Chapter 1038: The Seventy-Two Labyrinths
It was as if an entire organ of the human body had been shrunk to the size of a single cell.
Today, the Salvation Sect was hidden within the void above the Ten Thousand Immortals Alliance’s Gou Mang Prefecture, invisible and unknowable to ordinary people.
Following the coordinates provided by his Tianxuan Mirror avatar, Li Fan arrived at a point one hundred and twenty kilometers above Gou Mang Prefecture.
The entrance to the Salvation Sect was here.
Shrunk a hundred thousand times, the Salvation Sect was like a speck of dust, further concealed by the Dharma Spreader’s restrictive arts. Thus, even with Li Fan’s current perceptive abilities, and despite knowing exactly where to look, he could not detect any trace of it.
After a moment of contemplation, Li Fan silently activated the Limitless Fullness and Emptiness technique, carefully cleaving off a small portion of his spiritual soul.
Once separated from his body, the sliver of soul took on the form of a miniature Li Fan and transformed into a streak of white light, vanishing into the minuscule void before him.
As his surroundings magnified hundreds, then thousands of times, the space around Li Fan’s soul-clone rapidly expanded.
The soul-clone sped through the vast void, searching for any sign of the Salvation Sect's entrance.
“This is more than a simple reduction in scale; space itself is a superposition of multiple dimensions here.”
Before long, he sensed the familiar aura of the Dharma Spreader’s restrictive arts, and his form came to an abrupt halt.
Upon careful inspection, Li Fan noticed an area in the void not far away that seemed off. It was as if a mirror had been embedded in the fabric of space, creating a subtle, discordant shimmer.
An ordinary person would never have noticed it, but Li Fan had simulated and cracked the restrictive arts countless times on the Dissociation Disk; he was intimately familiar with their nature.
Without hesitation, he flew toward the “mirror.”
It felt like passing through an invisible bubble. In an instant, Li Fan's sense of direction was thrown into chaos as up became down and left became right, over and over again.
A slight vertigo washed over him. He knew he had entered the second layer of space.
Beyond the first layer, the path was not only guarded by the true entrance but also riddled with decoys.
One wrong step would teleport an intruder into a confounding labyrinth of void space. These false paths had no exit, only endlessly magnifying layers of micro-reality. Never mind finding the Salvation Sect again; just avoiding getting lost forever was an immense challenge.
Fortunately, Li Fan held the key. He proceeded with caution, and after penetrating seventy-two layers of space, he finally saw it: a mountain, floating in the distant void.
Seventy-two layers deep, shrunk a hundred thousand times over.
Here, the void was not the conventional pitch-black, but an eerie, pale purple.
At the edges of the purple-lit expanse, thin lines of light would occasionally flash by, leaving faint trails that vanished almost immediately.
They moved so fast that even Li Fan couldn't track them.
Even stranger, spheres of purple light would periodically ignite throughout this space, their numbers varying each time.
Like suns, or perhaps clusters of stars, they would briefly illuminate the realm before quickly fading away.
...
Against the backdrop of these bizarre phenomena, the distant Salvation Sect took on an even more uncanny aura.
Li Fan's soul-clone slowly approached the mountain.
After passing through a protective barrier, he officially entered the grounds of the Salvation Sect.
It seemed to be a self-contained space. For the first time since entering the labyrinth, sound reached Li Fan’s ears.
There were no specific noises, just the mere presence of sound itself—a stark contrast to the absolute silence he had experienced while traversing the seventy-two layers.
Li Fan found himself at the foot of the mountain.
Seeing a single stone staircase stretching upward, he attempted to fly directly toward the summit.
He hadn't flown far before his vision blurred, and he found himself right back where he started.
“Is this due to the Dharma Spreader’s restrictive arts,” Li Fan wondered, “or one of the Salvation Sect's own protective measures?”
With that thought, he abandoned the idea of flying and began to ascend the mountain path, step by step.
“Hmm?”
He had only taken a few steps when he suddenly froze.
“Was that my imagination?”
Just now, it seemed as if a figure had rushed past him, heading straight up the mountain.
Li Fan hadn't *seen* anything, but he had most certainly *felt* its presence.
“Such theatrics...”
Li Fan snorted coldly and continued on his way.
Sure enough, with every new stretch of path he climbed, he felt the appearance of that ghostly figure.
Sometimes it went up the mountain, just as he was. Other times, it came down from above.
The occurrences grew more and more frequent, and...
...each time it appeared, the sensation it left behind was more distinct.
A grave expression crept onto Li Fan's face.
At first, it was like nothing more than a passing breeze. Now, when the figure brushed past him, he could clearly feel a cold, clammy dampness.
It was so palpable that his soul-clone felt like a mortal after a long run in the height of summer, his body drenched in sweat...
“Sweat?”
Li Fan was jolted into awareness. Something was wrong.
He scanned himself with his spiritual sense, but found nothing amiss.
He cast a Water Mirror Technique and gazed into its surface.
In that instant, Li Fan's scalp prickled.
The dark figures that had brushed past him hadn't vanished at all.
Instead, they were piled one on top of the other, all of them clinging to his back.
What horrified him most was that, without the mirror's reflection, he hadn't sensed a thing!
As if sensing his gaze through the reflection...
...the faces of the once-blurry shadows slowly began to materialize.
A collage of impossibly pale, overlapping faces flickered and shifted, and their fragmented voices echoed in Li Fan's ears.
“Go up the mountain, go up...”
“Run! Run away!”
“Fellow Daoist, give me a ride... this path is so hard to walk.”
“So tired. So tired. We must be near the exit.”
...
As their voices swirled around him, Li Fan discovered to his horror that his body had begun to act on its own, responding to their conflicting demands.
It tried to ascend the mountain and desperately flee at the same time.
Neither impulse would yield to the other.
*Rip...*
Caught in this absolute contradiction, it was as if he were being pulled in opposite directions by two massive crowds.
Li Fan's body was instantly ripped in two.
“That's more like it... that's more like it...”
Both sides, having claimed a piece for themselves, let out a gleeful cheer.
Then the shadows went their separate ways, each carrying half of his body with them.
One went up the mountain, the other down, both moving swiftly along the path.
As if contaminated by the shadows, Li Fan's two severed halves became shrouded in a thick gloom of their own.
As time seemed to warp and corrode, the two halves quietly regenerated, each becoming a complete body once more.
Outside the Salvation Sect, back in the normal space of the Xuanhuang Realm.
Li Fan felt the simultaneous feeds from his two soul-clones, and a look of keen interest appeared on his face.
One ascending, one descending.
Two scenes unfolded at once.
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