Poison God's Heritage

Chapter 790: Dead Sun

Shi Situ, a man who once was revered as the Dead Sun a long time ago, but has fallen and completely disappeared only to be replaced by the Darkest Sun.

The origin of the story is known only to a select few among them the Wisest and Lording Suns. Even the rest of the Suns only know him by title and the Blue Sun has no idea of his existence at all due to her being the youngest.

He once ruled with the same power as the current suns owning a massive territory that has been completely uplifted once his pursuit of strength went a tad too far.

He was obsessed with immortality to the point that he would try and use any method or means to achieve it. He feared death so much that he experimented on himself and his closest to the point of diving into the wheel of reincarnation and back.

His land was once prosperous and greatly fortuitous. The people that followed his Sun had little to worry about since not only was his land bountiful and had many treasures, he too had a keen interest in the lives of the people as he mingled with them and changed their lives for the better, and sometimes for the worse.

Until the point he hit the ceiling of the Sun Stage, unable to continue anymore, stuck on a treadmill, grinding through cultivation levels yet never ever being able to take a single step forward, the looming threat of death soon began creeping up on him.

Although he wasn't nearly as old as the Lording Sun, he was pretty much the closest to death due to his Dao.

To seek to understand death is to dance and court it, and it is his Dao and what it dictates.

And due to his fear of death, he began mass experimenting, on his own followers first, then his people, and finally his closest disciples and even himself.

His land soon became as dry and as dilapidated as his own deteriorating skin. Where Qi was once bountiful it now became as think as a spider's silk almost impossible to cultivate. Where he used to rule over the masses, he no longer had anyone to rule over.

Bound by death from his own Dao, extorted and extracted out of their own vitality, his people were all turned to a furnace of life energy to support his deteriorating life.

His region which was in the far northern side of the Beyond was no longer habitable and was so dry and emptied out of Qi that natural disasters were a common thing.

And a part of those lands was where the race of the Strongest Under The Sun had happened.

A section of pure baleful Qi, turbid and not usable for cultivation created a land so vast and so great that no grass could ever live nor survive in. The scorching heat of those lands burnt the ground to molten moving lava, and turned the air to a blistering hot atmosphere.

And on the other side was an area so void of life and Qi that it froze in place, turning to a frozen endless land that extended all over to the horizon, without a place for anything to live but the most fearsome of beasts.

Life was no more, and only death remained. And even he wasn't safe as he was affected by the consequences of defying the natural order of the heavens. Unlike demonic cultivators do who defy but respect, he tried to defy and revolt against the heavens to steal away and hide from the eternal law of everlasting silence.

The cost of such transgression was his cultivation. The heavens took what it had given but he somehow managed to although lose his cultivation to hide from the scythe of death.

He had begun transporting the dead of his dominion, all of the people that died to his experiments from mortals that knew nothing about cultivators, to the highest of levels of cultivation had all suffered due to his experiments and were now forever cursed to walk the earth not knowing rest.

The destruction and devastation that he had created had turned the entire Beyond Upside down, the disappearance of a massive number of people caused the intervention of the Suns but it was far too late to save anyone, especially since when they arrived, they didn't find a single living soul nor anyone to uphold the transgressions.

The Dead Sun had picked up the corpses and fled the area, knowing well that by having been degraded to a pseudo-Sun he'll be excommunicated at best, or killed at worst for he had crossed a few of the current Suns way too many times.

Obtaining his corpse would allow them a great deal of benefits, not to mention what he carried in his pouch. He fled the entire region completely removing himself from the seat of the Suns and ran to the Sea of Demons' second floor where even the Suns dare not venture.

In his escape, he had come to the discovery of something left behind by people that lived in the beyond a very long time ago.

It looked like a teleportation gate that led somewhere, but it was completely destroyed, an exit. Or an entrance. He didn't know, but one thing he did know was that the knowledge and the power to operate such a machine never existed in the beyond in the first place.

He theorized that the beyond was not the final destination, but was merely a stopping point or even a starting point for cultivators where there is a bigger world even, somewhere even larger, greater, and vaster than the beyond, with more resources and a better path towards the heavens.

However, he knew well that he didn't have the ability to open this path, and even if he did, he didn't have the power to do so.

The required energy to light up a single formation was more than what a Sun could even output. And it needed nine nodes for it to operate. It was quite a hefty investment of Qi that he couldn't afford.

But it was hope that he couldn't give up.

Yet this hope needed time, which he severely lacked.

So he split his already decaying soul into multiple avatars of a far lesser cultivation ability than he currently has. And then he sent them all over the beyond and anywhere possible for them to learn and absorb knowledge.

Some died, some cultivated well and some simply were failures.

But among the failures, one of them was experiencing something greatly interesting, at a place so far away that he needed to send a piece of his soul to possess and incarnate into the body of a stillborn.

His stillborn body never had the chance to create meridians, so he was about to give up on it but left it to its own devices. After all, even if it was without meridians it could live a mortal life and die a mortal life, what is a hundred years to a man who lived tens of thousands?

When born, the baby had consumed the life force of his mortal parents and began growing, an abomination of a creature that grew feasting on weak souls of mortals and began using the Death Dao, knowledge given by the main body of the Dead Sun.

It didn't perish even when hounded by other villagers, it didn't die when it was left all by itself in a forest full of beasts.

It didn't die even when it was forcefully plunged into a pool of Bone and Body Grinding Poison. And it was only then that the Darkest Sun even remembered that he had a mortal avatar.

Since the Bone and Body Grinding Poison causes pain that can reach the soul, he was notified. And when he began watching, he discovered something interesting.

The people who threw the baby into the poison were immediately consumed by a soul that was quite powerful for them. And the baby didn't die, and his dead meridians were replaced by new ones. A new type of body was created, a body of pure poison, yet since he was heavily affected by the Dead Sun's Dao, the Poison Meridians had a slightly different mutation.

Which allowed him to use the Dao of Death, even though he was poisoned.

The baby now with a book written by a wise person began learning by himself, powered by the focused knowledge of the Dead Sun, he began to read and understand.

And finally, the book revealed its true name.

The Poison God's Heritage, Book of Death.

A book that was so fitting to the child that it was a miracle to have stumbled upon it. It needed a body that has died before it lived, and it needed a body that had killed before it fed. And it also needed a body that had no meridians. The baby that was a failure ended up teaching the Dead Sun about the Book of Death authored by Du Shen.

He read through his contents and scoffed at many of the ideologies in it. Even for the Death Sun some of these methods were too extreme, but he still made the baby do them all.

And it grew, killing and killing and killing some more.

Until the first day he met Shen Bao.

A man who also carried the Book of the Poison God. Thinking of him as nothing but another weak cultivator made Shi Situ lose one of his avatars' lives.

It was annoying, so annoying that Shen Bao became a pest to the plans of the Death Sun. He felt that the Book of Death was incomplete and needed to have all of the other tomes, but this Shen Bao was an incredibly hard pest to get rid of…

And so Shi Situ cultivated.