Stealing The Heavens

Facing the rising sun in the east, the mighty fleet of flying ships sped across the sky toward Dong Hai. There were twice as many flying ships in Dong Hai Army as they were at the time of their arrival, carrying more people and goods. Wu Qi needed a lot of ordnance and supplies to suppress the eastern provinces, so Emperor Haozun had supplied him with many resources and skilled craftsmen.

Although the imperial clan and the aristocratic clans of Great Yu had suffered a huge loss after two major upheavals, the craftsmen at the bottom were not harmed at all. Emperor Haozun was generous enough to grant Wu Qi two million skilled craftsmen. Together with their families, more than twenty million people were following him back to Dong Hai.

Ao Buzun stood proudly on the bow of Wu Qi’s flagship, swinging his arms and laughing. “I can’t believe I gave the Human Emperor a good beating! It’s such a wonderful feeling! Haha! Oh! My hands are really powerful! I’ve beaten the Human Emperor with them!”

While Ao Buzun was bragging about how he had knocked Emperor Haozun away with a flash of lightning, Lord Xiansheng and several other sober-minded people, who stood not far away, were too lazy to pay him any attention. If he had not been Wu Qi’s ‘mount’, and Wu Qi had not rendered a great service while having a large army stationed outside of Liangzhu’s gates, the kings of the council would have requested Emperor Haozun to grant them the permission to dismember him for the offense he had committed against the emperor.

But, this fella was still showing off that he had beaten Emperor Haozun, with no clues of how many pedantic subjects of Great Yu were thinking about hacking his head off. They were holding back only because of Wu Qi; if Ao Buzun ever dared to leave Wu Qi, someone might be bold enough to kill him secretly. In his previous life, he was killed and made into a storage ring for raping the White Emperor’s daughter. In this life, if he were killed for his sin of beating Emperor Haozun, the cruel Oracles would certainly make him into a chamber pot.

So, Gold Horn and Silver Horn, who had been on good terms with Ao Buzun, wisely stayed away from him. This fella was a disaster now, and getting too close to him could get them burned. They were convinced that if Wu Qi ever ordered Ao Buzun to lead an army out for some mission, there would be a group of pedantic Supreme Oracles faithful to Emperor Haozun waiting for him with bricks in hands.

Wu Qi stood on the mast in the middle of the flagship, enjoying the beautiful scenery around him. This was where the beauty of Pangu Continent lay. The magnificent mountains made for a spectacular sight; gigantic mountain ranges were everywhere, tens of thousands of miles tall and stretching for hundreds of millions of miles. Beneath them, the land spread out flat into the distance, covered in grasses which rippled like a green ocean when the wind blew.

Roads as fine as hair wound among the grasslands and mountains, connecting towns, villages, and cities that dotted the vast landscape. These settlements were very far apart from each other. The nearest two counties were often more than one million miles apart. Therefore, many places had not been inhabited since ancient times, and still retained the primitive scenery.

A daring flock of birds followed the fleet. These huge birds sang sweetly, and they adorned the fleet with their colorful plumage like clouds of fire. On the grassland below, a large herd of wild animals was running at will. Their hooves thundered and kicked clouds of dust into the sky.

“What a wonderful place!” With his arms around Princess Zhang Le’s slender waist, Wu Qi sighed and said in a low voice, “We can’t let those from the Heaven and Buddhist League ruin this place!”

Princess Zhang Le, too, was absorbed in the immensely beautiful scenery before her eyes. The Primordial Dao of Divinity she cultivated had a very high degree of affinity with nature and the laws of heaven and earth. Therefore, the boundless, primitive, and uninhabited landscape had struck her many times as hard as it struck Wu Qi. In this magnificent nature, she faintly felt that she had become one with this part of the world; every breath of hers was the breath of the heaven and earth, and every heartbeat of hers was the beating of the heaven and earth. She had a clear feeling that she could use this part of the world as her weapon and destroy her enemies at will.

Her mind had completely merged with this part of the world. When it came to the ‘oneness of man and nature’, even Wu Qi was not nearly as good as the princess who cultivated the Primordial Dao of Divinity. When he still needed to work very hard to integrate with the heaven and earth, Princess Zhang Le herself was a part of the world. The gap between them was too huge.

Wu Qi narrowed his eyes and smiled as he sensed Princess Zhang Le’s aura suddenly turning ethereal and unpredictable. He immediately sent his own divine sense into hers. Both divine senses fused as one perfectly and integrated into this part of the world.

Heaven and earth were like a perfect crystal without any impurities, and everything was exposed in their hearts; it was a sudden epiphany. As the couple was comprehending the movement of the Heavenly Dao and the myriad laws and natural energies that made up the world, the boundless energy Wu Qi had secretly stored in the Heaven Refining Cauldron flowed out from between his brows and gradually fused into their bodies. In this deepest and most essential epiphany, the attainment and magic power of the couple rose rapidly.

The state lasted a day and a night. Without alerting anyone, Wu Qi and Princess Zhang Le had made a steady stride in the realm of Dao Breaking. From the sixth tier, the couple had stepped up onto the fifth tier together. Wu Qi’s insights of the Heavenly Dao from his previous life played a very important role in this process. He had passed on all his insights to Princess Zhang Le, while she had also provided him her understandings.

Heaven and earth were like a treasure house, from which the couple had, once again, gained a great deal.

But, the wonderful, ineffable state was suddenly ruined by someone. A vast army of Heaven, about a hundred thousand men strong, suddenly rushed into the void covered by the couple’s divine sense like a huge 10,000-watt light bulb. It was as if a thumb-sized, green-headed fly suddenly appeared in a clear crystal ball, making one feel sick and want to vomit.

The soldiers clustered around a chariot in which a disheveled Liu Bang was caressing a beautiful female immortal in her nakedness. The woman had a thick liquid flowing slowly down between her legs. It was obvious that the two of them had just finished a strenuous exercise.

Princess Zhang Le flew into a rage. “Shameless scoundrels!” she snapped, “I’ll kill them now!”

A beam of five-colored divine ray shot whistling out and transformed into a hill surrounded in wisps of swirling mist, about to be thrown over at the army led by Liu Bang. With her current cultivation base as a Dao Breaking expert, the strike was enough to turn Liu Bang and all his subordinates to ashes.

But, Wu Qi stopped her with a clap of his hands as he chuckled and said, “Liu Bang’s here to disgust us, isn’t he? Oh well, let me make him feel disgusted then!” After saying that, he pointed out a finger. A trace of blood-red light sped quietly into the distance as it flew past the peak of a great mountain and disappeared behind it.

The area the couple’s divine sense covered was extremely vast. It took an hour for Liu Bang’s army to stop in front of Dong Hai’s fleet. A handsome immortal in a purple-and-gold robe of the Celestial Official flew up and shouted at the fleet, “You have come upon Liu Bang, the King of Han, the Inspector of the Universe, the commander of the Thunder Division! Halt now and pay your respects!”

If it had been someone else, they might have exchanged a few words of courtesy with the Celestial Official. But it was Bai Qi, the murderous lunatic, who commanded the vanguard. His eyes turned scarlet as soon as he heard the name. “Liu Bang, the King of Han? Are you the one who…”

Before Bai Qi could finish speaking, Zhang Yi, standing beside him, hastily covered his mouth. The identity of the people from the six states was an absolute secret and must never be disclosed. For the trip to Liangzhu, if Wu Qi had not made all the preparations in advance, they would have already been discovered. Nobody knew what would go wrong if their identities were exposed to outsiders.

Bai Qi struggled as he drew his sword and wanted to kill the official, but Zhang Yi hung on his arm like a monkey and dared not let him do that. Just as the two were entangled with one another, a gloomy growl came from the distance, “Liu Bang, you dishonorable dog! Do you still remember me, Xiang Yu, the Hegemon-King of Western Chu? In this life, if I captured your father, the Crimson Emperor, and cooked him into a stew, would you share it with me?”

Liu Bang, sitting in the chariot and caressing the naked woman in his arms, jumped up and stared agape at the distant mountain.

A great mass of blood-colored light poured down from the summit of the mountain like a waterfall. Holding a bloody spear, riding a dark horse stained with blood, and clad in the blood-colored Banner of Chiyou, Xiang Yu screamed wildly as he rushed in the direction of Liu Bang with a large host of generals. In the sea of blood that surrounded him were at least tens of millions of ferocious heavenly ghosts, whose bodies were covered in sharp bone spikes, baring their teeth while waving their claws and roaring.

Although only a few years had passed in the outside world, tens of thousands of years had passed in the space inside Wu Qi’s Dark Yin Celestial Tower. He had taken thousands of heavenly ghosts from the Ghost Realm, but after breeding in a carefree environment for so many years, and with plenty of food supplied by Dong Hai, they had shown their incredible ability to reproduce. Right now, the population of heavenly ghosts under his control had grown to tens of billions.

Today, these heavenly ghosts were thriving in his interstitial world. On top of that, he had managed to connect the Yellow Spring in the Nether World with his interstitial world, creating a filthy world hundreds of millions of miles around. Infected by the aura of the Yellow Spring, the heavenly ghosts had become a hundred times more ferocious and stronger than their kindreds, and had acquired the almost invincible tenacity of the creatures in the Nether World.

With plenty of fresh animals to eat, the weakest of these heavenly ghosts, who relied on devouring blood to increase their cultivation bases, were as strong as a peak-level Heaven Immortal. Xiang Yu had brought with him tens of millions of them, and they exuded a terrible killing intent that turned into a thick cloud of blood and engulfed Liu Bang’s army.

A sea of blood surged up into the air, rocking violently. Soon, the soldiers were screaming and shrieking in despair, their voices drowned by the sickening noises of bone-crunching, flesh-ripping, chewing, and swallowing. The hundreds of thousands of soldiers were all devoured by the tens of millions of heavenly ghosts in the blink of an eye.

At that moment, a golden dragon rose to the sky. Under the protection of Han Xin and others, Liu Bang fled in a panic.

Lifting the spear over his shoulder, Xiang Yu chased after the other while shouting madly. The vast host of heavenly ghosts followed him.

Wu Qi shouted dryly, “Protect King of Han, and don’t let these monsters hurt him!”

Amidst the soldiers’ roar of laughter, the fleet continued its flight toward Dong Hai. No one cared whether Liu Bang was alive or dead. It was not a big deal for them.