Though the upper half of his body had already dissolved into a puddle of blood and flesh, Li Fan could still "feel" it: the Retrograde Boat that the Heavenly Emperor Tai had given him remained quietly within his "mind."
Now, in answer to Li Fan's desperate yearning to travel against the current, the boat began to give off a soft, crystalline white radiance. Threads of green seemed to accompany the white light as well.
The scenery of the real world dissolved and warped, like a painting that had been splashed with water.
An agony almost beyond bearing rose in Li Fan's mind as well. It was as if a hundred million chains had pierced his skull all at once; then, spinning at furious speed, those countless chains churned and heaved through his brain.
"Aaaah!"
Even without a head, what remained of Li Fan's flesh and blood began to spasm and shudder from that indescribable pain.
Though the Heavenly Emperor Tai had passed on to him every last insight into the Dao of Retrograde Travel, he had never once mentioned that activating the Retrograde Boat carried such horrifying side effects.
Li Fan vaguely remembered that in past simulations he had endured all manner of torment. Yet none of it came to even a ten-thousandth of what he suffered now.
The pain spread in perfect synchrony through flesh and blood, spirit, will, and memory. It seemed to seep into the true core of Li Fan's being.
Faint sounds of wind and rain gradually rose around him, and countless "droplets" struck him head-on. Each drop was like the sharpest blade in the world, cutting into Li Fan.
And so his suffering deepened.
But the formless, enormous power welling up from memory had already finished crushing what little remained of his body. His flesh was gone; if he wanted to live, Li Fan had no way back.
Amid boundless agony, he barely kept a thread of consciousness clear, and went on holding the Retrograde Boat's power together.
The sound of wind and rain grew louder.
The droplets striking him no longer came singly but joined into lines.
Under the ceaseless impacts the Retrograde Boat gave out rumbling booms, as though it might burst apart at any moment.
Fortunately, at the critical moment those hidden green lights bloomed forth in time, swiftly repairing the damage to the boat's hull.
He held on for nine breaths.
The countless lines of droplets finally converged into a river.
In an instant, Li Fan plunged into it. Every pain he had felt vanished at once.
It was as though he had separated from the whole world.
His perspective rose up out of the Great Xuan pocket world, out of the Xuanhuang Realm; after hanging still for a brief moment, it began to run backward.
Li Fan looked out and saw himself entering the sealed village beneath the Mountains and Seas fishing grounds; saw himself subduing and taking command of Xuanhuang's Ruomu; saw himself as Grand Tutor, holding the whole world under his sway; saw himself just after waking with his memories restored, forced to drink that disgusting talisman water…
The River of Time churned on. The little boat traveling upstream trembled at every jolt; one careless slip and it seemed it would capsize.
But precisely because those existences he had once lived through in the years gone by stood like so many anchors, Li Fan could, after each stretch of retrograde travel, "borrow strength" to steady himself in the river.
Yet when Li Fan had returned to Anchored Year 1 and tried to push further upstream, something changed.
The instant he crossed that crucial node in time, the scouring of the River of Time grew more than a thousand times fiercer.
It was as if he had gone from a clear, fast-flowing channel into a stretch far muddier and more violent. Li Fan could no longer make out any images in the River of Time at all.
All around were surging lines of color that looked like a thousand hues melted together, blotting out the perception of this retrograde traveler.
The terrifying force that suddenly erupted in the river nearly destroyed the Retrograde Boat outright, catching it unprepared. Beside the surging river, the white light around the little boat was pitifully faint—weaker even than a single drop of its water. Yet it strained desperately to keep that white light alive, so the hull would not be smashed apart then and there.
Li Fan understood the consequence of a failed retrograde journey.
It was not simply a matter of being thrown back into reality again.
He would vanish utterly from history; the world would bear no trace that he had ever existed.
Li Fan strove with all his might to turn his fate aside.
But one insignificant person was far too small against the vast River of Time. Even though he now thoroughly understood the Dao of Retrograde Travel, here in the river he could only be carried where it willed, at the mercy of fate.
It seemed he was already in a hopeless pass.
Yet Li Fan still did not give up on survival. Holding to the Dao of Retrograde Travel, he struggled to steer the Retrograde Boat.
Even as he fought for his life, too much in Li Fan's heart remained unexplained.
According to the Heavenly Emperor Tai's transmission, the retrograde journey should never have been this hard. At the very least, while traveling back within a range of a thousand years, even a battered boat on the verge of falling apart should have been enough to weather the waves raised in the river.
But now Li Fan had traveled upstream barely fifty years, and the waves that abruptly rose in the river were already as violent as those that should come after ten thousand years of retrograde travel!
After all, by the Heavenly Emperor Tai's experience, the further back one traveled, the greater the pressure one had to bear—growing almost exponentially.
And now, barely at the start of his journey, he already met resistance this great… It was hard to imagine how huge the waves would be when he had gone back ten thousand years, or thirty thousand!
"How can this be!"
Li Fan was astonished and full of doubt.
Then he recalled the images he had glimpsed earlier in the river—scenes from his own life.
While those images were present, the river had behaved within normal bounds. But once they disappeared, the river's waves surged up as though to snatch Li Fan and devour him!
"Could it be that I never lived through these years at all? With no anchor to support me, the resistance I meet has multiplied a thousandfold?" The thought struck Li Fan in a flash of intuition.
But even knowing why the river had suddenly turned violent, Li Fan was now riding a tiger and could not get off.
The River of Time was a muddy blur; up and down, east and west, could not be told apart. The immense scouring force was ceaselessly "cutting" at Li Fan, making it impossible for him to find a safe node in time to "land."
Amid the wind and waves the Retrograde Boat's light dimmed further, teetering on the verge of falling. It seemed that in the next moment the boat would overturn and its passenger perish.
Just at this critical juncture, immeasurable green light suddenly welled up from nowhere.
Like a precious pearl that calms the wind, it temporarily quelled the storm in the river.
This green light seemed to come from within Li Fan's own body, yet at the same time, throughout the endless River of Time, countless star-like green points glittered all at once, from remotest antiquity to the present day.
Like so many standing lighthouses, they lit the way forward for Li Fan.
Their usefulness seemed somewhat inferior to that of his own anchors, but without question they were Li Fan's last straw.
The Retrograde Boat threaded forward in the direction of the green light.
A hundred years, three hundred, five hundred.
On to a thousand, five thousand…
The green light on Li Fan's body was already nearly spent.
The river's green lighthouses too grew dim, gradually sinking back into the surging tide of history.
Yet Li Fan still had not found a safe landing point beyond the shelter of the green light.
"If I force my way out of the River of Time right now and return to reality, there can be two outcomes."
"First, I fall and die, my body torn apart by the scouring of time until nothing remains but dust in history."
"Second, I land by sheer luck…"
"Let me wait a little longer."
Most of Li Fan's knowledge of retrograde travel came from the Heavenly Emperor Tai's transmission, yet their experiences in the River of Time could not have been more different.
Li Fan had met far more violent waves, but by contrast, he felt very little of the erosion and stripping-away of the River of Time that the Heavenly Emperor Tai had dreaded so deeply.
After all, on the Heavenly Emperor Tai's first retrograde journey, he had lasted barely three thousand years before he felt himself on the point of dissolving completely into the River of Time, and had been forced to return to reality.
And now, on his very first attempt, Li Fan had already gone back nearly ten thousand years, without feeling much of this so-called pressure of deprivation.
If not for the fact that the Great Dao of Longevity lent him no protection or guidance, and the waves in the river were simply too violent to sail against, Li Fan even felt he could have kept traveling back like this indefinitely.
Though the pressure of erosion was slight, the further back he went, the greater the other pressures on Li Fan became as well.
When he had traveled back roughly eight thousand years, the waves in the river rose to the heavens and all conditions for sailing were utterly lost.
Li Fan was swept up in them, unable even to tell which way time was flowing.
He studied every detail of the river closely, striving to find a last glimmer of hope in the final moment.
But in the end he was not a lucky man.
Bang!
The Retrograde Boat had begun to break apart. Without the treasure boat's protection, Li Fan was directly exposed to the River of Time, and the pressure he faced instantly multiplied beyond measure.
At last Li Fan understood what the Heavenly Emperor Tai had meant by that sensation of melting.
Each scour of the river stripped something from him.
Cultivation base, divine abilities, the feelings of enlightenment he had gained…
All of it was like things attached to the outside, peeling away under the river's washing.
Only the core within still clung on in agony.
When the true inner core itself began to take damage, Li Fan's instincts registered an extreme, deadly threat. He knew he could not put it off any longer: even a reckless "landing" like this offered a better chance at life than dying here in the River of Time.
Steering the battered, broken Retrograde Boat, Li Fan gradually drew himself out of his immersion in the Dao of Retrograde Travel.
The vista of the River of Time slowly withdrew from his sight. In its place came a sky full of pouring rain.
In an instant Li Fan had nearly lost all sense of direction.
In the borderland between the River of Time and reality, he found himself in a dilemma with no way forward or back.
To press on rashly and he might plunge headlong into the River of Time again. To stay where he was left him still within reach of its scouring, his inner core eroding without pause—also a dead end.
Just as Li Fan hesitated for a moment, he suddenly saw, amid the rain filling the sky before him, a thread of familiar light.
Perhaps it meant that at some point eight thousand years later, he had come into contact with this light.
Though it did not exist in the past, that contact had formed an anchor spanning time and space.
Li Fan knew how rare it was, in the storm and rain of eight thousand years ago, to find something connected to himself.
The chance would not come twice. Li Fan hesitated no more. He at once steered the tattered Retrograde Boat in flight toward where that fleeting light had been.
Guided by the anchor, Li Fan finally crossed the wind and rain of the River of Time before the Retrograde Boat came completely apart.
And arrived in the real world.
The Xuanhuang Realm.
Eight thousand six hundred and forty-three years before the initial anchor!
"That streak of light… was that the Medicine King Sect?! How dare they run?"
"Quick, go inform the elders!"
"Wait! The Medicine King Sect isn't a large sect, but they're still comfortably wealthy. Fleeing in such haste, there's no way they could have carried off all the sect's treasures…"
"Move. Don't let someone else beat us to it!"
"Wait, what's that? Why is there another streak of light?"
"Could the Medicine King Sect have fallen out over it and decided not to flee after all?"
"Let's go take a look first!"
…
By the time Li Fan came to, he was already surrounded.
"Hm?"
Still dazed, Li Fan had not yet gathered his wits. He only noticed that the cultivators around him were tallying their spoils while glancing his way from time to time.
"You brat, you're finally awake."
"Speak up—what exactly happened with the Medicine King Sect? Tell the truth and we may spare your life. Otherwise…"
"Why waste words on him? Just do a soul search!"
"You idiot, those two streaks of light were plain for all to see; there's no hiding it. When the elders ask, how are we going to explain?"
The group muttered among themselves, completely ignoring Li Fan, who was bound tight.
Li Fan paid them no mind for the moment and first examined his own condition.
Although his body had nearly vanished entirely in the River of Time, the instant he returned to reality, the Great Dao of Longevity within him evolved a new body.
But to his regret, after this voyage the Great Dao of Longevity seemed to have been greatly depleted.
And this depletion seemed irreversible.
At least as things looked now, it would not recover within any short time.
"After all, it isn't truly mine—it was a gift from the Mound-Guarding Lord," Li Fan said, a little mockingly at his own expense.
"Hm?"
"The Mound-Guarding Lord?"
A moment later, Li Fan came back to himself.
In the River of Time he had traveled eight thousand years upstream.
It had scoured away his cultivation and divine abilities—even the Great Dao of Longevity—but in exchange, every memory he had lost had returned.
All that had happened across his two lives played out before him one scene after another, and he could not help sighing inwardly.
"A moment's greed, and I set loose endless variables."
"The consequences of merging the three Daos—Mountains and Seas, Longevity, and Revert to the True—are indeed far more than I can bear as I am now."
"Fortunately my fortune isn't bad. Even with my memories gone, I still found a great opportunity."
"The Dao of Retrograde Travel…"
Li Fan lowered his head. Recalling all he had experienced in the River of Time, a strange light rose in his eyes.
"Revert to the True."
After some thought, Li Fan called out in his heart first of all.
The repeated failures of Revert to the True filled Li Fan with deep unease.
Still there was no response.
But after sensing carefully, Li Fan finally confirmed that Revert to the True was still with him.
Only, for some reason, it seemed to have fallen into slumber.
Chapter 1529