It was a frenzied speed of operation unlike anything Li Fan had ever experienced since he began cultivating the Heart-Refining Incantation.
As if a special switch had been tripped, the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation's operating efficiency surged hundreds, if not thousands of times over.
If Li Fan's previous personal attempts had been like a slow millstone turned by a donkey, then now, the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation was like an enormous, roaring machine, devouring every single one of the countless semi-real, hallucinatory experiences that had abruptly flooded his mind.
Bringing order out of chaos, clearing away falsehood at the root!
Like a basin of ice water dumped over his head, it cooled the blazing heat completely.
Li Fan gradually recovered from the obsessive madness and bewilderment.
"This..."
"?"
In an instant, Li Fan understood what had just happened to him, and horror gripped his heart.
He had not expected the backlash from a complete "Chaos" formula to be so terrifying.
Once fully formed, it was several times more potent than his previous dry runs, which had fallen just short of completion.
Now that the character "Chaos" had truly taken shape, it was like a qualitative transformation—its might could not be compared to the fragmentary glimpses he had wielded before.
"If even the backlash is this horrifying, then its actual effect..."
Suppressing the turmoil in his body and mind, Li Fan looked up toward the sky.
Where the rain and corpses had been plummeting, the scene seemed faintly distorted.
As though an invisible void lingered there, the moment the rain and corpses drew near, they vanished into thin air.
Yet after swallowing the bizarre rain, the area of that distorted void also seemed to be slowly shrinking.
In this manner, the two appeared locked in a state of mutual balance, continually canceling each other out.
Finally, when no more raindrops fell from the sky, the effects of the Chaos formula vanished as well.
A disheveled figure tumbled from the air. It was none other than Master Yin.
At this moment, his body was translucent. With disbelief written across his face, he stared blankly at Li Fan.
He opened his mouth, wanting to say something, but could not produce the slightest sound.
Master Yin looked down at himself. As if understanding his fate, he ceased his futile efforts.
His form grew fainter and fainter, yet his face held no fear of his impending demise—only relief and release.
Moments later, Master Yin vanished completely from this world.
Li Fan had no time to celebrate surviving this ordeal.
Driven by an intensifying sense of crisis, he suppressed his injuries, activated the secret technique Covering the Sky with One Hand, pushed his escape art to its absolute limit, and swiftly fled the area.
Not long after Li Fan's departure, a vast, peerless divine sense seemed to descend.
The scene on the nearby seabed traced back into the past, replaying continuously as if time and space were flowing backward.
Yet at the very instant Li Fan's silhouette was about to appear, a crack manifested out of nowhere.
Then a second, a third, and countless fissures ruptured in succession, instantly throwing the scene into disarray.
The replaying image shattered like a mirror, returning everything to normal.
The divine sense lingered for a long time, as if pondering something.
Then it quietly swept across the entire Congyun Sea, but in the end found no anomalies.
Afterward, it fell completely silent.
Meanwhile, Li Fan, who had not yet returned to Congyun City, dug up an ore from the seabed beneath his feet. Putting on an elated display, he stored it in his storage ring.
He continued to pretend to mine there for quite a while, stopping his charade only after the sense of crisis within him had completely subsided.
Just earlier, the moment he had been rushing back to Congyun City, an unprecedented sense of peril had struck him. His heart had pounded violently, as if his life and Dao would be snuffed out in the very next second.
Without time to deliberate, he had first dropped the disguise of Covering the Sky with One Hand, then invoked the Wondrous Profound True Spirit Transformation, instantly shifting his appearance into that of another cultivator and pretending to mine ore on the seafloor.
Sure enough, his premonition had been accurate. Moments later, he had felt the sensation of being watched.
Suppressing the tremor in his heart, he had acted as though he had noticed nothing at all.
Dangerous as it was, he had ultimately evaded the other party's probe.
"The Chaos formula, the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation, the anomalous Restore-Me Rain... and that immense divine sense..."
On his way back to Congyun City, Li Fan pondered the connections between them all.
"If I hadn't inadvertently executed the Chaos formula, I almost certainly would have been unable to escape that anomalous rain. My only option would have been True Reversion.
"Yet I never imagined the Chaos formula could truly eradicate the anomalous rain."
In Li Fan's eyes, Master Yin and the rain carrying countless identical corpses were extremely similar to the anomalies of the Xuanhuang Realm. They defied all logic—rules operating beyond established rules.
Yet an anomaly of this sort, reputed to be unalterable and impossible to eradicate, had actually been resolved by the Chaos formula.
What did that signify?
Li Fan continuously replayed the process of the Restore-Me Rain vanishing in his mind.
"Chaos, disorder..."
"Rather than saying it was resolved, it was more like..."
"Disorder piling upon disorder, canceling each other out?"
Li Fan's heart stirred, and a bold conjecture surfaced in an instant.
"Could it be that the root of all anomalies in this world stems from this 'Chaos'?"
Once the thought arose, it could no longer be suppressed, accompanied by an inexplicable dread in his heart.
"The character for Chaos that I saw on the stone slab in the mist back then seemed to have lost nearly all its power over the passage of time.
"Yet without question, it was the chief culprit that destroyed that world of mist.
"If one possessed the original Chaos formula with its complete power..."
Li Fan narrowed his eyes.
"Moreover, there seems to be an expert in the Xuanhuang Realm who cares deeply about this Chaos formula. Sensing its aura, they immediately descended to investigate.
"It seems that unless driven to dire straits or facing a matter of life and death, I had best use it as little as possible in the future," Li Fan mused to himself.
Having attained the Nascent Soul realm through the Five Elements Grotto-Heavens, his Five Elements power was endlessly regenerative, granting him frighteningly potent recovery capabilities.
By the time Li Fan returned to Congyun City, his injuries were fully healed, showing no sign that anything had happened.
And the fleeting glimpses of ten thousand lifetimes that had surfaced in his mind had also been absorbed and resolved, thanks to the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation operating at full throttle.
What puzzled Li Fan was that, by all rights and according to past experience, absorbing so many stray thoughts ought to have fed back into and nourished his soul's strength. Yet from earlier until now, Li Fan had not felt the slightest increase in his soul power.
"Could it have been consumed repairing unseen hidden injuries in my soul?"
Puzzled, Li Fan inspected himself closely.
The Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation's operating speed had gradually returned to normal, but Li Fan keenly perceived that the incantation seemed slightly different now. It felt as though it had undergone a certain sublimation, yet had not fully completed the process.
Prompted by an intuitive tug, Li Fan opened the True Reversion panel and fixed his gaze upon the cultivation method descriptions.
The technique that originally held the top spot, the Xuanhuang Heart-Refining Incantation, had silently changed its name.
Xuanhuang Immortal Heart Incantation (Incomplete).
Li Fan's pupils constricted abruptly, his heart reeling in utter shock.
Chapter 638