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Chapter 2229 War of the Heavens

“It’s just as you have thought. It is the War of the Heavens!” Kong shi replied. “It’s a fight that cannot and must not be avoided. All forces of the world congregate and disperse with time; this is a natural and inevitable cycle. No one can escape it. If I win, I’ll become the new overseer of the heavens. If I lose, my soul will dissipate, and everything will end right there.”

“The War of the Heavens...” Zhang Xuan’s face paled. “Then, she and I...”

Did that not mean that he would have to eventually fight Luo Ruoxin as well?

Would they have to compete for supremacy, too?

Was this the reason she was unwilling to accept him when he fell in love with her, even coming up with all sorts of excuses to reject him?

Back then, he had thought that there was some compelling power behind her that prevented them from getting together, but that was not the case at all.

In the War of the Heavens, there could only be one survivor.

Back when they were on the Master Teacher Continent, he had asked her many times for her real identity, but he had never been able to receive a concrete answer.

Thinking back, it was not that she had been unwilling to speak; she simply could not do so. If she had revealed her true identity to him in advance, there was no saying how the heavens would have reacted to the divulging of the secret.

They might even have had to fight one another in a life-and-death battle prematurely!

“If I win, the enemy you will have to face in the future is me. If I lose, it will be you and her battling one another. This is fate, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Kong shi said with a composed voice.

Even though it was his life and death that they were talking about, he was still able to remain completely rational about it.

“Are the heavens you are referring to the heavens of the Firmament?” Zhang Xuan asked. “Is there really no way to avoid it?”

“There isn’t.” Kong shi shook his head.

“But... isn’t the Firmament still functioning fine? Cultivators can rise through the ranks, and life is still thriving! If the heavens are really severed into fragments, that shouldn’t be the case!” Zhang Xuan exclaimed.

If the heavens of the Firmament were really divided among the three of them, the world should have been in utter chaos. Yet, that was not what Zhang Xuan had seen.

“Thriving?” Kong shi shook his head bitterly. “The Firmament stopped thriving forty years ago. The spiritual energy started receding, and many plants and beasts went extinct. Cultivators were forced to live within cities, and most of the population can’t acquire the Aura of Divinity they require to make a breakthrough. There is a huge strain on the supply of cultivation resources. We might have survived till now, but give it another several hundred years or so, and everything would be utterly barren. Life might not even exist then...”

“This...” Zhang Xuan fell silent.

He knew that the other party was right.

It had only been forty years since the receding of spiritual energy began, but a huge part of the Firmament had already turned inhospitable. Innumerable lives had been lost as a result of that.

Many cultivators, due to the scarcity of resources, were unable to raise their cultivation anymore.

With the resources accumulated in the Firmament throughout the innumerable years since its creation, the Firmament was still able to continue functioning. However, how long could its resources last?

When all the Celestial Gods from forty years ago met their end, how many Celestial Gods would there be to replace them?

What about God Kings and Conferred God Kings?

As the spiritual energy in the air grew scarcer and scarcer, how many people would eventually die of starvation?

He did not even dare imagine that!

Was this the effect of the fragmentation of the heavens?

“Isn’t there the Flood of Spiritual Energy?” Zhang Xuan asked. “I heard that it’s possible to acquire plenty of resources during that period.”

The Flood of Spiritual Energy was a natural phenomenon of the world that had happened once every decade since the receding of spiritual energy. Each time it happened, it would bring innumerable resources over to the Firmament, allowing the withering plants in the barren lands to continue surviving.

For that reason, even though the Grand Spirit Mountain had been deprived of spiritual energy for a very long time, there were still many plants that still persisted to this day.

“If you view the Firmament as a building, the heavens are the pillars propping up the building,” Kong shi said. “Right now, the pillars are divided between you and me. It’s only a matter of time before the building collapsed at this rate.

“The Flood of Spiritual Energy is nothing more than temporary support structures put in place. While it can slow the rate of the collapse, it is nothing more than a temporary stopgap measure the world has put in place, and it can’t be sustained for too long.

“Furthermore, a huge disruption occurs each time the Flood of Spiritual Energy occurs. Cultivators resort to any means necessary to obtain more cultivation resources. While it looks like it’s the force maintaining the stability of the Firmament, it’s actually hastening its death. Do you know many Gods, Celestial Gods, and God Kings die in each Flood of Spiritual Energy?”

Those words left Zhang Xuan in deep thought.

These were the secrets of the Firmament. The figures were not recorded in any of the books that he had read previously.

“There is no way to count the number of Gods and Celestial Gods, but before the Floods of Spiritual Energy began, there were more than three hundred Conferred God Kings and one thousand God Kings in the Firmament!”

“Three hundred Conferred God Kings and one thousand God Kings?” Zhang Xuan’s body jolted.

Based on what he knew, there were only thirty Conferred God Kings and one hundred God Kings around...

In other words, the Firmament had already lost ninety percent of its strongest experts.

If so, how many Celestial Gods and Gods had died over the years?

“The heavens of the Firmament cannot remain incomplete any longer. If we allow it to remain fragmented, the situation will only continue to worsen over time. The world will be further destabilized, and all beings will suffer,” Kong shi said grimly.

He could not simply sit still as the world was torn into pieces.

“Is there no choice but to sacrifice one of us in order to save the rest of the world? Is it... not possible to sustain the heavens together?” Zhang Xuan asked.

If the heavens could be divided, was there a chance that they could govern each jurisdiction of heavens separately and ensure that everything continued running as normal?

“Of course not! The heavens are an integrated existence, and it is sustained by a delicate harmony. The only way to stabilize it is to merge it back together as one. It’s impossible to control the heavens separately through the fragments,” Kong shi replied. “It’s similar to a series of cogs within a system. They are useless if we tear them apart and use them separately.”

Hearing those words, Zhang Xuan suddenly thought of something and asked, “If that’s the case, Ruoxin already knew that I controlled a fragment of the heavens during our time back on the Master Teacher Continent, so why didn’t she kill me? And it’s the same for you, Kong shi. If you wanted to, you could kill me right away and grab my fragment of the heavens. Wouldn’t it be in your interest to do so?”

Zhang Xuan was not so arrogant as to think that he would be more important than the entire Firmament combined. If killing him could save the entire Firmament, it was hard to understand why Kong shi and Luo Ruoxin had not made a move yet.

After all, when he first met Luo Ruoxin at the Master Teacher Continent, he was no more than an ordinary mortal from a lower world. There were no feelings between them. There should have been no reason for Luo Ruoxin not to make a move.

For Kong shi, if he could obtain the Library of Heaven’s Path, he could become even stronger, thus increasing his chances of surpassing Luo Ruoxin and defeating her in the upcoming battle. Why was he not doing so?

Putting aside everything about saving the Firmament, being able to control the heavens meant gaining supreme dominance over the world. This was a great temptation that hardly anyone could resist.

“Kill you?” Kong shi looked at Zhang Xuan with a glint in his eyes before sighing deeply. “If I could save the rest of the Firmament by killing you, I would bear the sin for doing so. However, that wouldn’t work. At the very least, it isn’t time yet.”