Chapter 1214: Purple Qi Enters the Starry Sky
"This soul fragment was meant to be my ace in the hole, saved for the most critical moment."
"But now, it seems, I have no choice but to put it into play."
Having stayed close to Wu Ninglu, he had become intimately familiar with her mannerisms and routines.
Li Fan's soul fragment took control of her body, making a plausible excuse to leave the Sun family's estate without arousing any suspicion.
After shaking off the trackers from the Chen family's alchemy hall, he found a remote, desolate patch of wilderness and descended underground. There, using materials sourced on the spot, he began constructing stone puppets.
His goal was to dispatch these stone puppets to the very edge of the Xuanhuang Realm before the sixteen Dao Integration cultivators made their departure.
He needed to observe their method of escape up close.
With his current mastery of formations, Li Fan wasn't the least bit concerned about being detected by the Ten Thousand Immortals Alliance.
"They say you can't be in two places at once," the soul fragment sighed. "I've split myself so many times, yet it's still not enough."
A quick mental tally confirmed the situation: his true self was concealed within the Deduction Jade's space in the Law Enforcement Hall.
His sacred embryo clone had journeyed to the far side of the Star Sea to probe the mysteries of the echoing starlight.
The splinter of consciousness within the Immeasurable Mirror was too weak to be of much use...
And as for his Holy Emperor avatar, it had the misfortune of being dragged into the Gloomy Realm by Yin Shangren.
That left only this hidden soul fragment to handle things personally.
The situation unfolding in the Gloomy Sea of Darkness would have to wait.
The day the Ten Thousand Immortals Alliance completed its grand mission arrived sooner than Li Fan had anticipated.
It was the thirty-third day since the Clear Void Flowing Crystal had been declared a prohibited substance.
A brilliant rainbow suddenly materialized between the heavens and the earth of the Xuanhuang Realm.
It was a distorted, mesmerizing ribbon of light, as if all the colors of the world had been woven together.
Like a meteor flying in reverse, it pierced the firmament and soared away with majestic power.
Under the watchful gaze of countless cultivators, the rainbow tore a gash across the sky of the Xuanhuang Realm.
Its lingering afterglow, a tapestry of a thousand hues, did not fade, suffusing the canopy of the sky for days on end.
For the next half a month, the skies of the Xuanhuang Realm remained a mottled, dreamlike spectacle of seven colors.
Curious cultivators tried to capture these scattered wisps of rainbow light.
To their surprise, the lights seemed to possess a tangible form; they could be collected and even refined.
What's more, they had the unique property of imbuing other objects with the same seven-colored luminescence.
When they recalled the Clear Void Flowing Crystal—the very substance the Ten Thousand Immortals Alliance had repeatedly and strictly forbidden any discussion of...
...it didn't take a genius for the cultivators to put two and two together.
This was the Clear Void Flowing Crystal, used to forge artifacts capable of leaving the world.
The revelation of this secret, however, did not cause any widespread chaos.
For the majority of cultivators, who were oblivious to the existence of the Immortal Ruins—or even the fact that the Xuanhuang Realm was inescapable—the news was of little consequence.
They only knew that communication with the outside world had been severed for a long time, and they merely speculated that the Alliance's grand project was an attempt to re-establish contact.
But their opinions were irrelevant.
The cultivators who *did* matter, upon grasping the truth, felt entirely different ideas begin to stir in their minds.
An undercurrent of dissent began to ripple through the Ten Thousand Immortals Alliance.
Let us return to the moment the iridescent rainbow departed the Xuanhuang Realm.
Through the eyes of a hundred stone puppets, Li Fan observed the entire process with perfect clarity.
The instant it left the Xuanhuang Realm, its trajectory shifted exactly as he had predicted, veering from its initially straight path.
It curved toward the Immortal Ruins.
But not all of it.
Like a strand of dough being pulled and stretched thin.
Only a portion of the iridescent beam was forcibly diverted by the pull of the Immortal Ruins.
The remainder continued its steadfast flight, streaking deeper into the Star Sea.
As the beam of light journeyed onward, more and more of its colors were drawn away, spiraling down toward the Immortal Ruins.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo...
As these colors peeled away, the light of the beam grew progressively more uniform.
In the end, only a single streak of purple light was left.
Flying alone into the unknown depths of the Star Sea.
From the perspective of the Xuanhuang Realm far below, it simply looked as though a beam of light shot toward the stars had been dispersed into its constituent colors.
It was a curious phenomenon, but not one that would spark any significant discussion.
In Li Fan's eyes, however, the scene was nothing short of a miracle.
"It actually resisted the pull of the Immortal Ruins?!"
"No, it wasn't resistance," he realized. "It was a process of delaying and dissipating the force!"
"It shed the parts of itself affected by the pull, using that release to counteract the force. As each layer peeled away, the main body moved further and faster from the Immortal Ruins, weakening the gravitational tether with every passing moment."
"An incredible feat, only possible through countless precise calculations!"
"This wasn't a victory of brute force, but of finesse."
The dynamic curve of the separating colors replayed over and over in Li Fan's mind.
It seemed to hold infinite mysteries within its arc.
The Transformation Dao Stone crystal in his sea of consciousness whirred to life, attempting to deduce and replicate the event.
But he only managed to simulate up to the point where the yellow light peeled away before a wave of dizziness washed over him, forcing him to stop.
A pang of regret struck him, but he had no choice but to cease the deduction.
"So this is the method the Dharma Spreader devised?"
"Elegant."
That was the only word Li Fan could find to describe it.
"The Clear Void Flowing Crystal must have been the key to separating the different colors."
"As for the raw propulsive force to escape the Xuanhuang Realm, that must have come from the sixteen Dao Integration cultivators."
"Cultivators at the Longevity stage are bound to the very fabric of the Xuanhuang Realm. Unless one reaches the level of the Dharma Spreader, escape is likely impossible. That means Dao Integration is the highest power that the world can dispatch."
"Even though they were hastily nurtured by the Ten Thousand Immortals Alliance, I could sense that the auras of those sixteen Dao Integration cultivators were by no means weak."
Li Fan's mind raced.
The sight of the iridescent rainbow departing the Xuanhuang Realm had shaken him to the core.
Only when you see someone else effortlessly achieve a goal you've struggled with for ages do you truly comprehend the gap between you.
"The Dharma Spreader is truly beyond the ken of ordinary cultivators."
"But no matter. Once I master this method and use [Truth]..."
"...I'll be the one ahead of him again."
...
The Great Qi Dynasty.
Sun Erlang watched Yi Shu with a perplexed expression.
Lately, the senior cultivator had developed a strange habit of freezing mid-sentence, his gaze turning distant.
If Sun Erlang hadn't witnessed the terrifying power of the Transformation Dao Stone Mother firsthand and known this was a sign of it channeling immense computational power, he might have mistaken it for some form of dementia.
But what on earth was the Stone Mother calculating that it would affect all the separated bodies of the Taiyan Sect?
Having spent a fair amount of time with Yi Shu, he had a decent understanding of the Taiyan Sect's collective nature.
Instead of guessing wildly, he simply asked.
It took Yi Shu a moment to return to his senses.
"It's nothing," he replied. "I was just considering a method to escape in certain extreme situations without having to abandon the Stone Mother's main body."
"Until we achieve complete informational immortality, losing the main body of the Transformation Dao Stone would still have a catastrophic impact on us," Yi Shu explained.
"Extreme situations?" Having witnessed the Stone Mother's might and even experienced reincarnation in its simulated worlds, Sun Erlang found it difficult to imagine any catastrophe that could force such a being to flee for its life.
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