Chapter 238: Picking Up Discarded Invitations
“We’ve arrived at the entrance to the Southern Heavenly Gate’s Cloud Steps.”
At the little wood spirit’s announcement, the cylindrical golden celestial staircase did indeed stop after delivering the Well Palace Lady to the cloud steps. The divine power surrounding it transformed into countless fine threads, dispersing on the spot and flying upward toward somewhere higher.
The Well Palace Lady stood where she was, facing the enormous cluster of celestial palaces atop the cloud steps. For a moment, she wasn’t quite sure what to do.
Just one glance at the countless celestial palaces stretching beyond the horizon, along with the numerous deities flying into them, was enough to make it clear: the Great Luo Heavenly Court was real.
But that meant the situation had completely reversed.
The Blue Sea Great Luo Heavenly Court was real, and judging by appearances, it was a rather powerful divine pantheon, too.
What reason would they have to allow deities from other divine systems to join them?
Back in her own divine residence, the Well Palace Lady had been absolutely convinced that someone must have bewitched the Emperor of Yun Kingdom to make him issue an order placing the Heavenly Court prefix before the names of all the deities within the borders of Yun Kingdom. Now, however, she couldn’t help feeling inexplicably guilty.
—Could it be that the Yun Emperor had somehow learned of the existence of such a powerful Heavenly Court and was now insisting on dragging all the deities within his domain along to attach themselves to it?
But that raised another question. Did the Heavenly Court know that, strictly speaking, she wasn’t one of its deities? She had merely managed to get herself an invitation thanks to the Yun Emperor’s decree.
Fortunately, the Well Palace Lady soon noticed that quite a few of the other deities who had ascended via the golden pillars looked much like her. They, too, wore expressions that seemed to say, ‘This is my first time here. I never imagined I’d get to witness something on this grand a scale.’
After all, she certainly wasn’t the only one who had inexplicably been classified as a Heavenly Court deity because of that imperial decree. If they were going to sneak in under the Heavenly Court’s banner, at least they were all doing it together.
Thinking of it that way, the Well Palace Lady felt considerably less nervous. She did her best to arrange her expression into one of composure before slowly stepping onto the cloud stairway.
Because what she had just witnessed was so utterly astonishing and grand in scale, the Well Palace Lady was now so tense that she had barely noticed how her mindset had shifted.
She had gone from ‘What the hell is this? Who gave them the right to slap a Heavenly Court title onto my name?’ to ‘I hope the Heavenly Court doesn’t make a fuss about the fact that my title was added afterward.’
She blended in with the other deities ascending the cloud steps and made her way, one step at a time, toward the celestial palaces.
——
Blue Star.
“Another one~”
Cheng Qisheng withdrew the divine power she had used to send the Well Palace Lady up the celestial staircase, feeling rather reluctant to stop.
That’s right. The countless celestial stairways, which now covered practically the entire territory of Yun, were all her handiwork.
This world was simply too accommodating to her. She possessed the status of a substitute for the Heavenly Dao, could use mental power as divine power, and could even manifest it in a tangible, physical form.
After Yun Ying, acting in his capacity as emperor, ordered all the people of Yun to worship the deities of the Heavenly Court, Cheng Qisheng, as the Celestial Venerable of the Heavenly Court, received an extraordinarily vast amount of faith power.
It was practically a positive feedback loop.
Because she had enough faith power, she could do more things. And because she did more things, she received even more faith power.
Once Yun became territory under the Heavenly Court’s jurisdiction, Cheng Qisheng gained all sorts of privileges over this land.
For example, those invitations.
In essence, they served the same purpose as the tokens used in Youdu. Each one had Cheng Qisheng’s mental power attached to it.
As long as she was within territory belonging to the Heavenly Court, she could remotely operate through these invitations and open a dedicated Heavenly Court passage for whoever held one.
Although the passage appeared to exist in the physical world, its actual operating mechanism still relied on another dimension.
It was much like how, back when those spirit mediums and shamans prayed to the Heavenly Dao, their prayers had traveled through another dimension before reaching Cheng Qisheng’s ears.
Back then, she’d certainly been driven half-mad by all the incessant prayers. But once she’d gotten over the annoyance, she’d put that phenomenon to use, developing the divine possession technique. And now, she’d gone a step further and developed a divine passageway leading directly to the Heavenly Court.
The saying goes, “When three people walk together, there is always at least one who can teach me something.” The ancients certainly didn’t lie!
Cheng Qisheng decided that, from now on, she would pay more attention to those spirit mediums and shamans. Who knew what other new things she might be able to learn from them?
Seeing that it was about time, she simply cranked things up a notch. As if playing a video game, she activated the fast-forward function on every single divine passageway at once.
After all, the passengers were deities, and divine power was constantly circulating to maintain their equilibrium. The excessive speed of the celestial stairways wouldn’t have any adverse effect on their bodies.
Countless golden pillars of light delivered one deity after another to the cloud steps.
And countless little wood spirits, dug up by Blue Sea residents, earnestly announced each arrival.
“We’ve arrived at the entrance to the Southern Heavenly Gate’s Cloud Steps.”
—“Bleeeurgh!!!”
Among the countless deities who emerged looking somewhat disheveled, but who only needed to straighten their clothes, stare in amazement at the celestial palaces above, and then follow the crowd forward, there were more than a dozen who stood out particularly.
There were men and women among them, both elderly and young adults. Their only common trait was that the very first thing they did after stepping off the celestial stairway was retch.
These people were precisely those deities of Yun who had received invitations but hadn’t believed the Heavenly Court’s claims and had casually tossed their invitations away.
Where something was thrown away, there was always someone to pick it up.
Although ordinary mortals couldn’t see the golden radiance of divine power attached to the invitations before the divine passageways were activated, the invitations themselves had been written on high-quality paper. They were beautiful to look at, and even had gold leaf sprinkled across them.
Originally, the divine power attached to the more than a hundred discarded invitations would eventually have returned to Cheng Qisheng.
But by sheer coincidence, more than a dozen of them ended up in the hands of mortals from different parts of Yun. This was because Old Eighth had, for once, managed to get the public aesthetic just right, making the invitations so attractive and valuable-looking that people couldn’t resist picking them up.
And evidently, the little wood spirits responsible for checking the arrivals had been so preoccupied with memorizing how to operate the celestial stairways that they had overlooked this detail.
Thus, after finishing their bout of retching, these dozen or so mortals found themselves standing on the cloud steps.
They stared at the numerous deities around them, some gliding gracefully along on their celestial steps, others floating weightlessly through the air as they made their way up the cloud stairway.
They looked again at the magnificent celestial palaces towering before them, and every single one of them froze in a daze—
A deity guarding the Southern Heavenly Gate called out from ahead:
“The banquet is about to begin. Esteemed deities, please don’t linger here. Make your way to the Jade Terrace Immortal Palace as soon as possible.”
The dozen or so mortals, who hadn’t understood what was happening in the first place, had somehow boarded the celestial stairways simply because they possessed invitations, and had somehow ended up here. Now, they were even more bewildered.
A banquet?
Esteemed deities?
An immortal palace?!!!
All dozen of them were adults. Looking at the surrounding scenery, then at the deities of all sorts of appearances, each radiating an otherworldly celestial aura, and finally at the enormous cluster of celestial palaces floating above the clouds—a sight that could never possibly appear in the mortal world—
No matter how absurd it sounded, the dozen of them nevertheless understood what had happened.
They, mere mortals, had somehow stumbled into… a banquet of the gods.
