A couple of decades had passed since Chen Yuan's soul transmigrated into this mystical immortal cultivation realm, and much had happened during those years.
Going back to the early years.
After wiping out the Lei Clan and seizing their territory, he continued his life in this new world.
He built his own place and formed a small community as its leader with the people who had been slaves and victims of the Lei Clan, right above its ruins.
After that, he pursued this world's unique element—Immortal Cultivation.
Although he was invincible within the Heavenly Domain, he knew too well that strength was not his own—it was a mysterious power bestowed by the system.
If one day the system stopped working or decided to leave him, he would be left with nothing and become, once again, a defenseless ordinary mortal in this dangerous world.
Thinking of losing this power made him tremble in fear.
The power that let him decide his own fate—he didn't want to lose even a tiny fraction of it, and he was willing to risk anything to keep it forever.
In order to avoid such a thing from happening to him, he began his path toward true immortality, earning his own strength.
The road of cultivation was smooth for him, as the Heavenly Domain System provided everything he needed, whether it be cultivation resources or techniques; he had it all.
He only needed to pay Heavenly Points—earned through the system's quests and other means—which served as currency to buy all the things from the Heavenly Exchange, aka system shop.
This continued for a while, but everything changed after he became a Qi Gathering Realm cultivator.
Ding!
[Main Quest: Initial]
Quest Title: The Heavenly Regulator's Duty
Description: As the Heavenly Regulator, you have a duty to bring heavenly order to the Heavenless Realm.
Objective: Rule over the White Cloud Realm and eliminate all heavenly traitors within 1,000,000 years.
Rewards: ???
Failure Penalty: Existence erasure.
…
With the appearance of the main quest, his chill and peaceful daily life within his safe domain came to an end.
The failure penalty of the main quest was far too severe to ignore, so he entered an intense cultivation mode, determined to grow stronger as quickly as possible to prevent his very existence from being erased.
At some point, the Heavenly Points he had earned from eradicating the Lei Clan began to run low, and he found himself in need of more.
But.
Easy missions, such as building a house for the people or finding a lost kitten, were no longer available.
Dangerous missions were assigned one after another, forcing him to risk his life in a place outside his own domain.
He had to do it.
Otherwise, he won't have enough Heavenly Points to spend on his cultivation resources.
Though the dangers he faced were many, they came with great rewards.
He became stronger as a cultivator, and his cultivation realm increased rapidly; within just a few decades, he was already on the verge of becoming a Grand Unity Expert—the same cultivation realm that the strongest elder of the Lei Clan had attained.
And recently, he was assigned one of the most astonishing and most difficult missions—building a kingdom and founding a fortune dynasty with him as the emperor.
As someone who came from modern Earth, the very idea of becoming an emperor felt uncomfortable to him. He had no desire to bear responsibility for millions of lives, yet this mission had to be completed, for its reward was worth more than anything 'Chen Yuan' had ever hoped for.
He needed a billion ordinary mortals and ten thousand cultivators to be his new kingdom's citizens for the quest to complete.
The cultivator part was not hard since he had already trained most of his followers from the early years to be cultivators; he just needed to train more people.
The problem was the mortals; a billion people were a huge number, but it was just a minimum requirement for this world to form a fortune dynasty.
The small community consisted of just a little over a million people, mostly former slaves of the Lei Clan or nearby residents.
The process was smooth for people from his small community; he kept them safe, fed their stomachs for a decade, and they quickly pledged their loyalty.
They immediately became the first batch of citizens. This granted his forming kingdom the first million citizens; he needed 999 million more.
So, to complete the mission, he began to gather people from within and around the Heavenly Domain.
It didn't take long for him to turn all the people within his Heavenly Domain into his citizens, since his name and deed had already been known to the mortals living around the Lei Clan territory as someone who brought retribution to the evil Lei Clan.
They already worshiped him as a god.
The second recruitment granted him half of what he needed.
500 million more to complete the mission.
500 million people were needed; that was where the real problem began.
Smuggling a large number of mortals was challenging; it could not be done without anyone noticing, especially since those mortals had been smuggled into the new forbidden zone of the Burning Cloud Realm.
The Burning Cloud Imperium immediately noticed his movements and secretly sent a powerful cultivator to investigate.
Chen Yuan noticed that his actions had been spotted, but things couldn't be delayed, as the mission time limit was closing in; he had to risk his life for this mission to be completed.
During this smuggling event, he fought hostile cultivators who tried to sabotage his mission one after another.
Those he could manage, he killed on the spot; those much stronger than him, he lured into the Heavenly Domain and killed.
Over and over, fighting events took place around the forbidden zone.
Things were not as smooth as when he did things within his own domain, but it was still in his favor.
He safely returned every time whenever he had to fight against the strong enemy to protect and bring his citizens to a new home, but not without cost, since his repeated combats made his enemies aware of his existence as the lord of the forbidden zone and gave them some knowledge of how the Heavenly Domain worked.
They stopped pursuing him beyond the boundary of the domain; this made him lose some of the Heavenly Points he would have gained from killing them, but he didn't care much since the mission was the most important.
Eventually, the mission reached a critical point; he only needed to bring a few more thousand people for the mission to be complete.
That was when the greatest adversary in this world arrived—The Heavenless Immortal.
One of the Heavenless Immortals from the Burning Cloud Imperium, one of the strongest cultivators of this realm, personally had come for him.
Chen Yuan had been captured helplessly under the Heavenless Immortal's might while he was about to bring the last batch of people into his domain, and those unfortunate mortals were killed on the spot when this immortal arrived, which made him grieve—they had bet their lives on him, and he had failed.
At the same time, he was angry at this immortal.
Very angry.
He had been subjected to numerous mysterious techniques by the Immortal, as this Immortal tried to uncover the secret of the Heavenly Domain, also known by the Imperium and the rest of the world as the Land of No Return, a newly merged forbidden zone.
Mind searched, illusion tricks, or physical torture—Chen Yuan underwent them all. Even a trained soldier like him, this Immortal's torture techniques were so advanced that if he were his old self, all of his secrets would already have been revealed.
Fortunately, due to the Heavenly Regulator Physique, his ability to retain his own secrets was unmatched; all attempts to dig his secrets without his consent were impossible.
When the Heavenless Immortal noticed that his attempts were useless, he was about to unalive Chen Yuan.
At that moment, the miracle happened.
Back in the territory under the Heavenly Domain, thousands of women were giving birth to infants at the same time; this brought the number of citizens to the billion mark, instantly completing the mission.
Ding!
Quest: Establishing the Heavenly Kingdom [Success]
You have acquired: 1,000,000,000 Heavenly Points, Kingdom Management [Function Unlock], Resurrection Token x1.
With the reward he was granted from completing the mission, he immediately used all of his newly gained Heavenly Points to increase the Heavenly Domain's range.
Instantly, the domain's range increased from 200,000 kilometers to millions of kilometers, covering where he and the Immortal were—the tables had turned.
With invincibility, Chen Yuan immediately stripped the Immortal of his strength and threw him into prison. He kept this old monster alive; he wanted to make him taste his own medicine later.
For him, he had something more important to do.
The reward from the quest gave him a Resurrection Token, which allowed him to revive someone from death.
This was a chance to fix Chen Yuan's guilt, as he was the only one who survived the Lei Clan's hand.
New Chen Yuan used this token to revive Chen Lu, Old Chen Yuan's little sister.
…
Present.
Chen Yuan gazed beyond the boundary of the Heavenly Domain, and he found the army of the Burning Cloud Imperium surrounding the domain from all directions.
Losing one of the Heavenless Immortals, making the imperium act intensively toward his domain; they controlled everything going in and out—not even a single fly could slip past their observation.
'This is troublesome,' He thought.
If he could get out of the domain to do the quest, he would not be able to earn Heavenly Points effectively, which would slow his cultivation.
While Chen Yuan was deep in thought about the solution for cultivation resources, the system notice rang.
Ding!…