The Divine Martial Stars

“Wait, there’s still a bottom half! The chick popped out of the top one, what about the bottom!” The village headman called loudly.

The calabash gourd was so large that it has two halves: top and bottom. The fruit that the Tree of Eternity bore always had something in the bigger half of the gourd while the other half had always been empty. This time, it was different.

“Cute little chicky.”

The little girl from just now, Xing Yan picked the tiny chick up in her hand.

Village elder Feng Feng was about to swing his cleaver again to split open the bottom half when a loud crack jolted him. A crack had opened on the bottom half before a rusty sword blasted a hole through the gourd.

That was enough to send the peasants into such a fit of stricken panic that they quickly withdrew.

Crack! Crack!

The calabash gourd was smashed into bits.

And in its place was a dashing and thick-browed young man wielding a rusty sword.

“W-Wha?! A-An adult?!”

“He looks at least twenty!”

“It had always been babies up until now! From which world did he come?! They’re supposed to be turned into babies!? And here is a fully-grown man armed with a sword!?”

The villagers all chattered anxiously, peering at Lu Ye the same way as they were looking at a monster.

That comes out of a Tree of Eternity fruit that had always been infants that the villagers would take care of for twenty months before they grow up into adulthood and rediscover their former memories to once again become warriors.

For an adult to pop out straight from inside a Tree of Eternity fruit was a heretofore unknown precedent.

Surely this man would not end up a decrepit senile after twenty months?

Li Mu found himself inside a darkened and cramped space when he finally regained his senses. He could hear sounds coming from outside, but nothing he tried could break him free. It was as if his strength and his power had all but vanished. Hence he could only rely on the rusted sword and used it to make a hole out of the “wall” that was keeping him confined.

“Hm?!

“Where am I?!”

When he came out, he found himself surrounded by peasants dressed in simple and patched-up rough-spun attire, all of them staring at him with bewildered looks on their faces. Just in front of him was this scrawny old man who had this gigantic cleaver that looked like it was longer than his height held over his head, ready to swing it down with all the fury and force he could muster.

“Is this the Battlefield of Chaos?!”

Li Mu turned around and saw the bits and pieces on the ground that was formerly the calabash gourd. Connecting the dots, he finally began to understand what was going on. The portal to the Battlefield of Chaos is all about using Mimameidre’s growth stages of fruits as a means of energy transference to transport him from one dimension to another—a method subtler and more elaborate than just using magical wards and circles. Somehow Mimameidre must have some kind of bond with the Trees of Eternity here and this method of conveyance in essence is a manipulation of the laws of Nature of both dimensions.

“How amazing!”

Li Mu returned his gaze to the villagers. There was no animosity, except for incredulity, surprise, and uneasiness. He sheathed his sword.

“Hello, if you don’t mind, is this the Battlefield of Chaos?”

He addressed the crowd.

But his questions were answered with nothing but bewildered and perplexed stares.

Some of the peasants spoke, but he could not recognize what were they talking about.

“An alien tongue?

“That’s embarrassing.”

In the end, it was with the help of sign language that he managed to communicate with them and conveyed each other’s meanings.

“Oststern, eh?

“What’s this? A new town or a starter town or something?”

When night descended upon Oststern that night, the villagers held a great welcoming celebration.

With the night as a backdrop, Li Mu was surprised to discover that the sickly twenty-meter-tall tree was radiating a dome-like effulgence that kept the entire village under its aegis.

From the aura of this azure-green effulgence, Li Mu sensed that it had the property to ward off evil, keeping the village safe from the sinister airs that pervaded the atmosphere outside and functioning like a natural magical array.

The villagers committed the broken pieces of the gourd to the raging bonfire of the celebration and the ashes were used as dressing for the large magical tree, buried just around its roots.

In the meantime, Li Mu began learning how to speak their languages.

A language using a very ancient form of utterance, the native tongue sounded very similar to the archaic languages Li Mu encountered at the Ziwei Star Zone. That experience helped him to understand some of the words in the language that the inhabitants of the Battlefield use.

And that was how he came to be certain that this dimension really was the Battlefield of Chaos.

To his amazement, this dimension, after so long of being cut off from the rest of the universe, had turned into a whole new world. The host of armies and different races that were once left here had flourished into a new realm of untold and yet macabre peculiarities.

The scourge of war was dying a long and slow death here.

Its embers never fully extinguished.

With the lingering remnants of the old crusade war refusing to yield, fire and blood had long become the defining feature of this savage and harsh underworld

That the villagers of Oststern could still live in relative peace was only because this quiet little hamlet sat very, very far away from the frontlines, being in the middle of nowhere and so far out in the frontiers. The villagers here were constantly tormented by the menace of poverty and privation. Such was life in the Battlefield of Chaos, a world where perils prowl every lurking shadow everywhere and the weak suffer what they must.

The townsfolk of Oststern knew little about the rest of the world.

But Li Mu could care less.

He needed to regain his strength and power. That was the matter of the greatest importance.

Although he did not have much to worry on that regard.

The Spiritual Qi in the atmosphere here was the richest in all the planets and dimensions that he had ever been to before. Just breathing in the Spiritual Qi that permeated the air, was enough for even an unskilled man to feel strong and invigorated.

For this reason, the villagers all looked stronger and healthier than the natives of Earth, the Heavenly Land, and the home planets of the Ziwei Star Zone, where an ordinary man could have the arm strength of at least two hundred kilograms.

In just one night, Li Mu channeled his Xiantian discipline, and his powers, from zero, shot precipitously back to the Natural Realm state.

Much of this has everything to do with Li Mu’s perception and acumen.

In the meantime, that was how Li Mu’s stay in Oststern began.

The Battlefield teems with infinite amounts of perils and dangers and that included the areas beyond the protection of the Tree of Eternity, especially after sundown. Having returned to the Natural Realm assured Li Mu of his safety in this village not one bit at all and he was anxious to begin his search for Wang Shiyu’s remaining fragments of her psyche and soul, but he knew he needed to be patient, more so, with so much at stake.

The following day, the villagers went back to their daily lives toiling at the fields but with excitement and fervor still alight.

Food supply was beginning to run tight in Oststern and the villagers needed to harvest the crop before the long winter set in and people could starve.

Li Mu was arranged to live with one of the villagers, another Feng. During the day, he would help with the work in the fields, and at night, he would focus on his meditation. With the Xiantian Skill discipline working constantly, he did not have to worry about not having enough time to meditate, and working with the locals helped him to gradually grasp their language and eventually learn more about this dimension.

That night, Li Mu meditated below the Tree of Eternity.

Despite losing all his powers initially, being back to basics was an opportunity he readily welcomed.

He could re-learn the combat techniques and disciplines he had once discovered in Molderad. Not unlike a chalkboard now completely wiped erased of its contents, he could now once again fill his “chalkboard” with more content, this time more orderly and well-organized than before.

To put it bluntly: to tear everything all down to rebuild.

One night.

“Come on, little chicky… Why aren’t you growing up?” The young little girl Xing Yan was cradling the golden little chick, talking to it while she tried to feed it some vegetables and seeds.

The little golden creature was also entrusted to the care of Feng, just like Li Mu. The six-year-old Xing Yan was the Fengs’ only daughter and the innocent and adorable tot just loved animals so much, although she loved spending time with Li Mu as well.

“Do you know? This little thing was an angel. A twenty-winged archangel more than tens of thousands of years old. I guess he’ll need time to grow up,” Li Mu grinned.

He knew right from the start what that little chicken was: Archangel Colombo that Old Swindler had caught. Somehow, that old thing had decided to show some mercy and chose instead to insert the archangel’s soul into his fruit. That was how they became fellow commuters that arrived here in the Battlefield of Chaos together.

Perhaps this was why his calabash gourd took two months to ripen.

“But what’s an angel, Li Mu?” Little Xing Yan asked excitedly, “Are angels great? How should I feed it? Would it keep us safe when it grows up?”

“Well, angels are not animals… So maybe you can try some food that we humans eat. Try avoiding grasses, vegetables, and seeds,” Li Mu suggested.

“Oh, all right.”

A few days later, little Xing Yan came with trotting happily around until she found Li Mu, “Look, Li Mu! The angel’s eating! He’s growing up!”

She was cradling a hen. A golden hen.

“And it does grow up…”

Li Mu mused wryly. But there was no neglecting the golden hen’s venomous stare at him.

Then they heard Feng calling his daughter out to help out with some chores.

“Let me take care of the chicken for you, Xin Yan,” offered Li Mu, hatching a plot.

“All right,” she responded, consigning the chicken into his arms before she scampered off.

Li Mu watched her leave. Next, he placed the hen on the ground. He beamed at it broadly and said, “All right, off with the theatrics. I know that you’ve regained your memory. Let’s talk.”

The chicken clucked ignorantly, pretending to not hear him.

Li Mu gave it a ferocious swipe and the mauled fowl shed golden feathers in its attempt to escape.

“Quit pretending or I’ll slaughter you for meat,” Li Mu remarked viciously, “Or do you still think you’re still that twenty-winged archangel? You’ll do well to remember that I only have use for you, or you would have been on the dinner table already.”

“You are Li Mu. I shall remember this well,” the chicken spoke, at last, using the local tongue of this dimension.

“Look at how pitiful you look now,” snorted Li Mu. “You don’t know how to regain your powers, don’t you? So you better obey me before you really end up in tonight’s soup.”

“And what do you want to know?” Colombo relented at last.

The status quo really was not in his favor.

“Tell me about this world,” said Li Mu after a moment of thought.

Colombo had powers comparable to the pre-Emperor class and it was very likely that he had lost his powers during the journey here. But being such a powerful figure in the past would mean that he must know more about the Battlefield than the average inhabitant of Oststern.