Chapter 1607: Breaking Through the Mist of Time
Chapter 1607: Breaking Through the Mist of Time
[Truth] had always been Li Fan's greatest asset, a secret he guarded more closely than any other.
This was especially true after he learned of the ancient Immortal Realm legends—tales of a world-saving treasure that sounded suspiciously like [Truth]. Terrified of losing it, Li Fan had gone to great lengths to conceal the artifact's existence within him.
Yet he never imagined that in the instant he came face to face with the Saints, [Truth] would be laid bare.
Like a feast being eyed by hungry predators, Li Fan’s eyes turned crimson. He stared, on high alert, at the nine Saintly figures standing beyond the halo of light.
Though shaken to his core, Li Fan didn't lose his senses. He keenly parsed the hidden meaning in their words.
"It?"
"You've known about [Truth] all along? What exactly is it?" Li Fan demanded, his voice laced with instinctual urgency.
The Saints remained silent, simultaneously pointing a finger at Li Fan's body, which had shattered into countless fragments.
A blinding light erupted from every one of the billions of fragments that was his body, as if something was being violently extracted from his very essence.
The very foundation of his being fractured. Li Fan’s consciousness was consumed by a pain so immense it defied description. He couldn't even form a curse, only let out a primal scream of agony that reverberated within the halo of light.
As the extraction continued, a phantom image flickered across his billions of fragments. With each pulse, the image grew clearer, while in stark contrast, the fragments of Li Fan’s body began to fade like melting snow.
"Burn... the mountains... boil... the sea..."
Trapped in a torment worthy of the deepest hell, Li Fan's thoughts flickered in and out of existence. He couldn't even muster the strength for his only countermeasure: igniting the True Spirit embers he had sown throughout the Mountain and Sea.
As if sensing his intent, one of the Saints spoke, its voice utterly devoid of emotion. "The Other Shore, while within the Mountain and Sea, can be considered an independent existence. Furthermore, you are currently trapped within a cage forged from our collective will..."
"How could your thoughts possibly escape?"
Perhaps to make him abandon all resistance and facilitate the extraction of [Truth], the Saints’ torment ceased for a moment.
"You bastards! Go to hell, all of you!"
But in his state of extreme agony, Li Fan couldn't comprehend their words. The instant his thoughts cleared, they were consumed by a tidal wave of fury.
Roaring, he issued the command to ignite his True Spirit embers.
But the command vanished like a stone cast into a bottomless ocean.
Below the halo, the world remained serene and undisturbed. The only sound was the periodic clash of Mountain and Sea, the quiet ripples of the Dao Annihilation.
Refusing to accept it, Li Fan screamed the command again and again.
His voice, the desperate cry of a cornered animal, echoed within the light as the Saints watched on.
The Saints said nothing, merely observing his desperate frenzy in silence.
An unknown amount of time passed before, as if his strength was utterly spent, Li Fan finally fell silent.
"Heh... heh heh..."
"After you take [Truth], what will become of me?" Li Fan asked, his voice barely a whisper, a bitter smile on his lips.
"Rest assured, we will not take your life. If you wish, there is a place for you here on the Other Shore. If not, you may go wherever you please among the countless possibilities of the Mountain and Sea. We will not hinder you in any way."
"Aren't you afraid I'll burn this entire Mountain and Sea to the ground the moment I'm free!" Li Fan snarled.
"Even if you burn the Mountain and Sea to cinders, what is that against a single utterance of [Truth]?"
Only in loss does one truly comprehend the value of what they once possessed. The Saints' words struck at the very heart of Li Fan's vulnerability.
No one in the entire Mountain and Sea understood the power of [Truth] better than he did.
No matter what chaos unfolded, a single command from [Truth] could reset everything.
But now Li Fan, who had always been the one wielding its power, was about to become just another variable subject *to* its power.
Without [Truth], how was he any different from the countless ants he had once dismissed as mere NPCs?
Li Fan's expression turned hollow. He fell silent.
He allowed the Saints to proceed.
The figures outside the halo pointed in unison once more.
The forced extraction of [Truth] from his body resumed.
Immersed in boundless pain, his consciousness drifted into an eternal abyss.
When Li Fan came to his senses again, he was outside the halo, beyond the Saints' gaze.
The nine figures now focused their collective gaze upon a single jade tablet hovering in the center of the halo.
"So... that's [Truth]?"
It was the first time Li Fan had ever seen its true form, and he stared, mesmerized.
Both faces of the jade tablet appeared perfectly smooth, devoid of any carvings or symbols.
And yet, in that smooth surface, Li Fan saw a phantom flicker of countless figures, shifting and transforming.
Some were impossible to make out, yet he could feel their overwhelming auras.
Others were faintly, disturbingly familiar.
Innumerable figures, all condensed upon this single, small jade tablet.
For reasons he couldn't fathom, the Saints all wore expressions of profound complexity.
Li Fan had expected them to start extracting his infinite spirituality next, to power the artifact.
Instead, one of the Saints simply said, "You may go now."
With that, he was expelled from the halo's space.
Seeing Li Fan suddenly appear, the Hunger Immortal on the Other Shore was slightly taken aback. "So soon?"
He then smiled. "You see? I told you there was nothing to worry about..."
Before he could finish, his gaze met Li Fan's bloodshot eyes.
Even with his superior power, the Hunger Immortal felt his spirit falter, his words dying in his throat.
He paid it no mind, however.
Those who had just undergone the Saints' trial were often emotionally volatile. The Hunger Immortal was long accustomed to it.
When an equally devastated Xiao Wangsheng emerged, the Hunger Immortal escorted them both to the Myriad Phenomena Heaven, the domain of the Transcendent on the Other Shore, before departing.
Lost in the agony of losing [Truth], Li Fan drifted in a daze, completely unaware of his surroundings.
He burned with the desire to rip [Truth] back from the Saints' grasp, but it was obvious that the collective will of the nine Saints was far too powerful.
As he was now, he stood no chance against them.
"Even if I revealed the existence of [Truth] to everyone, the nine Saints are powerful enough to simply ignore it," he thought. "Worse, with [Truth] in their hands, they could undo any chaos I might create in an instant."
He had always been its master. Now, he was its subject. For the first time, Li Fan truly understood the utter helplessness of being on the other side of its power.
Shrouded in despair, Li Fan drifted through the Myriad Phenomena Heaven for centuries.
Time flowed on, but his mind remained trapped on that single, devastating day.
He replayed the confrontation with the Saints endlessly, savoring the bitter taste of his own impotence.
"I came to this world, believing that with [Truth] by my side, I could attain eternal life and freedom. I never imagined..." Li Fan laughed bitterly to himself.
Suddenly, a thought made him freeze.
"Came to this world... I came to this world..."
As his mind replayed the Saints' interrogation, he murmured, "Something... doesn't add up."
"The Saints saw my infinite spirituality and saw that I possessed [Truth]."
"So why didn't they see that I was a transmigrator?"
His status as a transmigrator was a secret he considered just as vital as the existence of [Truth].
And yet, the Saints had completely overlooked it.
"My original world is utterly different from this Mountain and Sea. Even the Xuanxian Ark, in all its travels, never found a remotely similar possibility. If the Saints had seen it, they couldn't possibly have just ignored it..."
"It's right there in my memories. How could the all-seeing Saints have missed it?"
Li Fan's brow furrowed in deep thought.
Once planted, the seed of doubt was impossible to uproot.
As he replayed the events again and again, more inconsistencies surfaced.
"My infinite spirituality is an absolutely world-shattering phenomenon."
"Even if the Saints have [Truth], they still need spirituality to power it. Even if their own reserves are as deep as mine, it makes no sense for them to let a convenient, free power source like me go. Given their methods, turning me into a machine for the sole purpose of extracting spirituality would have been trivial."
"And yet, all they did was..."
"...mention my plan to burn down the Mountain and Sea."
Li Fan's head snapped up, his gaze once again fixed on the distant place where the Saints resided.
He stared for a long time before his eyes swept around, taking in the space and time he currently occupied.
"There are too many contradictions."
"It's as if it's trying to display the power of the Saints, but the execution is flawed, a disconnect between theory and reality."
"It's like..."
Li Fan held out his palm. "...a simulation reaching the very limits of its processing power."
"Simulation..."
That single word triggered a memory buried deep in his mind.
He had just awakened from a deep slumber.
Amnesiac, he had been captivated by lines of flashing text on a screen before him.
Faced with several choices, he had hesitated for a long time.
In the end, he had decided to run one more simulation.
And then, he found himself back a month in the past.
Step by step, he went from a mortal to the Grand Preceptor of the Great Xuan, then journeyed to the Xuanhuang Realm. He met the Mount Tai Emperor and was sent back in time.
Ten thousand years in the past, he recovered his memories.
He struggled to find the path to transcendence and finally reached the Other Shore.
...
The events of this lifetime flashed through his mind at lightning speed.
So much time had passed that the sheer weight of it made his mind feel heavy and dull.
Yet he clung to one core realization. "Wrong... It's all wrong..."
"Before, I could definitely activate [Truth]."
"But after I entered this simulation, when I fell into the river of time and tried to use [Truth] to save myself, it failed."
"Why..."
Like a bolt of lightning, the thought shattered the fog in his mind.
He connected it to the Saints' inability to see his memories from before he transmigrated.
An answer began to form in Li Fan's mind.
"Could it be...?" Li Fan muttered, his eyes wide with dawning realization.
He once trapped the Heavenly Doctor in an immortal-grade illusion array.
But in the end, when the Heavenly Doctor confronted the Hunger Immortal from the Immortal Ruins, the array failed because it couldn't perfectly simulate the power of a True Immortal. The Heavenly Doctor saw through the deception.
"My current situation is exactly the same."
"Only I'm not trapped in an illusion array."
"I'm trapped in a simulation created by [Truth] itself!"
"It wasn't the real nine Saints who couldn't see my pre-transmigration memories. It was the simulated nine Saints, within this version of the Mountain and Sea created by [Truth], who couldn't!"
"Or to be more precise," a sharp glint appeared in Li Fan's eyes, "[Truth] itself cannot see them."
"The earliest point in time [Truth] can access is the exact moment I arrived in the Mountain and Sea. My existence before that is a complete blank to it!"
"My transmigration, my infinite spirituality—they are variables from outside this simulation. So when the simulation tries to process them at the highest level, it hits its limits and has to gloss over the details..."
The heart that had grown cold and still at the loss of [Truth] began to pound once more.
Li Fan stared intently in the direction of the Saints.
"No wonder awakening [Truth] was so difficult. I roamed the entire Mountain and Sea and still couldn't do it. For the longest time, I felt like I was just on the verge... and it stayed that way right up until I reached the Other Shore."
"And when the nine Saints took it, [Truth] didn't put up any resistance at all."
Ideas erupted in his mind like water from a geyser.
The light returned to Li Fan's eyes. "There's a simple way to test this. I just have to face the Saints again."
"This version of the Mountain and Sea is almost indistinguishable from reality."
"The Saints... they're the only flaw."
"And even if I'm just deluding myself, what's the harm? The Saints are merciful. I'm sure they won't hold it against me!"
With that thought, Li Fan headed straight for the platform where one could audience the Saints.
He didn't expect to be intercepted by the Hunger Immortal along the way.
"Those on the Other Shore only have one opportunity to meet the Saints, and that is upon their first arrival."
"If you wish to see them again, you must make a significant contribution to the Other Shore."
Li Fan stared at the Hunger Immortal, sensing the fluctuations in his aura, and ultimately chose to back down.
After returning to his quarters, Li Fan forced himself to calm down and think. "This simulation is very different from any I've experienced before."
"Perhaps it's a change brought on by the fusion of the three Daos."
"[Truth] is absent, yet this doesn't feel like it's actually happening in 'reality' either."
"And yet, throughout this life, my intuition has constantly warned me of danger. Like when I was struggling against the current in the river of time..."
"It feels as if I die in this time and space, I will truly die."
"It's indistinguishable from reality."
"Even if I'm right that this is a simulation, waking up from it will be no easy task."
"The nine Saints are the only way out."
Li Fan chose to bide his time.
He began to ask about the changes that had taken place on the Other Shore and in the Mountain and Sea over the past century.
He didn't know if it was because the factor of [Truth] itself exceeded the simulation's capacity, but its influence was once again blurred.
The Saints had obtained this supreme treasure, yet nothing had changed.
This only strengthened Li Fan's conviction.
"The question is, how do I break free from this simulation?"
Li Fan frowned.
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