Chapter 570 - 38: Destroying Twilight

If the New Dawn Association—whose members, strength, and everything else besides their calamitous destructive power remain a mystery—are ghosts wandering the world creating random acts of chaos and destruction,

Then the Holy Snake Spirit Prayer Association are the spiders. They are rooted in the upper-middle echelons of various nations, using rare commodities like Extraordinary Knowledge and extended lifespans as bait, hiding their existence in the shadows and secretly weaving a web.

The Association’s organizational structure is actually extremely decentralized. Except for the Leader, who holds the Continuous Prayer Book and presides over each Void Orbit, and whose region serves as the "headquarters," every other region has its own local leader.

Furthermore, local leaders do not have complete knowledge of every member’s identity within their own region. Aside from rituals, members rarely gather, which significantly reduces the risk of exposure.

These two mysterious organizations are the truly mysterious ones. The average person, and even the average Transcendent, might go their entire lives without ever hearing their names or having a chance to encounter them.

But the Celestial God Descent Association is different. Any Transcendent has, without a doubt, heard of the destruction and tragedies they have caused. Even ordinary people have likely heard news about them indirectly through various channels. Some might even live in areas that are actually under the Celestial God Descent Association’s rule.

The Association is like a starving wolf, a fierce beast that lives far from civilization but periodically invades villages and cities, leaving death and injury in its wake.

Su Zhou stared at his computer screen. His expression was blank as he gazed at the blue and red zones circling areas on the world map.

Blue represented the Holy Snake Spirit Prayer Association, while red represented the Celestial God Descent Association.

The potential sphere of influence for the Holy Snake Spirit Prayer Association was mainly concentrated in Zhengguo’s coastal regions, Yingzhou, the Mediterranean Coast of Europa, and the east and west coasts of the American Federation. The more affluent and developed a place was, the more active they were. In those places, there were plenty of wealthy people who could be tempted by Extraordinary Knowledge and extended lifespans—they focused on the upper class.

Meanwhile, the potential sphere of influence for the Celestial God Descent Association was mainly concentrated in the Southeast Asia, Central and West Asia, the African Region, and Central and South America. The weaker the regime and the less control the nation’s official forces had, the more powerful the Celestial God Descent Association became. It was there that more poor and desperate ordinary people were willing to join for a chance to change their fate and become fodder—they focused on the middle and lower classes.

In fact, after the start of the Era of Spiritual Qi Revival, the Celestial God Descent Association had even become the de facto ruler in some lawless zones.

Furthermore, it was expanding its operations all over the world with an almost frenzied momentum.

Even without using the Zhengguo Government’s official intelligence network, Su Zhou could see the shadow of the Celestial God Descent Association behind many major incidents just from the news and netizen comments circulating online.

"A while ago, the officials of a southern city in Mexico were massacred by mysterious individuals. It’s rumored that an Extraordinary-Tier Cultivator was involved. The official explanation is that it was retaliation from local drug traffickers for a recent anti-drug operation. I’m not surprised by that excuse, but since when did those drug traffickers get so powerful?"

This was a netizen’s comment under a news article from Mexico. The local resident’s post was filled with confusion: "Now everyone is living in constant fear, but official aid hasn’t arrived. In a few more days, those ’drug traffickers’ might actually occupy the city!"

"My company was working on road infrastructure in the Eastern Region of Africa a while ago, and we happened to see two groups of troops and Transcendents fighting in the distance... We didn’t dare to keep watching and retreated immediately, but at the end, I vaguely saw what looked like the local government’s Transcendents being defeated, and their army was routed along with them..."

This was a comment from a friend in Zhengguo who had been working on infrastructure in Africa and had since returned home. He still seemed shaken by the experience: "The company arranged for us to fly back home that same day. I really don’t know what would have happened if we had stayed!"

Various revelations from foreign netizens on international forums were also quite sensational. In some people’s residential areas, there were continuous disappearances. When the authorities located a suspect’s address, all they found were skeletal remains that had been gnawed clean, with even the marrow sucked dry.

There were also villages in remote parts of Southeast Asia that were completely enveloped in fog and then vanished entirely. When the fog dissipated and the village reappeared, everyone inside had disappeared, never to be seen again.

Many events that would have sounded like Kaidan and Anomalies in the past now seemed to be happening all around everyone in the Era of Spiritual Qi Revival, which was chilling.

At a cursory glance, all these various news stories might just seem like the usual "peace and prosperity at home while the rest of the world is in chaos," or the "daily dose of happy gunfights" that everyone has grown accustomed to.

But Su Zhou saw it very clearly. He knew exactly which Celestial God’s Favored Clans’ powers were at play behind these incidents.

He was especially familiar with one case that occurred in the Southern Europe region.

It was a quiet little border town, with no tourists or other outsiders on a normal day. The entire city had a population of only around thirty thousand.

However, starting one day three months ago, people in the city began to disappear inexplicably. What was even stranger was that a few days after disappearing, the person would return home. But when asked where they had been, they couldn’t give an answer at all, as if that period of time had been erased from their memory.

At first, only seven or eight people had disappeared. But as time went on, dozens of people would go missing at a time, with entire streets of people sometimes vanishing at once.

By the time the European Union Harmony Bureau intervened, they were shocked to discover that everyone who had disappeared had, in essence, been turned into an extremely bizarre and evil kind of monster! These things resided within the soul, wearing the host’s skin and living with the host’s memories on a daily basis. In reality, the host’s soul had long been devoured, or rather, transformed into some kind of grotesque, twisted monster.

The European Union Harmony Bureau dispatched three Extraordinary High-tier Cultivators, one of whom was an acquaintance of Su Zhou’s: Rafael, the Sealing Master and an elder to Selos. He had actually suffered considerable injuries in that battle because no one had expected that the majority of the small town’s local Transcendents had also become those bizarre monsters.

When the Harmony Bureau’s Transcendents arrived by plane, the monsters fired surface-to-air missiles from an unknown location, shooting down the aircraft. They then used their numerical superiority to launch a siege against the Bureau’s Transcendents... Fortunately, they underestimated the Life Force of Transcendents and were ultimately crushed to pieces by the enraged high-level Cultivators.

While assessing the aftermath, they even discovered that in many local families with children, the parents had all been corrupted into monsters. Perhaps because the children’s souls were not yet mature, they were spared and had simply been living with the monsters for several months.

It was hard to imagine the kind of trauma these children would suffer, having gone through such an ordeal and losing their parents.

"It was the Dusk True Demons."

Gazing at the confidential data only visible to High Tier Extraordinaries, Su Zhou muttered to himself, "The Celestial God Descent Association actually summoned so many Dusk True Demons... And judging by the scale and level, one of their Leaders must even be cultivating the legacy of Dusk!"

"It’s hard to imagine a living person would willingly choose to accept the power of ’Dusk.’"

Even Yara was clicking its tongue in amazement. "It’s like grabbing the third rail. Anyone with the slightest understanding of Dusk’s nature—even a madman—wouldn’t choose this path."

"Yara, you’ve mentioned the nature of Dusk before, but it was always vague."

Lowering his head, Su Zhou took off Yara, who had transformed into a hat, and let it change back into its snake form, coiling around his hand. He asked, full of doubt, "Does a ’Great Being’ like that have a Clan?"

"It does, but very few."

Unlike the excitement it showed when talking about old friends, where it seemed ready to burst with commentary, Yara’s face was now full of disgust. It looked exactly like a corporate drone who’d just been told to work overtime on a holiday, knowing full well there’d be no overtime pay.

Its body, coiled around Su Zhou’s wrist, squirmed. Its tone was annoyed. "That thing, Dusk, originates from pure ’negation’ and ’void’... Its purpose is to render everything ’meaningless.’"

"Just like us, Dusk has its own projections in numerous myths and legends. It is the Dusk of the Gods, the fate destined for doom. It is the apocalypse of Tianqi, the fiery rain of the Final Judgment. It is the essence of the Celestial Five Declines, the Source of calamities for Immortal Gods... It’s just a boring thing like that, with no real intelligence to speak of. And we never considered it one of our own."

"Its Clan consists of the Dusk True Demons, the Dragon of the Apocalypse, and various mindless, twisted Demons... Anyone who chooses this being’s legacy, even if they can maintain their self-will for a time, will inevitably become a pure incarnation of destruction as time goes on."

When talking about the Twin Divine Trees, Yara’s tone was like it was meeting an old friend after many years. And when it spoke of the Silent Lord in the past, it was like discussing a decent acquaintance about whom it had some reservations.

But when discussing Dusk, Yara’s tone was one of pure hostility and disgust. It was also an extremely rare moment for Su Zhou, one where he could sense what could only be described as loathing from Yara.

Coincidentally, he also despised the Dusk True Demons.

’The Celestial God Descent Association has been desperately creating chaos everywhere recently, taking advantage of the fact that all the major powers are focused on the Beast God Realm. They want to break the stalemate and find an opportunity to travel to an Otherworld.’

The reason Su Zhou had been focusing on information related to the Celestial God Descent Association and the Holy Snake Spirit Prayer Association recently was precisely that the world’s governments had now freed up their hands from the Beast God Realm. They were preparing to clean up and suppress these dregs and remnants festering on Earth Civilization.

Originally, if the Celestial God Descent Association had kept a lower profile recently, the various national governments might have turned a blind eye. After all, the regions outside the three major power centers were mostly impoverished areas with nothing to gain... It sounded selfish, but that was how nations operated. As long as they weren’t the ones suffering the damage, why would they expend effort to clean up trash abroad?

If they encountered a hostile civilization from an Otherworld, they even planned to let the Celestial God Descent Association loose like a mad dog, using their own trash to probe the enemy’s strength.

But now, it was unclear whether the Celestial God Descent Association had sensed the impending crisis or simply had some secret plan to pull off something big. Their recent activities had become too excessive, to the point that no one could tolerate them anymore.

’Before the end of 2116, the Celestial God Descent Association must be wiped from the face of the Earth—the governments of multiple nations will conduct a joint encirclement to completely eradicate this tumor festering on human civilization.’

As he mentally repeated the joint decision made by the world’s major powers during the meeting in the Celestial Capital, Su Zhou’s eyes filled with determination.

He had once made an oath—he would hunt all Dusk True Demons, until the End of all Demons.

And now, it was time to act.