Unlike what occurred when the elders of the Celestial Vessel made contact with the ancient seal character, no reversion took place within Ou Shangtian's already youthful body. Deep inside him, the Kunqian Bone Hand trembled with faint, imperceptible vibrations, absorbing and assimilating all the might of the ancient glyph.
Li Fan was not sure whether "absorbing and assimilating" was the most accurate way to describe the process. All he could sense was that a peculiar resonance had formed between the ancient seal character and the Kunqian Bone Hand.
As a result, the power of the True Immortal seal character that should have acted upon Ou Shangtian's physical body was completely diverted into this strange item, the Kunqian Bone Hand.
Meanwhile, the other strange item residing within Ou Shangtian, the Ten Thousand Deaths Register, showed no reaction whatsoever.
Stirred by the resonance of the power of [Ancient], the Kunqian Bone Hand began to undergo a subtle, quiet transformation.
Upon those stark, bare white bones, thin streaks of dark red flesh and blood unexpectedly emerged. They were mere hair-thin threads, virtually impossible to detect, but Li Fan had watched the entire process from the beginning and spotted the abnormality at once.
The sprouting of flesh and blood made the Kunqian Bone Hand appear all the more wondrous, as though it were suddenly infused with spirit and had come alive. Even without Ou Shangtian controlling it, the skeletal fingers twitched faintly on their own.
"Ugh..." Ou Shangtian let out a muffled groan in his deep slumber. Clearly, the disturbance from the strange item within was subjecting him to considerable agony.
Li Fan pressed both hands against Ou Shangtian's head, soothing him back into a heavy, tranquil sleep.
A ray of golden light sprang from Li Fan's hand, condensing into a razor-sharp scalpel. He sliced downward toward Ou Shangtian's arm.
The flesh was not torn; the golden scalpel phased directly into Ou Shangtian's body and reached the Kunqian Bone Hand.
As though sensing the approach of an external foe, the Kunqian Bone Hand began to shudder violently and incessantly, even showing signs of wanting to tear free and flee, heedless of whether its host lived or died.
Yet how could Li Fan ever let it have its way?
Fine golden threads branched out from the small blade, turning into chains that pinned the Kunqian Bone Hand firmly in place.
The blade's radiant silhouette shifted fluidly, swiftly scraping away every inch of the newly grown flesh from the skeletal hand.
Faint, shrill, and resentful howls seemed to ring in his ears. Unmoved, Li Fan wove a golden net out of Source Power Essence, gathering and sealing all of the flesh within it.
Without the influence of the newly formed flesh, the Kunqian Bone Hand grew quiet and peaceful once more.
Ou Shangtian, however, looked as though he had suffered severe internal injuries, his face frighteningly pale.
Flicking out a strand of spiritual energy to nourish the boy's body, Li Fan took the lump of flesh—now curled inside the net of Source Power Essence and seemingly drained of life—and flashed down beneath the Dao Lecture Platform.
Above the platform, the phantom continued its ceaseless instruction.
In the massive hollow excavated beneath it, Li Fan had already commenced his examination of the flesh.
"The Kunqian Bone Hand is identical in form to the White Bone Vanguard Realm. According to its master, Dao Integration cultivator Zi Miao, the White Bone Vanguard Realm was modeled after an illustrated scroll he once saw depicting a True Immortal relic..."
"Which means this is very likely True Immortal flesh and blood?"
Li Fan narrowed his eyes, staring at the dark red tissue inside the golden net.
Having escaped from True Immortals multiple times, and having witnessed Cat Treasure swallow a True Immortal in one bite with his own eyes, any awe Li Fan once felt toward True Immortals had long since vanished.
In this life, by a stroke of fortune, Trueness's reversion charging progress had surged and doubled, allowing him to trigger Trueness three consecutive times.
With his safety fully assured, Li Fan began attempting his research on this True Immortal flesh.
The first thing he could confirm was that the mass of True Immortal flesh before him possessed no consciousness of its own. Its ability to move was far more like the instinctual reflex of an organism.
"Still, the amount of gathered flesh is very small right now. If there were more, that might be a different story." Li Fan remained exceedingly prudent in this regard.
This lump of flesh was certainly enough for research. Once it was largely consumed, he could simply harvest more from Ou Shangtian.
Li Fan began by conducting a rough analysis of the True Immortal flesh's composition.
Using the Source Power Essence blade, he sliced off a tiny piece. Golden light then spun relentlessly, transforming into a meat grinder that pulverized the small morsel.
"No immortal spiritual energy." This was within Li Fan's expectations, so he felt no disappointment.
"The bodily tissue is separating from the blood. The vitality of the tissue is noticeably inferior to the True Immortal's blood. In this blood, there seems to be a peculiar energy concealed..."
Li Fan's eyes brightened. He separated a wisp of divine sense, intending to probe the isolated blood.
To his surprise, the instant his divine sense made contact with the True Immortal's blood, it felt as though it had slammed into a searing iron gate. Dizziness and violent shockwaves struck him, and more than half of the wisp was instantly vaporized by the blistering heat contained in the blood.
"Hm?"
It was clearly just a separated wisp of divine sense, yet the shock and burning sensation it suffered were mirrored onto Li Fan's true divine sense in real time.
His head felt as though it had taken a brutal blow from a heavy club, followed by a raging blaze igniting within his soul.
It was an agony akin to having one's soul scattered. Had an ordinary cultivator encountered this unprepared, they likely would have been wiped out on the spot.
Yet Li Fan was no ordinary cultivator.
Empowered by the Limitless Waxing and Waning Method, his soul cycled and regenerated, rendering it nearly indestructible.
Even amidst what felt like purgatory, Li Fan gradually endured it.
Given Li Fan's current tolerance, after withstanding this bout of backlash from the True Immortal's blood, cold sweat still beaded on his forehead, and his muscles spasmed continuously.
The searing sensation in his soul slowly subsided. Once everything calmed, Li Fan exhaled a long breath, casting off all discomfort.
"The divide between immortal and mortal..."
"A True Immortal cannot be touched."
That was what the ordeal had impressed upon him.
Even a single drop of blood still asserted the chasm between mortal and immortal in its own way.
However...
Far from making Li Fan draw back, this minor warning only piqued his interest.
The more it tried to keep him out, the more Li Fan wanted to peer within.
Burning his soul?
With the Five Elements returning to One and the Limitless Waxing and Waning in place, his state of an imperishable soul was sufficient to let him weather the backlash and forcibly pry into the mysteries inside the True Immortal's blood.
Endless agony?
On the path Li Fan had walked, he had long since learned to treat pain as nothing.
With a thought, he instantly split off tens of thousands of divine sense threads. Like fearless soldiers, they all charged toward the True Immortal blood inside the golden net.
*Boom! Boom! Boom!*
The backlash of the True Immortal's blood echoed incessantly within Li Fan's soul, striking like a massive hammer.
Tens of thousands of impacts brought tens of thousands of backlashes. Inside Li Fan's soul, it was as though a firestorm had been lit, countless sparks spreading into a raging conflagration.
The pain was beyond words.
Even with the ward of the Immortal Heart Incantation and his supreme willpower, he nearly broke, barely holding himself together.
Li Fan first checked the Trueness interface.
The reversion charging progress remained steady at 400%, showing no drop despite the backlash from the True Immortal's blood. This proved that the backlash of a mere single drop was not enough to threaten Li Fan at his current strength.
With his safety assured, Li Fan maintained the operation of the Waxing and Waning Method as best he could while focusing all his attention on that fiery rampart of True Immortal blood.
Under the relentless assault of countless soul strands, faint fissures seemed to appear in its inner defense.
After a stalemate that lasted an indeterminate time, Li Fan finally breached the True Immortal blood's defenses.
The backlash vanished into thin air, and a refreshing chill washed through his soul.
A light welled from the True Immortal's blood, enveloping Li Fan's divine sense.
A sequence of shifting scenes then surfaced before him.
Everything was shrouded in a luminous haze, rendering the surroundings indistinct.
A furious voice echoed from a tall, distant silhouette.
Broken and intermittent, only fragments could be gathered: "...Qionglang Star Domain... perish... garrison..."
"...Find the target."
"This subject obeys the command," a deep voice sounded from his own form.
The scene shifted once more.
In the next instant, he was already within the Xuanhuang Realm.
Standing high in the sky, looking down upon the myriad living beings below.
Yet his body's attention did not appear to be on the Xuanhuang Realm below.
Instead, it was directed beyond the starry void.
Waiting for something, it seemed.
After who knew how long, a streak of brilliance suddenly arrived from beyond the heavens.
The gaze of the body instantly locked onto it.
Yet he did not interfere, allowing that brilliance to plunge into the Xuanhuang Realm.
Only when the light had completely dimmed and subsided did the figure descend into the mortal realm to inspect it in detail.
"Still not it."
"Though not mediocre either. In those days, there would have been hope of ascending to immortality. A pity..."
The body seemed well accustomed to such an outcome, his tone devoid of joy or sorrow. Shaking his head slightly, he sighed, then returned to the vault of the Xuanhuang Realm's heavens.
He watched in silence, waiting for the arrival of the next target.
...
The vision abruptly froze, then faded and dissolved as rapidly as a bleached photograph.
Li Fan jolted awake from the illusion, returning to the present.
Though what he had experienced in the memory of the True Immortal's blood consisted of only a few fleeting scenes, to Li Fan, it felt as long as a dozen lifetimes.
And that vast passage of time had produced real consequences on his physical body.
His hair had grown down to his waist without him noticing, and it was now streaked with black and white.
The skin on his face, hands, and whole body had developed wrinkles.
Li Fan checked his age on the Trueness interface.
His psychological age was unchanged.
His physiological age cap, however, had been cut down directly to fifty years.
He was still in his thirties, yet his time was already drawing to a close.
"Is this the price of peering into a True Immortal?"
After testing and confirming that heaven-and-earth treasures for extending lifespan in the Xuanhuang Realm could not restore this shaved-down age limit, Li Fan felt a surge of chill in his heart.
"If this had been an ordinary cultivator, they would likely have been driven into a corner right then and there."
"Fortunately, I have Trueness by my side. A fifty-year lifespan limit makes little difference to me."
"I still have twenty years in this life, which is more than enough to complete my arrangements."
His mind settling, Li Fan could not help but recall the scenes he had witnessed within the True Immortal's blood.
"The True Immortal to whom this blood belonged must have come to Xuanhuang under orders to find a certain target..."
"The term 'this subject' is rather telling."
"And that brilliance that arrived from beyond the heavens..."
Li Fan narrowed his eyes.
Connecting this with the information he had gathered from the ancient immortal formation of the Xuanhuang Realm and the Nine-Star Red Bead, a hypothesis inevitably formed in Li Fan's mind: "The ancient Xuanhuang Realm was also capturing."
"Unlike later times when other cultivation realms were captured, the target back then was..."
"People?"
Li Fan's gaze flickered.
"'Though not mediocre either. In those days, there would have been hope of ascending to immortality...'"
Li Fan repeated the True Immortal's words several times in his head.
"Even foreign brilliance with hope of ascending to immortality was not the target he awaited. Just what was..."
Suddenly, for reasons he could not explain, Li Fan thought of himself.
Though the True Immortal's memory was blurred and belonged to an era countless years ago, a faint sense of having survived a brush with death crept into Li Fan's heart.
By the time he came back to his senses, his back was drenched in cold sweat.
This was by no means cowardice on Li Fan's part.
It was the instinctive dread and relief that came after realizing the implications in hindsight.
"Could it be..."
His pounding heart gradually slowed.
Li Fan momentarily left the underground space beneath the Dao Lecture Platform and flashed back to the heavens above the Great Xuan pocket world.
Ten thousand li of cloud cover shielded him from the gaze of the beings on the ground.
Li Fan reflected on the premonition he had just felt.
"Though it sounds somewhat unbelievable..."
"A premonition from the unseen tells me that many years ago, the target of that Xuanhuang True Immortal... could truly have been me?!"
"Or rather, not me, but Trueness!"
Li Fan closed his eyes, keeping the churning shock within him from showing.
"Trueness, Trueness..."
As he murmured the words, the scenery around him grew ethereal and indistinct once more.
Only by isolating himself from the real world did Li Fan feel a modicum of ease.
"Trueness involves the Great Daos of True and False, Real and Unreal."
"Whether strange items of heaven and earth or True Immortal seal characters, even that mysterious symbol that forged Great Heavenly Venerable Xuanhuang—they are all partial projections of the Great Dao."
"Yet only Trueness stands above everything."
"It could be said to be almost the Great Daos of True and False, Real and Unreal themselves..."
Thoughts swirled through Li Fan's mind as he analyzed calmly.
"For a True Immortal to refer to himself as 'this subject,' the tall figure in the distance of that memory must have held an extraordinary status."
"'Qionglang Star Domain... perish...'
Li Fan attempted to deduce the possible truth of the matter from those scattered words.
"It seems the Immortal Realm was already facing a crisis at that time."
"Perish..."
"With the might of a True Immortal, perhaps they deduced that one of the solutions to the Immortal Realm's crisis lay in Trueness."
"Is that why they waited in ambush in the Xuanhuang Realm?"
"Only, for some unknown reason, my arrival here was tens of thousands of years too late."
...
Having stepped away from the True Immortal's memory for a long time, the lingering feeling of surviving a narrow escape finally dissipated from Li Fan's heart.
Without that inexplicable emotion clouding his mind, Li Fan looked back at his previous conjecture and found it almost absurdly laughable.
"What is the truth, then?"
His composure restored, Li Fan flashed down from the heavens back into the underground space.
Looking at the remaining True Immortal blood within the golden net, he fell into deep contemplation for a long time.
"I cannot peer into it again in this life."
"I'll wait until the next life to see if I can uncover more clues."
"Even if that conjecture turns out to be true, it makes no difference. After all, the Immortal Realm suffered a great catastrophe, and those True Immortals who sought to hunt me have already vanished ahead of time!"
A sharp glint crossed Li Fan's eyes, and his state of mind regained its unshakable footing.
Although he could no longer glean memories from the True Immortal's blood in this life, it did not prevent him from continuing his research on the True Immortal's flesh.
"Next, let me see just how resistant True Immortal flesh is to the power of a True Immortal seal character."
Chapter 1324