Outside the karst cavern.
By the time that churning black mist had rolled up before him, the True Lord Shí Fǎ's left knee finally gave under the pressure, and he dropped with a thud into the observation chains the Record of the Myriad Worlds had laid down.
The old monster faced the earth veins with a sweetness rising again and again in his throat, forcibly damming back half a mouthful of old blood he hadn't managed to swallow. Even so, he did not dare lift his head.
Because the moment his eyes rose so much as a fraction, he would take another thorough beating inside the simulated deductions of ten million world lines.
Song Heng's blade shaved past his shoulder. Bai Cang's spell punched through his back. Qin Wuwang's great seal came down on his chest. Every stroke of pain fed back to him with perfect fidelity — and yet he was, after all, a great cultivator of the late Fifth Realm.
"Every Dao has a seam; every seam can be entered."
The line his master had left him in the year of his death surfaced in his mind once more.
And at last, he found his opening.
The thousands upon thousands of world lines still loading their deductions around him collapsed all at once, scattering into a sky full of drifting silver-grey dust.
He spat out the clotted blood in his chest with real relief and slowly straightened his spine.
"Gu — Cheng — ming — !!"
The roar tore out of him, venting everything he had been forced to swallow. He hadn't even taken a step before the black mist boiling around him swept ahead of him into the cavern mouth, as if it had auto-pathed there on its own.
The old monster drew both hands back into his broad sleeves, set off at a leisurely stride, and swaggered across the wreckage of observation chains littering the ground.
"A Third Realm brat, and every strange trick he owns is borrowed from outside himself." His voice grated with hatred. "This Lord would like to see just how much of that borrowed inventory you have left."
…
Gu Chengming ran the numbers quickly.
The End Lotus was down to under thirty percent. Forcing the Dharma-Station's birth and snatching it out from under the Record of the Myriad Worlds had eaten most of it.
The Ten Perfections Sword Formation paired with the Entanglement sword intent made for a fine combo, but the old Dharma-Eroding monster had already suffered badly from it once. Running the same play twice on a late-Fifth-Realm great cultivator would give sharply diminished returns.
Infinite Love put out staggering numbers, but his opponent was one of the very best of the late Fifth Realm. Trading blows head-on would be an ant trying to shake a tree. Ordinary methods weren't going to cut it.
His eyelids lowered a fraction, and his gaze settled on the newly unlocked CG.
CG: Endless War God, Come Forth!
[Effect: Summons any cultivation technique within the host that has reached "Unto Death, Unwavering" favorability into the world as a corporeal phantom. Duration scales with the technique's favorability and the host's spiritual power reserves. The phantom fights at full strength and shares battlefield perception with the host.]
[Currently summonable: Hundred Bones Resonance, Huiyuan Sword Formula, Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method, Clear-Heart Formula]
Gu Chengming looked over the techniques he could call out as phantoms.
"Endless War God—"
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Heavenly Emperor Gu! This Emperor felt it! Is that new CG calling This Emperor out to fight?!]
"Come forth!"
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Yes yes yes!]
A white brilliance split the empty air at the cavern's center.
A figure with white hair and golden eyes stepped out of the light. Crimson blood-and-qi detonated along her meridians, soaking her white training robes until they glowed translucent.
She planted one foot, bent the other knee slightly, put both hands on her hips, and lifted her chin high.
What did not match that emperor's bearing at all was—
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, should This Emperor do an entrance line first?"
Gu Chengming sighed. "Hundred Emperor, maybe save it until after the fight."
"Oh. Okay." The Hundred Bones Resonance turned her face aside and asked, expectant, "Is there a reward when we're done?"
A phantom ache went through Gu Chengming's pelvis at the question, but he answered without hesitation. "As much as you want."
The words had barely left him when the space outside the cavern let out a shriek of something loaded past bearing.
The light screen that had sealed the cave mouth split apart strand by strand, brittle as a dead leaf.
The black mist poured in like the netherworld's dead waters through a broken dyke, carrying the utterly unrestrained killing intent of a late-Fifth-Realm great cultivator, and melted a vast breach straight through the boulders at the entrance.
The temperature crashed. The air turned thick and carried the sharp reek of rust.
What remained of the rock strata on the walls withered and flaked away under that cold, sinking pressure, dripping down as foul black water.
A century of honing had produced an erosion intent that now gnawed brutally at every living thing inside the cavern, until even the light seemed swallowed whole.
The True Lord Shí Fǎ strode in, the bluestone beneath his feet crumbling to powder inch by inch. "Gu Chengming!"
"You severed the foundation of This Lord's path to the Dao. Today, though the Heavenly King himself stood guard over you, This Lord would still draw your tendons, flay your skin, grind your bones and scatter the ash!"
Gu Chengming didn't so much as raise an eyelid. His right hand settled on his sword hilt. "Might Senior want to look behind him?"
The old monster laughed coldly, over and over, the ink-black compass in his palm spinning like mad.
"On death's doorstep and still trying to fool This Lord with a trick fit for a three-year-old?"
The black mist became ten thousand clawing ghost-hands, grinding in at Gu Chengming from every direction.
Late-Fifth-Realm erosion intent blanketed heaven and earth, boring specifically into the seams in the circulation of spiritual energy, meaning to strip Gu Chengming's qi mechanism bare in an instant.
In that very moment alarms went off in the old monster's mind, as though he had grown eyes in the back of his head. He twisted aside in a panic and barely dodged the blow.
A thunderous crash followed. Where he had been standing, a great crater had been blasted out of the ground.
A white-haired girl stood proudly in the pit, cracking her knuckles.
The True Lord Shí Fǎ's shock ran deep. Where had this helper come from? He looked closer — and found not the faintest trace of a living creature's aura.
He had assumed the brat had called in reinforcements. Now it looked like yet another of his endless supply of bizarre methods.
How could this whelp possibly hold so many cards?
Jealousy and hatred tangled together in the old monster's chest, and he sneered aloud. "However heaven-piercing your methods, today you leave your life behind!"
His sleeve lashed out, driving the sky-filling black mist down over that white-robed figure. Every filament of it carried the true meaning of Dharma-Erosion, made to feed on whatever was thinnest in a foe's qi.
The next instant, before the mist could even close, blood-and-qi force shook it into uniform collapse.
"Primordial Imperial Aura!" The Hundred Bones Resonance's punch struck empty air, and crimson flame sprayed in all directions.
The True Lord Shí Fǎ immediately turned his art on this uninvited guest to observe her — and his pupils shrank to points. Why were there no seams?!
"Absurd!" He forced the word out through grinding teeth. "What sort of heretical art is this?!"
"Heretical art?!" The Hundred Bones Resonance bristled instantly. "This Emperor happens to be the Primordial Boundless Myriad-Dao Source True Sovereign Sole-Honored-of-the-Nine-Heavens-and-Ten-Earths Imperial Art — the Hundred Bones Resonance!"
The old monster was about to answer when a chill went up his back.
A hiss.
The crisp ring of the Ten Perfections Sword Formation closing came from behind him, and the old monster snapped to alert.
Trusting in his late Fifth Realm cultivation, he had never spared a thought for a Third Realm sword formation — but every scrap of his attention had just been dragged away by that white-haired girl, and the ten flying swords were now weaving furiously through the gap she had torn open. Each landing stroke pasted another layer of Entanglement sword intent onto him.
The old monster's chest tightened, and his hatred deepened.
This again?!
He had already been burned by this move once, and the brat actually thought he could run it a second time. It was a fool's daydream—
The thought hadn't finished forming before the white-robed figure blurred into afterimages, one punch shattering the black mist barrier on his left. The flying swords slipped into the opening and added another layer of Entanglement.
Stack. Sword light flashed again.
Stack, stack, stack, stack, stack.
Ten layers. Twenty. Fifty.
The old monster nearly bit through his back teeth.
Damn it all, how had he walked into it again?!
He forced his art into circulation to purge it, only to discover with horror that this sword intent didn't care about spiritual power at all. However high your stat sheet ran, a hit meant the slow went on, forced. His movements dragged with a lag visible to the naked eye.
And in that moment—
"Hundred Emperor. Next exchange, I attack, you defend."
"Right!"
The Hundred Bones Resonance stepped back from the front line and Gu Chengming swept forward, his left hand closing on the End Lotus. Gold light flared. The Entanglement sword intent that should have been ground out layer by patient layer had its causal progression cut clean by the End Lotus and skipped straight to the results screen.
Several hundred layers of Entanglement crashed down at once. The True Lord Shí Fǎ went rigid from head to foot, the spiritual power in his body circulating as though sunk in mud.
That single moment of rigidity was a dead position.
"Hundred Emperor!" Gu Chengming shot out his right fist.
In midair, the Hundred Bones Resonance's right fist drove out shoulder to shoulder with his.
Primordial Imperial Aura and the white-gold radiance of Love's Hundred Bones Resonance climbed the length of both forearms and wound together at the knuckles into a single knotted mass.
That light burned brighter than the Infinite Love Gu Chengming had thrown before on his own.
This time two Hundred Bones Resonances were working together — one the manifested phantom's true body, the other the fragment of consciousness fused into his blood and shaped into his fist.
Two emperors who should have been the same person, pouring their strength into the same punch.
In the old monster's vision there was nothing left but white-gold. The Dharma-Erosion spirit soul he had polished for a hundred years searched frantically across the face of that fist for a seam.
A seam as fine as a hair would do. His master's dying words rang over and over through his skull: "Every thing has a seam; every seam can be entered."
He had believed it for a hundred years and honed it for a hundred years. On that sentence he had severed the ascension of three late-Fifth-Realm great cultivators, and never once capsized.
Until today, when this light truly had no seam to slip into.
It wasn't that his eye had failed. It was that this light stood entirely outside the framework of "rules." It touched no causality, ran through no spirit veins, obeyed no ordinary logic of the Heavenly Dao.
A thing that refuses to reason will never show you a reasonable seam.
His full-throated roar slammed into that white-gold fist force and was ripped apart.
The Hundred Bones Resonance dropped hard from above the black mist, both fists locked together, and hammered the ground. The white-gold shockwave tore a breach straight through the mist, and Gu Chengming cut in along it.
The old monster stood at the far end of that breach.
"This old man has found it!" He laughed wildly, both hands pressed together into a sword-finger stabbing for Gu Chengming's heart.
Gu Chengming neither dodged nor deflected. "You found the wrong one."
At some point the Hundred Bones Resonance had flickered around behind him, her palms braced steadily against his back, white-gold formation patterns layering under the feet of them both.
Gu Chengming's fist drove out, and the old monster's two fingers struck its face.
Crack.
The finger bones snapped inch by inch. The savage recoil ran back up the arm — forearm broken, upper arm fractured, shoulder blade smashed to fragments.
"Aaagh—!" The old monster flew backward screaming and slammed into the dust, then dragged his head up in desperate struggle.
Boom.
The fist sank in through his chest and burst out his back. The Dao foundation the old monster had tempered for a hundred years, at the instant it touched that fist, collapsed inch by inch from the top down like a jade tower whose load-bearing pillar had been pulled away.
That Dao foundation of the character "grind", inherited from the last First Seat of the Withered Rock Sect, was, before that white-gold fist force, no more than a sheet of waterlogged mulberry paper — one tug and it came apart in shreds.
The old monster's features twisted horribly, his eyes shot through with terrified blood.
"Ab— absurd!"
He spent his last mouthful of true essence on a hoarse howl.
"—What in the world is this heretical art that ignores the Heavenly Dao?!"
"This is love." The Hundred Bones Resonance poked half her head out from beside Gu Chengming, white hair whipping wildly in the wash of force. "It's Heavenly Emperor Gu's love for This Emperor, and This Emperor's love for Heavenly Emperor Gu."
"I don't believe it! This old man does not believe it!" The old monster's face contorted as he glared at Gu Chengming. "You spit on the natural order! This is a heretical art! You will not die well!"
"Finished your last words?" Gu Chengming raised his right foot.
"You—"
Gu Chengming brought his foot down.
Crunch.
The skull burst apart.
A hundred years of Dao foundation died out with the old monster's last breath.
The final image frozen in his vision before his spirit soul scattered completely was—
the Hundred Bones Resonance nestled comfortably in Gu Chengming's arms, tilting her small face up at him.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, how did This Emperor do just now?"
"Mighty work, Hundred Emperor."
"Then…"
"A kiss."
…
"Waaah, Heavenly Emperor Gu is the best."
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, jealous: Chengming owes me a kiss too!]
[Flowing Cloud Moon-Following: …Gross.]
[The Clear-Heart Formula pressed a hand to its forehead: What a sickeningly sweet old married couple.]
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method watched with no small envy, then sighed: Where feeling reaches its fullness, rite raises no objection.]
The Hundred Bones Resonance settled contentedly against Gu Chengming's sleeve. At the center of the cavern, the shards of the old monster's Dao foundation were still slowly dispersing.
And just as Gu Chengming was about to gather in his formation and take a moment to regulate his breathing—
From deep within the cavern's earth veins came a sound, oddly muffled, yet heavy enough to set the whole of the Emerald Screen Range trembling.
Boom.
Not spring thunder. Not an earthquake. Gu Chengming's brow twitched hard.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula turned grave at once: Fellow Daoist Gu! That tremor is not natural!]
The air inside the cavern stalled. The Hundred Bones Resonance had felt it too. Her back snapped taut and she stepped half a pace out of his arms, eyes sweeping every direction with open wariness.
"Heavenly Emperor Gu, that sound—"
"—is coming for us."
Gu Chengming lifted his eyes. The once lightless rock of the cavern's vault was slowly weeping out faint threads of dim silver-grey light. The patterns weren't glaring; they even carried a certain air of decay. Yet every one that surfaced set off waves of shuddering in the depths of his Sea of Consciousness.
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds' narration arrived belatedly, with a quiet sigh: This is the aspect of the Heavenly Dao facing a tribulation.]
Gu Chengming's brows knit tight.
"Facing what tribulation?"
[On the Heavenly Dao's board, a piece — the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank — was meant to be set down. That piece was the ten-thousand-year settled position of the Emerald Screen Abyss, taken into the Heavenly Dao's own fated track a thousand years ago. And just now, you ate it.]
[The board is disordered. The Heavenly Dao has noticed.]
"And then?"
[And then the Heavenly Dao will set about erasing the error. Either it drags that Dharma-Station bodily out of you and back onto the board where it belongs, or it erases you along with every causal thread on you that touches "devouring a Dharma-Station," treating it as though it had never happened.]
"…"
The Hundred Bones Resonance flew into a rage. "Let the Heavenly Dao come, then! This Emperor will blow up the Heavenly Dao with one punch!"
Gu Chengming sighed inwardly. He had guessed that seizing the Dharma-Station might set something enormous in motion, but he hadn't expected the Heavenly Dao itself to get dragged in.
In a certain sense, this counted as his first direct contact with the Heavenly Dao, didn't it?
The last indirect brush had been during the Hundred Bones Resonance's bond quest, when he drew the voice of the Great Dao into his body.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds surely hadn't anticipated this either. Her plan had presumably been to string him along, seize the Dharma-Station in the confusion, and use it to slip free of him. Instead the Dharma-Station was gone and she was going down with him. She had to be despairing.
And exactly as Gu Chengming imagined, the Record of the Myriad Worlds was thoroughly done with living.
Think of it — a remnant of the old world, an eternal observer who had watched the birth and death of ten thousand fated tracks, who had endured even the end-of-Dharma Great Tribulation when heaven and earth collapsed.
Ten thousand years of effort had gone into finally raising a single Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank in this world, which she had meant to use as a springboard, a golden-cicada escape, a way to rebuild her true body.
Who could have guessed that the man out there was an anomaly willing to swallow a Heavenly Dao Dharma-Station whole? Her meticulous scheme had shoved her into a dead position of her own making.
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds stared at the vault of the Sea of Consciousness, without so much as the strength left to keep snarking in narration.]
She let out a helpless sigh, feeling that her "career as a cultivation technique" had lost all its luster.
Had she known the thing waiting outside was somebody as unreasonable as Gu Chengming, she'd have stayed obediently asleep under the Emerald Screen Abyss. Why crawl out of the grave at all, only to bury herself in a dead position past any salvaging?
No — wait. There might be a way out.
Something seemed to click for the Record of the Myriad Worlds, and she turned her attention toward the inside of the Love Laboratory…
Outside the cavern, the last dregs of black mist had yet to disperse. Qin Wuwang, the White-Azure True Lord, Song Heng, and the Nameless Daoist — the qi of all four Fifth Realm powers was pinned in place by the phenomenon overhead. Moving was out of the question; even breathing cost enormous concentration.
The four hung in midair, none of them daring to act.
The White-Azure True Lord's face had gone bloodless, the jade tablet in his sleeve shaking violently.
"Is that… the Heavenly Dao?!"
Song Heng's heavy brows drew together, his sword intent drawn but unloosed. "This old man has lived a few hundred years for nothing, apparently. This is the first time I've seen the like."
Qin Wuwang ground her teeth to splinters. "And whose account does this get charged to, exactly?"
The White-Azure True Lord said, "…Not ours, at any rate."
The Nameless Daoist watched from the sidelines with his hands in his sleeves, and something rare surfaced on that weathered old face — a bitter smile.
That boy's appetite really had no bottom to it.
He privately concluded that his notion of recruiting the boy into the Myriad-Theft Gate would have to be shelved for the time being. If the brat truly turned this around, then anyone at all might sit the Gate Master's throne — anyone except him.
Because if he ever settled into that seat, the Lián Tian Zhi the patriarch had left behind would probably get swallowed whole too.
He heaved a long sigh. Such a shame. Such a shame.
…
Inside the cavern, Gu Chengming bore the brunt of it, standing face to face with that irresistible blaze of heavenly majesty.
He craned his head back and stared at the silver-grey patterns pressing slowly down from the vault, feeling as though something were following the causality of his devoured Dharma-Station and rubbing out, bit by bit, every trace of his existence in this world.
Gu Chengming clenched his jaw. Cold sweat beaded at his temple.
He knew perfectly well that resisting the Heavenly Dao head-on was an ant shaking a tree. The only way out was to weld his own causal track into this world so firmly that it couldn't be pried loose — and to do it before the Heavenly Dao's rules finished "correcting" him.
But the aftershocks of the Heavenly Dao's tribulation had already left him struggling to hold on. On his own, sorting out the tangled spiritual mechanisms inside himself and steadying his mind in the space of a breath was a fool's daydream.
And at that hair's-breadth moment, just as he prepared to risk everything, the techniques in the depths of his Sea of Consciousness answered first.
[Clear-Heart Formula: None of you break ranks. Settle your minds first. Chengming will decide.]
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method: I shall use the Rite formula to steady Chengming's foundation. Each of you tend your own post.]
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula: I'll cover the leaks where his qi is bleeding out.]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula, anxious but game, chimed in: I— I'll help too!]
"…Thank you. That's a real help."
Gu Chengming pulled in a long breath. The only path now was to stabilize his own causal existence completely, anchoring himself into this world so the Heavenly Dao couldn't write him off as an "aberration" and sweep him away in passing.
It would take every ounce of his attention, coordinating the subjugation and harmony of every technique from the center. He closed his eyes.
Spiritual power and cultivation arts resonated through him in a thunderous chord, driving his fated track like a nail deep into the rules of heaven and earth.
Above, the silver-grey patterns began their slow descent.
They didn't fall all at once. They spread like a drop of heavy ink into clear water, thread by thread, every trailing filament carrying the intent to correct. This was the Heavenly Dao excising an error from its world.
[Clear-Heart Formula: Chengming, only hold to your original heart.]
A thread of cool, clear true intent spilled from between his brows and steadied the divine sense that had begun to tremble under the Heavenly Dao's pressure.
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method: Rite is the order of heaven and earth. With the Rite formula, I fix your place among the Three Powers.]
An archaic inscription surfaced around his body, running from the crown of his head down through the soles of his feet, joined above to the firmament and below to the earth.
With that definition in place, if the Heavenly Dao meant to erase Gu Chengming as an anomaly, it would first have to bore through the ordinance of the character "human".
The silver-grey patterns pressed formally down to within three feet of Gu Chengming's head, and with a soft hiss they touched the "human" inscription the Heart-Rectifying Method held aloft.
The inscription shivered faintly. It did not break.
…It had held.
Gu Chengming's nerves eased a fraction, though he knew this was only the first probe.
Sure enough, the next instant the silver-grey patterns intensified by a third, and the entire cavern vault seemed to sink toward him.
Gu Chengming grunted. It struck him then that pure defense would never be enough — screening and propping himself up with his techniques could buy him a moment, no more. To make the Heavenly Dao let him go, he had to make the Heavenly Dao acknowledge that he belonged to this world in the first place.
But he was the anomaly. He had swallowed a Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank, and that had unmistakably happened.
Which meant…
His eyes opened. "The Heavenly Dao wants a piece that fits its board," he murmured. "So I'll make sure it can't find the empty space where that piece was supposed to go."
The Hundred Bones Resonance blinked. "Heavenly Emperor Gu, what does that mean?"
Gu Chengming didn't answer. He raised his left hand instead, and in his palm a very faint white-gold pattern kindled slowly to life.
It was the aura he had inherited from Love's Hundred Bones Resonance — the source of Infinite Love.
The punch that had finished the old monster had come from exactly this.
"I remember what the Record of the Myriad Worlds said." His divine sense sank into his dantian. "She said the Heavenly Dao wants to dig the vacancy the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank left behind back out of me. But what if that vacancy has already been filled by something else?"
"Filled?" The Hundred Bones Resonance stared, then her eyes lit up. "Heavenly Emperor Gu, you're so clever!"
"Hold on to me."
"Right!"
The white-haired girl wrapped both arms around Gu Chengming's waist and pressed her cheek to his back, pouring white-gold emperor's aura down into him without holding a thing back.
Gu Chengming sank his mind into the deepest part of his Sea of Consciousness. The Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank the Love Laboratory had swallowed whole a short while ago now hung slowly at the center of his vision in the form of a CG. This was what the Heavenly Dao wanted back.
Without a flicker of expression he guided the white-gold aura the Hundred Bones Resonance had poured into him to that spot, and began overwriting the layer of causal veining on the Dharma-Station that belonged to the Heavenly Dao — an inch at a time.
What the Heavenly Dao wanted was not the Dharma-Station itself but that causal skeleton. If he could make that skeleton grow the flesh and grain of the Hundred Bones Resonance, then the Heavenly Dao, when it tried to identify it, would find only a mass of something it did not recognize at all.
The Heavenly Dao could sense the aberration, of course.
But the Heavenly Dao was a rule, not a person, and the thing a rule most abhors is running into an existence outside the rules.
Once it could no longer locate the object it was supposed to erase, it would have to settle for second best: re-fitting this world to the situation as it now stood.
Gu Chengming's pulse jumped, but he didn't dare let his focus split. The Hundred Bones Resonance's aura overwrote the Dharma-Station with startling smoothness, as though the Dharma-Station had been born for exactly this.
The silver-grey patterns above had pressed to within an inch of his brow, held back by that "human" inscription and nothing else.
Gu Chengming drew a deep breath, and the last thread of white-gold aura settled slowly into the Dharma-Station's core.
Hmmmm—
The whole Dharma-Station turned from dull to luminous white, its skeleton wrapped in a very faint golden glow, the Heavenly Dao's mark on its surface buried entirely out of sight.
In that same instant, the silver-grey patterns on the vault drew back like a receding tide, as though they had never been there at all.
Every technique let out a collective breath.
[Clear-Heart Formula, exhaling long: Chengming's wisdom is great indeed.]
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method, bracing its back with a groan: I very nearly didn't hold…]
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula laughed: Well, it's past now.]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula cheered: Chengming, you're amazing!]
Gu Chengming opened his eyes slowly, a thin film of cold sweat at his temple.
He wiped it away with his sleeve and said quietly, "My thanks, all of you."
Behind him the Hundred Bones Resonance tilted her little face up, exactly as always. "Heavenly Emperor Gu, This Emperor put in a lot of work this time."
Gu Chengming smiled. "And thank you too, Hundred Emperor."
"Then, a kiss."
It was only once the dust had fully settled
that Gu Chengming realized there was a new problem…
The Record of the Myriad Worlds… where had she gone?
At that same moment, in the Love Laboratory.
A thread of silver-grey remnant consciousness slipped in soundlessly through the causal seam torn open when the Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank was devoured.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds had reasoned it out: with every scrap of Gu Chengming's attention pinned by the Heavenly Dao, his oversight of this place was bound to slip.
She had not meant to take such a risk, but inspiration had struck. The Love Laboratory could devour a Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank, which proved its Station stood far above that of a Dharma-Station.
If she could steal into this place and take the nest for herself, it might prove more exquisite still than the "mirror" she had schemed over for ten thousand years.
She might even use it to attest to a supreme Dharma-Station in a single stroke, her Station transcending the ages.
Observing herself would no longer be a pipe dream.
Then the dead position of "the one who watches the sea cannot watch herself" would be trampled to pieces beneath her heel.
She floated at the threshold and made her final decision. She feared Gu Chengming noticing. She feared some unknown existence inside turning on her.
But if she pulled it off, ten thousand years of obsession would resolve in a single morning. Weighing gain against loss, the odds favored her.
…She steadied her resolve and chose to gamble everything.
The remnant consciousness drifted like a strand of gossamer, slow and cautious, toward the depths of the laboratory.
The inside of the Love Laboratory was far more deathly still than she had expected.
No Dao here. No Dharma. No cause, no effect. Only a field of pure white curtain-light. On the last road of the old world line's collapse, among the afterimages of all laws returning to the void, she had once glimpsed something very like this scene.
Back then she had taken it for illusion. Now it seemed clear that it had been no illusion at all, but something deeper — the true substance beneath.
Something stirred in her. The remnant consciousness hugged the pure white field and crept forward step by step, every step needing to guard against Gu Chengming's divine sense turning back midway.
But from the far side of the Sea of Consciousness came only the chaotic roar of circulation. Gu Chengming was pouring everything he had into stabilizing himself, wholly unaware that his back courtyard was on fire.
This was a gift from heaven!
She quickened her pace at once.
The pure white field held nothing whatsoever, and the Record of the Myriad Worlds grew ever more certain that the depths of this place ran far beyond ten thousand years of her deductions.
If she could borrow its momentum to rebuild herself, she could throw away even that Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank like a worn-out shoe.
She could simply take this as her axis and forge a "true-aspect vessel" fitted to herself. Ten thousand years of paradox, broken through at last!
The remnant consciousness finally swept up before the curtain of light — and at that critical instant,
she realized with a jolt that she was not the only living thing here.
Thirty feet in front of the light curtain, someone sat. She sat cross-legged, hands resting idly on her knees, a full head of white hair spilling loose over her shoulders and back, eyes fixed quietly on one corner of the curtain, as though she had been waiting there for long ages.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds' remnant consciousness stalled hard. She knew that face.
Wasn't it exactly the Hundred Bones Resonance — the technique Gu Chengming had just summoned with the CG evolved from that Dharma-Station?
The thought of that shabby little technique that spent all day hollering "This Emperor" inside Gu Chengming's Sea of Consciousness drew a cold, private sneer from her.
A third-rate cultivation art, nothing more. Ten thousand years ago it hadn't even cast a shadow. What was there to fear? Even granting it carried that "unfathomable resonance with the laws," it was still just a freak birthed by this world.
She was a remnant of the old world line, an observer enthroned for ten thousand years. Was she going to be undone by a body-tempering technique still wet behind the ears?
The white-haired woman raised her head unhurriedly. Her eyes reflected that thread of silver-grey remnant consciousness, and she let out a soft, drawn-out sigh.
"Haah."
"And here I was hoping to stay hidden a while longer."
"…"
Bewilderment struck the Record of the Myriad Worlds. Why did that tone sound wrong?
"The Hundred Bones Resonance" stood up in no particular hurry and brushed off the hem of her pure white training robe a couple of times.
"Ever since This Venerable One merged into Heavenly Emperor Gu's body, I have kept myself hidden here. I had thought to loaf about undisturbed until the next stage."
"But since you've walked in on me…" She rolled her wrist joints idly. "Then we'll have to do this by the book."
For reasons she couldn't name, the Record of the Myriad Worlds' remnant consciousness was seized at once by the urge to retreat.
Ten thousand years of contemplative instinct was screaming a warning: great peril here, do not linger!
But she had been too absorbed on the way in, and her path back had long since been drawn slowly closed by that white-robed woman with some profound, unfathomable law.
Like an insect stepping into a spiderweb, by the time realization dawned, every direction was a dead end.
"Don't fret." Love's Hundred Bones Resonance smiled until her eyes curved. "This Venerable One won't take your life."
"You'll be kept. Heavenly Emperor Gu will have use for you later."
"It's only…"
She lifted her right fist, taking her time about it.
"…that you'll need a lesson you'll remember."
Hearing that, the Record of the Myriad Worlds knew things had gone very badly indeed.
I'm finished. Looks like I walked into another trap!
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