Chapter 181: The So Called Heavenly Palace Should Stand Deep Within the Human Order
"Can we speak properly?"
Of course not.
Nezha standing here was not the reckless Spirit Pearl of legend, nor the youthful demon king who acted on impulse and thought consequences were something other people dealt with.
Right now, she was a Divine General stationed at Heaven Gate. An immortal soldier of the immortal path, forged by Taiyi Zhenren to guard the path itself.
Her duty was simple and absolute.
Guard Penglai.
Guard the gate leading into the Celestial Realm.
Stop outsiders.
Everything else was irrelevant.
If Rowe wanted her to cooperate, there was only one method. He would have to obtain recognition from the Celestial Realm linked to the Penglai she protected.
But Nezha refused to let him enter Penglai to confirm anything.
So Rowe chose the second option.
He tied her up and left her suspended.
"Put me down."
Bound by the tentacles of chaos, Nezha struggled slightly. Her arms and legs were held apart, her thighs pinned by coils that clung like living concepts. Her legs swung as she fought against the restraint, the split hem of her clothes rippling like waves with every movement. The curve of her hips tensed and released, again and again.
It was pointless.
No matter how much strength she used, it was swallowed. Absorbed. Made meaningless.
Chaos was not a substance. It was the universe's underside given form, and it did not have a bottom.
Nezha's power could not reach the floor because there was no floor to reach.
Rowe's expression remained unchanged.
Beside him, Consort Yu stared at the tentacles for a moment. For reasons she refused to explain, her face flushed.
"Shameless," she muttered.
Rowe glanced at her once.
He did not ask what exactly she was thinking, because if she could think about that in a situation like this, then the word she chose was misallocated.
Nezha, however, showed no embarrassment at all.
"Put me down," she repeated, tone steady. "Unless I die, I will not let you pass."
Rowe exhaled.
"So I will say it again. You do not have the right, and you do not have the power, to stop me from entering."
He looked at her calmly.
"Divine General Nezha."
"I do, and I must," Nezha replied. "I know I cannot defeat you. This is my duty."
Rowe paused.
Then he spoke with the same calmness.
"Then what about now?"
Nezha's eyes widened.
She twisted her head toward Penglai behind her.
The mist in the air was disappearing. Not dispersing like fog under sunlight, but being swallowed as if an invisible mouth had decided it was done hiding anything.
The scenery of the Three Immortal Islands was revealed.
Fangzhang's peaks were steep and jagged.
Yingzhou was lush with dense vegetation.
Penglai radiated light. Majestic mountain ridges rose from its heart, and although it floated in the vast sea, from this distance it looked like a land suspended in cloud and vapor.
The three islands formed a triangle with Penglai at its center. Wind and waves pressed against their edges in layered surges, stirring pale currents into the sky.
Nezha was stunned.
The mist surrounding the Three Immortal Islands was their protection. Only those recognized by the Celestial Realm could pass it. In the past, only the immortals who resided there could travel through it freely.
To strip it away so directly, so completely, had only ever been accomplished by the rulers of the Celestial Realm.
The Four Directional Emperors.
And the Central Heavenly Emperor.
Rowe withdrew the tentacles restraining Nezha and let her down.
"I told you," he said, voice level. "I am the Heavenly Emperor."
Nezha landed with a small sway. Her boots found the suspended Wind Fire Wheels again, the flames stabilizing her stance. She still held the Fire Tipped Spear, but the hostility was gone.
She stared at Rowe.
"Are you truly the Emperor of the Celestial Realm?"
Rowe nodded once.
"I said I am."
Consort Yu frowned, then suddenly realized the flaw.
"Then if the Five Directional Emperors can pass, why did I not have that ability?"
Rowe answered without mercy.
"Because you self detonated the moment you moved."
Consort Yu fell silent.
There was nothing to refute.
She had put genuine thought into using an imperial identity to slip past Nezha. Fooling Nezha for even a breath had already been an achievement.
But directly obtaining the immortal island's recognition through that identity was not something she had even reached before choosing violence.
Rowe turned his gaze back to Nezha.
"Now can I enter?"
"Yes," Nezha replied at once. "Of course you can."
Her voice still carried that clean, mechanical steadiness, but something like restrained excitement slipped through anyway.
"Since the Battle of Investiture of the Gods, I have guarded Heaven Gate. For eight hundred years, it has not opened."
Eight hundred years.
Two full cycles of spring and autumn.
It was also the span of time in which the ancient sages and ancestral gods departed, one after another.
With them gone, no one remained who could open the gate.
Even Nezha could only guard outside. She could not enter.
Rowe looked toward the islands.
"No rush," he said.
He stepped forward slowly, gaze sweeping across Yingzhou, Fangzhang, and Penglai.
From the outside, the three islands did not look large.
But Rowe knew better.
Each contained hidden space, like miniature worlds folded inside their shells. Grotto heavens and blessed lands.
Reality Marbles.
The Three Immortal Islands overseas contained ten continents within them. Each continent was itself a massive floating landmass.
In ancient times, the islands were dragged across the Eastern Sea by three enormous dragon turtles. Without that scale, they could never have housed countless immortals, nor drawn someone like Lingbao Tianzun, one of the Three Pure Ones, to settle there.
But no matter how vast they were, they could not escape Rowe's current attention.
He raised a hand and reached out.
Consort Yu narrowed her eyes.
Nezha stiffened.
They both felt it at the same time.
The Three Immortal Islands trembled.
Then light speared into the sky one after another.
Nezha's delicate face filled with astonishment, and even her usually flat voice rose slightly.
"These are the Golden Scissors. The Money Falling Coin. The Sea Calming Pearls. The Five Fire Seven Feather Fan. The Heaven Flipping Seal. The Yin Yang Mirror…"
The treasures suspended in the light were precisely the mystical artifacts left behind by the immortals who once lived here.
Nezha recognized them all.
Each had displayed terrifying might during the Investiture of the Gods, the war that toppled Shang.
The immortals had long since departed, yet they did not take these treasures with them.
They left them behind.
Gifts for whoever came next.
Or rather, the countless immortal dwellings on these islands had always been a vault prepared for the next Heavenly Emperor who opened the Three Immortal Islands.
Rowe studied the hovering lights with an even gaze.
"It is a pity there are no Zhuxian Four Swords, no Taiji Diagram, no Pangu Banner."
Even so, this was more than enough.
He was not the type to demand infinity.
But he was also not the type to pretend he did not want what was useful.
Quantity mattered too.
And besides, he still remembered one particular king's habit of showing off.
"Gilgamesh flaunted his treasury at me once," Rowe said, half amused. "Later I will let him see my Heaven and Earth Treasury."
As the thought settled, the chaos core surfaced again. The ineffable shadow of Heaven stretched across the sky.
Countless tentacles extended downward, dividing into myriad branches, each one reaching for a different treasure.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
A storm of metallic chimes rang out.
Rowe watched as the chaos core held an immortal treasure in each grasp, divine level and beyond, like an absurd collector with too many hands and not enough restraint.
He imagined using it in battle.
Manifest the chaotic form.
Activate the treasures.
Then the battlefield would be filled with twisted darkness and drifting immortal aura, an aesthetic contradiction so offensive it could count as psychological warfare.
Rowe laughed.
Nezha was dumbfounded.
Consort Yu simply brushed her long black hair as if nothing in the world could surprise her anymore.
Rowe glanced at Nezha.
"First come, first served. But you already have enough. Even if you had three heads and six arms, more would only get in the way. I will not give you these."
Nezha nodded without argument.
Too much was not always a blessing. As a disciple of Taiyi Zhenren, she understood that principle well.
Consort Yu snorted when Rowe's gaze slid toward her.
"I do not need them either. I cannot use them."
Rowe replied immediately.
"You should use them."
Consort Yu blinked.
Rowe's expression turned solemn, as if issuing an important strategic doctrine.
"I am telling you not to self detonate again. It is embarrassing."
Consort Yu's teeth ground together.
"If you are here to mock me…"
Rowe continued, unbothered.
"To prevent you from doing it again, from now on you can use my collection."
He paused, then added with the air of someone describing a minor administrative adjustment.
"Consider it common property."
Consort Yu's mind lagged behind by half a breath.
Then her face turned red.
"What are you talking about?"
She looked away, voice sharpening out of pure instinct.
"Do not think you can bribe me with that. Common property and all that…"
Rowe did not even blink.
"You do not need to thank me. I am doing it for your own good."
Then, in the same tone he might use to describe the weather, he finished.
"After all, you are my immortal child."
Consort Yu bared her teeth again.
The sight was almost cute.
To Rowe, it made no difference whether she was a white tiger or a housecat. The behavior was the same.
Nezha tilted her head slightly, watching the exchange.
This Divine General had shed her demonic nature and lost pieces of her humanity when her lotus body was rebuilt. The social logic in front of her did not compute.
Consort Yu's blush, however, refused to fade.
Common property.
In the marriage structure decreed by Nuwa, those words were reserved for a very specific relationship.
The more she thought, the redder her face became.
Rowe did not press her further.
He understood exactly what she was thinking.
He had simply decided, after abandoning the habit of chasing death, that he could afford to be a little more reckless.
If something truly happened, he would not refuse responsibility.
He was not afraid of death.
So what was there left to fear?
Rowe turned his attention forward.
"Next, it is time to go to the Celestial Realm."
Nezha straightened.
"I will lead the way for you."
"No need," Rowe said.
Nezha froze.
Consort Yu also looked over, the flush finally easing as she forced her mind back to the present.
Rowe continued calmly.
"We are already there."
Already there?
Nezha could not understand.
Even Consort Yu, who had never entered the Celestial Realm but had seen it from afar, could not understand.
This was the Eastern Sea.
This was the Three Immortal Islands.
This was not the Celestial Realm.
Rowe looked ahead, gaze steady.
"This is not the Celestial Realm," he said. "And what lies ahead is also not the Celestial Realm I intend to reach."
He raised his hand slightly.
"Because I say this."
"The human heart is Heaven."
"The true Heaven should stand above the human heart."
His words echoed between heaven and earth.
Taiyi, suspended in the air, extended its endless tentacles again. Chaos mist surged outward and wrapped the Three Immortal Islands, not as fog, but as a conceptual net.
It enclosed the islands entirely.
Then pulled.
Upward.
Along with every landscape on those islands.
Along with the Celestial Realm connected to them.
"I did not come here to enter some existing Heaven," Rowe said. "I came to integrate that former Heaven into Pan."
"To transform it into a new Heaven rooted in human thought."
The Eastern Sea vibrated.
The Three Immortal Islands rose into the air, drifting toward a pinpoint of starlight at the horizon as the last glow of sunset lingered on the waves.
Nezha snapped back to awareness.
She found herself standing in a vast, spacious expanse.
Pan.
The domain carried by thought and Mystery, layered from shattered grotto heavens, had just gained something new.
Above the Mystery rooted in human thought, another layer had formed.
An Age of Gods, also rooted in thought, but now derived from the Human Order itself.
The Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors had manifested here before. When they returned earlier, their forms were fragmented, temporary.
After Great Qin unified the world and Human Order flourished, those fragmented divine forms contracted into Pan.
Because Pan had only carried Mystery and thought, they could only exist as pure concepts, gazing down upon the Divine Land.
But now, with the expansion of this new Heaven, the ancestral gods finally had a place to stand.
Magnificent golden palaces took shape in an instant.
Ethereal immortal aura drifted in from every direction, as if the countless immortals had never truly left.
Rowe walked forward and took his seat upon a high throne in the grand hall.
His voice carried the weight of something that did not argue.
"I am the Heavenly Emperor."
He looked down at Nezha.
"Divine General Nezha. Are you willing to become the Great God of the Three Altars and Sea Association, and guard the Three Realms?"
Nezha froze.
Astonishment, then something close to joy, flickered through her like a system receiving a command that made life meaningful again.
The Age of Gods had vanished.
Her seniors, her juniors, her master, her martial uncles.
All gone.
She had believed she would guard Heaven Gate until her body withered into dust.
But now, in front of her, the world looked like the peak era again.
No longer alone.
No longer waiting to die.
How could she refuse?
How could she possibly refuse?
"Nezha receives the Great Heavenly Lord's command," she said, and bowed.
"Thank you, Great Heavenly Lord. Thank you, Heavenly Empress."
Consort Yu, seated beside Rowe, looked exactly like Nezha had earlier.
Bewildered.
Rowe himself stiffened.
Then he saw it.
A faint slyness passed through Nezha's otherwise emotionless face.
She blinked once, as if to say.
No need to thank me.
.....
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