Chapter 1484: The Dao From Beyond the Dao
Even before attaining the rank of a half-immortal, Li Fan had, on several occasions, drawn upon this gloomy power using the Faceless Immortal Statue. It was safe to say he was intimately familiar with it.
Now that he had ascended, capturing the energy that had accumulated in the Gloomy Sea of Darkness for so many years was as easy as reaching out his hand.
Li Fan was not the master of this gloomy power, so it exhibited immense resistance as he captured it. But Li Fan was no longer who he once was; under the crushing weight of absolute strength, all the gloomy power's struggles were futile.
It all gathered obediently in his palm.
As a "near-immortal power" born from the corpse of a True Immortal, it surprisingly possessed a quality similar to the "infinite" nature of immortal energy. It converged in Li Fan's palm, compressing ceaselessly as if without limit.
By the time the entire Gloomy Sea of Darkness had been absorbed by Li Fan, its shadowy depths cleared, his palm held nothing more than a tiny, perfectly black sphere that glittered with a faint light.
And as the long-settled darkness finally dispersed, Li Fan was able to see clearly the remains of the True Immortal in this place.
Or rather, the remnants of the remains.
The True Immortal's body had been completely drained, used as nourishment by the Spirit Gathering Immortal Ascension Array. All that was left were a few wisps of a trace, even thinner than a shadow.
"So, the immortal has passed," Li Fan murmured, his gaze resting on the residual image for a long while. The trace was too fragile, too thin to hold any useful information.
He blew a gentle breath, sending it to dissipate completely.
It wasn't a sudden burst of compassion, a desire to help this departed True Immortal find peace.
Instead, he wanted to use the clearing of this trace as a trigger, to see if there were any other True Immortal remnants within the Gloomy Sea of Darkness.
The result was as expected.
Aside from a few faint roars from the True Immortal's will to survive below, the vast Gloomy Sea of Darkness, and indeed the entire Xuanhuang Realm and the countless star-filled skies of the experimental site, showed no corresponding fluctuations.
"It seems this True Immortal is well and truly dead."
The Spirit Gathering Immortal Ascension Array within the Gloomy Sea of Darkness was originally built for a single purpose: to serve as the power source for the Xuanhuang Realm's escape from the Immortal Ruins.
But the Li Fan of today could single-handedly drag the Xuanhuang Realm away from the pull of the Immortal Ruins.
The power he could display, even if partly borrowed from the phantom of Shou Qiu, was far greater than that of the entire Gloomy Sea of Darkness.
The fact that he subdued it without a hitch was well within reason.
Li Fan turned his gaze to the final remnant in this place.
The True Immortal's will to survive.
It resembled the shadow of a withered branch, or perhaps a stooped, hunched figure. Upon sensing Li Fan's presence, it displayed a mixture of fear and desire.
It was like a wild animal in the forest that had spotted a hunter. It watched from the shadows, wavering between the urge to flee and the pull of greed.
As if feeding a pet, Li Fan separated a sliver of his own energy and tossed it toward the will to survive.
The will to survive circled it a few times before, as if afraid the food would escape, enveloping, chewing, and swallowing it.
Seeing this, a faint smile touched Li Fan's lips.
"Just as I thought. A witless thing driven only by the instinct for survival."
"An Ink Death Immortal Soul, and one fused with the Great Dao of Heaven and Earth, no less. How could you possibly digest something like that?"
The will to survive tried to consume its meal, but no matter what it did, it couldn't diminish its prize in the slightest.
Worse, the food in its belly began to turn on it, attempting to devour it from the inside out!
The True Immortal's will to survive let out a horrifying shriek, like that of an ancient, ferocious beast.
Yet, no matter how much it struggled, it could not resist the power of the Ink Death Immortal Soul.
It thrashed and writhed helplessly in the deepest part of the Gloomy Sea of Darkness.
When the dust settled, the True Immortal's will to survive had been reduced to just another one of the countless aspects of the Ink Death Immortal Soul.
Li Fan had hoped to find some past memories within this wisp of a True Immortal's remnant will.
But after a thorough search, he found nothing but instinctual thoughts of devouring and rebirth.
"A pity."
"I couldn't figure out the true identity of the True Immortal buried at the bottom of the Gloomy Sea of Darkness."
"But at most, it was just an ordinary True Immortal. It's of no consequence anymore."
Able to suppress a Nameless True Immortal with a wave of his hand, the Li Fan of today had earned the right to say such words.
He surveyed the now-empty Gloomy Sea of Darkness, pondering how to make use of such a vast, vacant space in the future.
Suddenly, however, he sensed the generation of some inexplicable energy from this place.
"Hmm?"
The source of energy here had been completely collected by him. Where did this new power come from?
Li Fan was somewhat surprised but remained calm.
A sweep of his divine sense revealed that this energy, like countless faint points of light, was originating from all over the Xuanhuang Realm.
These specks of light were even more minuscule than the residual traces of the True Immortal's corpse.
If they hadn't suddenly appeared in the completely drained Gloomy Sea of Darkness, Li Fan would have subconsciously overlooked them.
Li Fan drew over a point of light and found that the moment he touched it, it burst and vanished like a soap bubble.
It didn't seem to exist within his body either, its destination unknown.
After a moment of contemplation, Li Fan gathered all the points of light in his hand, condensing them into a sphere for careful observation.
Only when the quantity reached a certain level did Li Fan feel a strange sense of familiarity from it.
"This is..."
"Spirituality?"
"No. It doesn't reach the level of [Truth]; it's much more basic."
"But it is, to a certain degree, a convergence of cultivation talent."
Holding the sphere of light together with the black sphere formed from the gloomy power, Li Fan felt he was beginning to understand what was happening.
"The myriad beings of the Xuanhuang Realm, in their original design, were nothing more than pieces on a board. From the moment of their creation, their attributes were all designed: height, appearance, talent, temperament."
"These spheres of light are the power that the Xuanhuang Realm's natural operation bestows upon its beings as talent. The reason it's now being absorbed by the Gloomy Sea of Darkness is because that True Immortal's will to survive sensed its existence and instinctively tried to seize it..."
Li Fan frowned.
"Although the countless beings of Xuanhuang are chess pieces, they are the chess pieces of the higher-ups in the Immortal Realm. A mere will to survive..."
He looked up toward the beings within the Xuanhuang Realm.
He wanted to try and replicate it, to plunder the talent of the masses.
But it was clear he couldn't do it.
"The True Immortal's will to survive has been eliminated by me, yet this precipitation of talent continues."
Li Fan suddenly recalled a topic he had discussed with Bai Hua, Qiao Gong, and the others before.
During the Great Calamity, many cultivators had personally witnessed from afar their homeworlds falling into the Immortal Ruins, a dreamlike spectacle of all things collapsing into a bizarre, twisted ring of light. As the cultivation world vanished into the Immortal Ruins, a large amount of matter seemed to erupt in the opposite direction. This substance was imperceptible to the naked eye and divine sense, yet it truly existed.
The former Immortal Puppet Ancestor of the Tianji Realm had decayed because its proximity to the Immortal Ruins caused something to constantly drain away from it. Back then, Qiao Gong had even found an excuse for his own "dulling wits."
"The Hunger Immortal has been suppressed by me. The Immortal Ruins are no more..."
Li Fan's form flickered, and he appeared in the starry sky outside the Xuanhuang Realm.
He took out half of the light points.
Here, they showed no tendency to flow. They simply floated silently in the void. They didn't seem to be able to last long, quickly growing dimmer.
Before they could dissipate completely, Li Fan collected them again.
Though it was just a small ball of light, if it were all bestowed upon a single person, the resulting cultivator's talent would likely be no less than that of Zhang Haobo or Xiao Fan.
"It seems that the Xuanhuang Realm, after spending so long beside the Immortal Ruins, has been shaped by it, developing this characteristic."
"The talent and spirituality of all living beings precipitate out in the opposite direction of the Immortal Ruins' pull. Even though the Immortal Ruins no longer exist, this tendency cannot be completely reversed overnight."
After conducting comparative experiments in multiple locations throughout the Dark Star Sea, Li Fan reached a preliminary conclusion.
"As long as it isn't some new monster causing trouble," he first sighed in relief.
But naturally, Li Fan grew curious about the reason this phenomenon occurred.
His understanding of the Hunger Character Art was, arguably, second only to the Hunger Immortal in the [Primal] possibility.
He knew that comprehending the Hunger Character Art would create a vortex that devoured all things.
But he had never noticed anything that was not attracted by this pull, but was instead actively repelled.
Verifying this matter wasn't difficult.
In the center of the Dark Star Sea, Li Fan shot a Hunger Character Art into the distance.
Though it couldn't compare to the reappearance of the Immortal Ruins, it was still like a giant vortex suddenly materializing.
The Star Sea once again grew turbulent.
Li Fan's figure remained unmoving amidst the waves. He took a group of You Clan members, who had caught his eye earlier when they were howling in despair over the disappearance of the Gloomy Sea of Darkness.
He threw them into the vortex, one by one.
Although the You Clan were physically formidable, able to hold their own against cultivators, how could they possibly resist the power of the Hunger Character Art?
Without being able to put up the slightest struggle, they were all turned to dust within the immense vortex.
With no change in his expression, Li Fan tossed them in one by one, observing.
He had never paid special attention to it before, so it was normal to have overlooked that spiritual substance. This time, under Li Fan's meticulous observation, he truly discovered this formless matter.
And because the You Clan were all descendants of the first Xuanhuang Great Heavenly Venerate, the amount of spiritual substance that precipitated from the vortex was not insignificant.
Li Fan was like a gold panner, collecting all the spirituality.
"Interesting. Why does comprehending the Hunger Character Art produce such a strange phenomenon?"
"Perhaps it has to do with the Dao of [Hunger] itself."
Li Fan recalled the scene when he suppressed the Hunger Immortal not long ago.
Faced with Shou Qiu's phantom, the Hunger Immortal, though outmatched, did not simply accept its fate. It fought back with all its might.
The Hunger Immortal's struggle was futile, but what concerned Li Fan was the ghostly, profound voice that sounded like, "Hungry... so hungry."
It sounded less like it came from the Hunger Immortal and more like it originated from a mysterious existence beyond the Great Dao itself.
An existence that seemed to want to swallow mountains and drink seas, to turn everything in the world into its own sustenance.
Li Fan's gaze suddenly shifted back to the Pillar of Dao that was the Hunger Immortal.
"There seems to be a problem with this Dao of Hunger."
"It isn't a Dao native to the Primal Possibility? Did it devour the original and usurp its place?"
Li Fan couldn't be one hundred percent certain.
But from the various signs at present, it was more than likely the case.
"Spiritual substance is closely related to the creation of living beings. It subtly touches upon the very foundation of a possibility's evolution. This outsider, the Dao of Hunger, although it has occupied the Dao path on the surface, it has not yet fundamentally integrated with it."
"Therefore, when it devours all things, this phenomenon of precipitation occurs."
The proof for Li Fan's theory lay within the Hunger Immortal's memories.
The Hunger Immortal had become a Pillar of Dao, its past life open for Li Fan to browse. The final unveiling of the mystery would not be far off.
"If the strange beast race could flee here from another possibility, then it's not surprising that there are other outsiders."
"However, looking at it from the perspective of a latecomer, one discovers the absurdity of the situation."
"These outsiders, just like that group of so-called transcendent True Immortals who fled from the [Primal] possibility, endured countless hardships, thinking they had found a safe haven. They never expected that they would still be unable to escape their fatal end."
"Or perhaps..."
Li Fan's eyes narrowed, light and shadow flickering in his sea of consciousness as images of countless possibilities surged forth. With his current deductive abilities, even without knowing the specific names of the individuals involved, he could, to a certain extent, reverse-engineer the events of the past based on the outcome.
"These outsiders who fled here never considered this place their final harbor at all. They merely treated it as a temporary foothold. If they could escape once, they could escape a second time, a third time..."
"At the very least, that's what they must have thought. If the Dao Annihilation Calamity were to descend again, they would simply flee once more."
"Resisting a catastrophe, apart from favorable timing, requires utmost unity of purpose. And if, hidden among the ranks, there are such innate deserters..."
Li Fan had served as Grand Preceptor for decades; he naturally understood the harm of such rotten apples.
If they merely fled passively, it would be one thing. The most terrifying part was how they would invisibly infect, change, and shake the resolve of those around them.
It would spread like a plague. The consequences would be absolutely unimaginable.
"This is not just my speculation."
"At that time in the Immortal Realm, there were indeed such people."
An image suddenly appeared before Li Fan's eyes.
"Sun Piao Miao."
"And that group who created the Immortal Domain's chess pieces."
"And Qing Yin, as well as the True Immortal with the surname Ling, who managed this Immortal Realm experimental site before leaving without a moment's hesitation."
"This is just the tip of the iceberg. One can only imagine how many similar figures existed among the immortals of the Immortal Realm back then."
"Working with people like them, the Heavenly Net Emperor, for all his boundless ambition, was doomed to fail. If it were me, I would have first used a fishing strategy to gather all these deserters in one place. Then, I would have slaughtered them all!"
"It would serve to prove the people's resolve, and I'd also get a batch of consumables to resist the Dao Annihilation..."
As Li Fan mulled this over, a vicious glint flashed in his eyes.
It wasn't that Li Fan truly intended to become a world-saving emperor. It was merely a flight of fancy, placing himself in that position while deducing the past.
All that was past had become but a fleeting illusion.
The Primal Possibility today was nothing but crumbling ruins, desperately holding on.
All Li Fan could do was the same as those deserters: find a new world and start anew.
(End of Chapter)
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