Chapter 1 Sunny Day

The sun shone brightly.

It was a rare beautiful day in the Southern Border. The autumn breeze was gentle, and the clouds in the sky were sparse, allowing the warm sunlight to illuminate the earth.

All things rejoiced because of this, including the residents of the mobile city on the vast land. Blood-colored tendrils spiraled and extended into the sky, eventually transforming into an umbrella-like canopy. A structure resembling a flower bud was blooming in the center of the canopy, revealing a blood-colored flower covered in phosphorescence and crystals.

It was absorbing the dazzling sunlight, a rare sight after the dimming of the Holy Sun.

Tens of thousands of human faces, limbs, and pulsating fascia and blood vessels formed this giant umbrella and flower.

And it was far from being alone.

Russet, plant-like, yet flesh-like tissue grew between the rocky and metallic city, eventually transforming into sturdy giant pillars.

They were perched atop the towering buildings of the mobile city. These giant pillars were mostly connected by blood vessels or umbilical cord-like biological tissues, like vines connecting giant trees, supporting the flowers and umbrellas as the main trunks of the trees' canopies.

There was a sound—in the stillness, the sound of souls was resonating, and the towering blood-flesh trees stretched out their bizarre branches and canopies. The phosphorescence of yuan energy spread in the atmosphere with an almost nectar-like scent.

—Is it painful?

It was not painful.

There was nothing painful about being absorbed by the giant trees. Pain was the instinctive reaction of human nerves, and under the gentle embrace of the Divine Tree, there was no chance of being stimulated.

—Is it sad?

Not really sad either.

Everyone in the city was here. No one was lost, and no one was forgotten. All things were united, more intimate, direct, and undisguised than ever before.

—Is it despair?

Strangely, there didn't seem to be despair either.

What was there to despair about? Everyone was the same, neither dead nor gone. Everyone still existed, just in a different way.

Yes, there were indeed wails, roars, and cries.

But there were also cheers, exclamations, and praises of enlightenment.

The blood-colored Divine Tree spread its leaves, and human faces with different expressions appeared on it.

Humans, unable to understand each other, found it difficult to truly empathize even when their bodies were absorbed and dissolved, and their souls were fused together. So, different emotions were only natural, and feeling repulsion and fear was perfectly normal.

But they would eventually understand that if they wanted to exist forever, then this very moment was the last and greatest opportunity for ordinary people like weeds, destined to live no more than fifty years.

This was the day they were closest to achieving eternity.

As a part of eternity.

The Blood Divine Tree grew vigorously in the light, with the positive sun, autumn breeze, and the rosy clouds on the horizon, giving it even a sense of divine beauty.

However, there were always some stubborn individuals who could not appreciate this beauty.

For example, First Knight Ilovitz, who angrily gripped the hilt of his sword the moment he saw the Blood Divine Tree.

"This is... what... evil!!"

Looking down from above at the blood-colored canopies and branches swaying in the wind and light in the city, the gray-haired knight stopped in mid-air in shock. He sensed an incredible yuan energy reaction contained within this Divine Tree, the aura of a Calamity.

The Divine Tree was still in a dormant state, but when it awakened, it could dominate all the yuan energy within nearly a thousand square kilometers centered on it, transforming it into their domain.

This was already the size of half a province of the Empire, and there were hundreds of such auras in the Southern Border Noble Alliance. They overlapped and intertwined, and as soon as they awakened, they could instantly contaminate most of the southern part of the Aeon Continent.

What exactly happened? The knight was at a loss. He could no longer sense any life aura other than the Divine Tree from the mobile city, and the Divine Tree was not yet awake, not showing much danger of attacking.

This made Ilovitz unsure whether he needed to attack, or what he should do now.

"Goodness, if these Divine Trees were evenly distributed, they would be enough to cover the entire Earth."

At this moment, a calm voice could be heard.

A male voice with a subtle accent appeared behind Ilovitz, causing the knight to turn around warily.

But in the instant the knight turned his head, the white-haired old man had already passed the gray-haired knight. Su Zhou silently followed Ilovitz's trajectory, and then came to the top of the Blood Divine Tree.

He hovered parallel to the blood-flower, and then reached out and touched the blood-brown biological tissue that seemed to be a mixture of plant and biological flesh.

The dazed Ilovitz watched all this, watching Professor Svetlye nod slightly and comment: "As expected, the technology is not perfect enough. The souls are all separate, the fusion is very slow, and the underlying True Spirits are destined not to fuse, so there is still hope."

"This world is still somewhat gentle."

He sighed with words that the knight could not understand at all, and even more incomprehensible to the knight was that a small red snake suddenly appeared on the other person's shoulder.

Ilovitz had not sensed the slightest aura of this little snake before, but it just appeared, and it even made a rather emotional voice: "Gentle? You just don't know."

"Behind your gentleness is the destruction of countless universes in the past, and the War in Heaven where correctness was rewritten."

"Lord of Silence rarely took the initiative for the sake of the imperishable True Spirit, and beat up both Termination and Creation... Of course, I also intervened, and many people intervened with more than one hand, but in the end everyone reached a consensus, which is really gratifying."

"So, Yala."

The Light of Hope, Svetlye, turned his head, and said gently to the little snake on his shoulder: "This is love."

He retracted his hand that touched the Blood Divine Tree, and then turned his head and met the knight's eyes.

"Hello, First Knight of the Empire, Ilovitz, Queller of the Stars."

The man's tone was so calm that it didn't seem like he was facing an enemy who had almost fought just now, and whose auras had subtly clashed: "What's wrong, aren't you attacking? I'm the one who forced your friend to his death."

Although his tone was calm, the content of his words was a straightforward provocation.

But Ilovitz was surprisingly not provoked by this sentence.

On the contrary, after a moment of silence, he lowered his height to be parallel with Su Zhou. Ilovitz met Su Zhou's eyes, staring at the old man's pupils and expression.

After a long while, he slowly turned his head and looked at the Blood Divine Tree aside, "Aren't you angry? Facing such an evil monster?"

"This doesn't even count as a monster, just a group of pitiful people."

Raising his hand, Su Zhou shook his head slightly: "And anger is not expressed with words."

The hand Su Zhou raised silently disintegrated into a strange vine composed of metal and roots. This cyan-purple vine rapidly dispersed, rotated in mid-air, and transformed into lines that flickered with yuan energy, and then, like meteors with trajectories, they pierced into the seed of the Blood Divine Tree.

The flesh-flesh Divine Tree that was pierced by the vines immediately began to squirm violently, producing an extremely strong rejection reaction.

In Ilovitz's astonished gaze, the behemoth entrenched in the entire city began to squirm, shrink, and coil violently, and then, just like that, it actually began to 'wither' at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Like a sponge being burned by flames, or a slowly leaking inflatable castle, the Blood Divine Tree, which was originally towering into the clouds, wanted to resist after Su Zhou's arm roots were inserted, but it was meaningless. No matter how much its instinct made it roll, swell, and extend its tentacles to try to counterattack, the outcome was in vain.

In Su Zhou's loving embrace, everything would end.

The Blood Divine Tree shrank, shriveled, and eventually turned into a pile of brown root-like knotted objects covering the ruins of the city, a rather disgusting carpet of flesh and blood, with a viscous substance like petroleum flowing out of it, yet with a heavy, dizzying fragrance.

The power and souls parasitized in the Blood Divine Tree were extracted, and it was already an empty shell.

With absolute power and authority, he crushed the Divine Tree derivative that condensed the flesh and blood and souls of an entire city, as well as alien yuan energy. Su Zhou retracted his hand, and other than the aura on his body becoming slightly heavier, he didn't seem to have changed at all.

"Anger must be expressed with hands."

Turning his head, with deep eyes, Su Zhou looked at Ilovitz, sizing up the gray-haired knight: "Ultimately, although it looks terrifying, the Blood Divine Tree is just a semi-finished product. The souls have not fused, they are just simply wrapped together, and have not yet become the souls of a new Divine Tree."

"To be honest, it's a bit cliché to want to use the souls of everyone in a mobile city as sacrifices to awaken the Divine Tree? But the Divine Tree is not an evil god. Natural death is fine, but the souls of living people, when they enter its body, are naturally well preserved... The person who did this probably didn't expect that the Divine Tree 'loves' all living beings, right?"

Su Zhou's sigh revealed a lot of information, some of which coincided with Ilovitz's own guesses.

"And you..."

So, the knight took a deep breath, and said the conclusion seriously, word by word: "You have incorporated all the souls in that Divine Tree into your body... You have just imprisoned those souls in another place."

"It's letting them start a new life."

Su Zhou didn't care about this unwarranted accusation. He pointed to his chest with his thumb: "I am the Underworld, and also the Light of Hope."

"I am Svetlye. Knight of the Empire, although I can't revive these poor people, they can still live in my body while maintaining their own will, until an opportunity, and then return to the world."

The white-haired man didn't pay too much attention to the knight's awkward expression on the side, he just turned his head and scanned the entire Southern Border Plain.

The Aeon Continent was far larger than Earth. Even the Divine Tree cluster that could cover the entire Earth only occupied most of the southern part of the continent on the Aeon Continent, and did not really cover one-fifth of the world.

Moreover, vaguely, he seemed to sense a trace of Twilight's aura from the depths of the origin of this Divine Tree.

That was a trace of the original Burning Ember Divine Tree's thoughts, which was parasitized in the depths of the core of many Blood Divine Trees.

The will of the 'Twilight Dragon'.

—Existence is meaningless.

—Even if you call yourself the truth, existence is a stumbling block for other existences.

—Divine Tree, your body will be killed by your descendants, and your soul wants to protect them, but it will also be made into poison by their own greed.

—The perfect cycle you prepared for them, the utopian world that can exist forever, will only be wasted by them without regret.

—Then, they will walk to their own dead end, and everything will turn into nothing, and finally end as if nothing had happened, a meaningless end.

—Divine Tree, pitiful Divine Tree.

—Pitiful me.

It was not a mocking voice.

Instead, it was more like a message from the entire world.

Words that oneself said to oneself, the self-talk of the first Burning Ember.

Perhaps, this was the thought of the original Burning Ember Divine Tree when it fell and transformed into a Twilight Affiliate?

"Indeed pitiful... The gods of this world are just reaping what they sowed, but this foolishness is also the common condition of life."

Shaking his head slightly, Su Zhou turned his head and looked at Ilovitz.

"Knight, you came for me, right?"

He said: "Since you didn't start fighting immediately, why don't you tell me your thoughts? Tell me what you want to do."

"...I'm here to tell you the truth."

Ilovitz's gaze swept across Su Zhou's face, paying attention to every detail. He seemed to want to find a flaw in this man in front of him, wanting to figure out whether the other party's seemingly great declarations and dreams were true or false, whether they could really make his friend feel ashamed, and ultimately commit suicide out of humiliation.

He didn't find any flaws.

From the beginning, Su Zhou's pity for the souls of ordinary people in the Blood Divine Tree, as well as the subsequent cautious handling, and the disgust towards those who implemented this secret method, were all without the slightest disguise—it seemed that there was no one in this world worthy of him pretending to be emotional, not even himself.

So, he couldn't help but sigh.

"The Blood Divine Tree you saw is likely transformed from the 'Soul Burning Secret Method' secretly passed down in the Southern Border Noble Alliance of the Empire. It was originally a secret technique used by strong warriors on the battlefield in desperate situations to burn their souls and temporarily increase their strength to defeat the enemy."

"But generally speaking, transcendents are nobles, and how 'precious' are the souls of nobles? Randomly burning souls and mind-light bodies can be restored, but it is also a serious injury that requires more than ten years of recuperation. In order to solve this sequelae, later generations developed a new Soul Burning Technique, allowing strong warriors to burn spirit matter that has been stored long ago to provide themselves with power."

"Although the consumption is far greater than burning one's own soul, it is not one's own soul after all..."

Ilovitz didn't say where the spirit matter came from, but there was no need to explain. Everyone knew their origin very well.

Su Zhou narrowed his eyes. He recalled the pure spirit matter taken by the demonized person in the Primordial Sun Ruins... Because of the mind-light body, the Aeon World's research on souls was indeed quite good.

Unfortunately, it had entered the evil path.

"From souls gradually deepening to life, and finally not even letting go of a bit of flesh and blood."

The white-haired old man crossed his arms and looked down at the Blood Divine Tree beneath him, and said lightly: "The Blood Armor Method of the Avend family can even consume the lives of those around them to complete it. On the battlefield, such a secret method can be said to be impossible to destroy, because whether it is friend or foe, the battlefield is always filled with endless blood and souls."

"Life deprives other lives for itself, until now, it has evolved into what it is now—the Blood Divine Tree completely deprives the souls and flesh and blood of all lives in the entire city."

The context was very clear, and Su Zhou finally understood why Earl Avend arrogantly called all the residents in the entire city 'meat people'. Su Zhou originally thought it was an extended meaning of preying on the people, but he didn't expect it to be such a simple and direct meaning.

But there was still one doubt.

"Theoretically speaking, the person who initiates such a Soul Burning Secret Method will become the core will of this Blood Divine Tree, that is, the future soul of the Divine Tree."

Landing on the city covered in corrupted flesh and blood, Su Zhou lowered his body and touched the irritating liquid that had begun to quickly evaporate in the atmosphere: "But in reality, they disappeared, or rather, became a part of the many souls."

The answer was simple.

"Because their secret method is incomplete." Ilovitz also landed on the ground, he stared at the flesh and blood beneath him with a complicated gaze, which in the past might have been women and children, or strong men and old men, and then said softly: "The Soul Burning Method was improved by Mikhael, and so was the Blood Secret Method."

"If you want to rule over the souls of hundreds of millions of living beings with your own strength, your own soul also needs to be pure and powerful enough—but people whose own soul is pure and powerful enough don't need to rule over the souls of hundreds of millions of living beings."

"So, its original purpose when it was improved, and its true purpose, was not an evil method used to absorb the souls and lives of all living beings, but an mystery that Mikhael used to protect the souls of all living beings in the void in order to condense the 'Will of the Empire' in the future."