Chapter 800: A True Immortal in the Immortal Ruins
Chapter 800: A True Immortal in the Immortal Ruins
A faint light radiated from it.
Many blurry images flickered into existence, carried upon the glow.
As Gu Xinghan found himself captivated by the scenes within the light, the jade disc, as if alive, began to transmit waves of intense craving.
Snapping back to his senses, Gu Xinghan was momentarily bewildered.
And then, a little surprised.
However, he had heard stories of treasures possessing their own spirits.
After quickly accepting this new reality, Gu Xinghan focused on understanding the disc's yearning.
But its reactions were vague, almost instinctual.
Gu Xinghan tried every method he could think of to satisfy the disc.
Spirit stones, mineral jades, medicinal herbs...
The jade disc seemed to have no interest in any of them.
It continued to relentlessly pulse with that same desperate craving.
To make matters worse, all his peers had successfully established their foundations, one after another. He, however, still had no idea how to proceed.
The combination of these two pressures left Gu Xinghan deeply agitated.
It was only by a stroke of luck, when he saw Elder Fang Zaiji preparing a Terminal Disc for a newly recruited core disciple, that he understood.
The jade disc began to thrum with a frantic energy, and in that moment, Gu Xinghan finally realized its objective.
"This..."
Gu Xinghan hesitated.
After all, Elder Fang had repeatedly stressed the importance and value of the Terminal Disc.
If anything went wrong...
But in the end, he couldn't resist the jade disc's incessant pull.
With a flash of light, the jade disc appeared within his sea of consciousness.
As Gu Xinghan watched with a pounding heart, the disc slowly drifted down and landed upon the Terminal Disc.
Then, from its underside, countless fine, tentacle-like beams of light extended.
They latched onto the Terminal Disc.
At first, Gu Xinghan had feared the jade disc would damage the Terminal Disc.
But after a few moments of observation, he realized that wasn't the case.
Instead, through those sticky, luminous tentacles, the two objects seemed to be merging into one.
This sight put Gu Xinghan's mind at ease.
At the same time, he felt a spark of curiosity.
"Could it be that these two—the jade disc and the round disc—are actually parts of the same thing?" Gu Xinghan couldn't help but wonder.
But he was still a child at heart. When his investigation yielded no answers, he soon set the matter aside.
Instead, he began to study the images he had received from the jade disc.
"Foundation Establishment Through Oneself? What's this? It seems to match the state of my own body."
Gu Xinghan was overjoyed.
He immediately stopped paying attention to the disc and devoted himself to studying the method of Foundation Establishment Through Oneself.
By the time he emerged from his state of profound enlightenment, the jade disc had completely fused with the Terminal Disc.
The process, however, looked rather forced, as if the jade disc had pounced on the other and held it down.
And the final product wasn't particularly beautiful.
But Gu Xinghan didn't care about that.
He knew that this jade disc was, without a doubt, an extraordinary treasure.
Though young, Gu Xinghan was not naive. On the contrary, he had a keen awareness of the world's dangers.
He understood the old saying about an innocent man finding trouble by possessing a treasure, and so he decided to keep both the jade disc and the Foundation Establishment Through Oneself technique a secret.
"Perhaps I can use this new disc as a cover. I'll tell everyone it's my Foundation Establishment Wonder..." the young Gu Xinghan schemed.
And so, hidden from all eyes, the world's only cultivator of the "Foundation Establishment Through Oneself" method began his journey.
In the beginning, his performance brought unexpected joy to Elder Liu San and the others in the Medicine King Sect.
He understood everything he was taught instantly, mastering one concept and grasping a hundred others.
He was unbeatable among his peers, and he could even challenge Golden Core cultivators while still in the Foundation Establishment stage, and do so with ease.
For a time, Gu Xinghan became the most brilliant junior disciple in the Medicine King Sect.
The entire sect placed their highest hopes upon him.
But...
His peak was like a shooting star, brilliant but fleeting.
Before long, his peers began to break through to the Golden Core and Nascent Soul realms.
Yet Gu Xinghan remained stagnant, still treading the same ground.
This highly unusual situation perplexed Liu San and the other elders of the Medicine King Sect.
Suspecting something was wrong with his body, they took turns examining him personally.
But not one of them could figure out what the problem was.
And when they asked Gu Xinghan himself, he could only say that he had tried his best but was simply unable to advance any further.
Thirty years passed in the blink of an eye.
The Medicine King Sect had no choice but to reluctantly accept the reality of the situation.
They officially ceased his specialized training.
However, they did not treat him harshly; he was still allowed to use the sect's many resources as he pleased.
They simply no longer paid him much attention.
Faced with juniors who had all surpassed him in cultivation, Gu Xinghan became increasingly quiet and withdrawn.
He spent his days in seclusion, taking no part in worldly affairs and rarely interacting with outsiders. rANOBЕ.s
He was forgotten by almost everyone.
And so, two hundred and sixty-three years went by.
Gu Xinghan, now white-haired and ancient, finally reached the end of his life.
"A Primordial Unity Golden Core... a Primordial Unity Golden Core..."
"What exactly is 'Primordial Unity'?"
He let out a bitter laugh, his face a mask of misery.
"To forge a new path from nothing... it's too hard. It is simply too hard..."
"Once you succeed with Foundation Establishment Through Oneself, there isn't even a chance to regret it, no opportunity to switch to a new method."
In his hand, a smooth jade disc materialized.
Compared to over two centuries ago, the disc's brilliant glow had completely receded into itself.
It looked like a common stone one might find on the side of the road, utterly unremarkable.
Gu Xinghan stared at the jade disc that had been with him for nearly his entire life, his expression a storm of complicated emotions.
"You ruined my life... you ruined my life..."
He mumbled the words under his breath.
He wanted to hurl the disc to the ground with all his might, yet he couldn't bear to part with it.
In the end, he clutched the disc tightly in his hand. Filled with a bottomless sense of regret, he breathed his last.
Gu Xinghan's death caused not a single ripple.
In fact, because there was no strange phenomenon after his passing, his body wasn't discovered until three years later.
After more than two hundred years, the Longevity Valley was a completely different place.
No one remembered the young prodigy who had once been the hope of the Medicine King Sect.
No one paid him any mind.
The funeral was a simple affair.
Soon, Gu Xinghan's body was buried in the Medicine King Sect's disciple cemetery in the Beast Seed Realm.
As one of his few remaining possessions, the jade disc in Gu Xinghan's hand drew no attention.
It accompanied him, buried deep beneath the earth.
From that moment on, it rested in endless darkness.
...
Outside the Xuanhuang Realm.
Within the Medicine King True Cauldron.
A figure, remarkably similar to Li Fan but incredibly frail, let out a muffled groan.
He wiped away the blood that trickled ceaselessly from his mouth and nose, looking as if he might perish from blood loss at any moment.
Yet his expression remained unchanged.
"A mere moment in the cauldron, a thousand years in Xuanhuang."
He coughed softly, his eyes filled with infinite emotion.
"To personally experience such a difference in the flow of time... the feeling is truly beyond words."
The one inside the Medicine King True Cauldron was the Holy Embryo clone of Li Fan.
As part of a deception, he was a secondary body created by Li Fan using his own blood essence and the Holy Blood Embryo Transformation technique, just before Mr. Bai's arrival.
Time had been short, and his innate talent was the same as the original's.
As a result, he was just a mortal with no cultivation whatsoever.
Not long after leaving the Xuanhuang Realm, he sensed that the Medicine King Cauldron had deviated from its original trajectory.
Moreover, the images transmitted from the Dissociation Disc he was incarnated as were accelerating.
The massive flood of information had nearly overwhelmed his mind.
Fortunately, everything eventually faded to black.
That gave him a moment of respite.
"Even though I transformed my body, this Holy Embryo clone still exists, so I can actually exert some simple remote control over my incarnation."
"But that seems to be the limit."
He had not seen the images of the battle between the Dharma Spreader and Mr. Bai that the Dissociation Disc recorded in the Xuanhuang Realm, as he was already outside of it.
However, to have witnessed the Dharma Spreader—the Immortal Ancestor—in action for the first time was a significant gain for Li Fan.
Temporarily setting aside his thoughts about the Dharma Spreader, the Holy Embryo clone now felt a faint stir of excitement.
For he was about to see the legendary Immortal Ruins.
A grinding, creaking sound emanated from all parts of the Medicine King True Cauldron.
It was a clear sign of the immense pressure it was under.
The Holy Embryo clone retrieved a long-range spyglass that had been prepared in advance and aimed it toward the Immortal Ruins.
Ahead, there was nothing but darkness.
The Medicine King Cauldron's velocity increased relentlessly.
A tremendous roar echoed from all directions.
It felt as if the cauldron might disintegrate at any second.
And yet, in the Holy Embryo clone's field of vision, there was still nothing to see.
"Is this as far as I go?"
He couldn't help but feel a pang of disappointment.
Boom!
The Medicine King Cauldron began to break apart.
The violent shaking made it nearly impossible for him to stand.
The Holy Embryo clone struggled, taking the spyglass with him, and took cover in the innermost core of the Medicine King True Cauldron.
It was a tiny shelter forged entirely from Everlasting Adamantine.
Under the increasingly powerful, almost unimaginable pressure, the Medicine King Cauldron finally gave way, shattering into countless fragments.
They all plummeted toward the Immortal Ruins.
Only a moment later, the Holy Embryo clone sensed that even the Everlasting Adamantine was about to succumb.
But true to his innate character, he did not give up.
He raised the spyglass once more and peered ahead.
Instantly, he froze.
The view that had been pitch black was, at some unknown point, replaced by a sprawling, desolate wilderness.
Countless ruins were scattered across the bleak landscape.
A towering corpse sat cross-legged upon the earth.
Its flesh had almost completely vanished, leaving only a layer of skin draped loosely over its skeleton.
Dozens of blood-red chains were embedded deep into the ground.
They shackled the skeleton to the wasteland.
Around the corpse, a network of deep, intersecting ravines scarred the land.
Across the vast wilderness, they outlined an impossibly complex symbol.
Although he did not recognize the symbol, the moment he saw it...
Li Fan instinctively knew its meaning.
It was a single character.
The character for **Hunger**!
An endless sensation of starvation surged through the Holy Embryo clone's mind.
At the same time...
The corpse in the desolate wilderness abruptly opened its eyes!
(End of Chapter)
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