Chapter 84
Chapter 84: I Ask Ming Yue
In the Mystic Moon Secret Realm, the cultivators who had remained below stared up in shock.
The bright moon overhead had somehow become a full moon. Then faint traces of green began to creep across it—like wild grass ready to race over hills at the first breath of spring.
Those with sharp eyes watched the color spread. In seven or eight minutes, it covered the entire moon.
From afar, it looked like a jade-green sphere.
Then the green moon shuddered once, twice.
The blue-green vanished, and the moon turned pure and bright again.
But cultivators with keen spiritual sense could tell the restored moon had lost the liveliness it once held. It had become a rigid projection, empty as painted light.
No one understood what had happened.
…
Jiang Yun Jiang stepped into the third trial as though strolling through a garden, confidence already filling her chest.
That familiar voice sounded again—the call she had been hearing ever since she entered the secret realm.
“You finally came.”
“You were waiting for me?” Jiang Yun Jiang asked, pulse quickening.
She understood perfectly: this inheritance ground had chosen her.
Now that she had reached this place, that strange familiarity rose again, echoing the hazy woman she had seen fly from White Jade Capital in the seventy-second layer.
“I’m ready,” she said, voice steady. “What is the third trial?”
“There is no trial. The inheritance exists for you. Come. Take what belongs to you.”
Jiang Yun Jiang’s pupils shrank. Her heart pounded like thunder.
A tremendous opportunity sat right in front of her, within easy reach.
She drew a slow breath and stepped forward.
In the next instant, the ground shook. Mountains roared.
The voice screamed—no longer calm, but hysterical, cursing as the earth beneath her cracked inch by inch. Jiang Yun Jiang’s composure shattered.
An invisible force seized her and flung her away.
A streak of purple light flashed into being and lunged toward her like a living thing.
Jiang Yun Jiang reached out by instinct—
—but blue-green vines burst out of thin air, chasing the purple light like mad serpents. They wrapped it, tore it, shredded it into dust.
Only a few violet sparks escaped and flowed into Jiang Yun Jiang’s body.
“Ah!”
She was thrown out completely.
In her ears, a hoarse roar howled, full of hatred: “Kill her!”
Her mind swayed. When she forced herself steady and looked around, she realized the other cultivators had been expelled at the same time.
They stood on ground formed from the Tai Yin star fragment. Above them, the false moon hung pale and empty.
Ahead, a moon palace was bound tight in vines that had come from nowhere. The vines tightened and tightened, grinding it to pieces.
The cultivators around her stared, stunned, too shocked to speak.
Then they saw what lay beneath their feet.
Vines.
Countless blue-green tendrils were already tangled together, spreading everywhere.
“Even the Tai Yin star fragment is going to be crushed?”
Even Xuan Yun An, who had seen her share of storms, cried out in alarm. Her voice boomed with spiritual power. “Disciples of the Star-Inquiry Sect—steady yourselves! The Tai Yin star fragment is about to break. Prepare to land!”
Panic rippled through the crowd. People snapped out of it, scrambling, trying to ready themselves.
Jiang Yun Jiang watched them move, yet she couldn’t stop the numb helplessness flooding her veins.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Two or three breaths later, just as Xuan Yun An had warned, the ground beneath them shattered completely. The strange force that kept their bodies light vanished with it.
The moon palace and the Tai Yin fragments crumbled into dust before their eyes.
They fell.
…
Shao Heng came to herself amid a sea of vines.
The Gray Cocoon had amplified Azure Emperor, but it swallowed everything it devoured. It hadn’t even spared the meager spiritual power within her yellow sprout.
To keep herself from being consumed, Shao Heng had been forced to balance three forces at once: the Gray Cocoon’s hunger, Azure Emperor’s pull, and the fragile core of her own cultivation.
She was exhausted to the bone.
As she fell, her awareness wavered for an instant.
The Divine Voice’s questions looped through her mind, relentless.
“Do you truly have no regrets?”
“You’re vicious. You don’t deserve it.”
Shao Heng had heard countless voices since childhood. She had learned early that for the same person, for the same act, there would always be two opinions, three, a hundred—endless angles, endless judgments.
Those who loved you called it innocence. Those who hated you called it arrogance.
Those who loved you called it ambition. Those who hated you called it showing off.
Those who loved you called it knowing when to advance and retreat. Those who hated you called it cowardice.
Those who loved you called it decisive killing intent. Those who hated you called it cold-blooded.
Those who loved you called it clever strategy. Those who hated you called it sinister poison.
Why?
What was the difference, really?
Once, Lu Shao Heng had been tormented by it, lost in confusion, drowning in thought.
But she wouldn’t drown now.
Wind tore at her clothes as she fell faster and faster. She had no spiritual power to circulate. She didn’t call Ao Chuan out to carry her.
She only lifted her head and looked at the moon.
“Ming Yue,” Shao Heng said softly. “Ming Yue, I ask you.”
“You hang high in the sky. Some praise you as pure; others scorn you as lonely. Who is right, and who is wrong?”
“Sometimes you are full; sometimes you are broken. Which is better? Which is worse?”
Ming Yue stayed silent.
It did not lean to either side.
It was neither dazzling nor dim.
Shao Heng closed her eyes.
“I will never regret anything,” she said. “There is no clear line between right and wrong. As long as every choice I made was what I believed to be right at the time, that’s enough.”
“Whether the outcome is good or bad, I accept it all.”
“And this world is too loud. I don’t want to listen—whether they’re right or wrong.”
“No one gets to shape me. No one gets to change me.”
“My world has room for only one voice.”
“My own voice.”
She was like a seed.
Storms. Thunder. Quaking earth. Flooded marshes and cracked drought—none of it mattered. As long as she could split her shell and sprout, whether she grew lush or stunted, she would still become a towering tree.
Not a flower. Not grass.
Never a worm, bird, or beast.
Just as Shao Heng would only ever be Shao Heng.
“In my Dao ground, there can be only one true god,” she whispered.
“So I am my own true god.”
The Gray Cocoon trembled.
It had absorbed the entire Tai Yin star fragment, the moon palace’s inheritance power—enough to fatten itself into completion. Now it shivered like a lotus on the verge of bloom, revealing its true form at last.
A brand-new sigil rose beside Azure Emperor.
Ancient and strange, it was pale gray, as if black and white had been ground together. It formed a closed ring layered with dense, mysterious patterns, overlapping and intertwining without chaos.
When it broke free, Shao Heng felt it fuse with her soul, as inseparable as Azure Emperor itself—impossible for anyone to steal.
The Gray Cocoon had once been an outsider, a seed taking root within her.
Now it had transformed into something new.
Whatever name it once held no longer mattered. Everything about it was hers.
Divine Fetus Wondrous Dharma.
She fell like a meteor. Heat tore sparks from her clothes. Fabric blackened. Her whole body burned.
Then beneath her, vast silver-white radiance surged and condensed into a human shape.
She had Shao Heng’s face and figure—yet she wore a cassia-wood crown. Her hair spilled like a waterfall to her waist, and both hair and pupils were pure white.
A wide, silver-embroidered gown flowed around her. Deep violet gauze coiled around her arms. Twisted silver bangles circled her wrists. Behind her head shone a halo-like totem—a moon.
Every movement was holy and flawless.
She was the bright moon in deep night, the dew on a leaf, the lotus before the Buddha.
Divine Fetus Wondrous Dharma—Ming Yue.
Every cultivator in the secret realm watched the figures falling from the sky. For a moment, that silver-white light stole everyone’s eyes.
Someone drew a sharp breath, certain they would never forget this sight.
Moon hanging in deep night.
A goddess descending.
“Ming Yue?” Shao Heng called, voice hoarse.
“I’m here.”
The silver-robed woman’s expression was gentle. She lifted her arms and caught Shao Heng as if catching a drifting petal.
Holding Shao Heng by the waist, she looked down with pure white eyes—then dissolved into soft light and flowed into Shao Heng’s body.
In Shao Heng’s qi sea and dantian, beneath the yellow sprout, a Ming Yue Divine Fetus—shrunken countless times—sat in meditation with eyes closed. Behind it, a white moon cycled through its phases like a living totem scroll.
Shao Heng’s drained spiritual power filled in an instant. Her spiritual sense surged.
Of all of it, the Gray Cocoon—now Divine Fetus Wondrous Dharma—gained the most. Having taken in enough nourishment, it finished its incubation and truly became her divine ability.
Even the overflow that spilled to Shao Heng was staggering. Her spiritual power jumped from a little over 600 furnaces to 787, saving her months of bitter cultivation.
And the Tai Yin moonlight that had formed from the star fragment was vast and boundless. As Divine Fetus Wondrous Dharma absorbed it, it also washed and tempered her sea of consciousness.
Within that sea, her eight threads of spiritual sense split—sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four—until they stabilized at 128.
Only one final split remained. One more, and she would complete the first level of the Great Expansion Spirit-Refining Art.
Shao Heng let out a long breath. She pushed spiritual power through her body and cast the Wind-Blowing Technique, stirring the air into a rushing cushion that slowed her fall.
For the first time in a long while, ease filled her limbs.
She flipped in midair and looked down at the earth, eyes bright and calm—ready to choose where she would land.