Chapter 875: The Golden Chain that Bound a Distant Star
"Without an outsider to break this cycle, the phenomenon would likely have continued until the power that nurtures these soul bodies in the great yellow river completely dissipated."
"Still, the aura here remains incredibly potent. Without the protection of my Seven-Colored Divine Light, I doubt I could last long within it."
"Power of this magnitude..."
"It couldn't have only held out for a mere two or three decades, could it?"
A sliver of doubt crept into Li Fan's mind.
"What shattered the tranquility of the Soul Shade Realm? What unleashed the trillions of soul bodies from the Yellow Springs?"
"Unless... it was a cultivator who wandered into this place by mistake, just like me."
"Or..."
The image of the skull he had recently suppressed flashed through Li Fan's mind.
The thought surfaced unexpectedly.
This wasn't some baseless fantasy born of fear from the eerie scene around him.
The Soul Shade Realm was simply too remote. Even at his current speed, reaching it required over a month of uninterrupted flight.
The chances of someone stumbling upon this place by accident, without a specific destination in mind, were slim to none.
As for the skull, though nothing but a cranium remained...
...the black-gold patterns on its surface had somehow endured the corrosion of the gray mildew.
"The black-gold pattern remains untarnished on the outside, while the gray mildew festers within."
"Perhaps that means their powers are evenly matched, with neither able to overcome the other."
Recalling the mysterious skull, Li Fan grew more convinced that his speculation might be true.
"If the corrosion were complete, it should have disintegrated into dust, just like everything else in the Soul Shade Realm."
"The fact that the skull still exists implies it never truly died."
The cultivation world was home to countless esoteric arts. Cultivators in the Xuanhuang Realm could achieve a form of immortality, where their grotto-heavens never perished.
It wasn't so hard to believe, then, that this mysterious skull could be resurrected through the power of its black-gold patterns.
"It is undoubtedly dangerous. But it is also an opportunity."
"An opportunity to learn what has befallen other cultivation worlds."
Li Fan's eyes gleamed as dozens of ways to exploit the situation instantly flooded his mind.
Still, he hadn't forgotten the primary reason for his visit.
"Tianyang, these Split Boundary Whales can carve out space from the void. They clearly relish these spiritual bodies, so they must be quite beneficial. Do you want to try one?"
Tianyang hastily shook his head.
"They aren't human souls. They merely resemble them."
Seeing his junior brother's reluctance, Li Fan elaborated, "These spiritual bodies are condensations of the Yellow Springs' power."
Tianyang seemed relieved.
He reached out and drew one toward him—the soul of an adult, its original features long erased by who knew how many years of immersion in the Yellow Springs.
Tianyang channeled his spiritual energy and absorbed it.
A moment later, his eyes brightened with understanding.
"Senior Brother, I understand why those great whales enjoy eating them now!" Tianyang exclaimed, a note of excitement in his voice.
"This small world was originally born from the Yellow Springs, like a fruit growing from a tree."
"The waters of the Yellow Springs are suffused with the power of various laws, but the most abundant is the authority to create and open up space."
"Even though it's only on the level of a small world, it is genuinely useful to me."
Tianyang explained it all in a rush, grabbing another spiritual crystal to absorb as he spoke.
This time, however, he frowned.
"A pity. It seems the influence of that gray mildew has corrupted it, making it somewhat disordered."
"One is enough. Any more would be of no benefit," Tianyang concluded.
Li Fan nodded.
His divine sense swept across the river, finding a spiritual crystal that seemed ancient.
Upon absorbing it, a series of images flashed through Li Fan's mind.
The waters of the Yellow Springs flowed in a great, circular current.
At several fixed points along its course, remnants of its power would pool and linger.
Over countless years, this power grew, accumulating layer by layer.
Eventually, it blossomed and bore fruit, forming a ring of nine "worlds."
An eternity passed, and life began to emerge in these worlds.
Civilizations rose.
When the beings in these worlds died, their souls returned to the Yellow Springs, carried by its current to another of the nine worlds to begin a new life.
This peaceful cycle continued for ages, until one day...
A golden chain tore across the sky, descending from the vast, distant void.
The chain extended, instantly wrapping itself around the entire world of the Yellow Springs, binding it tight.
Then...
An immense force began to pull, and the world of the Yellow Springs thundered in protest.
Mountains crumbled and rivers shattered. It was like the apocalypse.
But the chain did not relent.
Instead, a sacred, golden energy pulsed from its links.
This energy sharply severed the connection between the world of the Yellow Springs and space itself, as if intending to drag it somewhere else.
It was a magnificent force, far surpassing anything the world of the Yellow Springs could muster.
There was no room for resistance. It was dragged relentlessly through the void for an unknown length of time before its trajectory finally stabilized.
In the end, the world of the Yellow Springs was torn asunder by the extreme strain. Of its nine realms, only one remained, arriving here, in this unfamiliar stretch of starry sky, along with the great river itself.
...
The images in his mind slowly faded.
But a strange light ignited in Li Fan's eyes.
He had long known that in ancient times, the Xuanhuang Realm possessed a formation of almost divine power.
It was capable of capturing grotto-heavens and entire worlds from the farthest reaches of the void.
It could even open spatial passages to wage war directly upon other realms.
Most of the countless grotto-heavens and small worlds that now existed within the Xuanhuang Realm had been acquired this way.
But ever since the fall of the Xuantian Sect and the rise of the Ten Great Immortal Sects, the great formation seemed to have fallen into disrepair.
Its fame dwindled, and it seemed to vanish into the river of history.
Now, through the residual memories of the Soul Shade Realm's Heavenly Dao, he had been fortunate enough to witness the might of that ancient formation in action.
Li Fan was deeply shaken.
"Spanning the void, a golden chain to ensnare a world..."
"What kind of power is this?"
Li Fan could already be considered a grandmaster of array formations.
With the Final Dissociation Disc in his possession, it was unlikely there was anyone in the entire Xuanhuang Realm whose skill in arrays surpassed his own.
Yet even with his expertise, he could scarcely imagine how such a magnificent formation could have been constructed.
"To pluck stars from the sky... this must be the work of a True Immortal, surely?"
Li Fan couldn't help but wonder.
Moreover, in that fleeting glimpse from the Yellow Springs' memory, the golden chain Li Fan saw...
...bore a striking resemblance to the one he had seen in the Immortal Ruins, the one used to bind the remains of a True Immortal.
"I wonder if there's a connection between them?"
"That True Immortal was trapped precisely at the passage between the mortal and immortal worlds of the Xuanhuang Realm. That can't be a coincidence."
"Back when the path to immortality wasn't severed, the cultivation world and the Immortal Realm were still connected."
"If they could receive immortal artifacts as support, then it stands to reason they could also get help building such an array."
Li Fan's thoughts churned like a tide.
Seeing his senior brother standing motionless for so long, Tianyang thought something was amiss.
He sent a telepathic inquiry, which finally roused Li Fan from his reverie.
"Junior Brother, did you also see the vision of the golden chain tearing through the sky?"
Li Fan asked.
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