My Journey to Immortality Begins with Hunting-Chapter 719 - Into the Underworld, Stepping into the Second Rank - Part 1

Chapter 719 - Into the Underworld, Stepping into the Second Rank - Part 1

Unlike the last time he used the Life Star Art, this time Li Yuan didn’t fall into a deep sleep.

Everything went smoothly. And this time, he remained fully conscious.

He sat in meditation, hidden away in the depths of a remote mountain, maintaining his connection with the Ancestral Land.

Though physically in the mountains, his bond with the Ancestral Land allowed him to sense the world beyond. The things that once appeared hazy, like a landscape viewed through fogged glass, were beginning to come into focus.

Before, he could barely make out the shape of the land, mountains, rivers, vague outlines... But now, he could see the people walking the earth below.

Their voices were still distant, like the muffled hum of insects burrowing underground, yet he could now grasp the broader shape of things.

What he saw was peace.

Years had passed. Green mountains turned white with snow, flowers bloomed and withered, and even the wild beasts had gone through several cycles of rise and fall.

By Li Yuan’s rough count, fifteen years had already gone by.

Fifteen years, and all he saw was peace.

The Great Tang truly was in its golden age.

When he handed over the empire to that ten-year-old prince, he hadn’t just given it to a single child. He gave it to Li Youning, Li Tianshi, and to the entire Li Clan.

The first period of the new reign was named Everlasting Harmony. A wish for a world forever free from war.

Looking at it now, the Li Clan had lived up to that name.

There was no more chaos. The land was split in two, one half in the hands of imperial power, the other under the Church of Light.

It didn’t disrupt the flow of the Ancestral Land. The spiritual power of its mountains and rivers was so vast that one person couldn’t exhaust it alone.

The armored cavalry of the Tang never stopped. They kept expanding outward, pushing into new lands.

The Emperor himself rode across the realm, performing bestowal ceremonies to honor Heaven and Earth at the four corners of the world.

And each time he performed those ceremonies, the Li Clan never played tricks or claimed the glory for themselves. Instead, they made sure Li Yuan’s name echoed far and wide, reminding the mountains and rivers that above even imperial power, there remained the ever-watchful master of the Church of Light.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

The 27th year of Everlasting Harmony.

Li Youning, now 74 years old, was gravely ill and bedridden.

A lifetime of devotion had brought peace to the realm, but it had also left her body worn and broken.

Her son, Emperor Li Dao, rode to the Church of Light to pray for his mother. And for the first time, he used the title Lord of Light to refer to his father.

From that day forward, Lord of Light became the formal title for the eternal head of the church.

Every year after that, Grand Princess Li Chan made her pilgrimage to the sect to pray.

She called it prayer, but what she truly hoped for was that her father, somehow, somewhere, could hear her voice. That he might return, just once, to see her mother who grew sicker with each passing year.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Another five years slipped by.

Winter winds. A frozen wasteland.

A man, hair wild and clothes in tatters, trudged through the snow with a broken wooden door strapped to his back. He walked and paused, walked and paused. Lost in the blizzard, he’d stop to look left, then right, then press onward.

After who knows how long, he reached the foot of a mountain.

Still carrying the door, he moved solemnly into the mountain’s depths. Then he began to climb up the steep slope, thick with snow.

A gust of wind swept across the peak, knocking loose the piled snow above. In an instant, it all came crashing down in a roaring black wave.

The avalanche came roaring down.

Snow from a thousand peaks thundered forth like an endless charge of knights clad in silver armor.

The ground trembled with the sound, deafening, like the wrath of thunder gods.

Such was the might of mountains and rivers.

But then, something strange, something utterly surreal, happened.

Wherever the raging snow approached the man, it halted on its own, falling harmlessly to the earth in silence, as if bowing in reverence.

He kept climbing, step by step, pressing forward through the white chaos like a lone leaf floating upstream against a storm. Yet the storm, when it neared him, seemed to lose its strength entirely.

At last, the man reached the summit. He looked around at the desolate expanse and murmured to himself, “This should be the place.”

That man, of course, was Li Yuan.

He had just completed the second use of the Life Star Art, transferring that power back into his physical form.

The bad news? The two strands of power had not merged. They simply clung to each other like two bubbles pressed together, close, but separate.

The good news? This time, he was simply backing up recovering his power, his original strength in this new age remained intact.

Even better, something had changed. Now, he could walk through the human world and still see it with the clarity once reserved for his astral form. He could perceive the hidden flow between worlds, how the realms connected and diverged.

So, he hoisted the long-prepared Gate of the Beast Path onto his back and set off for his next destination.

The Underworld revolved around the Ancestral Land, drawing near only once every few years and never in the same place twice.

Sometimes, it brushed past the unreachable depths of the earth. Other times, it skimmed through bizarre and unexpected places. These spatial alignments cared nothing for human accessibility.

And yet, Li Yuan got lucky.

Just after completing the second use of the Life Star Art, he sensed that the Underworld’s next closest pass to the Ancestral Land would happen miraculously inside a mountain.

So he didn’t return to the capital. Instead, he came straight here, only to discover...he was early.

It would be another full year before the Underworld reached its closest point.

Li Yuan stared at the gray sky for a long time.

Then, he decided to wait.

He built a wooden cabin in the mountain. He hunted. He cultivated. He lived quietly, self-sufficient and patient, never straying far.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Back in the palace, Li Dao and Li Chan were talking.

“Next year is Mother’s 80th birthday,” Li Dao said. “We must make it grand.”

“Her health has improved a lot,” Li Chan replied, smiling.

Both of them were now parents themselves. In this flourishing Tang Dynasty, the two of them stood at the very peak of power, their lives near-perfect in every way.

Yet even so, one flaw remained.

Like their mother, neither of them could cultivate.

They had studied the teachings now known as the Scripture of Light, but no matter how much they meditated, the door to transcendance refused to open.

In an age where the supernatural had become the norm, it seemed absurd that the Emperor and Grand Princess, powerful in title, possessed no transcendent power of their own.

Even with the Li Clan behind them, even with the strength of legacy and bloodline, that disadvantage should have been fatal.

After all, even families bound by blood contend for power.

Why would the strong ever bow to the weak?

And yet, Li Dao and Li Chan sat firmly at the pinnacle.

Not only that, but it was now a matter of tradition. Whoever succeeded the throne after Li Dao would have to be his direct descendant.

Why? Because the Scripture of Light began with a simple, absolute truth.

“He brought light to the world and entrusted his descendants to rule it.”

Every follower of the Church of Light held the scripture as sacred. It wasn’t just a doctrine. It was their path to power, the very foundation of their cultivation.

The Shadow Court, stern to the point of rigidity, tolerated no wavering. Any disciple who dared show even the slightest slackening of faith could be put to death.

Over the past few decades, countless people had died in the name of belief.

Anyone who dared question the Lord of Light, who spoke out of turn, who forgot reverence, or dared utter words like, Isn’t the Lord of Light just a man? or Can’t we just cultivate the power without the religion?, rarely lived to see another dawn.

Faith demanded fear.

And fear needed to be fed with blood and death.

Oppression alone didn’t spark rebellion. Neither justice nor evil stirred revolt. Only starvation, hopelessness, and the weakness of those who made the rules ever did that.

Faith didn’t care about reason. No one was supposed to question it. They were supposed to believe.

Anyone who joined the Church of Light and then tried to argue, to seek logic or compromise, was swiftly dealt with by the Shadow Court.

Every character inked on the pages of the Scripture of Light was soaked in blood and stacked upon bones. There were even literary purges, executions over mere words.

And in the eyes of the common people, the Tang Emperor, so wise and selfless in every other matter, seemed shockingly blind to all this.

He allowed the literary purges to continue and did nothing to stop them.

And so the scripture became something terrifying. Each word was bound to death and divinity. Each verse became inviolable.

The Church of Light eclipsed the other two great sects that had once shared power at the founding of the empire, the Sword Sect and Enigma Sect. It rose to become the most dominant force in the land.

And when the most powerful sect in the world stood behind the throne, the throne did not fall.

Li Yuan’s bloodline was destined to rule the human world.

Yet now, as the Emperor and the Grand Princess sat planning their mother’s 80th birthday, not a word was spoken of their father.

To them, he was a dream, distant, exalted, and untouchable. A godlike figure whose presence was felt more than seen.

Not just to them. Even Li Youning no longer spoke of him.

She had grieved him long ago, then buried that grief deep within her.

Years earlier, she’d fallen seriously ill, but had since recovered under careful treatment. Now, though her hair was white as snow, she still ate well, drank well, and carried herself with quiet strength.

When the weather turned warm, she would take slow walks in the palace gardens, leaning on her cane, flanked by daughters-in-law. She’d feed the fish, watch the cranes, listen to music from the court musicians, and enjoy performances from the opera troupe.

During ancestral rites, she no longer lingered before the Li Clan’s ancestral shrine, now stacked five generations deep. Even though the highest position on the shrine remained empty, replaced only by a statue of the Lord of Light seated in meditation, bathed in light.

On the eve of every new year, during every major ceremony, she would still make the journey to the Grand Cathedral, now a sprawling complex to rival the imperial palace itself, to offer her prayers.