CHAPTER 431: 233. THE BLUE SKY IS DEAD

The crowd collectively breathed a sigh of relief. Everyone present was counting on Chen Che to emerge from the Illusion Realm and rescue the Little Princess, so that they could all avoid taking responsibility.

Naturally, no one wished for Chen Che to fail.

But honestly, they couldn’t help but empathize with him. If they were in Chen Che’s place in the Illusion Realm, could they really refuse the dying request of this Prime Minister?

After all, it’s a colossal kingdom, entrusted into their hands.

A true ruler, above all others.

The last savior in everyone’s heart.

How many could really resist the allure of such a heroic reputation?

But finally, it was all over.

There couldn’t possibly be a third layer of Illusion Realm, could there?

This thought sketched itself in everyone’s mind.

But with a shift in the scenery.

Everyone’s expression changed with alarm.

Xu Ziang exclaimed in surprise: "No way, a third layer of Illusion Realm?! How is this possible? He’s already spent over 60 years in the two layers of the Illusion Realm! Now there’s a third layer, how many more years will he have to spend there? After so long, if he manages to succeed, how terrifyingly strong will his Spiritual Power become?!

Damn it!"

Xu Ziang couldn’t help but swear aloud, each person’s eyes flickering with shock.

The dreamscape crafted by the three layers of Illusion Realm was indeed quite a sight.

What kind of place is this third Illusion Realm?

When Chen Che opened his eyes and realized he was once more in an Illusion Realm, he exhaled a long, deep breath.

Again?

Who is it this time?

But suddenly, Chen Che discovered that unlike the previous times, he had no physical form, and was floating in mid-air.

He paused in surprise, what’s this about? What is this blasted Illusion Realm trying to pull now?

He was able to effortlessly float and drift across this vast continent.

"Could it be that they want me to get a clearer view of this world?"

Chen Che speculated in his heart, and if so, he intended to see what kind of place this was.

He followed his intuition and chose a direction, moving forward in that way.

As he continued northward, he sensed a guiding instinct, and next to a run-down thatched cottage, he saw a Taoist in a yellow robe.

At this moment, Chen Che felt something in his heart, and suddenly understood what this Illusion Realm aimed to do, as if he had suddenly realized where he was.

The end of a dynasty.

Chen Che fell silent, his gaze calmly fixed on the yellow-robed Taoist. The Taoist seemed to sense something, raised his head to look at the void where nothing existed, and gently stroked a ceramic bowl of talismanic water as his gaze pierced through the dilapidated thatched cottage, focusing on the distance.

Following the Taoist’s line of sight, Chen Che saw a scene more desolate than the apocalypse.

The sky was an iron grey where locusts had devoured it.

Last night’s rain had collapsed seven households’ mud walls in the eastern village, and in the mud smeared with grass roots lay half-buried three bloated corpses—two adults and a child.

As the official rode past on a bay horse, the child’s hand was still tightly clutching half a piece of Guanyin Earth.

The Taoist got up and left the place.

Chen Che followed by his side, observing this vast continent through his perspective.

The widows of Hejian County were stuffing the last half-liter of millet into their dying children’s mouths, swallowing ashes of talisman paper to stave off hunger themselves.

Outside the vermillion gates of the County Government Office, the piles of starved corpses were higher than the stone used for tying horses, yet the new thirteenth concubine of the Inspector Lord wore gold hairpins set with pearls enough to feed the entire Quyang City.

"Heaven must be blind to all this! And they’re still conscripting laborers to build some Ganquan Palace!" the Taoist’s eyes turned red.

The furrows were filled with rusty plowheads, the oxen long taken away to cover taxes!

When the plague came, the official granaries were emptier than a hungry ghost’s belly.

Chen Che witnessed entire villages of people with lips turning black as they collapsed dead by the roadside, with wild dogs lurking with red-rimmed eyes.

And those fat rats in scarlet official robes? They melted down five-zhu coins to make their drinking vessels!

The magma beneath the earth seemed to roar.

When mothers began exchanging infants for food, when old men cursed the Liu Dynasty before hanging themselves from crooked trees, the wrath of the Yellow Sky should burn away this rotten world!

The tragic scenes left everyone in the council hall deeply shocked.

Perhaps the early Wasteland was just as cruel, but it had been a long time since anyone had seen scenes this miserable in the Wasteland.

The imagery continued to progress.

This was his second year with the Taoist.

The Taoist sat cross-legged atop a mottled sacred altar, three talisman lamps flickering like bloodshot eyes in the twilight, his withered fingers gently running over the cracked bamboo scrolls of the "Scripture of Great Peace".

"Do you smell it?" On the deserted altar, the Taoist spoke to himself, his vision seemingly directed towards where Chen Che was.

"This wind carries the sweet stench of rotting corpses... cough cough..." He suddenly coughed violently, spitting dark red blood foam into the incense burner.

"From Julu to Langya, from Runan to You Province, three hundred and sixty-five days and nights of coughing blood—not because these old bones of mine are afflicted with an illness, but because this Han family world has rotted to its core!"

He violently overturned the offering table, the bronze tripod crashing down with a thunderous roar.

"I want to cut off the head of that person in the palace, and take him to see the fields of Ji Province!

On the day the locusts descended like dark clouds, an old farmer knelt on the cracked earth clods, wailing over the millet stalks gnawed to skeletons, yet the official shattered his teeth with an iron-clad tax ledger.

Do you know what their whips are dipped in? Saltwater? No, it’s lamp oil mixed with human fat!

Last year’s drought, seventeen child corpses were piled at the bottom of Zhuo County’s wells, all thrown in by their own parents—rather than watch them helplessly starve into skeletons, better to spare them some suffering on the Yellow Springs Road."

He grabbed a handful of incense ashes and scattered them into the void: "Oh Heaven! Why do you allow revelry in those vermilion gates night after night? When I collected corpses for the widows of Guangyang City, they still had their husbands’ finger bones sewn into their ragged garments, while at the Inspector’s feast, the roasted venison was served wrapped in whole shark gauze!"

In that moment, Chen Che was utterly stirred.

The Taoist suddenly closed his eyes and concentrated, the nine-segment staff’s copper bells ringing without wind.

"Did you hear it? That sobbing sound boring into your ears at midnight. In the mine shafts of Nanyang County, the blood from the slaves’ neck chains stained the coal carts a dark red.

A fourteen-year-old boy, crushed under collapsed stones, actually smiled as he bit off his own tongue—on his back was branded ’Hongnong Liu,’ and the burning charcoal for the branding iron was enough to provide hot porridge for three months for the whole village."

"Do you know how the nobles of Luoyang City escape the summer heat? They place living people in ice cellars, listening to slaves scream in the severe cold, calling it ’meat zither playing elegant music’!"

The Taoist’s lips trembled, raindrops fell from the sky.

"This rain... this damned rain! Three consecutive years of torrential rain in Qing Province, and what floats in the river channels are not fish, but bloated, drum-like corpses."

"Are you coming with me to see this world?" the Taoist gazed up at Chen Che.

Chen Che did not speak, and the two once more moved forward.

In Qing Province, a mother held her dead baby on a dike for seven days, until crows pecked out her eyes.

Meanwhile, the coast of Xuzhou has retreated, the saline air turning rice paddies into poisonous marshes, yet the court’s Salt and Iron Envoy still sprinkles pearl powder into his wine goblets.

In Yangzhou, people drank poisoned water and developed festering sores.

But those bugs in their five-colored court robes? They use mugwort incense to cover the stench of corpses, writing in their reports ’the people eat wild greens, yet their minds remember imperial grace’."

He heard Yan Province children’s songs written in tongue-tip blood, the ’Hungry Ghost Ballad,’ he saw the ’White Bone Manuscript’ painted with blood-dipped broken fingers by veteran soldiers in You Province.

"Yesterday, eight women with yellow scarves wrapped around their heads came from Bingzhou, walking four hundred miles, their soles revealing stark white toe bones...

Kneeling before me, just to tell the Taoist that the garrison soldiers outside Yanmen Pass have begun exchanging children for food.

Do you know how they allocate ’meat rations’? Drawing lots! Those who draw their own flesh and blood dash themselves to death against the city wall!

But guess what I saw in the ancestral shrine of the Wang family in Taiyuan? A bear paw and ape lips being stewed in a three-foot-high bronze tripod, with ’The people are the foundation of the state’ carved on its legs!"

The wind howled.

The Taoist stood on either side of the road, seeing countless phantoms in his eyes.

His face showed neither joy nor sorrow, loudly chanting the Rebirth Spell.

"The ghost soldiers have borrowed the road... these shadows shackled in chains are the thirty thousand corvée who died at the Ling Emperor’s Mausoleum.

Their fingernail cracks still embedded with the gold dust of the Imperial Mausoleum, their intestines, however, drawn out by the official to make bowstrings.

Look at that limping old man! When his daughter was taken by the gentry to be a ’human sacrifice’ for the river god, she had just reached adulthood..."

"Do you know why their foreheads are branded with the word ’tax’? Because people have become a tax item cheaper than livestock! Last year in Yu Province, during the great epidemic, even the last watchdog in the village was dragged off to settle household adjustments, yet the official’s hunting dogs wore silver collars, feasting every day on lamb mixed with honey!"

Chen Che’s fists clenched, for five years, he followed this Taoist to see how cruel the world was in the last years of this dynasty.

The inferno on earth, was just so.

In the downpour, the Taoist stood in the rain, letting the heavy rain wash over his face.

This rain... it was blood-red.

"Do you know what mixes with the red rain? The souls of three hundred thousand who died on the battlefield of Zhuo County, eight hundred salt workers from ships sunk in Xiangjiang, and those fools nailed to death in the eastern market of Luoyang for reciting the ’Scripture of Great Peace’!"

Rumble!

A thunderclap echoed across the sky, a flash of lightning illuminated the ground, and in the brief flash, beneath the Taoist, appeared countless silhouettes!

Their expressions were numb and lifeless, all looking up at the figure of the Taoist.

"Heaven has pronounced its judgment! But it punishes not the peasant wives who ate Guanyin Earth and swelled to death, nor the infants burnt to charcoal by the plague, but those serpents in the Weiyang Palace wearing human skins!"

He raised his arm and shouted, in each lightning flash appeared figures wearing yellow scarves!

When mothers in Yizhou begin to feed infants with arsenic when temples in Jingzhou are piled high with the bodies of the hanged elders, when rusted plowshares stand erect in the fields of Ji Province...

Rumble.

The Earth Dragon has turned!

This tremor did not come from underground, but from the turning of millions of white bones!

They chanted—Yellow Turban! Yellow Turban! Yellow Turban!

The fierce wind tore the roofs open, revealing a swirling blood-red vortex in the night sky.

"Do you see the light of the seventh star of the Big Dipper? It has already fallen toward the fields of Julu."

The Taoist grabbed a handful of ashes from the censer and scattered them into the crowd!

"Swallow these incense ashes! This is not ordinary ash, but the ashes of starving corpses burned for three days and nights under Mount Tai! Swallow it down! Let those crushed souls resurrect within your bloodline! They’ve come... they’ve all come... the starved prisoners, the beheaded officials, the drowned canal workers... they’re all under the Nine Springs wrapped in yellow scarves!"

"This fire... must burn through thirty-six prefectures... until the day the Luo River flows backward and the beams of Weiyang Palace sprout poisonous fungi, our Yellow Heaven’s war banner—will be planted all over this decaying dynasty."

"The Azure Heaven is dead, the Yellow Heaven shall rise! In the year of Jiazi, great fortune to the world!"

"I, Zhang Jiao, invite the Great Han to its death!"