No sorcerer would ever question the existence of the reverse golden rain, just as Yaxiu never pressed why this world had sorcery spirits or Lalafells—these were fundamental premises of the world, and those living within it could only accept them.
Besides, the Void Realm had far too many bizarre phenomena: the eternal white mist hanging over the Sea of Knowledge, the Vortexes that bridged thousands of miles in a flash, the never-sinking Great Route... Even the Time Continent had the Flowing Gold River that could affect time itself. Compared to such wondrous spectacles, rain falling in reverse seemed utterly ordinary.
Over the past month, aside from training, Sonia spent her days browsing works on the Time Continent in the Forest and Flower Halls. Many of them studied the Seven-Colored Tail, the Flowing Gold River, Destiny Q&A, and knowledge creatures, and there were even studies on the Heroic Spirit Legions, but almost no one had ever investigated the direction the rain fell.
Just as no one wondered why apples fell to the ground.
Perhaps someone had researched it once, but having produced no results, nothing had been recorded.
So when Yaxiu brought it up, Sonia's immediate reaction was denial: "How could that be... What about the White Ox, then? Is the White Ox upside down too?"
"It is!" Yaxiu said with absolute certainty. "We aren't standing beside the White Ox's feet—we're on the White Ox's belly."
"That's absurd—"
"Wait, but has anyone actually seen the White Ox's belly?" Diya piped up suddenly. "The owners of several sorcerer manuals once tried flying up to search for the Seven-Colored Tail. Although they were pounced on and killed midair by knowledge creatures, when they flew up and looked skyward, all they saw was the golden sky. None of them saw the White Ox's belly."
"Tricks involving things being upside down aren't uncommon in fairy tale picture books either," the Witch quickly accepted Yaxiu's hypothesis. "Think about it carefully: is the Flowing Gold River really a river of time spreading from the White Ox's four hooves? If we're truly on its belly, the river actually has nothing to do with the hooves. It's fixed to the belly; it's just that the belly moves along the Time Continent, and because the four hooves are constantly moving as well, it gives us the illusion that the Flowing Gold River is tied to the hooves."
"What do you mean?" Sonia's eyes widened. "Is the White Ox's true form overlapped with the Time Continent? Does it have no physical body?"
"Sword Princess," Yaxiu smiled, "did the Golden Fish have a physical body? Was the Golden Fish truly a fish?"
Sonia froze.
"The White Ox really is walking along the Time Continent, but it isn't walking right-side up—it's walking upside down!" Yaxiu's thoughts grew clearer and clearer the more he spoke. "As for beneath the White Ox... Holy crap, that's right! Why didn't I notice it before?!"
Yaxiu cursed under his breath and thumped his head hard with his fist. "I saw the Golden Fish with my own eyes! Why didn't I connect the dots sooner? Sword Princess, you still remember what the Golden Fish's true form was, don't you?"
"The Golden Fish's true form was the golden sea. It looked like a golden fish only because it reflected the feathers of our void wings, making it look like fish scales at a glance, turning ten thousand miles of golden sea into the belly of the Golden Fish—" Realization dawned on Sonia as well. "A golden sea?!"
"Never mind anyone else who hasn't seen it, but we saw it with our own eyes!"
Clutching his forehead, Yaxiu said, "A golden sea, golden rain! The reverse golden rain ultimately gathers into the golden ocean, which means directly above us is the Golden Fish—it's the Sea of Knowledge!"
"If someone in the Sea of Knowledge looked upward, and if her vision could pierce through the white mist, the golden sea, and the golden rain, she would see us hanging upside down on the Time Continent. The Time Continent and the Sea of Knowledge aren't two separate storeys—they're the ceiling and floor of the very same space! The only thing between them is the Golden Fish, and the White Ox steps along the Golden Fish, marching upside down across the Time Continent!"
"I remember now," Sonia murmured. "When we crossed through the Golden Fish, it didn't feel like 'surfacing from below'; it felt like 'falling from above'... But I was so excited back then that I didn't pay attention at all."
"There's so much we didn't notice," Yaxiu murmured. "So many clues were right in front of us the entire time: the rain falling in reverse, the Golden Fish, and... But the Time Continent has too many novel temptations dividing our attention—the Heroic Spirit Legions, the Legendary Museum, Miracle Paradise, the White Ox's four hooves. We preferred to focus on those rare spectacles, and ended up overlooking the divine miracle right in front of us."
"In that case," Diya said, "the Seven-Colored Tail isn't above us—it's below?"
"The Flowing Gold River."
Yaxiu nodded. "The only downward path on the Time Continent is the Flowing Gold River."
Thinking it through, the Sword Princess and the Witch couldn't refute it. Moreover, the Flowing Gold River matched the trait Yaxiu had mentioned earlier: it was everywhere, with zero geographic barrier to entry; any ordinary sorcerer who simply picked a direction and walked straight ahead would soon stumble upon a wild Flowing Gold River.
Yet no one had ever attempted to explore the Flowing Gold River.
Not just out of fear of death, but even more out of fear of aging.
Birth, aging, sickness, and death held immense terrors of their own, but ordinary sorcerers had basically broken free from 'birth,' 'aging,' and 'sickness'—the only thing they could not escape was death. Yet in just a few seconds, the Flowing Gold River could make a sorcerer experience the crushing weight of time: sluggish reflexes, rusted thoughts, a withered soul, a dormant consciousness... Those who hadn't experienced it could hardly comprehend a sorcerer's terror of the Flowing Gold River. The reason Yaxiu and his companions hadn't gone to fish out sorcery spirits from the Flowing Gold River wasn't merely because it wasn't worth the effort, but because they dared not and did not want to.
That helpless dread of being crushed by time made one feel as if their entire body had turned into dry twigs and fallen leaves—powerless, ready to shatter at the slightest touch. Unless a sorcerer was seeking to delve into the time faction, no one would ever soak in the Flowing Gold River, let alone dive into it. Under normal circumstances, sorcerers dissolved in the Flowing Gold River; soaking in it for a few seconds was practically enough to dissolve completely.
"We have the Six-Colored Anchor," Yaxiu said. "A hundred percent Anchor effect renders us immune to all damage, including the temporal corrosion of the Flowing Gold River!"
"But wouldn't that make it way too difficult?" Diya felt something was off. "Although the Golden Fish was also hard to find, that was a conceptual hurdle. Once you saw through the Golden Fish's trick and managed to convince another sorcerer upon meeting them, you could easily fly past the Golden Fish."
"Meanwhile, the Six-Colored Anchor was only obtained after you, Watcher, plundered the Soul Summoning sorcery spirits of six factions. Normally, that's a trophy you can only obtain by slaying Heroic Spirit Commanders," the Witch said. "Could any other sorcerer aside from us ever satisfy that prerequisite? If no one in the past could meet it, how was the legend of the Seven-Colored Tail passed down in the first place?"
"There are two possibilities," Sonia answered. "First, there was a period when the Heroic Spirit Commanders were extremely weak, giving ordinary sorcerers a chance to slay them... That possibility isn't low. Once they finished their war, their forces must have hit rock bottom, making slaying them far easier back then than it is now."
"And the second possibility," she paused, "is that the legend of the Seven-Colored Tail was born long before Heroic Spirit Commanders ever existed."
Yaxiu and Diya were both puzzled. Diya asked, "But without Heroic Spirit Commanders, how would anyone get Soul Summoning sorcery spirits? And without Soul Summoning sorcery spirits, how could anyone get the Six-Colored Anchor?"
"Do you remember the Disordered Shopping Book?" Sonia said. "I went back and looked up the Dramatic Poet, and found that many sorcerers had encountered legacies left behind by the Dramatic Poet. After thorough study, they concluded that the Dramatic Poet didn't actually create new Void Realm structures out of nothing, but rather remodeled other Void Realm structures for his own use."
"Remodeled?"
"The Dramatic Poet's structures might originally have been resource points, Miracle Paradises, windmills, colosseums, cabins of lost memories..." Sonia explained. "It's precisely because the Dramatic Poet's structures were originally inherent to the Void Realm that the Void Realm automatically maintains them, allowing his buildings to endure and remain fresh even though he disappeared so many years ago."
Yaxiu caught on: "You mean the six colors of the Six-Colored Anchor..."
"The six gods each usurped a color and used it as a foundation to develop their faction Main Cities and Heroic Spirit Legions, which is why we had to kill Heroic Spirit Commanders to claim their colors," Sonia analyzed calmly, tugging at the corner of Yaxiu's coat. "But in the distant past, before the Heroic Spirit factions even appeared, those six colors might have been special mechanisms scattered all over the Time Continent."
The epoch calendar had only reached the year 1668, so Sonia certainly didn't believe the gods had existed since time immemorial. Even so, imagining a past before the gods had ever emerged was still profoundly difficult for her, carrying an inexplicable sense of dread, as if she were committing heresy against the foundational order of the world.
"Ah," the Witch spoke up. "I once read a fairy tale picture book that featured a very peculiar setting. There was a Stele Without Purple. Whenever someone stood before it, their past would appear on the stele in purple script. What's more, everyone else except that person would forget those memories, but that person could rub the purple characters onto their own body, and each character would turn into an equal amount of gold dust..."
"In the sorcerer world, gold usually refers to golden wings," Sonia said. "If that truly was a Void Realm mechanism, the meaning of that setting is that one could trade their own past for the rapid growth of golden sorcery power... an effect similar to a Vortex!"
"Come to think of it, I always wondered why the Time Continent had no mechanism similar to the Vortexes," Yaxiu remarked. "If the gods usurped those mechanisms, that explains it. Compared to the gods, the Dramatic Poet's work is hardly worth mentioning—the Dramatic Poet merely left legacies for future generations, while the gods left behind an eternal war across the Void Realm that has spanned a thousand years and may continue forever!"
"The Flowing Gold River, the Stele Without Purple..." He couldn't help chuckling, a strange light glinting in his eyes. "The Time Continent we see now is merely a fragmented world. Of course! The Void Realm is like a buffet overflowing with exquisite delicacies—how could nobody have touched it?"
"In other words, a long time ago, the Time Continent had six mechanisms similar to the Flowing Gold River," Diya summarized. "Back then, all a sorcerer needed to do was find a way to gather the six colors and leap into the Flowing Gold River to find the Seven-Colored Tail. Until the gods arrived, turning the Time Continent into what it is today."
"That's the most reasonable explanation," Sonia said. "And the best one we can come up with right now."
"Well then..."
Yaxiu stepped down from the car, turned to look at them, and waved his hand. "Let's go."
Six-colored armor draped over them like gossamer silk, dazzlingly brilliant and enhancing their beauty. On Yaxiu, however, the six-colored armor looked rather bizarre—as if an evil cult leader who committed heinous deeds secretly had a penchant for sparkly, multicolored shawls.
The three passed through the curtain of rain and arrived at the bank of the Flowing Gold River. The time sorcery spirits swimming in the river watched them curiously, but seemed stung by the brilliance radiating from their bodies, slipping quietly away along the current.
Yaxiu had originally wanted to pick up a few time sorcery spirits while he was at it, but seeing how they had abandoned their usual warm hospitality, he had no urge to chase after them. Without looking back at his teammates, he walked straight to the river's edge. Seeing that his six-colored armor was still circulating normally and that his senses detected nothing amiss, he let out a soft breath. Testing the surface with the tip of his foot and sending ripples across the water, he stepped into the Flowing Gold River.
As he submerged completely into the Flowing Gold River, the river was 'contaminated' by the six-colored armor upon him. As if swept over by an artist's brush, the entire Flowing Gold River gradually took on a kaleidoscope of colors until, at a sudden glance...
It looked just like a Seven-Colored Tail.
Chapter 481