Seeing Jiao Xiuyuan agree so readily, Li Fan nodded. "In that case, I'll trouble Daoist Jiao with this matter. I await your good news!"
With that, he tossed a communication talisman to Jiao Xiuyuan and walked off without even mentioning a receipt.
"This fellow sure is trusting of me," Jiao Xiuyuan muttered under his breath, tossing the Delusion-Dispelling Stone Eye lightly in his hand.
The next instant, the stone eye vanished into thin air, gone to parts unknown.
Meanwhile, the puppet on Wanxian Island slumped back into its previous indolent posture.
Jiao Xiuyuan could never have guessed that it was not a matter of immense trust at all.
Rather, that Delusion-Dispelling Stone Eye was merely an excuse for Li Fan to establish ties with him. Even if Jiao Xiuyuan failed to sell it or simply pocketed it, Li Fan would not care in the slightest. What Li Fan truly had his eyes on was the "major business" that would follow.
Returning to the Heavenly Profound Mirror, Li Fan thought back to another object he had discovered in the ruins of the Heavenly Mechanism Sect.
The entire floor of the pagoda that he had severed whole and brought back.
His original intuition had been correct.
After appraisal by the Heavenly Profound Mirror, that entire stone floor was actually a magical artifact called the Heaven and Earth Heavenly Mechanism Die.
When mortals roll dice, they roll mundane numbers of five and six.
When cultivators roll dice, they roll the reckonings of heavenly secrets.
Ancient Heavenly Mechanism Sect cultivators had relied on this Heaven and Earth Heavenly Mechanism Die—grounded in sufficient information and powered by their perception of subtle qi—to deduce countless possible futures.
As for why Li Fan had seen only utter emptiness...
That was because the Heaven and Earth Heavenly Mechanism Die had been frozen in the very scene produced when its last deduction concluded.
"A vast nothingness."
"I wonder what the Heavenly Mechanism Sect cultivators were deducing back then to have arrived at such an outcome."
Li Fan stretched out his hand, and a crystal-clear, twenty-sided die promptly manifested on his palm.
Looking closely, different flickering images seemed to play across every face.
Although Li Fan had previously tried using this Heaven and Earth Heavenly Mechanism Die several times to divine the future and see if it matched what he had already lived through, perhaps because he did not know the proper method, he had obtained only fragmented, incomprehensible images of no practical value.
Even so, Li Fan had not sold it. He had a lingering premonition that keeping it might prove immensely useful in the future.
After turning it over in his hand for a while, he put the Heavenly Mechanism Die away and shifted his awareness over to his avatar, "Zhou Qing'ang."
Throughout these days, he had remained on Tai'an Island, only occasionally using communication talismans to contact essential individuals.
He had not simply been idling away his time, but rather researching a way to overcome the side effects of the Great Method of Devouring the Heavens and Consuming the Earth.
This secret technique was likely created in imitation of the ancient exotic beast known as the Guiyuan Toad. Though it truly possessed the power to swallow heaven and earth, the cultivator's mind was exceptionally prone to collapsing, ultimately ending with them either bursting from gluttony or being discovered and beaten to death.
Li Fan, however, possessed a power that could maintain an absolute state of reason.
Namely, the power of the Blue Flame born from visualizing the phantom spirit.
He did not need to maintain composure throughout the entire devouring process; he only needed to be able to rein himself in at critical junctures.
Under the dual support of the Dao Comprehension Pill and the Spirit Enlightenment state, Li Fan had spent considerable effort and finally succeeded in doing so.
However, to increase his cultivation through the Great Method of Devouring the Heavens and Consuming the Earth, he still had to solve the problem of the earth veins being ossified and impossible to absorb.
For this, Li Fan had long prepared a plan.
Concealing his presence, he teleported to Lingmu Island in the western Congyun Sea and continued flying west.
Roughly five hundred li out, Li Fan slipped quietly beneath the waves.
Plunging deep to the seafloor, he searched for a short while and indeed found the ruins of the sunken island.
In his previous life, not long from now, this island would breach the surface once more due to an inexplicable shift in the earth veins.
The reawakened Island-Protecting Grand Formation would also draw the attention of the various formation masters from the Congyun Sea Formation Planning Hall.
Yet before all of that took place, this site looked no different from any of the other ruins strewn across the seabed.
Li Fan entered the rubble and waited patiently.
Seven days later, the seabed suddenly trembled faintly.
"Here it comes!"
Li Fan thought to himself. He stamped down hard with both feet, sinking downward in an instant.
At the same time, he circulated the Great Method of Devouring the Heavens and Consuming the Earth and extended his senses.
From an unknown, extreme distance, a surging, relentless power traveled faintly through the earth veins, gradually reviving the node here that had long since dried up.
Without outside interference, this newly vitalized earth vein node would thrust the sunken island back to the surface of the sea.
Now that Li Fan was here, however, that was not going to happen.
Beneath his feet, a massive whirlpool seemed to form.
The rushing power of the earth vein was drawn entirely into Li Fan's body before it could even fully take shape, transforming into pure spiritual energy.
At the same time, the technique cultivated by the avatar began to circulate rapidly on its own.
It was not the technique that the spy Zhou Qing'ang had originally practiced.
Rather, it was the Heavenly Will Xuanji Technique, another Nascent Soul technique Li Fan had acquired from the Heavenly Mechanism Sect.
This ancient method was originally agonizingly slow to cultivate. Yet now, under the unrestricted acceleration provided by the Great Method of Devouring the Heavens and Consuming the Earth, it advanced at an appalling speed.
The power of the earth vein flowed endlessly, and Li Fan's avatar gorged itself without restraint.
A tectonic upheaval that should have alarmed the four quarters of the sea was thus dispelled without a trace, entirely unbeknownst to anyone.
In mere moments, the avatar's cultivation reached the bottleneck of the early Golden Core stage.
Due to the presence of the Heavenly Calamity, no matter how fast the Heavenly Will Xuanji Technique circulated, the cultivation could not advance another inch.
Li Fan frowned slightly, but he did not halt the devouring.
Even though the earth vein power consumed at this point was completely wasted, he felt not the slightest heartache.
The spiritual energy converted by the Great Method of Devouring the Heavens and Consuming the Earth continued to accumulate within the avatar, thoroughly packing every inch of its body.
Seeing that this avatar was about to burst apart, Li Fan slapped his own chest, and a suction force erupted from his hand.
Once again, he began to swallow and convert the excess spiritual energy within himself.
During the ancient era, before the Heavenly Calamity existed, a situation like Li Fan's would never have occurred; the gathering of spiritual energy would only lag behind the rate of cultivation progress.
Yet the bottleneck of cultivation plunged Li Fan, who was devouring heaven and earth, into a bizarre predicament.
All the energy converted from his feeding was poured into accelerating the technique's cultivation.
Yet it still could not advance a single step.
The technique's circulation had already reached a terrifying velocity, battering against the unyielding embankment wave after wave like a raging tide.
Li Fan carefully savored and recorded everything taking place inside his body.
Compared to the majestic might of the earth vein, the strength of a mere Golden Core cultivator was negligible.
Yet this force—which should have been enough to elevate a Golden Core cultivator to at least the Nascent Soul stage—was constantly squandered in the process of pounding against the Heavenly Calamity.
Nevertheless, reality proved that Li Fan's efforts were not in vain.
Amidst the countless impacts, a faint sliver of looseness finally appeared in the bottleneck.
Chapter 452