The instant her gaze locked onto Sacred Embryo Li Fan, the craving of "hunger" in his mind surged to the absolute extreme.
If one is hungry, one must eat!
Every scrap of flesh and blood in his body seemed to awaken with a will of its own, desperate to devour everything around him without end to relieve this primal hunger. Sacred Embryo Li Fan's own thoughts were entirely consumed by it.
And so, in a split second, Sacred Embryo Li Fan was like a punctured ball. With a sharp pop, he rapidly shrank into a single microscopic particle amid the chaotic frenzy of self-devouring, then vanished completely from the world.
The final thought in his mind remained frozen at the moment the corpse in the Immortal Ruins opened its eyes.
To put this process in simple terms:
Sacred Embryo Li Fan, possessing merely a mortal body, could not withstand the sheer pressure of a single glance from the corpse in the Immortal Ruins and was wiped out of existence in an instant.
Of course, one could discard the limitation of a "mortal body." Even if Li Fan's true self at the Nascent Soul realm had stood there, the outcome would not have been much better.
A cultivator—especially one below the Longevity realm—stood an unfathomable gulf apart from an immortal. The difference was far too vast for words to describe.
With Sacred Embryo Li Fan's demise, what should normally have followed in this lifetime was waiting until his remaining duration was fully exhausted, at which point Li Fan's transformation medium, entombed inside Gu Xinghan's coffin, would automatically trigger True Reversion.
Yet everything within the Immortal Ruins—whether the humanoid corpse bound by dark-red chains or the character for "Hunger" carved across the desolate plains—defied all conventional logic.
The sacred embryo created through the Imperial-modified Sacred Blood Embryo Transformation Method was an entity entirely independent of the original body, yet it was also a clone linked by shared-body resonance. Even though the true self had already perished, this shred of resonance still crossed time and space, remaining anchored to the original body's transformation medium.
Such a connection was imperceptible to ordinary cultivators. Even the supreme paragons of the Xuanhuang Realm, the Heavenly Venerables of the Longevity realm, might not have noticed it.
Yet within the Immortal Ruins was an existence known as an "immortal."
And so, using that thread of connection, the gaze of the figure within the Immortal Ruins bridged the barrier of time and space, reaching all the way to the Xuanhuang Realm!
A terrifying, fathomless gravitational pull descended.
In an instant, the entire Beast Seed Realm collapsed into a pitch-black point of mass. Everything within it plummeted inward and vanished.
In the next breath, the reach of that pull spilled into the Valley of Longevity.
After more than two centuries of development, the Medicine King Sect had reached unprecedented prosperity. Ten Dao Integration experts, seventy-six Soul Formation cultivators, and countless Nascent Soul and Golden Core disciples—its strength surpassed even its peak in the ancient era.
Yet at this moment, all these great cultivators—Liu San, Fang Zaiji, Jiang Yushan, and the rest—were entirely powerless to resist. They did not even have time to react before being swallowed whole by the black point of mass.
Having devoured two pocket worlds, the black point of mass was far from satisfied. Instead, it expanded with terrifying speed.
A black sphere capable of swallowing all creation materialized in the Xuanhuang Realm.
A true apocalyptic calamity had arrived.
The moment that black point was born, the protective charge on Li Fan's transformation medium plummeted, dropping almost instantly to zero.
Had Li Fan's true self been present, he likely would have shared the fate of the other doomed cultivators, unable to react quickly enough to activate True Reversion in time.
Fortunately, True Reversion initiated on its own accord.
Yet unlike in the past, the surrounding world did not immediately blur into illusion upon activation. Instead, it fell into a bizarre state. Beyond True Reversion lay absolute pitch darkness, forming a circular domain. And outside that domain, scenes of the Xuanhuang Realm's destruction flashed past at dizzying speed.
Someone seemed to let out an earth-shattering roar, striving to halt the black sphere's wanton devouring.
A decaying tree supporting the heavens seemed to loom against the sky, accompanied by maniacal laughter: "Everyone must die! That's right, everyone must die!"
Two intersecting beams of light seemed to sweep across the dying Xuanhuang Realm in a flash before tearing through the void, fleeing beyond the realm and into the endless cosmos.
Countless cultivators seemed to stare in sheer horror at the black sun rising in the sky, awaiting death in utter despair...
The images flickered faster and faster, finally plunging into absolute blackness.
Then, brilliant silver light erupted outward from True Reversion's dark domain.
***
Anchored Year 1. The summit of Mount Jieli!
Li Fan, at the middle Golden Core stage, snapped his eyes open. His gaze was bloodshot, wild like that of a beast!
Hungry! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!
An endless, gnawing hunger flooded his mind, driving him to the very brink of sanity.
He was too hungry. Desperate to stuff everything in sight down his throat, he violently shattered the wooden bed beneath him with a single palm strike, then inhaled the splinters like a leviathan swallowing the sea, gulping them straight into his stomach.
Yet the hunger was not alleviated in the slightest. If anything, it burned even hotter!
A fierce sense of crisis instantly seized Li Fan's heart.
If he continued to let this hunger govern him, total destruction was the only fate awaiting him. True Reversion had not yet finished recharging; he would have no second chance to start over!
Seizing the brief moment where his reason regained control, Li Fan glanced at the True Reversion interface. In the cultivation technique column, his eyes caught the words: Xuanhuang Immortal Heart Incantation.
He immediately channeled it in silence.
*Through a thousand kalpas of tribulation, the immortal heart remains unchanged!*
While the Xuanhuang Immortal Heart Incantation could not diminish the effects of "Hunger," it allowed Li Fan to retain his clarity of mind, preventing him from degenerating into a monster that thought of nothing but mindless devouring.
Pushing the incantation to its absolute limit, he resisted the unending torrent of hunger. Though it preserved his life, the price was agony akin to being flayed in the depths of purgatory. For eight full years, Li Fan was forced to remain at the summit of Mount Jieli, locked in a brutal struggle against the insatiable hunger. He did not even notice when True Reversion finished recharging in Anchored Year 6.
"Eight years have passed, yet this hunger shows no sign of fading." A glint of resolve flashed through Li Fan's wild, feral eyes.
He first looked at the prompt that had been hovering within True Reversion for a long time:
[Simulation concluded.]
[You may choose one of the following options to retain:
1. An item held by yourself during this simulation.
2. Your cultivation realm attained during this simulation.
3. The simulated memories of an individual closely associated with you during this simulation. These memories may be inherited by that individual.
4. Forgo the above choices to accelerate the recharge process.]
Without hesitation, he selected the first option.
Immediately, an object named the Terminal Dissociation Disc appeared within True Reversion's storage space.
"True Reversion!" Li Fan called out once more.
"Do you wish to virtualize the current scene and return to the designated anchor?" True Reversion's prompt sounded right on cue.
Li Fan decisively selected yes.
In the next instant, the scene atop Mount Jieli blurred into illusion once again.
Chapter 799