"Hmm?"
Li Fan narrowed his eyes, trying to discern what was blocking his way in the pitch-black darkness.
Yet to his surprise, whether he probed with his divine sense or reached out with his physical body, neither detected the presence of an obstacle ahead.
Li Fan frowned slightly.
This time, instead of synchronizing with the ripples spreading through space, he deliberately avoided their timing and flew straight forward.
Strangely, the "wall" he had felt while moving within the ripples seemed completely non-existent now.
Li Fan could distinctly sense that his position in this void had changed. Or rather, a portion of his spatial attributes had shifted, while another remained frozen in place.
It was as though moving by his own power and undulating along with the ripples were two distinct layers of existence that did not interfere with each other.
This bizarre phenomenon somewhat exceeded Li Fan's current understanding.
With no desire to ponder the underlying causes just yet, he emptied his mind once more and waited for another ripple to pulse through the void.
Merging with it despite knowing an obstacle lay ahead, he crashed forward with full force.
Boom!
The next instant, stars burst across Li Fan's vision, and he was violently jolted out of the ripple.
After inspecting himself, he found that although his physical body was uninjured, his divine soul had suffered a slight concussion.
Li Fan pondered for a moment and temporarily set aside such reckless attempts.
Rather than leaving, he stood quietly in the void, focusing his mind to comprehend each ripple as it swept past, trying to discover why he was kept out while the ripples could travel unobstructed.
Once his mind was fully focused, the intermittent ripples became conspicuously distinct in this realm of absolute darkness and silence.
Li Fan recorded the exact timing of every ripple.
After patiently gathering over ten thousand data samples, he simulated them within the Dao Transformation Stone in his sea of consciousness, searching for any hidden pattern.
Hard work bore fruit.
Li Fan discovered that roughly every thousand pulses, a unique ripple appeared that differed from the rest, its intensity noticeably higher.
Its propagation speed across the void was nearly double that of the ordinary ripples.
Intrigued, Li Fan kept count. When this anomalous ripple surged forth once more, he settled his mind and merged into it.
This time, it truly had an effect. Instead of crashing directly into a wall like before, it felt as though he was continuously grinding against the surrounding obstruction.
A pain like the slicing of blades welled up from the depths of his soul. Gritting his teeth against the agony, Li Fan held on.
Yet as the ripple pushed deeper, his incompatibility with the surroundings became increasingly pronounced.
The slicing sensation gradually turned into brutal tearing. This inhuman agony nearly caused Li Fan to black out in an instant.
Only his innate self-preservation instinct saved him, wrenching him out of the state of unity.
"Phew..."
Li Fan gasped heavily for breath, his entire body soaked in cold sweat from the pain.
Even after separating from the ripple, the tearing ache in his soul seemed to linger.
Only after the span of two thousand-pulse ripples had elapsed did the sensation in his soul slowly dissipate.
Having caught his breath, a flicker of hesitation showed on Li Fan's face.
However, when the next thousand-pulse ripple arrived, he still threw himself into it.
This time, he seemed to endure slightly longer than before.
Or perhaps it was merely an illusion.
After resting briefly without waiting for the pain to fully clear, Li Fan merged his consciousness into the ripple once more.
"Ah!"
Li Fan's expression twisted into a grimace, his body twitching uncontrollably under the impact of the soul-rending torment.
A ruthless glint flashed in his eyes. The stray thoughts of giving up that surfaced in his mind were extinguished in an instant by the reverse cultivation of the Dao heart from the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation.
"A mere bit of pain dares to obstruct me?
"Again!"
Over the ensuing attempts to ride the thousand-pulse ripple into the depths of the void, Li Fan endured torment beyond words.
The pain in his soul mounted continuously, progressing from tearing to the sting of ten thousand needles, until every inch felt as though it were being repeatedly crushed beneath a millstone.
In the end, Li Fan's mind went nearly blank.
Only the obsession burning within his heart sustained him, keeping him from giving up halfway.
Throughout this ordeal, the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation played a crucial role.
Human nature naturally seeks escape in the face of suffering.
Especially in this situation where his soul felt as if it were being tortured, every passing second brought instinctive thoughts to Li Fan's mind: *Just forget it. Why bother? There's no need for this.*
Normally, such thoughts would be enough to shake a person's resolve. Yet under the great millstone of reverse cultivation of the Dao heart, every single one was ground down into raw nourishment for his soul.
Had it not been for this, no matter how unyielding Li Fan's willpower might have been, he likely could not have endured such torment.
Regardless, Li Fan ultimately succeeded.
No telling how much time had passed, but when he regained clarity from his hazy consciousness, he found himself in a wondrous space that felt faintly familiar.
Between heaven and earth, horizontal and vertical lines crisscrossed one another, with colored particles hurtling along them from time to time.
Now and then, particles on perpendicular paths collided, bursting into brilliant prismatic radiance in the air before vanishing in an instant.
"Where is this?"
Li Fan first examined his own body.
It, too, appeared to be sketched from crude lines—ludicrous yet unsettling.
Yet the sensations coming from it were completely identical to those of a normal physical body.
Without acting rashly, Li Fan carefully observed this magical space while dodging the colored particles that whistled past from time to time.
"It seems somewhat similar to the Heavenly Profound Mirror space I saw back then.
"However, inside the Heavenly Profound Mirror, there were only black and white. Unlike here, which is bursting with prismatic colors.
"Wait, I remember..."
A thought struck Li Fan. He retrieved the imagery stored in the Dao Transformation Stone and examined it closely.
He discovered that at the very end of those recorded scenes, at the boundary of the monochrome world, prismatic radiance had also been present.
Monochrome and prismatic appeared to be two completely opposing forces.
In the monochrome world, the prismatic radiance had been sliced away and converted into a part of itself.
"A newborn Heavenly Profound mirror..."
Li Fan narrowed his eyes, sinking into deep thought.
Before long, he formed a faint hypothesis.
The monochrome world undoubtedly represented the Heavenly Profound Mirror.
And the prismatic radiance was very likely an epitome of the real world.
Those crisscrossing lines were just like the principles of Heaven and Earth Li Fan had witnessed through the Humanity Stardust—they represented the myriad laws of the real world.
"The Heavenly Profound Mirror is parsing the real world in its own way...
"And here..."
A spark of enlightenment appeared in Li Fan's eyes.
"This is an epitome of the world at its inception."
Chapter 578