I am Jinshan Youxia

"Look at the Bridge of Helplessness!" A Yaksha exclaimed in surprise as he noticed that the Bridge of Helplessness, which had remained unchanged for thousands of years, was actually trembling.

"Go and report to the King immediately!"

I'll be updating a little late today.

I went out for a bit and am on my way back to my rented room. I'll start writing when I get back, and I'll try to update a chapter around six o'clock.

Chapter 267 The Beginning of the Anomaly

About two hundred years ago.

Zhang Chengyi floated high in the sky, his palms manipulating the boundless corpse energy that collided with the rolling thunder, causing violent explosions. His newly grown bluish-gray hair fluttered behind him in the gale, and he looked somewhat bored.

After taking a nap, the progress in breaking through the cycle of reincarnation was reduced by half, but it's still too long.

Of course, this is mainly because the progress made during the last attack on the cycle of reincarnation has been completely repaired in the past fifty years. As long as the power left by the gods and Buddhas is not completely exhausted at once, it will recover quickly.

If the female ghosts weren't still asleep inside his body, he would have gone to sleep again.

There are countless female ghosts in the underworld, and increasing their corpse energy is as easy as playing with it. You could say that they can stay in the underworld and sleep for as long as they want, and evolve as many times as they want.

The environment is just too bad; there's not a single patch of green to be seen.

Although Zhang Chengyi is a zombie, he is also a zombie with aspirations. The environment may not be particularly beautiful, but at least there should be some flowers and plants.

The sky was always pitch black, an unchanging darkness that made people feel incredibly depressed.

Moreover, the structures built by the spirits are just paper to a zombie. Ghosts can drive cars made of burnt paper, but when a zombie sits on one, it only adds another piece of paper to the car.

He had absolutely no interest in that ghost town; it was just a paper city. He could live in the ruins of the City of the Dead without any problem, but the living conditions there were comparable to the cage homes he had heard about in Hong Kong Island in his previous life on Earth.

The city lord's mansion collapsed after he destroyed it, and the ghosts couldn't rebuild it because they didn't have the materials.

So it's best to go back to the world of the living. The underworld is such a dreadful place.

[After two more evolutions at most, I should be able to shorten the time to a little over ten years, which would put me at the level of gods and Buddhas?]

Zhang Chengyi pondered to himself, "Last time it took fifty years, next time it will take at least a hundred years to evolve, and the time after that it will probably take a hundred and fifty or two hundred years."

Two or three hundred years have passed...

Fortunately, it doesn't matter how long the evolution takes.

I wonder how things are in the mortal realm now.

He somewhat missed the days when he could watch the excitement. The ghosts in the underworld had no ambition; they were all just waiting to be reincarnated. They were all cowardly and timid, barely managing to build a society under the temptation of reincarnation, with everything geared towards reincarnation.

Are there ghosts who don't want to be reincarnated?

No.

Ghosts have an innate desire for reincarnation. The feeling of having only a soul without a physical body is very uncomfortable, just like giving someone the ability to breathe underwater but being constantly immersed in water. Therefore, their desire for reincarnation is very difficult to overcome.

Especially the spirits of the dead. The spirits of the dead have no obsessions or resentments, and they will directly enter the cycle of reincarnation to be reborn.

Those with obsessions and resentments will repeatedly experience their own death before death, either succeeding in letting go of their obsessions or, over a long period of time, giving up on themselves and annihilating.

The key to Nie Xiaoqian and her group of female ghosts being able to remain relatively calm was that Zhang Chengyi's soul was united with theirs, temporarily alleviating their strange instincts. In addition, their strength was sufficient to resist to some extent.

Other ghosts don't have this condition, so naturally the social atmosphere among ghosts is to pursue reincarnation.

Everyone is thinking about escaping, and there are no other pursuits, so it's hard for the underworld to have the vibrant and diverse atmosphere of the mortal world.

"Master." Nie Xiaoqian, having bathed, changed clothes, and dressed up, flew over.

Zhang Chengyi looked over and asked, "Are you ready?"

Nie Xiaoqian nodded, hesitated for a moment, and then explained the anomaly of the cycle of reincarnation.

After the attack, the Bridge of Helplessness shook, and Meng Po, who was mechanically dispensing soup, would occasionally look up. A corner of the Terrace of Longing for Home had collapsed...

What if the master really manages to take down the underworld, but the cycle of reincarnation is completely destroyed?

No one knows whether the ghosts will be able to reincarnate normally after the cycle of reincarnation built by the gods and Buddhas collapses.

Zhang Chengyi responded, not caring much. Since he didn't know the result, he might as well give it a try. He would figure out how to solve the problems if they arose. His player mentality had caused a lot of trouble in many worlds, but it was impossible for him to change.

Perhaps because she had been an emperor for so long, Nie Xiaoqian had more to think about than just the master's bland reaction.

Was he feigning to test her loyalty? Or did he simply not care at all?

She suddenly smiled. Who cares? Does this kind of thing need her, an appendage, to worry about?

Anyway, everything about the ghost town has been arranged. We'll just take it one step at a time and deal with any troubles later. If we can't solve them, it's not her problem as a subordinate.

Thinking it over, she put aside her trivial thoughts and happily entered the old man's body to unite her soul with him.

After watching Nie Xiaoqian fall asleep, Zhang Chengyi did not stop what he was doing. He wanted to try to wear her down for a while, calculate the recovery speed of the gods' and Buddhas' power, see if the gods and Buddhas had any counterattack mechanisms, and the subsequent reaction of the cycle of reincarnation, before considering the next step.

Now, let the explosions come even more violently.

He opened his mouth and replenished the sea of ​​corpse energy above with some corpse energy, and heavenly lightning flowed out continuously from beneath his feet.

"boom!"

-----------------

Five years later, on the road to the underworld.

"boom!"

The yakshas, ​​wearing helmets and braving the thunder from the sky, shouted at the top of their lungs, "Do not be afraid, the thunder from the sky will not harm you."

"Be careful when crossing the bridge, don't strain."

"Squeak~"

One of the yakshas watched the spirits cautiously stepping onto the swaying, dilapidated Bridge of Helplessness and sighed, "When will this ever end?"

"What did you say?" the Yaksha next to him asked loudly.

"I'll talk!"

"This is unbearable! When will it ever end?!"

Towards the end, their voices were practically shouting. With the constant rumbling of thunder, the Yakshas had become less sensitive to sound.

"Splash!" The sound of water splashing suddenly came from the Naihe River, very clearly.

The nearby Yaksha quickly looked down, worried that another spirit might have fallen in. The Bridge of Helplessness had become increasingly dilapidated in the past two years, and it would sway from time to time. Spirits, frightened by the lightning, had fallen into the river during the swaying many times before.

No sooner had it looked down than a spider with a bull's head suddenly leaped out of the Naihe River and pounced on its head. The bull's head opened its mouth, revealing sharp teeth and emitting a foul stench.

"Crack!" The yaksha next to him was quick-witted and lashed out with his whip, and the bull-headed spider screamed and fell down again.

It floated on the river, seemingly fainting.

What the hell is this?!

The yaksha was nearly startled when the bull-headed spider lunged at his face; the thing looked really weird.

Where do monsters come from, such a strange and unrecognizable creature?

The next second, it felt it shouldn't have been frightened, and in a fit of rage, it stretched out the steel fork in its hand, knelt down by the bridge, and accurately stabbed the bull-headed spider in the back with the fork, then dragged it onto the bridge.

The bull-headed spider awoke in excruciating pain, muttering incoherently.

The demons gathered around to watch the spectacle.

"Strange, are there such strange monsters in the Naihe River?"

"Never heard of it."

"Should we offer this to the king?"

Chapter 268 Bull Demon

Ghost town.

"Your Majesty, it is a monster from Japan."

The old ghost pressed down on the bull-headed spider's enormous head with one hand, his palm shrouded in yin energy. "It called itself a bull demon. During the time of the demon's arrival, it encountered an anomaly and was forced to go into hiding. It fell into the River of Three Crossings, thinking it was going to become a water ghost and be forever condemned. But somehow it drifted with the current to the underworld and floated for many days without being able to reach the shore. It didn't even know where it was. When it saw the bridge, it tried to attack the yaksha before being caught."

After saying that, it added, "This kind of monster called 'Ox Demon' says that it has the habit of lying in the water and attacking other creatures."

"The yaksha that was attacked was too close to the water, so it..."

"Your posture is too good, so you couldn't resist making a move, huh?" Zhang Chengyi muttered, then realized something: the Japanese monster who fell into the Sanzu River ended up in the underworld?

This is no small matter. The Sanzu River is essentially the Naihe River in Japanese legend. As for the name Wangchuan River, it comes from the River of Oblivion in Greek mythology. In ancient myths and legends, places related to the dead and the underworld usually have rivers.

The underworld is only located near the land of China; other civilizations naturally have other gods and other underworlds.

Now that it's connected to Japan, it seems a bit troublesome. If this isn't an isolated case, it's probably related to the fact that he's constantly digging into the underworld.

Zhang Chengyi asked, "Ask it if it saw any other monsters at the bottom of the Naihe River?"

Since last year, the corpse energy and heavenly lightning he released have reached a considerable scale. Even if left unattended, they will continue to collide and explode on their own within a day or two, and occasionally they can still leave the sky to rest.

After asking the old ghost intently, he said, "Yes, it said that it had seen many other monsters from Japan in the river, but they were scattered throughout the Naihe River and were fewer in number."

Oops, this is really troublesome.

Not every civilization's underworld has a complete management system. For example, the Japanese underworld, also known as the Yellow Springs, has no concept of reincarnation. It is dark and deep, and the dead go there to suffer eternally.

The Naihe River, which connects the Sanzu River to the underworld, suggests that the underworld is much larger than imagined. Are the underworlds in other mythologies also part of the underworld?

Could it be that the ghosts and monsters from other myths that we couldn't see before were separated by the power of gods and Buddhas?

Moreover, the Ushioni is clearly a living demon. Putting aside standard Japanese demon and monster terms like "the time of descent into the underworld" and "the time of divine disappearance," this guy must have fallen from the mortal realm into the underworld and drifted all the way here. Could the path between the mortal realm and the underworld be disrupted as he attacks the underworld?

A multitude of thoughts raced through Zhang Chengyi's mind. He wasn't sure if this was a good thing or not. The separation between the living and the dead made sense, but what if they were to be able to communicate back and forth in the future...?

"Have someone search along the Naihe River," he ordered, then realized that ghosts couldn't interfere with the Naihe River. Even the strongest ghost, if it fell in, would need to swim back up just like an ordinary human. If it couldn't swim back up or couldn't swim, it would likely sink and disappear.

The underworld has no proper tools, not even ropes. Except for the yakshas and ghost messengers who have whips and forks, other ghosts, whether they live in or wear things, are essentially illusory. If you put your hand into the Naihe River, it will be dissolved.

He pondered for a moment, then reached into his waist and pulled out a few grass seeds. These were brought from the mortal realm and had been carefully preserved by Nie Xiaoqian while he was asleep. They were almost completely dead from being tainted by yin energy.

But it's okay.

Liquid corpse poison seeped from Zhang Chengyi's fingertips. As the seeds of the dead grass gradually sprouted and took root, they wrapped around his arm and grew into a clump.