Chapter 1179: A Disparity in Time
Li Fan had no way of knowing what would happen if he fell into these voids, nor could he even detect their presence.
He was forced to resort to a cruder method: letting the remaining stone puppets blaze a trail, carefully avoiding the routes where their predecessors had simply vanished without a trace.
As the number of stone puppets continued to dwindle, Li Fan's heart slowly sank.
At this rate of attrition, he feared he would never reach the depths of the Star Sea in this lifetime.
But the catastrophe Li Fan dreaded never came to pass.
When only thirty-three puppets were left, they traversed the void for a considerable time, and not a single one vanished again.
“It seems these voids aren’t scattered throughout the Darkest Star Sea, but are instead densely clustered in one particular region.”
“Just outside the Xuanhuang Realm?” the sacred embryo Li Fan pondered, lost in thought.
The thirty-three puppets flew in formation, with the streak of sword light that was Li Fan following close behind.
“This is going more smoothly than I anticipated.”
“I'm a considerable distance from the Xuanhuang Realm now, yet this avatar, an embodiment of its sword Dao, feels no diminishment in its power.”
“Quite interesting.”
Conventional wisdom held that without the support of a world's power, any laws existing in the void beyond its borders would inevitably weaken.
Yet, he felt no such decline.
In fact...
His understanding of the sword Dao, which had hit an insurmountable wall back in the Xuanhuang Realm, now began to shift. After just a short time in the void, the bottleneck that had held him back was already loosening.
Even though this sacred embryo wasn't exceptionally talented, a torrent of thoughts and epiphanies rushed into his mind, as if he had suddenly been blessed with the genius of a prodigy.
The sacred embryo Li Fan felt an overwhelming urge to stop, to abandon all else and focus his entire being on enlightenment.
He forcibly suppressed the impulse by circulating the Immortal Heart Mantra.
This strange phenomenon sent his mind racing.
“Does the entire Darkest Star Sea share a single system of laws?”
“Is the sword Dao of the Xuanhuang Realm merely a fraction of a greater, universal whole?”
“Out here, in the void beyond the world, one beholds a vaster existence. The limits are invisibly pushed back...”
“A place of coexisting danger and opportunity, indeed.”
“I suspect this is part of the reason the Heavenly Doctor and the Dharma Spreader venture into the Darkest Star Sea so often.”
The thought of the Heavenly Doctor and the Dharma Spreader brought a new weight to his heart.
He had been out here for a mere moment and already reaped such remarkable benefits.
It was difficult to fathom the heights those two must have reached after millennia in the Star Sea.
The Heavenly Doctor's advice had proven invaluable.
The “illness” of the void, a danger even he treated with the utmost caution, had now befallen the sacred embryo Li Fan.
It struck without warning.
Just as Li Fan savored the joy of his impending breakthrough, a sudden, inexplicable weakness washed over him.
Turning his senses inward, he found a black spot tainting his divine soul.
It wasn't just eroding the soul; it was consuming it, replacing it.
The countless treasures he had ingested to protect his soul were powerless to stop its insidious advance, and all his methods for nourishing the soul proved utterly useless against it.
“The maximum threshold of my soul's strength is decreasing,” he realized with grim gravity, “It's not that my soul is being damaged—it's being fundamentally diminished.”
A heavy sense of foreboding settled over the sacred embryo Li Fan.
Fortunately, the spot wasn't spreading too rapidly, giving him a precious window to act.
A shadow of a sword materialized within his divine soul.
With a flash of light, it cleanly excised the tainted portion!
As his soul was severed, the sacred embryo's sword-like form instantly split in two.
The untainted half shot away, accelerating rapidly to escape its former position.
The infected half remained behind, ceasing its forward momentum.
It settled into a cross-legged position in the void, its consciousness focused entirely on comprehending the mysterious blackness that now consumed its weakened soul.
The agony of cleaving one's own soul defies description.
Even fortified by the Immortal Heart Mantra, the sacred embryo Li Fan's vision swam with blackness, and he nearly lost consciousness.
A wave of enfeeblement, even more profound than the taint of the black spot, crashed over him. Ignoring the pain and exhaustion, he swiftly absorbed the refined essence of the soul-nourishing treasures he carried.
Freed from the corrupting influence, his purified soul slowly began to mend and strengthen.
“It was like scraping the poison from the very bone.”
Li Fan reflected with a sigh.
Only the bizarre nature of the New Method, with its indestructible foundation and body, coupled with a cultivation base forged from the Xuanhuang sword Dao itself, allowed him to so recklessly carve up his own soul without being reduced to a drooling imbecile on the spot.
“Unfortunately, without the Five Elements Great Cave-Heaven and the Limitless Fullness and Emptiness technique, relying on these external treasures is not a long-term solution.”
“With every cut, I become a little weaker than before.”
“...”
“I can only hope I last long enough to reach the depths of the Star Sea.”
Li Fan closed his eyes, banishing all distractions to focus on mending the trauma to his soul.
Meanwhile, the other half of him, the part left behind in the void, was meeting its end.
It was a fate far more terrifying, more utterly hopeless, than merely dying of old age.
Like a mortal succumbing to dementia, the mind of the abandoned half grew sluggish. Thoughts slowed to a crawl.
Its intellect dulled, until it struggled to recall even its most basic intentions.
The synchronous consciousness from Li Fan's other selves felt distant, as if separated by an impenetrable barrier, its messages impossible to comprehend.
At last, all thought ceased.
Like its divine soul, it plunged into an absolute, deathly silence.
...
“Just like this Darkest Star Sea.”
Back in the Xuanhuang Realm, within the space of the Deduction Jade.
Li Fan's true self reviewed the information streaming back from his sacred embryo, and a chill ran through him.
It wasn't the invisible voids or the soul-devouring plague that troubled him most.
It was the discrepancy in time between his true self and his distant avatar.
His sacred embryo, in its sword form, had harnessed the power of the cosmos to travel a vast distance from the Xuanhuang Realm.
In doing so, Li Fan had discovered a startling truth: the flow of time in the Xuanhuang Realm was out of sync with the depths of the Darkest Star Sea.
“It must be the influence of the Immortal Ruins.”
“While not as extreme as the temporal distortion at its very edge—where millennia pass in a flash—time here still flows more slowly than in the rest of the Darkest Star Sea.”
“Right now, the ratio is about one to two.”
“And the further my sacred embryo travels, the wider that gap becomes.”
This realization sparked a cascade of further thoughts in Li Fan's mind.
“The entire Darkest Star Sea, everything within the High Wall, is unavoidably warped by the Immortal Ruins, to one degree or another.”
“Does that mean time flows differently on the other side of the High Wall as well?”
“Could it be that while tens of thousands of years have passed for the Xuanhuang Realm since the cataclysm that severed the ancient immortal path...”
“Outside the High Wall, in reality...”
“...an even greater expanse of time has elapsed?”
At this staggering possibility, Li Fan closed his eyes, concealing the sharp glint that had appeared within them.
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