"You have betrayed Our trust and confidence, Greenwood. That is why We took your Amaranthine Clouddew Tree. Let’s call it even between us. You may depart as well." 

Celestial Emperor Taiyuan was strangely polite and tolerant. 

Greenwood gasped. "Were you the one who carried off the tree, Your Majesty?"

The Amaranthine Clouddew Tree had been the godking's life. He never expected the celestial emperor to be behind its disappearance!

At the time, he had believed the heavenly dao to be displeased with his treatment of it!

Greenwood opened his mouth for a moment, then shut it in depressed embarrassment. As he left toward the exit, he murmured, "Your Majesty, do I meet with the same fate as Whiteriver?"

"Yes," Taiyuan replied coolly. 

He hadn't taken the lives of those who'd betrayed him, but neither was he going to offer clemency. Greenwood and Whiteriver weren’t the culprits, but their opposition to his release were incriminatory enough in itself. 

Only Ninecauldrons remained. 

The last godking was as white as a ghost. He had cursed the celestial emperor the most viciously just now. Everything pointed to him as the villain. He wanted to break out into tears.

He was innocent!

Though he hated the emperor's refinement of the Sun Moon Pill and had participated in the uprising because of it, he was truthfully no guiltier than Greenwood. 

What could he say for himself at this juncture though? 

"You had a lot of fun cursing Us just now, Ninecauldrons, did you not? Some of what you said was quite reasonable. However, casting all blame for the decline of Taiyuan Plane upon Our head puts your malice on display. 

“We can understand ambition. You want the creation token so that you might rule in Our place. Your slanderous lies are what makes you intolerable. Taiyuan Plane will not have you any longer. Slap yourself three times, then leave like the other two!"

"Father!" Jiang Chen was dissatisfied. This bastard had afflicted his father and the Taiyuan Realm for hundreds of thousands of years. Three slaps were too light a punishment!

Taiyuan smiled smoothly. "Don't get so excited, my son. Old Ninecauldrons isn’t ambitious or clever enough to be the true mastermind." 

"What?" The young man gasped.

Jiang Huan and everyone else in the audience were taken aback as well. 

Ninecauldrons was astonished and grateful. He knew he wasn't the chief scoundrel, but he hadn't expected Taiyuan to know that. 

If the mastermind wasn't Greenwood, Whiteriver, or himself… then who could it be?

How could the three shadiest godkings all be innocent?

Crimsonwaters, Hoarfrost, and the other vassals were all flabbergasted. There was more to this mystery than met the eye. 

"Can it be them?" Some turned toward Skypillar and Darknorth, but their bloodless complexions and trembling lips showed them to be soft stuff. 

And yet, the rest of the vassals were much lower in status and strength. There was even less of a chance that it was one of them.

Taiyuan sighed softly. "Things have already come to this, and still you will not show yourself? Why must you continue this charade?" 

He murmured these words into the void. However, Jiang Chen's consciousness was extraordinarily sharp and picked up the faintest of auras hidden in the direction his father had spoken. 

"Get out here!" The young man slammed down a distorting mass of power, damaging the fabric of space there with the power of the four sacred beasts. 

"Tsk, you really aren't trash anymore, you little animal!" The voice that responded was sinister and filled with intense malice. "Why aren't you dead yet, Taiyuan? Why didn't hundreds of thousands of years wear you to nothingness?"

Many godkings paled when they heard the voice. How could this be?

The voice belonged to a subject that ought to have died at least two hundred thousand years ago.

"Godking Mirrorbloom!" someone yelped. 

Mirrorbloom was a woman who had served as one of Celestial Emperor Taiyuan's most trusted advisors and his cherished strategist.

She and her faction had always been only a hair below the emperor himself in strength.

Alas, she had disappeared shortly after the coup, believed by many due to the fact that she had openly supported the emperor both before and after it. 

Fallen to the mastermind that had staged the coup, no doubt. 

Thus, she had slowly been forgotten about as a footnote in history. 

Who could imagine that she wasn't dead after all! Not only that, but she had been the hand in the shadows behind the entire affair!

Truly, this was a wholly fantastic revelation.

Mirrorbloom's figure emerged from the air. All onlookers were bewildered.

Her face was just as stunning as before, but ferocity and viciousness tinged it now as well.  Her extended hermitage had caused her skin to take on a sickly pallor. 

"If you wanted Our domain, Mirrorbloom, you should have simply asked. Why did you do something like this? Was there really a need?" Taiyuan sighed. 

"Enough of your pretend sympathy, you old pervert! If you had really wanted to pass the throne to me, you wouldn't have refined the Sun Moon Pill or raised other potential heirs!" Mirrorbloom gnashed her teeth. 

"Jiang Chen is my son. Should I have simply let him die in front of me?" The celestial emperor sighed again. 

"Your son?" Mirrorbloom spat words full of venom. "A son who was utterly useless! I told you time and time again I would gladly bear any number of children for you. I waited by your bedside, as naked as the day I came to this world, but you just brushed me off! You said that you saw me only as a daughter, you lying hypocrite!"

The shocking secrets that were finally being brought to light dumbfounded the others. Such details regarded the celestial emperor's private life!

"I have a wife," replied Taiyuan coolly. "She may have departed from this existence, but my son remains as proof of our love. The entire world knows I see you only as a child, Mirrorbloom."

"I don't want to be just a daughter! What use is that? Is a foster daughter worthy of inheriting the rule of the realm? I want to be empress! I want to rule the realm myself!" Mirrorbloom snarled savagely.

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