KaiserBlak
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Chapter 498: Another Timeline
🕑 Added 2024-08-16 13:00:22 +0000 UTCTianyi sat in his allotted chamber. As an “injured” patient, he should spend all his time in his room healing. However, he didn’t look like he was focused on healing at all. Rather, he was resting his cheeks between his palms with a bored expression.
Strictly speaking, he wasn’t exactly injured. He just needed to strengthen the conduit. A conduit was a vessel. The larger the vessel, the more power of the Nine Heavens Universe it could accommodate.
Although Tianyi appeared to be doing nothing, he was actually expanding the vessel. Spacetime fluctuations flitted across his skin and clothes. If an unlucky person touched him, they might be sucked into his skin. They would shrink until they were smaller than microscopic, and all they would see was not skin, but a vast continent with no end.
If they survived the process.
Even if they did, the danger was not over yet. Time flowed differently near Tianyi. Sometimes it quickened to an absurd degree. Other times, it would flow in reverse. Age, memories, injuries, all would disappear as if they hadn’t existed.
Part of the reason he sealed himself in his room was to prevent prying eyes and affecting others during his upgrade process. He could go out with another conduit, but it would only attract disapproving eyes. His current mission was to heal himself for the next inevitable confrontation with the Demon Clan, and he didn’t want to reveal news about his conduit.
After a while, Tianyi sat atop a jade seat in a lotus position. He had finished scrolling through his Xiyi talisman. Logically speaking, he should have an endless amount of entertainment from the Xiyinet. However, his interests changed often.
When the mood struck him, he would consume one form or genre of entertainment voraciously, but he would also grow tired of it after a while. All forms of entertainment in a genre had many similarities. Once you consumed a certain amount, it would feel the same. Instead of forcing himself to consume it, it would be better to stop.
Still, Tianyi couldn’t find a new interest for a short while. He scrolled through many new shows on the Xiyinet or forums, but they couldn’t arouse his interest at all.
Since that was the case, he started comprehending the laws again. Ever since he entered the Immortal Realm by using the Law of Spacetime, he had not put much focus on it. Instead, he focused on comprehending the other myriad laws in order to strengthen his control over his inner universe.
He thought his current mastery over spacetime would be enough until he attempted to reach the Divine Realm, but the appearance of the realm beast changed that. Tianyi didn’t think his control over spacetime exceeded the Spacetime Chessboard by that much. Meaning that he would not be able to use his second-best ability in front of the realm beast.
In case he could not lure the realm beast into his inner universe, he needed to increase his mastery over spacetime. In addition, deepening his comprehension of the Law of Spacetime would also raise the limit of his conduit and the amount of power he could exhibit from his inner universe.
The fluctuations of spacetime cloaking Tianyi’s body expanded. It soon filled the center of the cultivation chamber.
The furniture within the sphere of influence became dilapidated instantly. Some parts even directly turned to dust. The next moment, the furniture returned to its original appearance, but it did not last long. Not a moment later, the furniture became a towering tree if it was made of wood or a slab of stone.
This wasn’t the strangest part. The strangest part was when the furniture existed in its normal state, its original material, and dust at the same time. If a mortal saw this scene, they would go mad instantly. Even cultivators had to be careful or they might form alternate personalities.
Time became meaningless within the cultivation chamber. A second could have passed, or it might have been a decade.
Finally, Tianyi opened his eyes again. His eyes seemed to contain the past, present, and future simultaneously. The primal chaos, the universe, and the final entropy of all. Behind each era of the universe, black mist filled with countless motes of lights could be seen.
Tianyi blinked and his eyes returned to normal, but if people stared too long, they would find their sense of time distorted.
“Not enough,” Tianyi said. Although he made some progress since the time he entered the Immortal Realm, he had reached a bottleneck. In fact, it was a miracle that he had only entered a bottleneck now. His initial comprehension of the Law of Five Phases and Law of Life and Death helped him progress farther through parallel comparison. Although these three laws did not seem to contain the same concepts, they all originated from chaos.
Tianyi rested his cheek on one palm as he tried to figure out a method to increase his comprehension speed. When cultivators wanted to feel the worldly laws, they would often visit locations with a large amount of aura of the law. For example, a cultivator that wanted to comprehend the Law of Fire might enter a volcano or a realm where the Law of Fire dominated. However, Tianyi did not know of any location where he could sense the Law of Spacetime.
His eyes flickered. ‘No, there is a place.’
Tianyi looked up. His gaze pierced through the roof and sky of Shangri-La. It did not end when he saw the void of the Divine Beast Pseudo System. His gaze traveled past the border of the pseudo system and into the Three Thousand Immortal Realms System.
It was as if he was staring into space, but Tianyi saw a silver river intertwined with the whole Three Thousand Immortal Realms System. The river had many forks and branches, all originating from one singular source. However, tracing the source, it actually branched away from the Three Thousand Immortal Realms System. From a distance, those branches mirrored the Three Thousand Immortal Realms System.
Now that Tianyi could see the Six Paths of Samsara, he knew that the timeline he lived in was the prime timeline. It was for no other reason that his timeline had the largest “branch.”
He recalled the first time he entered the vast silver river. He was too weak to notice, but he had to swim up the current so he could go to an earlier part of the river before swimming down the prime branch and leaving. As one of the foundations of the world, the Six Paths of Samsara was extremely beneficial to his understanding of spacetime, but unfortunately, even his current strength did not allow him to enter the silver river for long.
Still, entering would bring a certain amount of benefits, even if it was only for a short time. Tianyi did not plan to just enter and return to the prime timeline. That was a bit wasteful in his opinion. Since he was already going to enter the Six Paths of Samsara, why not enter another timeline?
***
A ripple appeared in the Vast Void of the Three Thousand Immortal Realms System. A hand sleeved in purple came out of the ripple. Slowly, a human figure appeared. It was Xi Tianyi.
He was one of the many conduits. According to power, Tianyi had three levels of conduits.
The first level was at the immortal lord level, and Tianyi could have eighty-one conduits of the first level. The second level allowed him to display the power of a half-emperor, but he could only have nine of them at any time. The third level allowed Tianyi the power of an emperor and sometimes beyond, but he only had one such conduit.
There was another level, level zero. It encompassed all of Tianyi’s conduits below the true immortal in power, and he could have a nearly infinite amount of them as long as his consciousness and willpower could support them.
The conduit that appeared was one of Tianyi's second level conduits. The conduit at war with the Demon Clan was also a second level conduit. Even if it was in the midst of promoting to the third level, the number of second-level conduits could not increase.
Tianyi looked up and slowly rose. The higher he rose, the more ethereal his figure became. Eventually, his figure started to become faint. It didn’t start at the foot, but the head. After a while, Tianyi’s body seemed to have disappeared into the thin air.
At this time, Mengfei opened her eyes inside Jade Peak Palace. She looked up and stared into the sky. Or rather, the Six Paths of Samsara. Not just her, but the founder of the Saintly Scholar School, Confucius, Daoist Lu, and even Bao Ling did the same. Although they did not major in the Law of Spacetime, Law of Samsara, or other related laws, it did not prevent them from detecting the abnormality.
However, none of them stepped out to stop it. They didn’t know who was attempting to swim up the Six Paths of Samsara, but brashly entering will only cause them to injure themselves. Besides, it was not that easy to swim up the Six Paths of Samsara. Even if the culprit survived, they would be severely injured, if not dead.
Tianyi, who had hidden his identity, had no time to comprehend the Law of Spacetime in the Six Paths of Samsara. Because of the turbulent and corrosive nature of the silver river, he had to direct all his focus on swimming through it.
His skin, the boundary separating the outer world from his inner universe, started to collapse. To preserve the integrity of this boundary and prevent himself from popping like a bubble, Tianyi had no choice but to shrink.
While combating the effects of the Six Paths of Samsara, he did not stop swimming. He used the Heaven-Bearing Seal inside the Nine Heavens Universe to detect the existence of the other Heaven-Bearing Seals in the other timelines.
Tianyi did not have many demands. He just wanted to find the nearest timeline. Once he spotted the aura of the Heaven-Bearing Seal, he immediately moved towards it. He had the power to change the perception of time of others, but now it was his turn to feel the experience.
It was not as torturous as his first dip into the Six Paths of Samsara, but he still felt like a long time had passed.
In the Vast Void, a silver ripple appeared. Less than a second later, something shot out of the ripple. The ripple disappeared, but the object that was shot out did not slow down and continued on its trajectory. Finally, it flew into an unranked realm. Still, the object’s velocity did not stop and impacted against the ground.
The continent fractured into tens of smaller pieces. The water surged and covered the ground. Some land resurfaced, others were buried permanently. Luckily, this was a realm inhospitable to life or else ninety-nine percent of the lives would have perished. This included birds, as they could not fly forever and needed to roost.
Before the unranked realm could recover from the catastrophe it experienced, a vortex appeared at the impact point. A humanoid figure flew out of the vortex.
Who else could it be but Tianyi?
However, compared to his usual look, he had obviously shrunk. If he appeared like a man in his early to mid twenties before entering the Six Paths of Samsara, now he appeared to be in his preteens. It wasn’t just his physical features that changed.
Tianyi clenched and unclenched his hands, feeling the power in his arm. Of course, this was just a symbolic gesture. He didn’t need to do such a meaningless action to ascertain his current combat potential.
“In this state, I don’t think I can defeat a monarch. Of course, outlasting a monarch and even an emperor is no problem,” Tianyi said.
He did not pay too much on recovering to his peak state, at least not now. With his mastery over spacetime, even emperors could not harm him. He had a more important thing to do now.
Tianyi looked up. “Now, I wonder how this timeline developed.”
