The sword appeared, and out came the White Frost Bloom.

The moment the innate body-piercing, formless sword-qi that purified all things emerged, the whole Yellow Sand Fortress became a place cleansed of every stain.

Those women with warped hearts, those flesh-eating cur-hounds — all of them vanished under that single sword. And those laboring men who worked in silence like mutes, never resisting; and those children who had been tortured — their bodies were released. Their purified souls, imbued with realization, bowed to Yue Yang and Liuye, then rose skyward on the pull of the law-force and vanished away.

No one knew how long they had been suffering in the Yellow Sand world. Only when Yue Yang and Liuye appeared were their bodies and souls truly set free.

Freed souls.

Carried out of the Yellow Sand world by the law-force.

But the twisted women and dogs — as their bodies were purified into ash — were not set free. The law-force of the Yellow Sand world held them fast, kept them here forever, never to be released.

Those sinful souls were bound into the sand itself, staining the ground around the former Yellow Sand Fortress an inky black.

With Heavenly Eyes of Wisdom, one could see their souls struggling in agony in the grains of sand.

Every pain they had ever inflicted in life —

Would now be repaid in this Yellow Sand world, forever. If the men and children hadn’t left — if they’d stayed to inflict equivalent revenge — then one day the debt could theoretically be balanced. But now, after Yue Yang’s White Frost Bloom sword purified the whole place, the men’s and children’s souls had all been carried away by the law-force. These women’s souls would carry their sins in this locked space of the Yellow Sand Fortress forever, waiting for a day of repayment that would never come, all while enduring every pain they themselves had once inflicted.

The law-force here was very fair.

Whatever pain a person had inflicted on others in life, that same measure of pain they would have to endure themselves. Failing to balance the ledger meant no release, ever.

“Let’s go.” Yue Yang turned and nodded at Liuye: “We don’t know what happened here before. But the way it turns out now — this may be the best possible outcome. This too was a trial. I think we’ve passed. Let’s go. On to the next stage.”

“Mm.” Liuye felt she had gained a great deal from this stage — anger, mercy, initial fury, then eventual forgiveness.

In one brief trial, she felt she had matured considerably.

She didn’t know whether, outside the Yellow Sand world, in other places, a person who wronged others would carry the same weight of sin, whether the same law-force would render the same judgment. But she now understood something. Many things in the world were exactly as Yue Yang had said — causal. Cause first, then effect. If everyone did good, then the very atmosphere of a place would grow better. If everyone treated everyone as an enemy, if hearts were warped toward the pursuit of profit, if pain was carelessly heaped onto others’ shoulders, the consequences would be terrible; even if there was no law-force to enforce it, that pattern would inevitably provoke resistance and war…

The Sky Tower had, for the longest time, been exactly that. Might made right. Strength was the standard.

The result was war every year, every month, every day.

Not until Yue Yang’s rise had that pattern begun to break. Beginning with the Sky Tower’s Longteng continent — turning it from absolute might-first, profit-first to a foundation of ethics and moral order, on which nations and clans could develop together and rise together — this had been, without any question, a return to human values.

Yue Yang, the third young lord of the Yue family, had not made it his stated banner. He had never issued edicts to require it. But his own example was the highest example.

Because of him, he had, without meaning to, moved a great many people. And those people had moved even more people.

A benign spiral had produced the flourishing Longteng continent of today.

With Longteng as an anchor point, the Sky Tower itself had gradually stepped into that spiral. Every place, every clan had found the best conditions for growth and development. This was utterly unlike the years of ceaseless warring that came before… Compared to the current Sky Tower next to the Heavenly Realm, Liuye felt, one could see at a glance how bad the situation in the Heavenly Realm actually was. With the widest land, the richest resources, the best living conditions, the finest bloodlines — with every advantage the Sky Tower could not begin to match — the Heavenly Realm nonetheless allowed the rising Sky Tower to keep narrowing the gap.

Liuye was certain — before too long, the Sky Tower would catch up with the Heavenly Realm. Would perhaps even overtake it.

All of it.

Was not because the Sky Tower’s cultivators had suddenly awakened. It was because of Yue Yang’s arrival.

He, through his own example, had brought a wholesale change and shown the Sky Tower’s cultivators a real road to growth… The Heavenly Realm’s cultivators had lost themselves in strength and power. Warfare, killing, everywhere — inflicting endless pain on others in the name of private interest. That the long-sunken, newly-awakening Sky Tower now steadily narrowed the gap was not without cause.

“Thank you.” Liuye suddenly felt she really ought to thank Yue Yang on behalf of every warrior of the Sky Tower. Without him, the Sky Tower didn’t know how many more years it would have stayed sunk.

“Huh? What are you talking about?” Yue Yang was baffled.

“It’s nothing. Let’s go!” Liuye smiled sweetly and didn’t explain. She knew Yue Yang had never intended to demand change from anybody. That was the point. His conduct had been entirely unconscious — because he had been a good example to Fourth Mother, Yue Yu, Yue Bing, Yue Shuang, the Yue family, to Great Xia, to Tianluo, and everyone around him, and that was why they had all begun to change and to spread that influence more broadly. She didn’t say it. She didn’t praise him openly. But in her heart she had already made a decision: from now on I too will stand at his side, and together we will be a good example, influencing more people, drawing them into this benign spiral.

Not making a show of doing it.

But — she herself would do it. She would never let him be alone.

For the first time in her life, Liuye took Yue Yang’s hand of her own accord. She kept her head lowered in shy embarrassment; her small hand trembled a little but held his big one firmly, and did not let go.

For the next three days, Yue Yang and Liuye passed through more than a dozen different spaces and unit worlds. Each space and each unit world gave the pair a different awakening.

In one, for example — a miniature unit world — they entered as though they were giant deities.

Impossibly large.

The ground looked like a small sand-table.

On that sand-table were countless nations, populated by uncountable lives. To Yue Yang and Liuye’s eyes, those races — smaller even than ants — attacked one another, warred without pause. The upper classes of every nation, for money and power, marched armies of a hundred thousand out to battle, met on the front line, and slaughtered until blood ran in rivers and corpses covered the fields. And yet in Yue Yang’s and Liuye’s eyes, the ant-people’s actions were pitifully ignorant. Even if some of them won money and power, in their absurdly brief, absurdly fragile lives, they would age and sicken and die in an eye-blink, and could not possibly hold on to that power or enjoy it for long… Yue Yang and Liuye looked down at these unbelievably small lives. Within the span of a few sentences of conversation, the ant-people were born, grown, killed one another, seized wealth, fought over power. Within half a minute, whatever they had bled for was gone before they could taste it — because they had died of old age — and the next generation’s war was starting again.

Nobody knew of the worlds above. No one saw Yue Yang and Liuye looking down on them, born-in-the-morning, dead-by-evening.

Nobody knew the truth of life.

Nobody knew the meaning of life.

Generation after generation, for a moment of pleasure or an instant of power, they rushed forward to kill one another…

They lived their whole lives in this ignorance, in an unbroken cycle, and not a single one of them stepped aside to think differently, to try something different! Those ant-people thought money and power were everything life was. They did not know they had been born and died in the space of one of Yue Yang and Liuye’s sighs — one minute, and their whole life had been walked through.

“I think — in the eyes of the ancient great gods, we’re the same as these ant-people.” Liuye shook her head softly, sighing. “We too do not have eternal life. Compared to the gods, or to the ancient great deities, our lives are also as morning-born, evening-dying. In a sigh of theirs, our human kind is born. In a few sentences’ time, we have fully grown, radiant with youth, brimming with life. But in the flick of a finger, the years have made us old. Our bodies wither in age and sickness, and at the last, like falling leaves, we drop from the tree. Countless generations before us in the Sky Tower forged brilliant glories. Their reputations shook the sky. And they are all gone now — just as we are born and grow and, in the future, will inevitably pass away… The only thing that does not change is the Sky Tower itself, which has watched every generation’s lives pass by. It alone endures. If we do not think about the meaning of life and the truth of life, then we are truly no different from these ant-people!”

“Cultivating and rising in strength — that is seeking the truth of life.” Yue Yang gently stroked her hair to console her: “Why do we study? Because study lets us gain wisdom. With wisdom, we can be enlightened and freed from confusion. We can think about the meaning of life and the truth of the Heavenly Way. Why do we cultivate and rise in strength? Because we are not content with the present state. We want to ascend to a higher tier of life and a higher realm… I believe that so long as we work on this direction — practice unceasingly — we will one day discover the meaning and the truth of our own lives!”

“Is that so?” Liuye felt a water-poured-over-the-crown clarity from Yue Yang’s words.

“A human is human because a human possesses wisdom. We can reflect on our own inadequacies. We can learn and grow. Through the cultivation-and-ascension path, we can seek out the mysteries and the truths of higher-tier worlds. That is exactly why other kinds of life envy us.” Yue Yang was moved. He sighed softly: “The reverse: if a person does not use their wisdom, does not learn and rise, does not seek the truth, and simply sinks into worldly pleasures — that is the greatest sorrow. That’s what most ordinary people become: unwilling to pay the price, coveting comfort, sealing themselves off; unwilling to change themselves through the hardship of cultivation. Those people are, honestly, no different from these ant-people. But the biggest difference between us and these ant-people is that we humans have countless forerunners — historians, records-keepers, teachers to explain and dispel confusion. Perhaps this generation cannot understand or reach the truth of life. But in the next generation, maybe someone will understand, and — through cultivation, through ascending — walk a whole new path of growth. Not sinking forever. That is our human race’s greatest advantage. That is our greatest hope!”

“I — I will work hard too!” Liuye knew Yue Yang would walk into a higher realm of life. He had always worked toward it. Not just him. Xue Wuxia, Princess Qianqian, Luohua, Yinan, Yue Bing — all of them were the same.

Watching these ant-people, she felt she couldn’t drag him down.

She didn’t want to be left behind. Left alone, sadly, in a lower-tier world, born and aged and sickened and dying under Yue Yang’s downward-looking sigh.

She wanted to be with him always. To step, together, into a world without birth-and-death. To seek together that higher, higher, better world. To live together inside it, forever, forever…

(End of Chapter 1035)