The entire sect is obsessed with love, but I'm the only one who's truly insane.

Lin Du found it hard to describe his feelings. "It's one thing for my senior brother to come, but why are you all here?"

A rare crack appeared on Hou Cang's perpetually icy face. "What do you mean by that?"

"It means I don't need to worry about someone as capable as my senior brother," Lin Du replied with a smile.

Hou Cang was speechless, then turned and said, "Do you think I wanted to come? It was those few who insisted on coming. If it weren't for the fact that those two Yang Lei and Yang Huo were so difficult to conceal and had to provide support from the outside, I would have been the only one here who could fight."

Lin Du let out a long "oh," deciding to maintain Hou Cang's dignity.

The judge finally came to his senses. "No, I mean, are you here as a group to cause trouble? No matter how strong you are, we have the Five Ghost Emperors and the Ten Kings of Hell above us. I'm warning you."

The group of people looked at the judge with smiles on their faces. "Look at you, saying such things."

Apart from the ice-faced guy, they were all just little kids. Given their age and cultivation, they shouldn't be so disrespectful. Yet, the judge couldn't muster any anger.

These are the people in front of us who found the hundreds of thousands of people who had vanished from the Book of Life and Death.

If a large number of souls are lost in one realm, even if it's due to someone's mischief, it's still the underworld's dereliction of duty, and someone has to take the blame.

There are plenty of ghost cultivators in the underworld who don't enter reincarnation and are waiting to eat the government's rice bowl, but he doesn't want to lose the judge position that he has cultivated for thousands of years to obtain.

That was a big deal. The judge would wake up in the middle of the night and keep talking about the tens of thousands of people who had disappeared. When the first wave of souls were sent back, he almost wanted to kowtow to the person who sent these ghosts to the underworld.

However, it's still best not to go near him. For a cultivator who doesn't want to ascend to immortality and ends up in the underworld, it's really not a good thing.

The person has arrived, but his methods are somewhat improper; we still need to examine his Book of Life and Death.

Lin Du wants to see the Book of Life and Death, and he will also be punished for keeping it.

"I have a plan. The five of us will beat you up, then steal your Book of Life and Death. That way, you won't be considered negligent; it'll just mean we're too strong. What do you think?"

Lin Du seemed to see the judge's struggle; of course, working people have their own hardships, and she understood that.

"A minor injury, or a more serious one, it's up to you." Lin Du looked at the judge. "We respect the victim's wishes."

If Hou Cang hadn't come, she might have tried to influence the judge, but since Hou Cang did, she wouldn't mind a group fight.

The judge was bewildered by this group of people who didn't follow any set pattern and didn't say a single word. Before he could react, the group had already pounced on him.

"Eh, no!! You guys!!!"

"I got it!!!" Ni Jinxuan excitedly pulled out a book and threw it to Lin Du.

Yan Qing and Yuan Ye each held down one of the judges. He seemed to struggle fiercely, but in reality, he subtly wedged his joints under their hands, making him very easy to control. There was also a long sword that had inexplicably appeared.

How did the spirit swords get brought to this underworld? Aren't they supposed to be spirits separated from their bodies?

Hou Cang gripped his longsword, lowered his eyes, and looked at the judge with a stern expression. "Don't move."

Lin Du quickly flipped through the book with her head down. She moved very fast. This kind of divine artifact looked extremely thin, and was all simulated, but in reality, it had an absurd number of pages.

But at this moment, inside the dark hall, candlelight blazed on both sides, and the golden pages of the book flashed rapidly, like a rushing river, never ceasing. Not only the judge, but even Yan Qing, who had always been crushed by Lin Du, felt that this was a bit too much.

"How can she concentrate like this?" The judge almost forgot that he was being held hostage.

Yan Qing was numb. "I don't know about others, but what Junior Uncle said is quite normal."

Lin Du was born with a reading speed faster than ordinary people, not to mention that his divine sense has been enhanced to the point that it is comparable to that of a thousand-year-old great power.

"You know what, that's faster than fanning the wind!" Yuan Ye exclaimed. "The afterimage is so blurry it's dizzying."

However, after three hours, Lin Du stopped and took out a chart showing the changes in the strength of the power of rules. She had made a new discovery.

I hadn't noticed this winding path when I was in the demon realm; it needs to be examined in several stages.

"There are a few interesting nodes."

"The population of the Dongming Realm has remained relatively stable since ancient times, but since six thousand years ago, the number of blank pages has begun to increase."

A blank space indicates that the soul cannot be recalled and has fallen outside the rules of Heaven, and has been destroyed and devoured by something outside the control of Heaven.

In the Realm of Insight, most of them were devoured by demons, but their numbers increased six thousand years later. This was not because the demons had become stronger, but because fragments of fallen gods had appeared.

"Six thousand years ago was exactly the time when the fragments of the fallen god first came into play in Dongming."

"With the period around six thousand years as the dividing line, the power of the Heavenly Dao rules had been declining relatively steadily before that. If we disregard the rebound caused by the cultivators who devoted themselves to the Heavenly Dao in the past thousand years replenishing the Heavenly Dao rules, I can almost draw a straight line with a certain slope. From six thousand years onwards, the fluctuations began to increase, and the decline of the Heavenly Dao accelerated."

As Lin Du spoke, Yan Qing took notes, and even the judge, who was forcibly tied to the stool, perked up his ears.

"So the reason why the power of Heaven's Dao weakened at the beginning was because of that demonic energy..." Yan Qing paused in his grip on the pen and looked at Lin Du in the hall.

"The origin of demonic energy." Lin Du affirmed his conclusion.

"But starting six hundred years ago, this downward trend actually slowed down."

"The Book of Life and Death has many blank spaces that have been continuously disappearing since more than 500 years ago, and the number of survivors has decreased sharply."

"I think that's why the Heavenly Dao rules have temporarily eased the pressure."

"Then... Wenfu..." Hou Cang was a little confused, "He couldn't have done something good, could he?"

Lin Du shook his head. "No, that's not it."

Hou Cang said "oh," and then he was relieved.

A scoundrel is a scoundrel after all.

Lin Du still had his eyes downcast, his hands gripping the two booklets tightly, slowly tightening their grip.

There are far fewer people in the spirit world than in the mortal world. A few hundred thousand people is not a large number. In the mortal world, a war might kill nearly a hundred thousand people, but those people can still enter the cycle of reincarnation.

Wen Fu's actions caused the number of souls to decrease over the past six hundred years, leaving large gaps that could not be filled even with Lin Du's efforts to save them, and most records are now incomplete.

He was blinded by a single leaf, failing to see the true enemy: the fragments of a fallen god, the external rules of heaven, leading him astray.

Lin Du suppressed his emotions, "If I don't save those souls, perhaps he can indeed slow down the decline of the Heavenly Dao."

"But we saved them."

"These returning souls will allow the Dongming Realm to accumulate a large number of cultivators within five hundred years. Those who are reborn as plants and unintelligent beasts are secondary; there are also a large number who are reborn in the Central Continent and the Demon Clan territory to become spiritual cultivators."

The fact that these people's Book of Life and Death shows that the scheduled cultivation time after reincarnation has become very long proves that spiritual energy can indeed not keep up with the supply.

Lin Du paused for a moment, "Unless the situation becomes unstable within the next five hundred years, with frequent wars, increased death, and a temporary delay in reincarnation after death, which is simply impossible, let's put that aside for now."

"Or someone might dedicate themselves to the Heavenly Dao to maintain balance; otherwise, the Heavenly Dao will experience a sharp decline in spiritual energy within five hundred years, exacerbating its decay and triggering natural disasters. The inability of resources to regenerate in time will also lead to man-made calamities."

"I dismantled the chessboard and blocked his path," Lin Du said, seemingly regretful. "But those useless pieces ruined the game. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to save him."

"But you're not the one who really made a mistake," the judge couldn't help but say. "What you did was the light of righteousness. If the population is too large, resources will be consumed and cannot be replenished in time. If the population is too small, your world's progress will slow down, and it may even lead to a complete reshuffling and collapse."

"If you hadn't retrieved these people's souls, your Dongming Realm might have been noticed by the people of the Thirty-Three Heavens. If you couldn't solve that problem, and they took action, the Dongming Realm would truly be left with nothing."

The gloom on Lin Du's face suddenly dissipated. He looked up at the judge, whose eyes, which had been dull and gray because they had not been transformed, were like snow falling on a cold mountain, blown away by the wind, revealing the crystal-clear light that had long been suppressed and turned into ice.

The judge then realized that he had been tricked by the child and had softened his heart, saying too much.

Lin Du smiled. "Thank you, Judge."

"We can naturally handle the matter of the Cave of Enlightenment." Lin Du returned the Book of Life and Death. "If a god enters the Cave of Enlightenment, we can naturally kill that god as well."

The judge felt a chill run down his spine as he was stared at by those eyes.

Even before Lin Du arrived, he had been speculating about what could cause so many souls to disappear from a great world without anyone noticing.

As expected, the reason why the Dongming Realm is in big trouble now is because of what the Upper Realm left behind. When Lin Du came to snatch the Book of Life and Death today, he actually gave him a heads-up.

His hinting back like that doesn't really count as revealing a secret, does it?

Lin Du received the answer, but his heart felt even heavier.

The decline of the Heavenly Dao was fundamentally caused by the origin of demonic energy. Later, the appearance of fragments of fallen gods exacerbated the decline, and Wen Fu became the sharpest blade of the fallen gods.

It's like playing a game of chess with someone where the initial moves were sharp and incisive, but the game turned into a complete mess. Only when you get closer do you realize that your opponent has changed, and those moves that the previous player made so badly have become sharp knives aimed at you.

Her opponent was not Wen Fu, nor the Demon Lord, but the Fallen God.

A seemingly soulless "dead thing" that can always hide behind the living.

Even though Lin Du fed the fragments to Han Yueling and the Heavenly Dao, the influence of this thing continued.

Her time is really running out.

"You may leave, but your lifespan will still be reduced." The judge watched Lin Du's departing figure. "Shall we do as you say?"

Hou Cang glanced at Lin Du with a cold face, "Otherwise what? Does Lin Du still have lifespan to deduct? If we deduct it, would you be going to take his soul right now?"

The judge, holding the Book of Life and Death, said, "Look at you, saying such things. I'm not the one who takes souls; I'm just responsible for keeping the ledgers."

"Put it all on my tab. I'm long-lived and too lazy to share with the kids. A hundred years won't make a difference."

After Hou Cang finished speaking, he turned and left.

Seeing them leave, the judge tore himself even more to shreds, and after half an hour, clutching the Book of Life and Death, he ran toward the main hall.

"My lord!!! Oh no!!"