the world’s sole existences is pursuing faith. Faith itself is deeply entwined with the extraordinary paths.”

“Gathering faith… may accelerate my development of the Underworld Path and hasten the formation of the Celestial Court.”

Lu Yan let out a long breath, his eyes flickering with thought.

As the Underworld Path matured, the amount of second Heavenly Dao authority he could recover would continue to grow.

Even if he never became the sole existence of this world, he would still have the power to rival them.

(End of Chapter)