Chapter 174 : A Place So Ordinary It Was Somehow Strange
Chapter 174: A Place So Ordinary It Was Somehow Strange
Just as Long Tao’s words—“We could definitely still salvage this!”—fell, the entire Void Platform began to shake violently without the slightest warning!
The platform’s edges, which had been steadily suspended in nothingness, started to blur and warp.
The Ancient Runes that formed the platform dimmed and collapsed one after another, as if some force supporting its existence was rapidly ebbing away.
“Not good! This space is about to collapse!” True Person Mingzhu forced her weakened body upright, her expression heavy.
She keenly sensed that, with Ye Jingchen’s complete annihilation and the withdrawal of the Star Lord of Fate’s will, the power sustaining this temporary space was dispersing at breakneck speed.
“Hold on to me!” she barked in a low voice, no longer caring about any propriety between men and women as she grabbed Long Tao’s arm.
At the same time, she painfully squeezed out a few wisps of spiritual power from her fingertips and laid a thin protective barrier over them—this was already the absolute limit of what she could do with her Destiny Luck severely damaged and her condition at its worst.
Long Tao only felt his vision flash as the surrounding void began collapsing toward some point.
An irresistible giant force wrapped around them and hurled them into the unknown depths of darkness.
When the dizzying weightlessness and crushing spatial pressure abruptly vanished, both of them could only barely steady themselves, hearts still pounding as they looked around.
They were still rattled as they scanned their surroundings, but what came into view made them both freeze.
The grand, majestic palaces one would expect of the Ancient Heavenly Court—its shattered immortal palace ruins—did not appear at all.
Instead, there was only a stretch of… the most ordinary woodland imaginable.
Underfoot was soft earth and fallen leaves. Around them stood lush, verdant trees. The air carried the fresh scent of grass and wood, and they could even hear a few crisp birdcalls.
Sunlight filtered through gaps in the branches, sprinkling mottled points of light. Everything looked so… mundane.
“Where… is this?” Long Tao blinked hard, even suspecting he had fallen into a hallucination.
The shift was far too abrupt—from the eerie, perilous Void Platform straight into such commonplace mountain wilderness.
The enormous contrast left him struggling to adjust.
True Person Mingzhu was equally baffled. She had cultivated for hundreds of years and explored no small number of secret realms, perilous lands, and ancient ruins, including several Heavenly Court Fragments.
Those places invariably retained vast immortal spiritual aura, shattered Great Dao laws, or some kind of primordial, undying majesty. But this woodland before her…
“Strange… from the faint trace of Dao resonance lingering here, this place truly shares the same origin as the Ancient Heavenly Court. By rights, it should be the space of some ancient Heavenly Court Fragment,” she murmured, “but why is the spiritual aura so thin, and the scenery so ordinary?”
It completely overturned her understanding of a “Heavenly Court Fragment.” Any place connected to the Ancient Heavenly Court, no matter how broken beyond repair, ought to show at least some extraordinary aspect.
It should never look like an ordinary forest like this.
“Perhaps this fragment was damaged far too severely and endured an unimaginable calamity, causing its origin to all but drain away and the laws of heaven and earth to degenerate to the most basic state—only then did it manifest such a… return-to-simplicity appearance.” True Person Mingzhu could only make this guess, even though she herself felt the explanation was strained.
“Be careful. Let’s go forward and take a look.”
In a place this unfamiliar and dangerous, even as a Golden Core cultivator, Mingzhu did not dare fly.
The two of them walked cautiously through the woods. Long Tao stayed close behind True Person Mingzhu, afraid that some primordial ferocious beast or bizarre restriction might leap out from a thicket at any moment.
Yet all along the way, nothing happened.
Forget ferocious beasts—the animals in the forest seemed to be nothing more than ordinary pheasants and wild rabbits, which bolted in panic the moment they saw people.
After walking for less than half an incense stick, the sight ahead made them both stop again.
Down the slope lay an open valley. Dozens of simple thatched huts and earthen-brick houses were scattered in orderly fashion. Wisps of cooking smoke curled up from chimneys, and faintly, the air carried the sounds of roosters crowing and dogs barking.
A village that looked so ordinary it could not be more ordinary.
Long Tao and True Person Mingzhu stared at each other, both seeing deep shock and confusion in the other’s eyes.
They had only just escaped a sky-shattering deadly crisis involving an ancient Star Lord and total annihilation of body and soul—yet in the blink of an eye, they seemed to have stepped into a pastoral painting untouched by the world.
“This…” Long Tao opened his mouth, taking a long while to find his voice again, disbelief threaded through his tone. “True Person, are you sure… we didn’t come to the wrong place? This is really inside that Heavenly Court Fragment? Why does it feel like… we walked into some secluded mountain village?” He even glanced back instinctively, suspecting that the spatial transfer had gone off-course and dumped them into some mortal territory.
True Person Mingzhu gazed at the quiet village below.
For the first time, uncertainty surfaced on her exquisite face. She drew a slow breath, sensing the spiritual aura so thin it was almost nonexistent, as well as the unmistakably real human warmth and smoke-and-fire liveliness drifting from the village. Her brow furrowed even deeper.
If this Heavenly Court Fragment had been nothing but woodland, she might have felt a little more at ease. But now a human village had appeared—this was far too abnormal. That village… absolutely had a huge problem.
However, looking around, there was only the dense forest behind them and this single village before them.
With True Person Mingzhu in poor condition and knowing nothing about this place, blindly turning back to explore the forest might not be any less risky than entering the village.
“There’s no better choice right now. We’ll go in and take a look, but we must be extremely careful,” True Person Mingzhu decided at last.
The two approached the village entrance with high alert. The closer they got, the more obvious the strange feeling became.
The village’s smoke-and-fire liveliness was strong—houses, fields, paths, drying clothes… everything bore the marks of human life. Yet all along the way, everywhere their eyes reached, they did not see a single villager.
Just as they stood at the village entrance, hesitating over whether to step in, a figure emerged without warning from behind the nearest earthen-brick house.
“Haha, new guests again, huh? Welcome, welcome.”
The newcomer was a middle-aged man who looked to be around forty or fifty. His skin was dark, his features plain, and he wore the most ordinary mortal farmer’s clothes. His face was piled with a warm, slightly simple smile.
Facing the appearance of these two “outsiders” whose clothes and bearing were obviously anything but ordinary, he showed no surprise or wariness at all, simply walking up as naturally as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Long Tao noticed that, the instant True Person Mingzhu saw this village chief, her expression turned exceptionally ugly. It was not the pallor of physical weakness, but a heavy, suspicious gravity—as if she had discovered something profoundly wrong.
Even with alarm bells blaring in his mind, Long Tao decided to be the one to speak first. He forced out a bit of a smile, cupped his hands, and asked, “May I ask, friend, where is this place?”
The village chief replied with a chuckle, his tone utterly matter-of-fact. “Can’t you tell at a glance? It’s a village.”
Long Tao froze, then added, “No… I mean, what specific territory is this, or what is this village called?”
A trace of confusion appeared on the village chief’s face, as if Long Tao had asked a very strange question. “You’re a strange one. This place is just our one village—why ask for a name? It’s just called ‘the village.’”
This… Long Tao was briefly choked speechless.
The other man’s logic seemed self-contained and flawless, yet his own question had been perfectly normal.
That feeling of talking past each other made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
“Then you are…?” Long Tao changed the question.
“I’m the village chief,” the middle-aged man said, patting his chest. “There have been quite a few guests lately, so I came over to tell you the village rules, so you won’t overstep when you’ve just arrived and end up causing trouble.”
“Please go ahead. We will definitely obey,” Long Tao said respectfully.
The village chief nodded in satisfaction and began counting on his fingers.
“First, and most important: nights are pretty dangerous here, so stay inside as much as you can. Let me make this clear upfront—if something happens to you outside, don’t think you can try to pin it on our village.” His tone was flat, but the word “dangerous” carried an unquestionable weight.
“Th-this… alright. We’ll remember it, and we definitely won’t go out at night,” Long Tao hurriedly agreed, even though they did not yet know where they would be staying.
“Mm.” The village chief continued. “Our village might be small, but proper courtesy still matters. Before entering someone else’s home, you must knock first. But most people in the village don’t like being disturbed by outsiders, so visiting once is enough—don’t keep knocking on the same door over and over. You’ll annoy people.”
“Oh! Alright, alright, we understand,” Long Tao said, nodding like a pounding drum. The rule sounded reasonable enough, but… it still felt a little strange.
“Mm, and lastly,” the village chief said, delivering the final rule, “our place may be small, but there are plenty of empty houses. If the two of you want somewhere to stay, just pick any house and go right in to settle down. No need for so many rules—empty is empty anyway.”
This… Long Tao’s heart jolted. Wasn’t that at odds with the earlier emphasis on “knock before entering”? If they could just pick any house to live in, what was the point of knocking? And the phrase “empty is empty anyway,” coming from the mouth of a village chief who had just been stressing courtesy, sounded especially awkward.
Yet the village chief did not seem to think there was anything wrong with what he had said.
After speaking, he smiled again at Long Tao and True Person Mingzhu, then vanished around the corner of another house, leaving Long Tao standing there full of doubt and unease, and True Person Mingzhu looking even more grave.
“True Person, what’s wrong? Your face looked bad the moment you saw that village chief. Is there something wrong with him?”
True Person Mingzhu slowly shook her head.
Those eyes that were usually cool and composed were now veiled by a rare gloom.
She did not answer, instead asking back, “Long Tao, try it. Can you use any technique right now? Just the most basic Fire-Starting Art will do.”
Long Tao did not understand why, but he immediately gathered spiritual power at his fingertips as instructed.
However, the next moment, his face changed sharply.
Spiritual power… could not be mobilized at all.
Within his dantian and qi sea, the spiritual power that had once flowed like a murmuring stream now seemed as if it had never existed.
“H-how could this be?!” Long Tao’s voice carried a faint, uncontrollable tremor. He tried again in vain, with the same result.
“As expected…” True Person Mingzhu closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them again, clarity filled her gaze. “When I saw that village chief just now, I instinctively tried to probe him with divine sense, but found I couldn’t call on divine sense at all. Then I tested other abilities—everything was the same.”
She looked at Long Tao and enunciated each word, clearly speaking the chilling truth:
“Long Tao, right now, we have probably both become mortals.”