Chapter 1247: Insisting on Exploring the Star Sea
Chapter 1247: Insisting on Exploring the Star Sea
“All supernatural power in the world has vanished. For an ordinary person, a lifespan of a hundred years is the absolute limit.”
“And yet, humanity’s eternal pursuit of the Dao remains unchanged.”
“By studying, analyzing, and harnessing the laws of nature, even mortals can unleash astonishing power.”
...
In the blank world before Sun Erlang’s eyes, a sphere suddenly appeared.
The sphere rotated on its axis, its surface covered in countless black specks representing humanity, all moving at incredible speed.
At first, the buildings on the ground were only a few meters tall, but as time flowed by in a blur, towering skyscrapers began to spring up from the earth.
Soon after, flying vehicles even appeared among the clouds.
“The plight of the Xuanhuang Realm is, in essence, no different from that of these worlds without supernatural power. The ancient scriptures often speak of the immortal Dao as eternal. Perhaps there is truth to that.”
“The so-called ‘Immortals’ are beings who have exhausted the principles of the Dao and wield it to its absolute limit. They stand on the far shore, beyond all other living things, equal to the Dao itself—gazing down upon the mortal world, undying and indestructible.”
“But what would happen if the Dao itself were to change?”
“The Dao would still be the Dao. But those beings unable to adapt to the changed Dao would inevitably face their own extinction.”
“Unable to harmonize with the Dao, an immortal is no longer worthy of the name. They will fall.”
“And from the teeming masses, new ‘Wielders of the Dao’ will always arise. The power they command will only grow stronger.”
“And they will become the new ‘Immortals.’”
...
At the time, the Faceless Saint Emperor’s words had been profound and mysterious. Not just Sun Erlang, but none of the other direct disciples under the Saint Emperor had been able to grasp their meaning.
But now, aided by the power of the Truth Inducing Fruit, he was fortunate enough to taste what it felt like to be a creator.
Gazing at the world he had created, Sun Erlang was suddenly struck by a realization.
Within that spherical world, after countless years of natural evolution, a race would inevitably emerge that was in harmony with the Dao of the world he had created.
They would be able to perceive the ultimate secrets of their world, secrets hidden from other beings, and through this knowledge, they would become the so-called ‘Dao Wielders’ of their realm.
Whoosh!
Sun Erlang’s perspective shot across the void, descending upon the sphere he had created.
Inside an ordinary building, a young scholar was deep in thought, frowning under the lamplight.
The blackboard before him was covered in complex equations and diagrams.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong...”
“Where did I go wrong? Why are my calculations so wildly different from the actual trajectory?”
“It’s as if some force is binding us, preventing us from leaving this planet.”
The scholar ran a hand through his hair in frustration, then suddenly lifted his head and stared out the window.
Through the dark of night, his eyes seemed to meet Sun Erlang’s gaze perfectly.
...
Sun Erlang’s vision blurred, and the scene shattered before him.
When he came to his senses, he was surprised to see that spaceships had begun to appear on the sphere, attempting to fly beyond the “world’s edge.”
But beyond this world, Sun Erlang had created nothing; there was only emptiness.
Naturally, they would not succeed.
Sun Erlang’s thoughts raced, and he began to create a new map.
The white space slowly darkened. In the starry sky, besides the initial planet, thousands upon thousands of other planets began to appear.
The map’s scope expanded a hundred thousandfold in an instant, and Sun Erlang’s Transformation Dao Stone suddenly began to feel the strain.
To lighten the workload, Sun Erlang designed most of these new planets as barren, lifeless places shrouded in silence.
And to prevent the inhabitants of the original planet from expanding too quickly, he set the distances between each planet to be vast.
So vast that without the power of longevity, it would take nearly an entire lifetime for one of these little people to travel from one planet to another.
...
After an immense effort, Sun Erlang managed to save the world that had been on the brink of collapse.
But soon, before he had time to refine and expand the star-sea vista, the world once again became precarious.
After some investigation, Sun Erlang realized the problem: the inhabitants had begun to doubt the reality of their world.
It wasn't just their inability to fly beyond their world; it was also because they had observed countless planets in the star sea that they had never seen before.
These planets seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, shattering their understanding of the universe.
“You can’t just crudely set the rules; the appearance of all things must be rooted in the world’s fundamental principles.”
The thought suddenly surfaced in Sun Erlang’s mind.
He quickly made the necessary adjustments.
Soon after, during another determined attempt by the inhabitants, a spaceship actually managed to break free of the planet’s grasp and enter the star sea.
The humans aboard the ship were stunned to discover a blue ring encircling their planet.
It was this ring that had interfered with their observations from the surface and prevented their previous attempts to leave the planet.
It was a monumental discovery, an event that reshaped their world!
After surviving a life-and-death crisis, the ship finally returned to the surface and made its discovery public.
And once the planet’s scholars added the stellar ring as a variable in their calculations, theory and reality finally reached a temporary consensus.
The people cheered, heralding the dawn of a new era. They hailed the crew of the first ship to enter space as heroes.
With this success, the planet’s inhabitants, who had been held back for so long, entered a period of explosive development.
Fortunately, by this time, Sun Erlang had more or less finished sketching out the desolate star-sea vista.
And thanks to the vastness of the star sea he had created, he could use space and time to keep the inhabitants occupied for now.
But Sun Erlang knew this was only a temporary solution.
Sooner or later, they would notice the anomalies in this star sea.
“If I don’t want to be discovered, I have to keep expanding this star sea.”
“And the pace of my expansion must exceed the pace of their exploration.”
His macroscopic view pulled back again, tens of thousands of times further.
Endless nebulae and galaxies were born in the darkness beyond.
The Transformation Dao Stone was already humming, pushed to its very limit.
“It’s like pulling a single hair and moving the whole body. Every object in the star sea is connected to every other.”
“You can’t just add them in later; you have to consider the impact their appearance will have on the original planet.”
“...”
After some thought, Sun Erlang sensed that the Transformation Dao Stone was in danger of shattering. He steeled himself and decided to crudely minimize these effects by simply increasing the spatial distances.
“It should be a long time before these little people notice something is wrong.”
The inhabitants continued to advance at a rapid pace.
They studied the stellar ring and invented the Reverse Flow Boat, a vessel capable of using the ring’s binding force in reverse.
Like a slingshot, it launched the spaceships out at incredible speeds.
Although it was a one-way trip, it greatly accelerated the inhabitants’ exploration of the star sea.
“Isn’t that a bit too fast?”
Sun Erlang watched, dumbfounded, as the first Reverse Flow Boat continuously used the power of the stellar rings of passing planets to accelerate.
It sped toward the fringes of the star sea.
“This won’t do...”
Sun Erlang mulled it over for a moment, then guided a meteor, altering its original trajectory to send it hurtling toward the Reverse Flow Boat.
But to his surprise, the crew of the vessel managed to dodge it at the last possible second.
In a flash, the scene aboard the Reverse Flow Boat appeared before Sun Erlang.
“Captain, thank you! If it weren’t for you, we would’ve been obliterated!”
A serious, middle-aged man with a long beard did not relax his expression. “That rock... its arrival was strange. The void is so vast, yet it just happened to cross our path...”
“Stay alert! Don’t let your guard down!”
...
Hearing the little man’s words, Sun Erlang couldn’t help but feel a flush of embarrassment. His intervention had indeed been a bit clumsy.
But in the next instant, he thought of a way to fix it.
Sun Erlang pointed a finger at the planet nearest to the Reverse Flow Boat.
Moments later, it violently disintegrated.
It shattered into thousands of fragments that rained down upon the Reverse Flow Boat like a torrential storm.
Luck can save you once, but not twice.
Faced with such a dense, precisely guided cluster of debris, the Reverse Flow Boat naturally stood no chance of survival.
It erupted into a ball of flame upon impact and vanished from the star sea forever.
However, a single accident was not enough to curb the inhabitants’ curiosity about the star sea.
Following that, larger and more advanced Reverse Flow Boats continuously launched from the home planet.
They set off to explore in every direction.
Although he was tempted to destroy all these ships using the same old method, Sun Erlang knew that his previous intervention had already shaken the rules of this creation game.
If he continued to interfere so directly, this world would only collapse faster.
So, Sun Erlang had to find another way.
He watched the countless ships launching off the stellar ring, and soon, an idea came to him.
With a single thought, the stellar ring around the original planet underwent a subtle, imperceptible change.
The little inhabitants didn’t notice anything was wrong until a year later.
The planet began to experience record-breaking extreme weather events.
Cold snaps and droughts swept across the world, wreaking havoc.
Crop yields plummeted, and even the inhabitants’ birth rate began to show a slight decline.
The little people sensed that something was amiss and gathered the planet’s most brilliant scholars to investigate the cause of these disasters.
Ultimately, they reached a conclusion.
While the stellar ring bound them and kept them from venturing into the star sea, it was also a protective shield.
It insulated the planet from the extreme conditions of the star sea.
In recent years, their overuse of the ring’s propulsive force had caused it to shrink ever so slightly.
Even though the degree of shrinkage was negligible for the ring itself, the planet’s fragile ecosystem simply could not withstand the resulting impact.
After a series of heated debates, the little inhabitants ultimately decided to temporarily abandon their plans to explore the star sea.
The Reverse Flow Boats were put into storage.
“That should hold them for a while longer.”
Sun Erlang couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief.
“I wonder how much time has passed in the real world.”
He gazed at the galaxy he had shaped with his own hands, his expression growing distant.
Time flew by.
In the blink of an eye, another century passed on the original planet.
Starting in the third decade, ships began to approach the stellar ring to collect samples for research.
By the fifth decade, after tireless efforts from all the little people, they finally found a way to repair the damage to the ring.
Sun Erlang watched with his own eyes as these little people recreated the power of the stellar ring in their laboratories.
His mind reeled, a thousand thoughts surging through his consciousness.
“The power of the stellar ring originates from the fundamental laws of the world I created.”
“But these little people are also manifestations of this world’s laws. As part of this world, they have the ability to explore the very source of its essence...”
“Because it truly exists, they can study it and make use of it.”
...
The changes on the original planet continued.
After numerous experiments confirmed the effectiveness of their repairs, the little people, who had been restrained for so long, could finally bear it no longer.
An unprecedented golden age of exploration had arrived.
Countless Reverse Flow Boats once again departed from the original planet, venturing out to explore the endless star sea.
In the seventh decade, the little people invented a method of long-distance travel that relied solely on a stellar ring power core, without needing the ring’s propulsive force.
From that day forward, the inhabitants officially achieved round-trip exploration of the star sea.
From the eighth decade to the end of the century, the little people ushered in a new era of exploring and colonizing the star sea.
At this point, Sun Erlang knew it was only a matter of time before his world of lies was exposed.
Watching the countless little people who were still willing to sacrifice everything for this cause, an inexplicable emotion stirred within Sun Erlang’s heart.
He no longer tried to expand the boundaries of the star sea.
Instead, he silently watched as the footsteps of the little people reached the edge of their world.
Five hundred years later.
When a strangely shaped Reverse Flow Boat finally arrived at the fringes of the star sea, the world before Sun Erlang’s eyes suddenly began to tremble.
Boom!
Like a cluster of exploding stars, a brilliant light erupted.
And then vanished.
But Sun Erlang did not return to the real world.
Before him, there was still only a blank void.
“Hm?”
Sun Erlang was a little surprised. He looked around, wondering what had happened.
“What problems, if any, did you see in the world you just witnessed?”
A voice suddenly sounded from behind him.
Sun Erlang’s heart skipped a beat, and he immediately spun around.
He saw a Daoist with long white eyebrows and white hair, holding a horsetail whisk, smiling as he observed him.
“This is...”
Sun Erlang had a faint guess as to the man’s identity. He gathered his courage and ventured, “Greetings, Heavenly Venerate.”
The Daoist didn’t respond, continuing to look at Sun Erlang with a gentle smile.
Sun Erlang pondered for a moment, recalling the civilization of the little people on that first planet.
After a while, he realized something. “There was something wrong. The little people on that planet...”
“They were too united.”
“They never had any major wars or internal conflicts. When the planet faced a crisis, they always managed to put aside their differences and work together to solve it.”
“...”
“Compared to the current state of the Xuanhuang Realm, it was truly unbelievable.”
Sun Erlang shook his head.
The Daoist nodded, then asked again, “That is one point. What else?”
“What else?”
Sun Erlang frowned slightly.
“The little people’s obsession with exploring the star sea... it was too profound.”
“Even after facing so many obstacles, they never gave up.”
“Even the highest echelons of the entire planet shared the same conviction...”
Sun Erlang looked at the Daoist.
“In the real world, that would be almost unimaginable.”
(End of Chapter)
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