“If it’s broken, then it needs to be reconnected,” Lu Yin muttered to himself.
“How do you reconnect it?” An unfamiliar woman’s voice reached his ears.
Lu Yin’s expression changed, and he slowly let out a breath. “Senior Greater Sancte Awe Gate?”
“Mhm.”
“Given your wisdom, Senior, it shouldn’t be hard to reconnect their cultivation path. Open the Skyward Gate and allow the Spirit Nidus’s cultivators who reach a certain level, or who pass a certain test, to join the Nine Odysseys Megaverse.”
“Qing Cao is an Immortal, and the Nine Odysseys Megaverse cannot control him. Essentially, Immortality is the end of their path.”
“But Immortality is much too ethereal a goal.” Lu Yin’s eyes then lit up slightly. “All along, the Spirit Nidus has had the legend that resetting a megaverse grants Immortality. Did the Nine Odysseys Megaverse offer them this path long ago?”
“It was merely done in passing.”
Lu Yin was amazed. “So, the Nine Odysseys Megaverse had already considered this day long ago... Then why ask me to deal with this?”
“Looking down or looking up shows different things. Perhaps you have a better solution. Or was all that talk earlier about putting the human race first nothing more than a lie to deceive us?”
Lu Yin frowned. “Their path can be reconnected, but they’ve lost their conviction. Before, the people of the Spirit Nidus believed that cultivating would give them better, longer lives. Even if they failed to ever achieve Immortality, they still strove for it. However, they now have to face the fact that, the stronger they become, the easier it is for them to be harvested by the Nine Odysseys Megaverse. Their dream of reaching the Immortal realm has become nothing but a castle in the sky.
“In order to reconnect their path, it’s necessary to restore their conviction.”
“Correct,” Greater Sancte Awe Gate said.
Lu Yin continued, saying, “Then the narrative just needs to be changed. Turn the Nine Odysseys Megaverse from their pillagers into their saviors.”
“How?”
“The Tianyuan is currently dealing with the threat of the Nest civilization. I suggest that we shift that crisis over to the Spirit Nidus. The Spirit Nidus has lost too many experts recently, and they might not be able to hold out. When the time comes, the Nine Odysseys Megaverse will open the Skyward Gate and defend the Spirit Nidus, saving their megaverse,” Lu Yin said.
“You are merely saving the Tianyuan Megaverse. You have ulterior motives.”
“And yet this would also help the Spirit Nidus. Otherwise, even if the Nine Odysseys Megaverse restores the Spirit Nidus’s cultivation path, the people there won’t feel any gratitude. As time passes, they’ll suffer more and more because they’ll become less useful to the Nine Odysseys Megaverse. It will become easier for them to be abandoned.”
“They won’t be abandoned.”
Lu Yin’s eyes flickered.
“Because they are also human,” Greater Sancte Awe Gate concluded.
Lu Yin fell silent. Sure enough, Immortals had a different perspective from those who had not reached that level. If even Lu Yin could say something like “the human race comes first,” then naturally an Immortal could see the bigger picture even more clearly. Abandoning the Spirit Nidus would only mean abandoning more people in the future.
“We need the Spirit Nidus to forget this matter. They must forget the truth.”
Lu Yin did not know how to accomplish that. The Spirit Nidus was an entire megaverse, not some place like the Perennial World. In the Tianyuan, the Perennial World’s four ruling powers had succeeded in forcing everyone to forget about the Lu family, but such a method could not possibly be applied to the entire Spirit Nidus.
Xing Fan had not been entirely wrong about one thing; without sacrificing several generations of cultivators, it would be impossible to erase this incident from the Spirit Nidus.
Just what was Master Qing Cao even thinking? If he was behind the upheaval in the Spirit Nidus, then he had essentially pushed his entire megaverse into a corner.
“One more thing; a Nest has already appeared in the Spirit Nidus,” said Greater Sancte Awe Gate.
Lu Yin was startled. “There’s already a Nest there? Where did it come from?”
“Greater Sancte Green Lotus looked into this. It came from the Tianyuan Megaverse.”
Lu Yin was shocked, his mind started racing. It’s from the Tianyuan? How did it get there? Who took it? This matches all too well with what I’d been considering.
“The Spirit Nidus is already seeing a crisis due to the Nests. They simply have not yet realized it.”
“What about Master Qing Cao? Doesn’t he know about the threat of the Nests? Even if the Nine Odysseys Megaverse ignores this matter, there’s no way that man would ignore the danger to the Spirit Nidus.”
“He’s not present. He went to chase away an Immortal beast.”
“An Immortal beast?”
“It shouldn’t be unknown to you.”
Lu Yin blurted, “The Immortal monster that was chasing me? But wasn’t it blocking the path to the Tianyuan through the Heavenly Karmic Macrocosm?”
“Is that what Greater Sancte Green Lotus told you? Then... that’s where it went.”
“...What’s really going on?”
Greater Sancte Awe Gate did not answer.
“How long has Master Qing Cao been gone? Did he leave before or after the Spirit Nidus started to descend into chaos?”
“Before.”
“Then does everything that’s happening there have nothing to do with him?”
“I don’t know about that. After all, this is something that was planned out too long ago. No one but him could have pulled such a thing off.”
Suddenly, Yong Heng’s name flashed through Lu Yin’s mind. No one else could have pulled such a thing off? Wrong—Yong Heng could. Lan is the Ascendant Hall’s steward, which means that her status is in no way inferior to the Seven Seraphs’. She could have accomplished a great deal.
Yong Heng’s plans stretched further into the future than anyone else’s. He had plotted against the Origin Progenitor and the ancient Heavens Sect, but before that, he had left Lan behind in the Spirit Nidus to carry out his schemes there. It was certainly possible that Yong Heng was behind everything.
With the recent reappearance of Netherfiends, Lu Yin would not believe that Yong Heng had nothing to do with recent events even if the man was already dead.
Lu Yin was convinced that Yong Heng had already entered the Nine Odysseys Megaverse, but as to where he was and what he was plotting, no one could say.
The Greater Sancti were Immortals, but they were not omnipotent. If they were, how could they have not found Netherfiends after so many years?
The more that Lu Yin considered the situation, the more that he was convinced that the upheaval in the Spirit Nidus had nothing to do with Master Qing Cao. That man would have never willingly forced the Spirit Nidus into such a corner.
“Where have Greater Sancte Green Lotus and Greater Sancte Blood Tower gone?” Lu Yin asked.