Silver flashes crashed down in relentless succession like streaks of heavenly thunder.
Beneath that resplendent, divine might, the humanoid figure hidden within the black mirror shifted from curses to agonized wails, and eventually to pathetic pleading.
Yet Li Fan's divine clone had never harbored the slightest intention of showing mercy.
Unlike an avatar, a divine clone could not autonomously draw spiritual energy from heaven and earth to replenish itself. The power it had accumulated was depleted with every bit spent, so it had to ensure absolute success without the slightest mishap.
The silver thunderbolts ground away like a massive millstone, relentlessly pulverizing the humanoid black mist.
Seizing the opportunity, Li Fan's divine clone rapidly formed hand seals, employing the technique of formation refining in an attempt to wrest control of the black mirror.
The black mirror had no master, yet because it had been nurtured with the bloodline of Sun Clan disciples at regular intervals over the years, a wondrous and subtle connection had formed between it and the clan.
Under normal circumstances, only members of the Sun Clan could use it, let alone refine it.
However, Li Fan's array mastery—bolstered by the accumulations of multiple lifetimes within the Terminal Dissociation Disc—had already attained an unfathomable level.
Layer upon layer of formations stacked together, allowing him to bypass such constraints entirely.
Even as Li Fan's clone refined the black mirror right now, Sun Luyuan, who shared a special resonance with it, remained completely oblivious.
As time quietly trickled away, unnoticed by anyone, the black mirror quietly changed hands.
Li Fan's divine clone condensed into physical form and weighed the black mirror in his hand.
He could sense that the humanoid black mist—the black mirror's "artifact spirit"—was curled up inside the mirror, shivering in terror, filled with immense dread and apprehension toward him.
Li Fan could not care less about what it thought. Narrowing his eyes, he grasped the full history of the Sun Clan's ancestral treasure in a single instant.
Over a thousand years ago, the Sun brothers, Sun Luyuan and Sun Luyao, had stumbled upon a somewhat damaged bronze mirror during the exploration of an ancient ruin.
At first, the two brothers assumed the bronze mirror was merely a common antique and paid it little heed. But when they brought it into the Heavenly Profound Mirror intending to sell it, something baffling occurred.
The Heavenly Profound Mirror turned a completely blind eye to the bronze mirror—or rather, entirely ignored its existence! Though it was clearly present within the Heavenly Profound Mirror's space, it simply could not appear on the trading registry.
After repeated confirmation, the brothers realized they had struck gold.
From then on, they made all manner of attempts to discover the proper way to use this miraculous bronze mirror. At the time, however, they were merely Golden Core cultivators; neither their strength nor their knowledge was sufficient to unravel its secrets.
It remained so until a century later.
The elder brother, Sun Luyuan, discovered a miniature grotto-heaven, intending to use it to achieve his breakthrough to the Nascent Soul realm.
Sun Luyao stood guard as his protector. Careful and vigilant though they were, man proposes but heaven disposes: they inadvertently alerted a passing cultivator at Golden Core perfection.
Golden Core and Nascent Soul—a single realm apart, yet worlds apart.
With a chance for breakthrough right before his eyes, that Golden Core cultivator naturally had no reason to pass it up.
To ensure his elder brother could break through smoothly, Sun Luyao staked his very life to hold off the enemy's assault.
By the time Sun Luyuan successfully broke through to the Nascent Soul realm and furiously slaughtered the attacker, Sun Luyao was already breathing his last, grievously wounded beyond all hope of recovery.
Just as Sun Luyuan was overcome with grief and despair, he suddenly discovered that the bronze mirror he had carried all along finally stirred!
At the brink of death, Sun Luyao's divine soul fled into the bronze mirror, preserving his existence.
Although he could never emerge from the bronze mirror again, it was still far better than being parted forever by death.
Upon fusing with the bronze mirror, Sun Luyao learned all manner of secrets regarding it.
The bronze mirror was originally named "Boundless." In ancient times, it was a supreme treasure bestowed upon Xuanhuang's Boundless Sect by the Immortal Realm.
Yet with the shifting of the stars and the passage of ages, this immortal artifact had somehow become battered and broken, losing the vast majority of its former might.
Even its original artifact spirit had vanished without a trace, leaving behind only an empty husk in the mortal realm.
Still, it had once been an entity far above the mortal world.
After integrating a new divine soul, it continued to exhibit several incredible abilities.
For example...
Whenever it entered the Heavenly Profound Mirror, it could siphon all manner of information from within.
Furthermore, after accumulating energy over a period of time, the Boundless Mirror could project faint apparitions of light and shadow.
Depicted within those lights and shadows were none other than events that might occur in the future!
Though they could not understand the underlying principle, the discovery left the Sun brothers ecstatic.
Relying on the Boundless Mirror, the brothers embarked on a legendary path to prominence.
Gradually, however, they also detected something bizarre and sinister about the mirror.
Because of its prior damage, the mirror's fractured state began to corrode Sun Luyao inside. His soul eroded continuously, and no matter what methods Sun Luyuan tried, he could not halt the process.
In the end, only through a stroke of fortune did he manage to slow the dissipation of his brother's soul by using his own essence blood.
If that had been all, it might still have been manageable.
After attaining the Nascent Soul realm, cultivators of the new method anchored their bodies to grotto-heavens, making them virtually immortal and indestructible. Squeezing out some essence blood was always possible.
The true menace of the Boundless Mirror was its inexorable tendency toward self-destruction.
As though it had once endured an unimaginable catastrophe, the scenes of "Boundless Light" predicting the future would, every few cycles, inevitably culminate in the exact same ending:
Endless darkness, great cataclysm, utter void.
It was as though this were the final destination of the entire world; no matter how the Boundless Mirror deduced the possibilities, it could never escape this fate.
And every time it awoke from the ruin to perform another deduction with the Boundless Light, the mirror seemed tainted by the prophesied black cataclysm, turning one shade darker.
Over the past millennium, though the Sun Clan had leveraged the mirror's power to grow from an insignificant, petty clan into a behemoth boasting four Dao Integration experts, and Sun Luyuan had risen from a mere Nascent Soul cultivator to a grand Dao Integration cultivator, they remained powerless to stop the Boundless Mirror from marching toward destruction.
The only solution Sun Luyuan could devise was to track down the missing shards of the Boundless Mirror to help mend it.
Over the years, relying on the mutual resonance between the pieces, he truly had managed to locate another fragment of the Boundless Mirror.
Yet this merely slowed the pace of its collapse without resolving the fundamental issue.
Moreover, the uncanny foresight displayed during the Sun Clan's rise had long since drawn the attention of calculating eyes.
Setting aside the many schemers lurking in the dark, the greatest benefactor behind the Sun Clan's rise was precisely one of the highest authorities within the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals:
The Mirror Keepers.
One among them, named Fu, had learned of the Boundless Mirror's existence.
Yet he did not seize it by force, and even provided resources to back the Sun Clan's rise.
All of it was because he valued the Boundless Mirror's ability to infiltrate the Heavenly Profound Mirror.
"A damaged immortal artifact, though incomparable to a true supreme treasure of the Heavenly Profound, still has its merits."
"Find a way to restore its power as much as possible."
"In the future, we Mirror Keepers might have a use for it."
Sun Luyuan knew this was poison coated in sugar, yet he had no choice but to swallow it.
According to his original plan, the Sun Clan was supposed to develop as discreetly as possible.
Reality, however, had run entirely contrary to his wishes.
Chapter 1159