Looking at Kou Hong's written confession on the table, Li Fan felt deeply disheartened.
Kou Hong had not lied to him; he genuinely knew of no method allowing a mortal to leave this land severed from immortality.
"A land severed from immortality..." Five cycles of reincarnation, three hundred years of anticipation, had all turned into an elusive bubble in this single moment.
With his dream of immortal cultivation and longevity shattered, Li Fan seemed to have aged completely overnight.
Not only physically, but mentally as well.
"A land severed from immortality..." He murmured the name silently once more, boundless indignation and unwillingness welling up within him.
"Why was I transmigrated and born in a place like this? If I had crossed over into the cultivation world outside, with True Reversion's ability of infinite simulated reincarnations, I would certainly have had hope for longevity. How hateful! Why did it have to be this land severed from immortality!"
The information from Kou Hong's confession flashed through Li Fan's mind once again.
The so-called land severed from immortality, as the name implied, was a place where immortals had vanished. Thousands of years ago, the ancient cultivation world suffered a cataclysmic upheaval.
At first, it was merely an epidemic sweeping across the mortal realm, which no cultivator paid any heed to.
Later, however, when a cultivator accidentally contracted this mysterious pestilence, the situation spiraled entirely out of control.
After infecting that cultivator, the epidemic seemed to undergo an inexplicable enhancement, becoming capable of spreading among cultivators.
Its transmission route was nothing other than the very spiritual energy cultivators relied on to survive.
Carried by the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, the pestilence rapidly spread throughout the entire cultivation world. Cultivators who contracted it, at best, suffered regression in cultivation and plummeted in realm; at worst, their cultivation vanished overnight, leaving them no different from mortals, only for their bodies to die and their Dao to disperse within days, returning the Dao to Heaven.
As vast numbers of cultivators perished, despair began spreading through the cultivator community.
Driven to desperation, some cultivators vented their wrath upon the origin of it all: the mortals.
Thus, large-scale massacres began.
Facing the lofty immortal masters, mortals had virtually no strength to resist and could only allow themselves to be slaughtered like cattle.
Yet before long, this slaughter was forcibly brought to a halt.
Not out of any sudden pang of conscience, but because the cultivators were horrified to discover that as they carried out their slaughter and massive numbers of mortals died, the pestilence within the mortals did not vanish with death. Instead, as if freed from restraint, it dispersed entirely along the spiritual energy permeating heaven and earth.
In an instant, the concentration of the pestilence in the cultivation world skyrocketed.
This in turn caused even more cultivators to perish.
Left with no choice, the cultivators abandoned their slaughter of mortals.
Yet sitting idly awaiting death was hardly the way cultivators acted. On one hand, cultivators began researching methods to treat and resist this pestilence; on the other hand, they proposed the notorious Great Migration Plan.
Although the proposal faced opposition from a considerable portion of cultivators when first introduced, the vast majority still cast their votes in favor for the sake of their own survival.
The Great Migration Plan was based on the following rationale:
Mortals could not be slaughtered, yet finding a definitive cure for this pestilence remained a distant, indefinite prospect. If mortals were allowed to reproduce freely, then as the pestilence multiplied, life would only grow increasingly perilous for cultivators.
And since this bizarre pestilence relied on spiritual energy to spread, a natural course of action presented itself.
Exile all mortals from the cultivation world to surrounding minor worlds, shattered grotto-heavens, and similar realms devoid of spiritual energy, then seal them off forever with formations to prevent these mortals from ever returning.
This would resolve the mortal problem once and for all, allowing them to turn back and take their time researching ways to combat the pestilence.
In any case, undeveloped minor worlds were virtually limitless; there was never any worry about running out of room for these mortals.
Thus, under the unified will of the entire cultivation world, all mortals within the cultivation world began a migration spanning several centuries.
As for how many mortals would perish along the journey over those hundreds of years, that fell entirely outside the cultivators' consideration. Before the might of cultivators, mortals had no room to resist anyway.
Just like that, through centuries of great migration, all mortals in the cultivation world were dispersed and relocated into surrounding minor worlds. Nearly a thousand years passed after that before the concentration of the pestilence in the cultivation world finally dropped to a manageable level.
Over that millennium of ceaseless research, cultivators finally found a way to purify the pestilence.
It took another several thousand years for cultivators to thoroughly eradicate its threat.
Yet to the cultivators' embarrassment, this pestilence lingered like a persistent ghost, lurking deep within mortal bloodlines.
Originally, the world had been emptied of mortals, but not every child born of cultivators possessed the aptitude for cultivation.
Over the passage of time, countless mortals were born into the world once more. Within all their bodies lingered the shadow of this pestilence.
Because this pestilence possessed a lethal toxicity specifically toward cultivators, mortal descendants who wished to pursue cultivation had to cleanse the pestilence from their bodies.
Over time, this pestilence became synonymous with the divide between immortals and mortals. Thus, people named it the immortal-mortal miasma.
Back then, the rampage of the immortal-mortal miasma had left a profound psychological scar on all cultivators. To prevent it from making a resurgence, cultivators established a convention to avoid visiting the places where mortals had originally been exiled.
As time wore on, those places became known as lands severed from immortality.
No one knew how many lands severed from immortality existed, large and small, and cultivators willing to brave enormous risks to enter them were few and far between.
For Li Fan to encounter two had already been an extraordinary stroke of fortune.
Now, neither cultivator possessed a method to allow a mortal to leave. How could Li Fan possibly hope that another cultivator of higher cultivation would break in?
What was more, as a mortal, his lifespan was finite. Even if he could continually simulate reincarnations, he was merely repeating life within the limits of his lifespan.
He was already seventy this year, and the physiological limit of his lifespan was eighty-six.
Over these sixteen remaining years, the possibility of encountering another cultivator was essentially zero.
Such being the case, how could Li Fan not feel despair?
He had clearly seen the hope of cultivating immortality and attaining longevity, only to find in the end that it was nothing but an empty joy.
Could it be that he truly had no choice but to repeat a mortal's life incarnation after incarnation?
Li Fan was truly unwilling to accept this.
The path to longevity lay right before his eyes, within arm's reach, yet it was also as distant as the horizon, hopelessly out of reach.
How could Li Fan resign himself to this?
Thinking of everything he had experienced through several lifetimes and nearly three hundred years of bitter waiting, Li Fan refused to abandon the path of longevity under any circumstances.
Was there truly no way left?
Suddenly, like a flash of lightning cutting through the fog, Li Fan thought of something he had previously overlooked.
Thousands of years ago, how had those vast hordes of mortals migrated here?
Although the minor worlds bordered the cultivation world, they were not the same world after all.
Those mortals certainly had not walked over on foot, had they?
There had to be some vessels that carried them here, right?
Were those vessels still around today?
If he could find them, would he be able to travel to the cultivation world?
Even if it was only a negligible sliver of possibility, it allowed Li Fan to see a glimmer of hope for cultivation.
Excitement surged through him, and he immediately headed for the prison where Kou Hong was being held.
He had to verify the feasibility of his idea with Kou Hong.
Chapter 9