Killing the giant clam fiend had opened Tang Jie’s mind.
He now truly understood why so many Titans wandered the world and experienced life in all its forms. They were not just experiencing life, but participating, changing!
In the past, he felt like cultivators were cultivators while mortals were mortals, that medding too much in mortal affairs would only hinder his transcendence. And people were always suffering, so he alone could not change anything, and anything he did change would only be momentary.
But he now understood that he was wrong. If he did not clean up the muck of the mortal world, how could he clear away the clouds over his heart?
The turbidity of the mortal world was a reflection of his own mental state. Changing the world was also changing himself!
Tang Jie was so elated from understanding this that he let out a loud laugh. Sweeping up the pearl left behind by the clam fiend, he flew into the sky.
Xu Miaoran and Yiyi didn’t understand why he had suddenly become so happy, but seeing him laugh so loudly after so many days of depression was a good thing. They sighed in relief, smiled at each other, and then followed.
As the three of them flew over the mountains, they spotted a village.
Frowning, Tang Jie said, “This place is thick with a crimson light, so a fiend must have terrorized this place. Let’s go over and take a look.”
Given that he flew straight in, the villagers cried out and immediately began to prostrate to him.
Tang Jie didn’t waste time, immediately asking if a fiend had been doing evil around here. The villagers said that this was indeed so, that a mountain fiend occasionally came down to wreak havoc. At this, Tang Jie summoned Tutu and had him take down the fiend. A few moments later, the rabbit came back with the body of that mountain fiend in his mouth.
The villagers dropped to their knees in worship, which Tang Jie accepted. He opened his mind and merged with the world. Before, the endless sorrow of the world would have left in so much pain that he would have wanted to kill himself. Now, while it was still somewhat difficult to bear, that feeling of overwhelming misery had lessened somewhat.
Thus, Tang Jie understood that he would have to carry this heavy burden for a long while yet.
Starting from this day, Tang Jie would pay attention to every place he visited, pacifying any unrest he encountered.
He didn’t intentionally seek it out, but followed the guidance of his heart.
Whenever he felt seething resentment, he would resolve the source of it. The source could be a fiend running rampant, an evildoing cultivator, a greedy official, or the local village boss, but whoever it was, so long as they were the source of grudges, Tang Jie would eliminate them.
But if the resentment was not particularly thick, Tang Jie would ignore it. He was aware that evil was endless, and completely wiping it out was a delusion. In the end, he wasn’t seeking to measure the world, only measure himself.
To measure his sorrow, his joys, his pain, his confusion.
In this process, Tang Jie gradually recognized himself and discovered various problems in himself.
One day, Tang Jie arrived at a river. Sensing the resentment here, he quickly learned that there was a fiend living in the river that demanded a boy and girl to eat every year. The villagers nearby were helpless and could only make this annual sacrifice.
Tang Jie immediately hunted down the fiend, and after half a day of battle, Yiyi finally took down the fiend.
But to his surprise, the resentment actually thickened.
Tang Jie didn’t understand the reason, so he could only inquire in the village. There, he learned that this village had been plagued by other fiends before this, and the water fiend had driven them all away. While it had demanded annual sacrifices, one boy and one girl was much less than the damage inflicted by the other fiends. Thus, comparing their options, the villagers much preferred the water fiend.
With this fiend dead, the villagers worried that the other fiends would come back, and their fear led to the thickening resentment.
Tang Jie was rather speechless from this. After a while, he said, “If that’s the case, I will leave something for all of you.”
A drop of blood flew out, and as it sank into the soil, the soil formed into a statue.
“This statue will protect you,” Tang Jie said before leaving. This statue stood sentinel by the river, and as the days passed, the villagers simply treated it as an ordinary statue, and it did nothing to reduce the surrounding resentment.
But one day, the villagers found the body of a large toad on the shore. They knew it was a fiend, but they didn’t know why it had mysteriously died, which filled them with fear and unease. However, once somebody noticed that the sword held in the hand of the riverside statue was stained with blood, they connected the dots.
A temple was erected, and the statue was moved in. From then on, the area around the village was no longer troubled by fiends.
Later on, people thought it improper that this temple lacked a name, but they also didn’t dare to name it themselves, so they burned incense and prayed every day. One day, the statue spoke the words “All Life”. From then on, the temple was named the All Life Temple, and it venerated the Divine Lord of All Life, which was a much more domineering title than “the Freedom Celestial Sovereign”.
The flowers bloomed in spring as another year arrived.
A group of children were playing alongside a willow-lined dike, running along with kites.
Suddenly, a kite string snapped, drifting into the distance before finally landing on a temple.
The owner of the kite was a child of seven or eight, and he ran over and began to climb up the temple. This temple was rather tall, but the boy was very nimble and steadily climbed toward the roof.
A woman who had come to burn incense saw this and scolded, “Where did this naughty child come from, daring to climb onto the All Life Temple? You’re climbing over the Divine Lord’s head. Are you not worried about incurring his wrath and getting struck by lightning?”
The temple’s attendant came out and also shouted, “Hurry and come down!”
The boy was thrown into a panic, and it just so happened that the tiles were still wet from a passing shower, so his hand slipped and he fell from the top of the temple. Everyone yelled in alarm, for this temple was tall enough that the boy would either die or be crippled from the fall.
At this moment, a gust of wind lifted the child and gently brought him to the ground, safe and unharmed.
Everyone was stunned, and then they realized what had happened and prostrated, shouting, “The Divine Lord has shown himself!”
These cries gathered together and flowed into the temple. There, behind the incense burner, a statue stood. It bore Tang Jie’s appearance, the hand of a craftsman making him seem more imposing and majestic. At his feet was a rabbit—Tutu—and he was flanked by two women—Xu Miaoran and Yiyi, each with their own title. Xu Miaoran, with her Violet Sunset Robe and Yin Yang mirror, was called the Subtle Fairy. Yiyi, with a crown of blossoms on her head, a golden lotus in her hand, and a treasure platform at her feet, was called the Green Rose Saintess.
The smoke of the incense made the three statues seem all the more solemn and serene. As the sounds of praise entered the temple, a light flashed from the forehead of the Tang Jie statue. Those prayers then transformed into invisible threads that entered the statue.
Through the statue, one could see a drop of crimson blood, still as bright as if it had just been bled. Those threads of thought were absorbed by the blood and further refined into a thread of Divine Will which drifted into the distance. Traveling across the land, this thread of Divine Will came to a cave in a cliff, entering the forehead of a person.
It was Tang Jie.
After absorbing this will, Tang Jie opened his eyes. “As expected. When I absorb this will, I strengthen my Primal Infant. This is precisely the method to deify the Primal Infant.”
Killing the river fiend had given Tang Jie an idea.
He realized that he could do a more thorough job when it came to his altruistic acts.
After all, he had Reflections of Floating Life, so why not use it to bring true blessings to the people of the land?
Thus, wherever Tang Jie went, he left behind a drop of blood to protect the area.
As the people found that these statues could act on their own, they established temples and prayed to them for protection. If this were anyone else, they would need to send a part of their soul to keep watch, but Tang Jie didn’t need to do this. The clones created by Reflections of Floating Life could resolve things on their own, and only when they couldn’t resolve the problem did Tang Jie have to go in person.
In this way, the All Life Divine Lord was able to prove himself far more than any other god, which earned him many more believers.
Tang Jie originally demanded nothing of his believers, as he simply hoped that helping the world would help himself so that he wouldn’t have to experience the immense suffering of the world as he merged himself with it. But through this Heaven–Man Union, Tang Jie came to understand the significance of all this incense and worship to Immortals. It wasn’t because he derived some power of belief from it, but because it aided in the connection between man and heaven.
The incense established a special connection between Tang Jie and all other life. Through the incense, Tang Jie could quickly find out what was happening in all the areas where he had temples and handle any problems, at the same time receiving the joyous feedback from these locations.
This was why great powers frequently appeared before the people. Like Tang Jie, they wanted to use this to experience the connection between man and heaven. A classic example was Godhead Palace’s Guangfa Celestial Sovereign. He had left a sliver of his Divine Will in the statue within Godhead Palace because when Godhead Palace prospered, he would prosper as well. The Titans of other sects would probably do the same so that they would thrive when their sect thrived.
Of course, once they had overcome this trial and truly transcended into Immortality, they no longer needed to concern themselves with mortal affairs, after which most of these incense burners would be ignored. By then, new people would come up to replace them.
For this reason, while God Immortals were worshiped in the Great Stellar Chiliocosm, these religions did not last long, and people would change to new gods once a certain amount of time had passed.
When it came to Tang Jie, though, things were somewhat different.
Changing the world and experiencing oneself was a huge and complex undertaking, and constantly splitting off parts of the soul to keep watch over the land was bound to be extremely exhausting, affecting one’s cultivation. This was why the vast majority of cultivators didn’t try to change too big of an area, usually focusing on the part of the world they dwelled in. After all, the Heaven–Man Union wasn’t without limits. Nobody could truly merge with the entire world, so most cultivators merged with the part of the world they were in at the time, or else a particular area that they cared about.
Here, Tang Jie was the exception.
Reflections of Floating Life allowed him to greatly expand the region under his protection, which made Tang Jie wonder: what would happen if he expanded the limits of Heaven–Man Union as far as he could go?
And his experiments had borne fruit.