Chapter 100: The Shadow of Millions of Years

The fabric of space around the main fissure still trembled with the knots Zhì Yuǎn had made to deceive Ancestor Lǐ Jìngzhī. But at the point where the first spatial fold overlapped with the void, the second ripple remained caught.

Zhì Yuǎn extended his Divine Sense, probing the space. There were no doors or seals, only a piece of a broken world, dragged by accident when he twisted the canyon’s coordinates.

He took a step forward and crossed the opening.

On the other side, the light was gray and dead. The ground beneath his boots was composed of cracked rock plates that floated aimlessly over a dense mist. The air smelled of dust and rusted iron—the residue of weapons that had lost their spirituality after ages of abandonment.

Zhì Yuǎn stopped at the edge of the slab. His perception expanded in silence.

The rules of that space had collapsed almost completely. Even so, at the center of the largest rock island, something pulsed. The energy emanated a blend of Immortal Qi and spiritual energy, leaking from wounds that refused to close.

Zhì Yuǎn flew over the frozen air, crossing the space between the floating slabs without making a sound.

When his boot touched the central rock, the mist around the pillar stirred.

A dry snap tore the silence.

A blade of gray energy, short and sharp as bone, burst from the ground and shot straight at his throat. There was no killing intent, only a speed he had never witnessed before.

Zhì Yuǎn did not retreat. He merely tilted his head a fraction of an inch to the side.

The blade ripped the air near his ear and lost its momentum, dissolving into dust before falling onto the rock behind him.

"Your reflexes are fast, boy," a deep voice rumbled. There was almost a trace of approval in it, the way a veteran lets slip without meaning to before a novice who should not have survived.

The mist at the base of the pillar yielded slowly.

Kneeling on the rock, a man kept his hand spread against the ground. The remains of armor covered his chest—the dark metal, worn until it resembled bronze, cracked by fissures from which a thin smoke leaked. Black hair, speckled with white strands, fell loose over his broad shoulders.

He lifted his face. His eyes were cold, tired—shaped by the weight of wars the outside world had long forgotten.

His hand withdrew from the ground, but did not fully relax. His fingers remained curved in the air, as if they still reached for the hilt of a weapon that no longer existed there. A soldier’s habit that had outlived his own army.

"My blade has not missed in thirty thousand years," said the warrior, assessing the intruder with half-lidded eyes. "You’re the first in a long time to make me think it has rusted."

He rose slowly. The armor creaked against his chest. For the first time in ages, he made no move to retreat into the mist—as if the exhaustion of counting days in the dust had finally overcome his instinct to hide.

"I am Méng Yá. General of the Celestial Emperor’s Vanguard." A dry pause, almost a mutter of mockery directed at himself. "Or what’s left of him after my own men decided loyalty was only a matter of who paid more."

Zhì Yuǎn kept his hands clasped behind his back. His perception was already probing the fissures in that being’s foundation—profound wear, a rot accumulated across ages.

"I don’t know who that Celestial Emperor is," Zhì Yuǎn remarked, his tone flat.

The silence that followed lasted a heartbeat longer than it should have.

Méng Yá stared at the youth in front of him as if he had just stated that the sky was green.

The general let out a hoarse sound that began as astonishment and ended as laughter—the first real laugh that had escaped him in who knew how many millennia, dragged from soot-filled lungs.

"A hundred thousand years," he said, slapping his palm against his own knee. "A hundred thousand years running... and the reason for all of it has already been forgotten out there." He shook his head, the laugh dying slowly into something more bitter. "I should be furious. But I confess it’s a relief to discover that no one cares anymore."

"Someone cares," Zhì Yuǎn corrected. "I met an immortal who was hunting a demonic cultivator in this region."

The general’s laugh died for good.

"Demonic cultivator." Méng Yá spat the word. "Ah. That boy. He was barely a few hundred thousand years old when he decided to rebel along with the others..."

He took two steps to the edge of the rock, his gaze lost in something only he could see.

"He may even believe his own story." The general turned his face back to Zhì Yuǎn, a dry gleam in his tired eyes. "But what about you, boy? Do you also believe the words of a stranger?"

Zhì Yuǎn remained silent.

Méng Yá narrowed his eyes.

He expected to find the usual marks of lower realms, but instead his perception met a blind spot.

Zhì Yuǎn’s foundation did not harmonize with the environment. Instead of absorbing the world’s Qi to build an inner ocean, that man’s chest devoured the air and warped the stability of the rock beneath his boots like a fracture in space.

Méng Yá furrowed his thick brows. The weight of having commanded the vanguard of the celestial throne did not help him decipher that body. The general let out a dry noise from the back of his throat, the discomfort showing in the expression that had remained placid for so long.

"What sort of abomination are you carrying in your chest, boy?" Méng Yá asked, his voice losing its military rigidity. "I’ve seen divine bodies that fused the soul into star cores so they wouldn’t die. But your structure has no form. It looks like you swallowed your own foundation and use your body only as a shell."

Zhì Yuǎn held the gaze without confirming or boasting of anything.

Méng Yá blinked slowly and swallowed the curiosity, locking it under a hard expression.

Zhì Yuǎn took two slow steps across the slab, his eyes fixed on the worn armor.

Méng Yá’s wound was a rot in the roots of his soul that ate away at him every moment in what seemed like endless torture.

"Your soul is leaking, General," Zhì Yuǎn stated, without false pity. "The Chaotic Void hides your presence, but it also makes your healing impossible. At this rate, this world fragment will become your tomb before you can recover."

Méng Yá let out a raspy laugh.

"You discovered the obvious, boy. If I had a better place to drop dead, I would have left this dust a long time ago."

Zhì Yuǎn stared at the supposed general for a while, calculating the profit of that exchange—and the extra value of keeping a card up his sleeve against that Senior.

"I have a better camp to offer," Zhì Yuǎn said. "I’ll lock the only door that leads to this broken world and hide it inside my own domain. No one will find the entrance—not even you, unless I allow it."

"Interesting choice of words, ’domain.’" Méng Yá raised his eyebrows, interest overcoming fatigue for the first time. "What kind of naivety led you to offer a roof to a stranger without first asking the price of his loyalty?"

"I don’t have the capacity to receive the loyalty of a man of your stature, General." Zhì Yuǎn shook his head with his gaze lowered, before looking the immortal in the eyes again. "I want what you carry in your head. The map of the Three Thousand Worlds. Names, routes, techniques... When I ascend to that realm, I don’t intend to arrive blind."

The general stared at the youth for a few moments. There was no demand for humiliating submission nor blood oaths. It was an alliance that only charged what it needed.

"Fair," Méng Yá agreed with a firm nod. "Knowledge is the only thing I have left."

------

The anchoring demanded five full days of uninterrupted concentration.

Zhì Yuǎn undid the original bindings of those fragmented spaces and tethered the coordinates exclusively to his Inner Universe. They continued floating in the Chaotic Void, but now the only entrance doors belonged to him. Finding them by chance would be harder than locating a specific grain of sand in the entire Universe; after all, the coordinates were tangled and constantly shifting.

Even so, the spiritual toll of bearing the weight of two realities simultaneously bordered on excruciating. During the peak of the tension, while the local Laws oscillated, Zhì Yuǎn even thought it would be safer simply to release the threads and let Méng Yá’s world be lost in the dark.

But the chance of an immortal monster finding the way back to collect the debt was not zero, and discarding the information of the Upper Realm went against his nature.

A silent snap warped the air in the west corridor of the Autumn Wind Pavilion.

Zhì Yuǎn stepped onto the cedar floor. His temples throbbed in a painful rhythm.

He braced his hand against the wooden wall for a moment, closing his eyes and releasing his breath.

From the main hall, the sound of feminine voices floated through the pavilion. Yù Qíng, Mò Yán, and Lín Jié discussed in calm tones, quietly plotting the conquest of the Twin-Faced Empire.

The sound of his wives’ celestial voices struck his mind like fresh water in the middle of a scorching desert. The sharp pain in his head receded almost in the same instant.

Zhì Yuǎn opened his eyes, which held a dark, predatory gleam. A light, hungry smile spread across his face, and he pushed off the wall, walking slowly toward the hall.