The second tale takes place in the same year, when the crown prince was seventeen.
Legend has it that, south of the Yellow River, there was a bridge called Yinian.1 Upon this bridge was a ghost that had been lingering for years.
This ghost was exceedingly fearsome: it was clad in broken armor, the flames of hell blazed beneath its feet, and its body was covered in blood and pierced by all manner of sharp weapons. Every step it took, it left behind a footprint of blood and fire. Every few years, it would suddenly appear at night and wander back and forth at the head of the bridge, blocking travelers to ask them three questions:
“What is this place?”
“Who am I?”
“What is to be done?”
The ghost would then devour whoever answered incorrectly. However, no one knew what the correct answers were. As the years went by, this ghost devoured countless travelers.
During his ascetic travel, the crown prince caught word of this. So he set out and found Yinian Bridge and stood guard there night after night. Until finally, one night, he met the haunting ghost.
When that ghost appeared, it was indeed as horrifying as the legends said. It asked the crown prince the first question, and he answered with a smile.
“This place is the human world.”
However, the ghost replied, “This place is the abyss.”
An auspicious start. The first answer was already incorrect.
Well, all three answers are going to be wrong anyway, the crown prince thought, so why should I wait till you’re done? And so he pulled out his weapon and lunged.
The fight was complete chaos. The crown prince was skilled in martial arts, but the ghost was terrifying and dauntless. Man and ghost fought so hard that the sun and moon began to topple. In the end, the ghost was finally defeated.
After the ghost vanished, the crown prince planted a flowering tree at the head of the bridge. As he did so, a cultivator passed by and happened to see him sprinkle a handful of dirt to consecrate the grave and send the ghost off.
“What is this?” he asked.
And thus, the crown prince replied with his now-famous line: “Body in the abyss, heart in paradise.”
When the cultivator heard this, he gave a light smile. He then transformed into a divine warrior clad in white armor, with auspicious clouds beneath his feet. Then, he drew in the wind and rode off in holy light. Only then did the crown prince realize that he had just encountered the Heavenly Emperor, who had personally descended to the Mortal Realm to subdue evil.
The deities had already taken notice of this exceedingly outstanding God-Pleasing Warrior since his time in the Shangyuan Heavenly Ceremonial Procession. After the meeting at Yinian Bridge, they asked the Heavenly Emperor, “How does My Lord find this Royal Highness?”
The Emperor answered, “This child’s future is infinite.”
That night, a celestial phenomenon manifested in the skies above the palace, and storms raged.
Amidst the flashes of lightning and the roars of thunder, the crown prince ascended.
Whenever a mortal ascended, the Heavenly Realm always shook. When the crown prince ascended, the entire Heavenly Realm quaked outright with three times the normal tremors.
Achieving fruitful cultivation was always far too difficult. It required talent, training, and luck. It was often a long road of a hundred years for a god to be born.
It was not that there were no fortunate souls who became deities at a young age. However, the majority who tried exhausted their entire lives, trained for a hundred years, and still had no Heavenly Tribulations dawn upon them. Even if they did come to face a Heavenly Tribulation, should they fail the trial, they would die—or be ruined, if they managed to survive. Those who made the attempt were as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, but most were simply ignorant mortals who would spend their entire lives as nothing more than ordinary, never finding their own paths.
Yet this Royal Highness was no doubt the darling of the heavens. Whatever he wanted, he received; whatever he wanted to do, he succeeded. He wanted to ascend and become a god, so at the age of seventeen, he did just that.
He had always led the hearts of the people, and the king and queen loved and missed him dearly. So to honor their son, the king ordered great temples and shrines to be built across the land and for statues of the crown prince to be erected and worshipped by all. The more believers that were amassed, the more temples were constructed. That meant the crown prince’s life would be more prolonged, and his spiritual powers would grow more powerful. Thus, in a few short years, the Xianle Palace of the Crown Prince became incomparably glorious, and for a time, its prosperity and splendor reached its peak.
Until three years later, when Xianle fell into chaos.
The cause of the chaos was tyranny, with rebels rising in revolt. However, while the flames of war were set ablaze all over the mortal world, the deities of the Heavenly Realm could not easily intervene. Their concerns were ghosts, monsters, and demons that encroached on the borders, and whatever fell outside of those parameters had to be left to its own devices.
Think about it: conflicts were everywhere in the Mortal Realm, and everyone believed they were justified. So if any god were to stick a foot in… Today, you would back your former kingdom, tomorrow, another would avenge his descendants. Thus, would there not be gods who wanted to fight each other all the time, who would fall into a life of disgrace?
That was why the crown prince needed to keep his distance. But he did not care for that reasoning in the least.
He said to the Heavenly Emperor, “I will save the common people.”
The Heavenly Emperor possessed a thousand years of divine power, but even he did not dare let those words hang off his lips. When he heard this, it was easy to imagine how he felt, yet he could not do anything to stop the crown prince.
So he said, “You cannot save everyone.”
“I can,” the crown prince declared.
Thus, he descended to the Mortal Realm without looking back.