Chapter 1747 — The Human Heart Burns the Karma Fire

A Chou was dragged by one leg, his head striking the ground, battered back and forth across the earth of the Nether Capital of the Primal Realm.

He was unharmed. His mighty karma-fire golden body had healed every wound on his flesh, and his soul was mighty beyond measure, the strongest primal spirit in all the world, one might say.

Yet he looked like a man suffering the gravest of wounds.

The words and deeds of Heavenly Venerable Xu were like the most formidable of divine arts, striking into his dao heart, and there, within his dao heart, turning all his hopes of becoming human, all his hopes of kinship, into karma fire that tormented him! This was the human-world karma fire he had dreamed of, condensed from human feeling, and yet, burning, it hurt so, it tore at heart and lungs.

If he endured it, he would become the one who attained the Dao of the Nether Capital, reaching an achievement that even Tubo in his former life could not have hoped for. But if he could not endure it, then he and his soul together would become kalpa ashes in the karma fire.

At this moment, what A Chou thought of was not whether he could attain the Dao, but the two of them, father and daughter.

Every thought he stirred made the karma fire heavier by a degree, the pain fiercer by a degree.

Over the past eight hundred thousand years he had endured endless karma fire, the karma fire of all living beings from the myriad heavens and worlds, and it had forged his karma-fire golden body.

That karma fire, though it tormented him, had also made him; he could bear it. But the karma fire born of kinship struck straight at the weakest point, the deepest point, of his dao heart, so fierce that he could not bear it! The weakest link in A Chou's dao heart was the karma fire of a father's love for his daughter, and that karma fire he could not withstand.

This, too, was why Shen Mu had always sent Heavenly Venerable You to face Heavenly Venerable Xu, and had kept A Chou from meeting Heavenly Venerable Xu.

Because Shen Mu knew that A Chou's kinship toward Heavenly Venerable Xu had already become his final inner demon.

He had waited eight hundred thousand years; the very purpose of forging his golden body in the karma fire of all living beings was that father-daughter bond. How strong was such an obsession?

The stronger the obsession, the more terrible the karma fire, perhaps terrible enough to burn even Tubo to ashes! Heavenly Venerable Xu dragged A Chou's body, step by step, toward the Lanfeng Valley of Jingping.

In the Lanfeng Valley, divine cities floated in the sky, and mighty passes stretched on for tens of millions of li, like a barrier blocking the ground below. Seen from the Nether Capital of the Primal Realm, both the divine cities and the passes had grown unreal, like shadow puppets cast upon a screen, wavering without cease. The Nether Capital of the Primal Realm and the Primal Realm occupied overlapping space.

Here Heavenly Venerable Xu could see the Jingping soldiers guarding the Lanfeng Valley, one by one, could see their life-and-death divine treasures, could see their flesh and their primal spirits.

But on the Jingping side, only those who had cultivated a special sacred pupil, or who had deep attainments in the Dao of the Nether Capital, could see the Nether Capital and Heavenly Venerable Xu. Such was the wonder of the Nether Capital. If the demon gods and monsters of the Nether Capital were to invade Jingping, then to the god-devils of Jingping it would be an invisible enemy striking, a bloody slaughter, a one-sided massacre!

"Heavenly Venerable Mu is in the Heavenly Court's great camp; Heavenly Venerable You is holding off the demon gods of the Nether Capital; Heavenly Venerable Yue, Lang Wan, has fallen several realms; only Lan Yutian remains to guard this place! " Heavenly Venerable Xu hauled A Chou Tubo along, striding hard toward the Lanfeng Valley, and laughed: "Even in the Nether Capital, Lan Yutian is no match for me!

To me, Jingping is an unguarded pasture. I can break in and slaughter at will, feast to my heart's content! Father God, this is our power, the power you dare not use!

" A gleam of delight flickered in her eyes, as though she were a little girl filled with darkness inside, about to push over and shatter the porcelain she had long wanted to destroy, her heart brimming with anticipation and excitement and a fierce lust for destruction! "But I dare!

" she laughed.

At that moment in the Lanfeng Valley, Lan Yutian was preaching. He looked down and saw Heavenly Venerable Xu holding A Chou by the calf.

He rose to his feet. If Heavenly Venerable Xu were to kill her way into the Lanfeng Valley, he feared no one there would be her match!

Only he himself could still give Heavenly Venerable Xu a fight! He was about to enter the Nether Capital of the Primal Realm when he suddenly halted. In the Nether Capital of the Primal Realm, Heavenly Venerable Xu halted as well, and let go of A Chou's foot. The karma fire on A Chou's body was too heavy; it scorched her hand and caused her unbearable pain.

She turned her head, and saw A Chou's karma-fire golden body burned black in the blazing flames, like a giant made of charcoal, but the charcoal had been set alight. "Father God, you still cannot bear to part with the human race? " Heavenly Venerable Xu laughed aloud and mocked him: "To become human, you killed my mother, you killed your sons and daughters.

And now, for the sake of the human race, you will kill your only remaining daughter, is that right?

" A Chou climbed slowly to his feet. The karma fire on his body burned fiercer still; the agony of it searing his flesh was not one ten-thousandth of the agony of it searing his primal spirit!

And yet the pain in his primal spirit was not one ten-thousandth of the pain in his dao heart.

"My children, I wanted so badly to protect you.

.

. " His back to Heavenly Venerable Xu, his shoulders shaking, he raised a hand to cover his face, and fiery tears flowed from his three eyes.

A Chou was not Tubo. A Chou was only a child who looked very much like Tubo; A Chou was only a man, ugly of face and kind of heart.

A living, breathing man.

He was good to others, he helped his neighbors. The villagers had been afraid of him at first, but in time they accepted him and thought him a good man.

He did not want his wife and children to come to any harm; he wanted with all his heart to risk his life to protect them. When his old mother died, he wished with all his heart that he were Tubo, that he had the power to raise the dead, to save his mother's life, to fulfill his duty as a son and care for her in her old age.

But he could not do it.

He simply could not.

He was only a mortal who looked very much like Tubo. Tubo possessed the mightiest primal spirit in the world, possessed boundless power, but bound by the station of Tubo, he could not overstep the will of the Dao of the Nether Capital.

But A Chou was human.

So long as he possessed human nature, he could not possess Tubo's power.

The hardships of life, the treachery of the world, the ugliness of gods and devils and their oppression and slaughter, none of it had made him give up his human identity, none of it had made him abandon his human nature.

He was the ugliest man in the world, and beneath that ugly exterior hid the purest heart. He was still full of hope for the future, still believed the future would be beautiful.

When his wife and children left him one by one, when the demigods lifted his sons and daughters and hurled them down the cliff, when his children were smashed to meat paste before his eyes, A Chou died. His human nature died. But not entirely.

His human nature became demon nature, and gained power; in that moment A Chou died.

Tubo was reborn within him, but the rebirth was not complete.