Chapter 860: The Generous Pot and Origin Energy

“Then what happened to the Generous Pot?”

“It was perfectly fine. The Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid was refined into its lid. Because the Heaven-and-Earth Furnace suddenly erupted, the forging process was interrupted, so the treasured lid only fused halfway with the Generous Pot, and its artifact spirit was never completely devoured.” Perfected Sanshui paused. “Looking back on it now, the Generous Pot may have been quietly assimilating something even more important at the time, leaving it no attention to spare for devouring the treasured lid’s artifact spirit.”

“You mean...?” The Generous Pot had even set its sights on the Heaven-and-Earth Furnace?

“Primordial chaos true qi.” Perfected Sanshui spoke slowly. “I suspect it stole the primordial chaos true qi.”

He Lingchuan pressed a hand to his forehead. Given the Generous Pot’s greed, it truly would not have let a treasure of that caliber pass.

The damned pot really would eat anything.

“After the forging of a mere pot caused such devastation, I became deeply suspicious, and I also grieved for the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid. So I demanded that the lid be separated and the Spirit-Sealing Treasure returned to me. But when Immortal Shou’an examined the Generous Pot, he discovered that the power inside it had already begun differentiating into distinct forms, and the order emerging from that division was extraordinarily systematic. He therefore concluded that this was the work of the artifact spirit. Everyone said that spilled water could not be gathered again, so we might as well continue observing the Generous Pot’s evolution. But it was insatiably greedy. No one knew what it would eventually become, and it was completely beyond human control. I argued my case again and again to no avail, so in the end I simply seized the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid by force and fled far away.”

He Lingchuan thought for a moment. “Since the pot and lid weren’t originally a matching set, why can the heavenly demons use the lid to locate the Generous Pot? And vice versa?”

“These are both extraordinary treasures. Once they had fused, a connection formed between them; it was merely interrupted by force.” Perfected Sanshui made an unexpectedly strange analogy. “Hating someone can etch them into your bones just as deeply as loving them.”

He Lingchuan remembered how delighted the divine bone amulet had been when it devoured the pot lid. Perhaps it had been celebrating the chance to resume a fusion interrupted thousands of years ago.

The lid, by contrast, had been filled with resistance and had rejected the Generous Pot all the way to the present.

One was desperately clingy, while the other was cold and aloof.

Wait, if both treasures had originally been forged from fragments of the Tianluo Star and were naturally part of the same whole, why would the lid resist the Generous Pot so fiercely?

Besides, if they had extra fragments of the Tianluo Star, why would those immortals have forged a lid? Wouldn’t it have been better to make a few cups instead, one for each person?

“Why were you so determined to separate them?” The other immortals seem to have just accepted it since it had already happened.

“I always felt that rather than saying we forged it into existence, it would be more accurate to say it borrowed our hands to enter the world. As for our original purpose—by the end, who even remembered it?” Perfected Sanshui’s legs had already dissolved into foam, but he did not seem to feel pain. He merely let out a long sigh. “Worst of all, after that world-shaking catastrophe caused by forging the Generous Pot, another strange form of power appeared. To this day, I still do not know whether the two are necessarily connected.”

“What kind of power?”

“We named it origin energy.”

He Lingchuan shot to his feet, his expression changing dramatically. “Wait, are you saying all the origin energy in the world came from the Generous Pot?”

That can’t be right.

Origin energy exists all across the mortal realm. How could the Generous Pot have produced it?

Perfected Sanshui corrected him, “No, the Tianluo Star altered the laws of heaven and earth, causing nightmare qi to appear in the mortal realm. But that does not mean all nightmare qi came directly from the Tianluo Star. Likewise, even if the birth of the Generous Pot, or perhaps it would be better to say the conflict between the Generous Pot, the Heaven-and-Earth Furnace, and the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid, caused origin energy to emerge, that would mean an entirely new rule or law had been born. It would not mean all origin energy in the world flowed out from the Generous Pot itself.”

He Lingchuan fell silent, struggling to absorb the information.

The Tianluo Star had the ability to alter the laws governing the mortal realm. As an important fragment of it, perhaps the Generous Pot truly possessed the ability to change those laws a second time.

Thinking about it carefully, origin energy really had not existed in the Ancient Era. It seemed to have appeared around the same time as nightmare qi, which was after the war of gods and immortals and the great catastrophe of the Ancient Era.

So those who knew the ancient secrets had all inferred that origin energy was very likely connected to either the Tianluo Star or the Generous Pot.

“After that incident, we discovered that the Generous Pot’s appetite had become enormous. It ate everything, whether it be nightmare qi, turbid baleful yin qi[1], natural treasures of heaven and earth, naturally born spirit creatures, anything useful or useless alike. Within half a month of entering the world, it even devoured two of the Grand Return Sect’s sect-protecting treasures.” Perfected Sanshui paused to catch his breath. “Leaving such a self-evolving, completely uncontrollable aberrant creature in the mortal realm was already far too dangerous. But the worst part was the appearance of origin energy. That may well have doomed us beyond redemption... I proposed destroying the Generous Pot, but the other immortals all disagreed. Perfected Shou’an believed that once the law governing origin energy had been born, destroying the Generous Pot might not make it disappear. And because the Generous Pot was so profound and mysterious, they wanted to preserve it, study it carefully, and discover ways to make use of it.”

He Lingchuan’s eyes flickered slightly. Immortal Shou’an’s attitude is actually rather scientific.

Perfected Sanshui, on the other hand, naturally regarded the emergence of origin energy as disastrous. In the Ancient Era, immortals could move mountains and fill seas while ordinary mortals could do nothing but kneel and worship, completely powerless to resist. But after the great war between gods and immortals, immortals and monsters steadily declined, while origin energy excelled at strengthening the body, weakening spells and wide-area divine techniques, and resisting ghosts and gods. If that trend continued, mortals would gradually become capable of using origin energy to oppose them.

Perfected Sanshui and the other immortals certainly would not have wanted to see that shift in power.

“But not long afterward, we learned from some heavenly demons that the Tianluo Star had behaved exactly the same way ever since it was born from the hands of their so-called ancient god. It acted entirely according to its own will and obeyed no one’s commands.” Perfected Sanshui shook his head. “The heavenly demons possessed it for so long and still failed to understand it. So I had no expectations whatsoever for the Generous Pot. So... before it could fully mature, I took the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid away, hoping to prevent it from continuing its self-evolution.”

There had been far more hidden history behind all of this than He Lingchuan had imagined. “How did you end up becoming part of the que beasts?”

Perfected Sanshui let out a mournful sigh. “The artifact spirit of the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid changed. It could no longer communicate with me. It seemed to have been altered by the Generous Pot and began drawing in every soul that died nearby. After I passed away, my soul was pulled into the treasured lid as well, becoming... what you see now.”

He Lingchuan genuinely sympathized with him. The Generous Pot did indeed possess the ability to alter outside objects. Mitian’s finger bone had been transformed into a necklace capable of communicating with He Lingchuan, while the juluo tree seed had been planted inside the Panlong World.

The immortals had intended to use the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid’s artifact spirit to control the Generous Pot. They must have been full of confidence at the time, only for the Generous Pot to turn the tables on them instead.

Perfected Sanshui’s fingers were dissolving into foam now as well. He could only raise his palm toward the Red General’s armor. “Isn’t everything you see here the same? We simply existed for too long. Gradually, we lost our original memories and were altered however it pleased...”

“The battle between you and me was effectively a battle between two artifact spirits. It represented the Generous Pot and the Spirit-Sealing Treasure trying to reconcile with one another.” His laughter was exceptionally bitter. “Both you and I were manipulated and exploited by the Generous Pot. But now... I’m finally close to being released.”

“After reflecting on it for all these years, my greatest regret is this: why did we ever try to implant an artifact spirit into the Generous Pot?” Perfected Sanshui forced his head upward and looked toward the night sky. “Only after spending a century alone in another world did I finally understand that possessing a spirit is not necessarily better than being without one.”

The opportunity was too rare to waste. He Lingchuan immediately asked, “Could having no spirit really be better than having one?”

“Let me ask you this: do heaven and earth possess a spirit?”

He Lingchuan knew this one. “No.”

“Does the Great Dao possess a spirit?”

“No, the Dao follows what is natural and cannot truly be put into words.”

“What about you?”

“I naturally possess one.” Humans had souls and spirits, after all. By this point, He Lingchuan already understood what Perfected Sanshui was trying to say.

“Are you greater than heaven, earth, and the Great Dao?”

“Not even close.” The dimensions and levels involved were far too different. How could they even be compared?

“If only we had understood that sooner.” Perfected Sanshui sighed faintly. “Remember this, the Generous Pot still has countless connections to the heavenly demons. If this thing ever falls into their hands, the mortal realm...”

What would happen to the mortal realm? No one knew.

At this moment, Perfected Sanshui finished dissolving away.

A breeze blew through, scattering the foam until it vanished without a trace. The last few strands of ghostly light flew toward the Red General’s cenotaph.

Perfected Sanshui’s true self had passed away long ago. Now that the remnant soul left inside the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid had completely dispersed, it also meant that the lid’s resistance had vanished entirely.

The process had been interrupted for thousands of years. But now, at last, pot and lid had fully fused into one.

He Lingchuan raised his head toward the sky. The night was dark and heavy. The lightning, the green light, the giant red figure, everything had disappeared.

Naluotian’s avatar had been subdued.

The Generous Pot had originally developed vulnerabilities because it was fighting on too many fronts at once and exerting tremendous power in several directions simultaneously.

Now He Lingchuan had dealt with the king of the que beasts and Perfected Sanshui, while the human parties had all been expelled from the secret realm. The pressure on the Generous Pot had abruptly dropped.

Suppressing a single Naluotian avatar while completely refining the Spirit-Sealing Treasured Lid was no longer difficult.

Those two major problems had finally both been settled.

Immediately afterward, the armor covering He Lingchuan’s body and the spear behind him gradually dissolved into red smoke and drifted away.

He Lingchuan removed the helmet, held it facing himself, and said gratefully, “Thank you!”

No matter how carefully he planned, circumstances changed faster than plans ever could. Naluotian’s avatar had actually managed to pass through the ocean inside the pot, enter the Panlong Secret Realm, and come directly for his body.

The reason He Lingchuan had managed to reverse defeat into victory and remain here with his mind intact was entirely thanks to the Red General.

Put plainly, the Red General had saved his life.

When the armor enclosed him, he had felt its unwavering protection and complete willingness to expend everything on his behalf.

He Lingchuan also finally understood that the promise once made to him had not come from the Generous Pot, but rather Zhong Shengguang’s daughter.

If Perfected Sanshui was right and the Generous Pot truly possessed no spirit, then it would never communicate with He Lingchuan, much less make him a promise.

The helmet gave no response. It simply dissolved into smoke and drifted away.

He Lingchuan reached out, only to grasp empty air. What a shame.

That terrifying power, that feeling that he could nearly destroy heaven and earth, vanished together with the armor.

The armor had never been a gift for him. It had merely been a trial set for fighting hostile creatures, and a single-use one at that.

When he thought about it, that made sense. The rules here were far too unusual. The power and home-field advantage he possessed inside the Panlong World should never have been something he could carry into the outside world.

He Lingchuan clenched and unclenched his fist, feeling strangely bereft.

But the sensation of that power, and the experience of combat at such an exalted level, had already been deeply branded into his mind. He could revisit it again and again in the future.

1. Honestly, this might just be referring to yin qi and baleful qi. ☜