Wei Yuan opened his eyes to find himself collapsed amidst ruins, without a soul in sight. With a stir of his divine sense, he realized he had only lost consciousness for a fleeting moment. Yet his stomach was churning violently, pitching in waves with an urge to vomit.
Such a thing had never happened before. Suppressing the nausea immediately, Wei Yuan first examined himself and found nothing amiss. He then looked into the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, where all was peaceful. Everyone was busy at their duties, handling the vast and tangled affairs coming from Qingming. The only irregularity was that the egg he had been unable to lift now had a crack across its surface.
Wei Yuan stood beside the egg and studied it for a good while, but could discern nothing. The fissure had not spread any further, nor was there any vitality within the egg. Instead, an ancient aura of weathered ages emanated from it, its origin unknown.
Wei Yuan sensed that something was off. Just as he was about to observe it more closely, he suddenly felt the arrival of an immortal outside.
Withdrawing his divine consciousness, he saw the Sword Palace Master reappear. Looking secretive and slightly tense, the master produced a small sword and whispered hurriedly, "Hang this on you at once, and do not move."
Wei Yuan did as instructed and hung the little sword over his chest. In an instant, dense corpse qi suffused his entire body. His divine consciousness grew numb, rendering him entirely unable to move. Beside him, the Sword Palace Master lowered his eyes, entering a meditative trance.
A moment later, an immense, icy will with undetectable boundaries swept across the land. Had the small sword not elevated the tier of his divine sense, Wei Yuan would not have been able to perceive this will at all. It was too vast, too lofty—like a colossal beast perched high above, surveying the ants scuttling back and forth across the plains below.
The will itself was so gigantic that it far exceeded the outermost limits of Wei Yuan's divine sweep. Thus, once engulfed by it, no matter how he scanned his surroundings, he remained entirely within it, making it impossible to detect its presence—much like mortals in their daily lives, who are wholly unaware of the air around them.
Wei Yuan had no idea what was happening, but seeing that even the Sword Palace Master was bracing as if facing a mortal foe, he naturally dared not make any movement.
Meanwhile, inside the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, now that Wei Yuan's divine consciousness had receded and remained frozen, the realm instantly sprang to life!
Three terrifying torrents of sword qi surged forth from the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss, slashing one after another toward Maiden Yin-Yang. Standing upon the earth, Yin-Yang summoned boundless yin-yang twin qi that surged like a tempest, two true dragons wheeling and coiling endlessly to scatter the torrents of sword qi.
Amidst this earth-shaking battle, the fissures across the eggshell spread rapidly and multiplied. At last, with a crisp snap, a small piece of shell bounced off, and a wisp of shadow rose from within.
This wisp of shadow seemed detached from all things in the world—imperceptible and untouchable. Its existence could only be "seen" by the contrast it cast against the surrounding environment.
It appeared to possess a will of its own, slowly crawling toward the sky beyond the vault of heaven. Its destination, astoundingly, was the orbit of the Fifth Grotto-Heaven, which Wei Yuan had not yet finished calculating.
For an instant, the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World fell silent again.
Wei Yuan had a faint inkling of something stirred, but the terrifying will had only just passed, and the residual force of the little sword still held sway. He was still immobilized, his divine sense frozen, incapable of examining the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World.
Within the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, the galaxy of sword qi and the yin-yang true dragons vanished at the same time.
Xihe kicked Liandeng aside, snatched the Blue Lamp, and its flame flared wildly in an instant. Half of the celestial plants in the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World abruptly stiffened as their divine consciousnesses spun out of control in furious calculation. As for Liandeng, hair sprouted rapidly from his scalp, plunging past his knees in a flash before falling off, only to sprout anew in an endless cycle.
Countless streams of data poured through Xihe's fingertips, turning into a blazing torrent. Amid the raging flames and firelight, the incomplete orbit of the Fifth Grotto-Heaven in the sky was being pieced together at a speed visible to the naked eye!
Yin-Yang lightly tapped a finger as well. The other half of the celestial plants stiffened, entirely stripped of their autonomous consciousness. At the same time, mortals who were not occupied with Qingming affairs were assigned tasks in an instant; countless streams of data were distributed down and returned as newly computed results.
Yin-Yang pointed again. A speck of light appeared in front of the shadow, enticing it to alter its course and crawl toward the light. Ahead of it, point after point of light materialized, coalescing into an orbital path of radiance that finally merged seamlessly with the newly completed orbit of the Fifth Grotto-Heaven.
The entire Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World seemed to turn into a bottomless abyss, voraciously devouring the surrounding heaven and earth origin qi. Meanwhile, the temperature inside climbed steadily until it felt like the height of sweltering summer.
Amid the boiling tumult of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, only the celestial laurel tree was left in a daze, unable to understand why those two hadn't come to her if they needed computing power. Feeling inexplicably melancholy, she began rummaging for snacks.
……
The Sword Palace Master was the first to recover. Glancing around and seeing that all was calm, he let out a long breath and removed the little sword from Wei Yuan's chest.
"What was that just now?"
"I cannot say for certain either. In any case, it bodes no good. Whenever the world falls into turmoil and the living are plunged into misery, it appears. Yet neither the Sword Palace nor the Palace of Grand Beginning—indeed, none of the great immortal sects—possesses the slightest record of it. Only the few of us who have ascended to immortality can retain memories of it, and even then, only if we have experienced it firsthand. No doubt some mighty figure erased its karma in antiquity, leaving virtually no trace in worldly chronicles.
"This time, I let you perceive it in advance so that you would remember it. When it appears next, you will be able to sense it and disguise yourself in time."
Wei Yuan felt a chill of solemn awe. Recognizing that this was something far beyond his current realm, he simply committed it to memory. Once he had seen off the Sword Palace Master, Wei Yuan hurriedly entered the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World to inspect what had occurred.
The moment he stepped into the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, he was dumbfounded.
Inside, the realm was peaceful yet bustling. Most mortals had been assigned tasks, with only a few relaxing and taking advantage of the free time to pursue their hobbies—fishing, carving, seal cutting, inscribing poems upon the walls, and the like.
The sole, colossal anomaly was that along the orbit of the Fifth Grotto-Heaven, part of a full moon had actually appeared!
Only a short arc of this moon was full and rounded; the rest was riddled with gaps, looking as if chewed away by insects.
Looking closer, Wei Yuan realized that the moon was not eroding, but completing itself. Patches of shadow wriggled across its surface. With every shift, they released another fragment of the moon, which was slowly growing whole.
Watching these shadows, Wei Yuan felt an odd sensation, as if they were invisible pouches that had originally contained the moon and were now spitting it back out.
Yet Wei Yuan clearly remembered that he had never finished calculating the orbit of the Fifth Grotto-Heaven. Less than thirty percent of the foundational work had been completed.
Having failed to fully master Chapter Eight of An Initial Exploration of the Desolate Realm, Wei Yuan had not even fully computed the fourth orbit; he had only managed to force it through with karmic luck, reverse-adjusting the third grotto-heaven's orbit so that the third and fourth could coexist.
Yet now, although the giant moon was not yet fully revealed, it was already revolving along the fifth orbit? Wei Yuan was utterly astonished. Could his innate talent truly be so monstrous that he had solved the fifth orbit without even realizing it?
But reason told him: to believe such a claim, he would need to drink a few more jars of wine.
Though only a small piece of this moon had emerged, Wei Yuan had an intuition that it was meant to be an entirely full moon. Furthermore, it was stupendously colossal. By the standards of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, projecting from its curvature, its diameter likely exceeded three thousand li—countless times larger than the other four grotto-heavens combined. In fact, its very presence had already begun to pull and move the body of the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World itself.
The moon was steeped in ancient grandeur, yet Wei Yuan found it vaguely familiar, as though he had seen it somewhere before. However, something had somehow gone amiss with his memories, leaving noticeable gaps.
The more Wei Yuan looked, the more he felt something was unusual. Suddenly, a flash of insight struck him, and he knew what the moon was. It possessed no true physical substance, only a fundamental true meaning; it had not even developed spirituality, remaining an entirely dead, silent celestial body.
It lacked a complete world of heaven and earth, nor did it possess spirituality, which meant... this was a Dao Foundation! The Dao Foundation of some supreme human cultivator from the Yuangu era!
Though devoid of spirituality, this true meaning was intact, replete, without flaw, inherently self-sufficient, and self-evident in its uniqueness. In other words, this was an incomparable ancient full moon.
How on earth had such a thing entered the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World, and even become his Fifth Grotto-Heaven?
At this moment, Wei Yuan felt just as he had when he first acquired Maiden Yin-Yang.
As the saying goes, a common man incurs no guilt until he bears a jade treasure. Now that Wei Yuan bore two such treasures, his crime was worthy of ten thousand deaths.
Chapter 1008