Chapter 177: Tamamo no Mae's Wondrous Experience
Across Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Zhao, Wei, and Han, the resurrected Six Heavens Ancient Ghosts found it impossible to resist the sword light that fell from the torn pages of history, from the deepest seam of human order. They could not resist the pull carried by Rowe's every word, as if each syllable had become a hook sunk into their core.
They were the chaotic aspects peeled away after the Outer Gods' infection touched the Divine Land's ancestral gods. Their roots still clung to the Great Old Ones as a greater body, yet they also carried the traits and divinities of the ancestral gods they had been torn from.
Countless in number. Repeated in form.
Yet once scattered, they were still one.
And Rowe had once stared into the collective gaze of the Great Old Ones.
Through Abigail, he had faced the attention that poured in from the fractures beyond the universe, the overlapping focus of innumerable beings.
All.
Against one.
Once Rowe gained control of the chaos within him, this was no longer a true battle. It was a process.
Wei's yellow fog thinned and peeled away. The massive King in Yellow shed its madness and stood revealed as a man in imperial yellow, wearing a crown.
Yan's faceless god dissolved, leaving behind a sacred female deity with a human head and a serpent body.
Qi's aggregation of light and shadow folded inward, taking form as a male deity holding the primordial Bagua.
Han's sky darkened, then clarified into a towering figure holding a bamboo staff, his body cloaked in herbs.
In Qin, Consort Yu, who had been struggling against the Outer Gods' influence after swallowing the chaos of the White Emperor remnant, shed that stain at the same moment. What remained was the sacred presence of the White Tiger.
Immortal Yu, clearly the White Tiger's divinity and yet still dressed in black, stood on a high mountain and looked up toward the rupture Rowe had carved into history, toward the seam in human order opened by the planet's primal rotational force.
"Home," she murmured. "That smell… I missed it."
The former King in Yellow, now unmistakable as the Yellow Emperor Xuanyuan, chuckled softly.
"It seems our homeland has produced another remarkable figure."
The Human Emperor Fuxi, condensed from countless orbs of light, laughed with open satisfaction.
"The Divine Land finally has successors."
The sacred female deity was Nuwa, the sage who shaped humanity.
The towering figure with the herb covered body was Shennong Lieshan, the Flame Emperor, one of the Five Emperors.
And behind them stood many more ancestral gods and immortal sages, those who followed after the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, returning as projections and avatars.
The chaotic mist purified into a cleaner, calmer flow. The circulation in the atmosphere felt so heavy it was as if the planet itself had paused its turning for one breath.
They had already departed long ago, leaving the Divine Land to fight the Great Old Ones in the outer cosmos.
What remained on the ground had been gnawed and occupied by the Heavens Ancient Ghosts.
Now, Rowe severed those remnants with his sword, stripped away their chaos, and returned them to their original state. That act opened a path for the ancestral gods and sages to descend as avatars and set foot again in the place that remembered them.
With their return, every living being across the Nine Provinces felt it at once.
People woke from the mist as if shaken from a single shared dream. For a fleeting instant, they saw the past through the torn pages of history.
They saw Nuwa shaping humans.
They saw Fuxi reading the Bagua.
They saw Shennong tasting hundreds of herbs.
They saw the Yellow Emperor establishing order. They saw Yao and Shun governing. They saw Yu the Great pass his home three times without entering as he controlled the floods.
They saw immortals and gods bleed to mend the sky.
They saw those who revered heaven and fate without fearing death.
And then they saw the Azure Heaven of the present.
King Zheng of Qin sat upright beneath the royal banner, personally leading the front. Zhao's pass had been broken, and Li Mu had died in battle, paying for his country with his life.
"Hahahahaha!" King Zheng's laughter rolled through the night like a drumbeat. "The Heaven established by my Great Qin shall be Heaven for all under heaven!"
He ordered the army to continue eastward, raising the banner of Azure Heaven as they advanced. Wherever Qin's banners were planted, the names Azure Heaven, Taiyi, and Monarch were to become the orthodox names of the Divine Land.
In Yan, Yan Dan frowned while Jing Ke drank in silence.
By the stone bridge, Huang Shigong paid respect to his ancestors, then bowed again toward the sky. He laughed until his shoulders shook.
Because with Taiyi's return, the divine mysteries of the ancestral gods naturally flowed into the Pan created by Taiyi.
Their presence would make Pan even more stable.
That stability was part of Rowe's intent from the beginning.
Tamamo no Mae wanted ruin.
Rowe wanted revival.
Pan was the best foundation to carry the thoughts and weight of the ancestral gods.
The Yellow Emperor's gaze sharpened. With one look, he pierced through Rowe's surface and saw the underlying structure.
"Azure Heaven." His voice carried a strange warmth. "A successor of the Eastern Emperor."
He paused, then spoke again, as if acknowledging something even more dangerous.
"On the path of chaos, he has walked more decisively than we did."
Formless and unnamed. A name that could not be spoken.
"For the next five hundred years," the Yellow Emperor declared, "you shall be the Heavenly Emperor of the Divine Land."
"We greet the Heavenly Emperor."
"We greet the Heavenly Emperor!"
"Greetings, Heavenly Emperor!"
All gods and all living beings bowed at once.
This was orthodoxy approved by Heaven, Earth, and Man.
They called him Heavenly Emperor.
They did not call him Rowe.
Because the one who became Heavenly Emperor at that moment was not Rowe the sage of Uruk, nor Rowe the primal human, nor Rowe the machina god, nor Rowe of the Wild Hunt.
It was Taiyi.
It was the chaos core.
It was Rowe.
Deep within the seam of human order, drums echoed.
Tamamo no Mae, who had been briefly checked by the strange binding and the Key of Heaven, stared at the figure before her with undisguised terror.
Rowe stood there, still wearing wide robes and a tall crown. His frame was slender, his features refined, his expression faintly amused.
His manifested rank still read as primal. His influence still covered the planet.
Yet Tamamo no Mae no longer looked at him with indifference, or with the desire to conquer.
In her golden fox eyes, there was only fear.
Fear of the man.
More than that, fear of what stood behind him.
A chaotic mist hung in the void like a second sky. From it extended twisting tentacles, and within it opened countless eyes.
It was behind Rowe, yet it also felt as if it existed in the deepest dark of the universe itself. Around it lingered the silhouettes of innumerable Great Old Ones.
Those were not true manifestations. They were shadows. Traces dragged out of the Ancient Ghosts Rowe had gathered.
Only a billionth of the greater body, and still bearing the same concepts, the same unbearable signature.
Just like Rowe at this moment.
The earlier step, becoming Taiyi, had been the act of planting the Outer Gods' residue as a seed within himself, forcing it to merge into his own foundation.
This step was expansion. Manifestation.
With the power left behind by countless ancient gods as nourishment, that inverted, maddening force finally tore loose from restraint.
From now on, the chaos inside him would continue to grow.
Rowe had achieved the greatest purpose of stepping onto the Divine Land.
From this moment forward, he would either die.
Or he would accept the chaos he had taken into himself, digest it completely, and like the ancestral gods before him, or even more thoroughly than they had managed, break free of the planet's limits without leaving behind future disasters like the Heavens Ancient Ghosts.
Yes.
Rowe had decided, step by step, to stop seeking death.
He would use death as his backstop and gamble on change.
He would seek strength.
He would seek the path with the greatest reward and the greatest danger.
Nine deaths and one life, the road ordinary people never dared step onto.
If something did not kill him, it would only make him stronger.
If something tried to kill him, he would teach it what invincibility looked like.
Even without fully digesting everything, Rowe's existence still tugged at the planet's primal layer.
And he was stronger than before.
Because chaos granted him overlap.
He could manifest the power that restrained everything.
He could manifest the power that nothing could restrain.
Whatever an opponent feared, he could become.
So.
"Fox." Rowe smiled at Tamamo no Mae. "Come. Let us settle the final accounts."
Tamamo no Mae's ears twitched violently.
A sound escaped her before she could stop it.
"Meow… meow goo?"
Her nine tails tensed. As Rowe stepped forward, she stepped back.
He closed the distance with each calm stride.
She retreated with each frantic one.
"I'm angry, I'm angry!"
She tried to bare claws and fangs. She tried to look feral.
Unfortunately, to Rowe now, she no longer looked like a vicious demon god.
She looked like a kitten throwing a tantrum.
That was also because even as a Primal Sun God and an Evil of Humanity, Tamamo no Mae still carried fear in her heart.
Not fear of Rowe's babbling insult.
Fear of the Star Hunter who had descended much earlier.
If she carried fear, she could be restrained.
Rowe raised his sword, and chaos surged behind him. In response, Tamamo no Mae shrieked.
She was afraid, but in a true crisis she still had the courage to fight.
So the Nine Tailed Fox pounced.
Not with a strike, not with a killing technique.
She wrapped her arms around his head, pressed herself against his chest, and clamped her legs around his waist as if locking him in place. Her body slid downward in an urgent, deliberate motion.
Nine tails spread and engulfed him.
Soft pressure. Clinging warmth. A smothering sensation that was more intimate than violent.
Rowe froze for a heartbeat.
Then he felt exasperation rise, sharp and immediate.
This was not an attack.
It was a plea.
With no path to victory and no path to retreat, she was gambling on the only weapon she believed could save her.
She was trying to reignite his human desire.
She was trying to drag him into a deeper kind of communication.
She had failed before. Twice.
Now she understood it was her only chance.
A frontal fight was impossible.
Escape was a joke.
Then the next moment, the tails that had sealed him were forced apart.
Tamamo no Mae let out small, whimpering migu sounds as she struggled, but it was futile.
Because the force prying her open was not brute strength.
It was the tentacles extending from the chaos core.
In that churning mist, a concept surfaced. The signature of a Star Hunter capable of devouring divinity.
It was not something Rowe chose out of cruelty.
It was simply the reflection of Tamamo no Mae's fear.
However, something went wrong, or rather, something became awkward.
Rowe's expression shifted.
The tentacles did not only pull apart her tails.
They also pulled apart what she had clamped onto him.
And her hands.
Tamamo no Mae's body was spread wide, only an inch away. Her chest rose and fell, her face burning red with a mix of anger and humiliation.
Her fox ears trembled as if trying to flee on their own.
What she did not understand was that Rowe, who had suppressed himself with effort until now, suddenly felt a very human impulse.
The distance was too close. The posture was too suggestive.
And the chaos core was still him.
Those tentacles were, by definition, part of his greater body.
"Migu?" Tamamo no Mae tried, stubbornly, to press closer anyway.
That faint contact nearly broke Rowe's restraint.
Light flared.
Rowe made a decisive choice.
He retracted the primal human form.
Steel blossomed.
The machina god unfolded, casting a hard, cold silhouette. The shift cooled the impulse like water on fire.
From behind the iron mask, his gaze fixed on the fox.
"Do not worry. I will not kill you," Rowe said.
"You have fused with human evil. Human evil coexists with humanity. If I kill you, you will revive somewhere else after a few years."
Unless all humanity was erased.
Otherwise, Evil of Humanity would not cease.
Tamamo no Mae blinked.
Rowe expected rage.
Instead, the Nine Tailed Fox gasped as if remembering something obvious.
"Migu, I almost forgot!"
"Then why am I fighting so desperately?"
Silence.
Rowe stared.
"So you forgot," he said, dryly.
Tamamo no Mae's ears drooped in embarrassment.
"Migu… can you put me down? I will not run away."
Since she would not die, the worst outcome was gone. She could finally breathe again.
Rowe's voice turned casual, almost thoughtful.
"Human evil is not truly impossible to erase."
Tamamo no Mae stiffened.
"First, I seal you for tens of thousands of years. When human civilization reaches complete goodness and perfection, human evil will naturally disappear."
"Migu!?" Tamamo no Mae's bound tails snapped taut. "Te tens of thousands of years!?"
She was genuinely scared.
Rowe laughed.
"I am joking. Mostly."
Then his tone steadied.
"Desire is also evil. If evil disappears, humanity stagnates. It is not worth going that far."
"What I want now is simple."
"I cut off your ability to do evil."
He stepped back and returned to his human form.
He raised the sword.
His voice was calm, like an administrator editing a law.
"From now on, on the Divine Land, there will be no Nine Tailed Fox."
He did not need to swing.
He did not need to strike.
They were still deep within the seam of human order.
So he wrote the decree into human order itself.
Tamamo no Mae's nine tails collapsed at once.
Not severed by a blade, but dismantled by the world's own rules, torn apart by the authority of human order.
It looked effortless.
No matter how she resisted, it could not last.
Because human evil was only a part of human order.
It could not disobey the framework that defined it.
And because Rowe, at that moment, was the Heavenly Emperor of the Divine Land, the Heaven worshipped by its people.
His words were the Heavenly Emperor's decree.
A decree capable of stabilizing the world with a single sentence.
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