Ten breaths.
Hearing the notification, before Chen Zhou even had time to take a closer look, an overwhelming wave of profound grief surged out of the ball of white light.
It was completely irresistible, pouring directly into his body through his arm and crashing into his sea of consciousness.
It was a feeling that was difficult to describe.
It felt as though all the pain, unwillingness, and regret he had once indifferently ignored were suddenly unearthed all at once, pressing down on his chest and suffocating him.
At the same time, the black thread fragments neatly stacked by the system sensed the scent of pollution and instantly rioted.
Chen Zhou felt as if his soul was being torn apart in an instant.
Countless tiny black fragments regained their activity the moment the pollution entered his body, springing forth from the depths of his divine soul's various layers and lunging frantically toward the ball of white light.
A sharp, piercing pain shot through Chen Zhou's soul-body. The black threads began to connect one by one, as if trying to assemble into some terrifying entity.
His vision began to blur, and his thoughts felt as if they were being dragged down by something, falling layer by layer.
Darkness surged in from all directions.
He felt an extremely heavy sense of oppression descending from a towering height. It was a sensation he was all too familiar with.
When he had divined the matters of Qingzhou and witnessed the entire process of Nüba being polluted, he had felt the exact same thing.
Chen Zhou knew what it was.
The Heavenly Tribulation.
It was waking up.
It had sensed the mark on Chen Zhou, and now that he was once again tainted by something bearing its aura, the Heavenly Tribulation began to stir from its slumber. It slowly turned over, its cold gaze piercing through layers of void to lock onto him.
The crushing pressure made Chen Zhou's scalp go numb and his limbs turn stiff. He could not even move a single finger.
He could only feel, with absolute clarity, the black threads within his divine soul aggregating, gradually piecing together an outline.
It looked like an eye.
Yet it also resembled a giant, faceless head.
And it also seemed like countless hands stretching out from the same direction, reaching to grab him.
He could not see it clearly. The outlines constantly shifted between blurry and distinct, changing with every passing second.
But soon, a surge of black water welled up, enveloping Chen Zhou's consciousness.
The chaotic sensations before Chen Zhou's eyes receded slightly. Only the rushing sound of water remained in his ears, bringing him an inexplicable sense of peace.
The countdown on the system panel was still ticking:
【Countdown: Seven breaths...】
Standing in the distance, the Fate Officer's expression completely changed.
He could feel that his connection with the Heavenly Weeping Star had been severed.
The power he had spent a hundred years plundering, and another hundred thousand years barely stabilizing, had completely vanished from his control without a trace.
He looked down at his hands. His smooth, wax-white palms were completely empty. There was nothing there.
“...How is this possible?”
The Fate Officer was both shocked and enraged.
He abruptly raised his head to look in Chen Zhou's direction, the slit of his mouth trembling violently.
The other party's aura was clearly only at the early eighth-stage. How could an ant-like existence master a fate-stealing technique that only those above the ninth-stage Truth-Usurping rank could possess?
To even snatch his Tears of Heavenly Weeping in a single breath?
What rank of formidable divine technique was this?
Did this even make sense?
The Fate Officer's mind raced as he suddenly recalled something.
The Sky-Monitoring Four-Direction Envoys of Central Province almost all had their own creations.
But he was different from the others. He was not Bai Xing's creation. In fact, his true form had existed even longer than Bai Xing.
One hundred thousand years ago, the God Emperor fell for unknown reasons, and the order of the celestial realm collapsed overnight.
Back then, the Fate Officer was not yet called the Fate Officer. He was merely a low-level fate-making clerk at the very bottom of the Thirty-Six Heavens. He was not even a proper celestial official, serving at best as a handyman artisan for the high immortals.
On the night the celestial realm collapsed, he watched all the high immortals flee in panic. Some were polluted by something and turned into monsters, while others knelt on the ground, begging for the God Emperor's return.
But the only response they received was dead silence.
The heavens were in utter chaos.
Chaos was good.
Chaos meant the old rules were shattered, the old order had collapsed, and the things that once stood high above had all fallen into the mud. Whoever bent down to pick them up could claim them.
Squeezing through the fleeing crowd, the Fate Officer turned into a collapsing scripture pavilion. Beneath a pile of scorched remnants, his hand brushed against a banned tome.
《The Book of Fate-Making》
The fates of mortals were bestowed by heaven and earth, destined from birth.
However, this banned tome recorded a technique that had long been strictly forbidden by the Heavenly Dao: the artificial creation of destinies.
By utilizing the souls of the dead, the resentment collected from natural and man-made disasters, and an extremely rare material, one could fashion a brand-new destiny that should never have existed between heaven and earth.
Even in the former celestial realm, possessing a unique destiny was a rare treasure that various factions would scramble to fight over.
Those born with a noble destiny were destined from birth to be recruited, enshrined, and won over.
Unless they were irredeemably evil, in which case they would be hunted, stripped of their destiny, and refined.
Everyone spoke of conforming to the mandate of heaven.
Yet in the shadows, which of the various factions was not searching for exceptionally gifted destinies to use for themselves?
The nobler the destiny, the more covetous eyes it drew.
Some ordinary celestial officials could even rely solely on awakening a special destiny to instantly transform themselves, becoming the predesignated successor of a certain faction.
This alone proved how precious destinies were.
The cover of 《The Book of Fate-Making》 was embossed with dark gold characters. The Fate Officer flipped to the first page, his fingers sliding across the divine script as his heart pounded like a war drum.
To fashion a brand-new destiny that should never have existed between heaven and earth...
When the celestial realm was stable, who would have dared to touch such a thing?
The high immortals kept it locked away. Anyone who so much as flipped through it would have their celestial status stripped and be cast into the cycle of reincarnation.
But now, the high immortals were either dead or had fled. The scripture pavilion had collapsed, and the banned tome lay right beneath his hand, covered in dust but still holding a lingering warmth.
The Fate Officer gripped the banned tome tightly, stuffed it into his robes, and slipped away from the celestial realm, blending in with the fleeing stream of immortals.
From then on, he began to study the techniques within the banned tome.
Using the resentful souls spawned everywhere in Southern Tang due to the celestial realm's upheaval as materials, he tested and modified it time and time again.
The upheaval of the celestial realm gave him time, the chaos of the mortal world gave him materials, and he gave himself a single idea—
Under the Heavenly Dao, all things are balanced.
If someone carries good fortune, someone else must carry misfortune; if someone carries joy, someone else must carry grief.
In that case, he would carry all the weeping, wailing, unwillingness, and despair in the world, only to pour it all out when the time was right.
Since the destinies of the celestial realm were determined by heaven, then he, in the mortal world, would—
Recreate another heaven.
The Fate Officer spent hundreds of years planning, artificially creating a Heavenly Weeping Star.
Then, he spent a hundred thousand years perfecting it, even going so far as to join Sky-Monitoring, all to refine the destiny of the Heavenly Weeping Star into his own body layer by layer.
It had been an incredibly long and arduous process, where every step was taken with extreme caution, as if walking on thin ice.
Yet this thing before him, barely past the eighth-stage, had snatched it all away in a single breath!
Rate on N.U.
