"I had originally intended to save this soul fragment for the most critical moment."
"From the look of things now, though, I have no choice but to make a move."
Lurking at Wu Ninglu's side, he had already become thoroughly familiar with her habits and demeanor.
Controlling her body, Li Fan's soul fragment came up with an excuse and left the Sun Clan without arousing anyone's suspicion.
Then, after shaking off the pursuit of the Medicine Hall's Chen Clan, he arrived at a secluded, uninhabited underground spot in the wilderness. Gathering materials on the spot, he began constructing stone puppets.
He needed to send these stone puppets to the border of the Xuanhuang Realm before the sixteen Dao Integration cultivators departed, in order to observe their method of escape at close range.
With Li Fan's current mastery of formations, he was not worried about being detected by anyone from the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals.
"They say one cannot be in two places at once. I've already divided myself into so many parts, yet it's still not enough."
This soul fragment of Li Fan felt somewhat helpless.
Taking stock:
His true body was concealed within the Protector Hall's Dharma Deduction Jade space.
His sacred embryo was far away on the other side of the sea of stars, prying into the mysteries of the reverberating astral power.
His divine sense in the Boundless Mirror was too weak and lacked the strength...
As for his Sacred Sovereign clone, as luck would have it, Master Yin had dragged him into the Nether Realm.
Thus, this hidden soul fragment had to handle the task in person.
Setting aside the situation in the sea of gloomy darkness for the moment, the day the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals completed Chuanfa's mission arrived sooner than Li Fan had anticipated.
On the thirty-third day after Void Clarity Flowing Crystals were classified as prohibited goods:
A resplendent rainbow suddenly appeared between the heavens and the earth of the Xuanhuang Realm.
It seemed a blend of all the colors in the world, warped and mesmerizing.
Like a shooting star flying in reverse, it pierced the firmament and surged grandly away.
Under the watchful eyes of countless onlookers, the rainbow light tore through the Xuanhuang Realm's sky.
The myriad afterglows it left behind lingered for days, saturating the dome of heaven without dissipating.
For the following half month, the sky of the Xuanhuang Realm remained mottled with seven colors, fantastical and dreamlike.
Curious cultivators attempted to capture these dispersed rainbow lights.
These brilliant colors proved to possess an actual tangible form, able to be gathered and refined.
Moreover, they possessed the property of making other objects radiate seven-colored light as well.
Recalling the Void Clarity Flowing Crystals that the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals had repeatedly and strictly forbidden anyone to discuss...
How could the cultivators not understand?
This was Void Clarity Flowing Crystal, used to forge a vessel for leaving the realm!
The unraveling of the mystery caused no great panic.
To most cultivators, they knew nothing of the Immortal Ruins' existence, nor did they know that the Xuanhuang Realm was fundamentally inescapable.
They only knew that communication between the Xuanhuang Realm and the outside world had been severed for a long time, and presumed that the Alliance was doing this to re-establish contact.
But these people were of no consequence.
Once the cultivators who truly mattered understood what had occurred, other thoughts began to surface in their minds.
Undercurrents began to surge within the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals.
Rewinding back to when the multicolored rainbow light left the Xuanhuang Realm:
Through the eyes of roughly a hundred stone puppets, Li Fan was able to see the entire process of how the rainbow light escaped the Xuanhuang Realm with far greater clarity.
The moment it left the Xuanhuang Realm, its flight trajectory, just as predicted, suddenly veered away from its originally straight path.
It curved toward the direction of the Immortal Ruins.
However, not all of it did.
Like a lump of dough being steadily stretched, only a portion of the multicolored rainbow light had its trajectory forcibly altered by the gravitational pull of the Immortal Ruins.
The remainder continued to streak swiftly toward the depths of the sea of stars with unwavering resolve.
As the multicolored rainbow light sped forward, more and more colors were drawn away, falling toward the Immortal Ruins.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo...
The disappearance of these colors caused the rainbow light's hue to gradually simplify, until finally, only a single wisp of purple qi remained, flying solitary into the unknown sea of stars.
From the perspective of the Xuanhuang Realm below, it looked as though a beam of light shot into the sea of stars had simply dispersed into various colors.
It seemed merely an intriguing phenomenon, hardly warranting significant discussion.
Yet in Li Fan's eyes, this scene was scarcely different from a miracle.
"It actually withstood the gravitational pull of the Immortal Ruins?!"
"No, rather than calling it withstanding, it's more accurate to say it delayed and neutralized it!"
"By releasing a portion of the pull it was subjected to, it counteracted the forces acting upon it to a certain degree. Then, as layer after layer was shed while it rapidly distanced itself from the Immortal Ruins, the gravitational attraction grew smaller and smaller."
"Only countless precise calculations could achieve such a feat!"
"This is not a victory of pure strength, but the triumph of finesse!"
In Li Fan's mind, the dynamic curve of the separating colors replayed over and over.
It seemed to harbor boundless profundity.
The Dao Transformation Stone crystal whirred at high speed, attempting to deduce and recreate it within his sea of consciousness.
Yet just after the yellow light separated, he felt dizzy and faint, unable to hold on.
With a trace of regret, he had no choice but to stop.
"Is this the method Chuanfa devised?"
"Elegant."
Li Fan could only offer that two-word appraisal.
"The Void Clarity Flowing Crystals were likely used solely to separate the different colors."
"As for the primary motive force to break free of the Xuanhuang Realm, it should still be those sixteen Dao Integration cultivators."
"With Longevity realm experts bound to the world of the Xuanhuang Realm, unless one reaches a realm like Chuanfa's, it should be impossible to leave easily. Dao Integration is already the highest level of combat power that Xuanhuang can deploy."
"Though they were forced to mature prematurely by the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals, I can still sense that the auras of those sixteen Dao Integration cultivators were not weak."
Li Fan's thoughts surged.
The sight of that multicolored rainbow light leaving the Xuanhuang Realm had shaken him deeply.
Only when someone effortlessly achieves a goal you have striven toward for so long without success do you truly feel the existence of the gap between you.
"Heavenly Venerable Chuanfa is indeed far beyond ordinary mortals."
"Yet no matter. Once I master this method, when I use Trueness..."
"I will once again be ahead of him."
...
In the Great Qi Sacred Dynasty:
Sun Erlang looked at Yi Shu with some curiosity.
Lately, this senior would occasionally freeze up in the middle of speaking.
If he had not personally witnessed the terrifying nature of the Dao Transformation Mother Stone and known that the Mother Stone was likely diverting computational power, Sun Erlang might have thought Yi Shu had developed some form of dementia.
Still, what was the Mother Stone doing that caused even these split bodies of the Taiyan Sect to be affected?
Having spent considerable time with Yi Shu, Sun Erlang had developed a good sense of the Taiyan collective's temperament.
Rather than guessing blindly, he simply asked.
Only after quite a while did Yi Shu snap back to reality.
"It is nothing. I merely thought of a way to escape without abandoning the Mother Stone's main body under certain extreme circumstances."
"Before achieving complete indestructibility of information, losing the Dao Transformation Stone's main body would still have a tremendous impact on us," Yi Shu explained to Sun Erlang.
"Extreme circumstances?" Having witnessed the Mother Stone's power with his own eyes and having undergone reincarnations in simulated worlds, Sun Erlang found it difficult to imagine what kind of catastrophe could reduce the Mother Stone to fleeing in disgrace.
Chapter 1214