Chương 86: Chapter 85: Closing Interlude V

The Sandy Mausoleum is a small world linked to the major realm of the Shifting Sands. Like many other isolated fragments in the vast Three Thousand Worlds system, it developed along a path entirely its own. But unlike most such realms, the Sandy Mausoleum lacks the usual variety of geography or ecosystems. It bears its name for a simple, unrelenting reason: sand. Golden grains stretch from one end of the horizon to the other. There are no mountains, only endless dunes that shift with the wind.

No rivers run here; only scattered pale-blue oases dot the land, like fleeting islands of hope in a boundless sea of dust. The sun burns overhead with cruel constancy, and the winds never rest, whipping the sands into a perpetual, low howling storm. It is always on the edge of a sandstorm; quiet, but never still. Despite its desolation, the Sandy Mausoleum is vast, even by the standards of the most significant small worlds. In sheer size, it surpasses Penglai, Fusang, Queqiao, and many others.

However, in terms of life, it is barren: a graveyard of past civilizations. Across millennia, cultures have risen from the sands only to be buried beneath them again. It was not always this way. Seven thousand years ago, the Sandy Mausoleum was a lush and thriving world. Rolling hills, winding rivers, deep valleys, fertile plains – it was a place teeming with life. Hundreds of billions called it home.

Towering cities and humble villages spread across the land, empires waxed and waned, and immortals pursued the Dao amid the harmony of all living things. Then came Chen Sha. A prodigious cultivator, Chen Sha rose swiftly through the ranks, eventually serving as a trusted advisor to a local emperor. In time, he achieved immortality and awakened the shen of the divine treasure hidden within his soul: the Yellow Gold Gourd.

Seemingly nothing more than a simple yellow flask, this treasure held within it a bottomless supply of golden cinnabar sand. In a realm without other divine treasures, this alone made Chen Sha the unrivaled sovereign. None could resist his will. Though he never claimed a throne, he ruled in all but name. Like many immortals, Chen Sha eventually withdrew from mortal affairs to seek enlightenment and advance further along his path. His aim was the same as every undying being: eternity.

Yet in him, the fear of failure and of death festered deeper than in most. It consumed him, an obsession with escaping death, with transcending his fate. By all logic, he had little to fear. None could challenge a man wielding a divine treasure. As long as no other cultivator bearing such a boon came upon him, he was invincible. However, fear is not logical. It lingered. It rotted. And it drove him to attempt ascension. He failed. That in itself was no surprise.

Though immortals who master their shen have ascended before, it has never been easy. Many are blessed with a shen. Few bring it to its final stage. Bitter and afraid, Chen Sha devised a plan that was both cruel and methodical. If ascension required mastery and profound understanding of his shen, then he would use it in full, again and again, until every hidden truth revealed itself. He unleashed the Yellow-Gold Gourd. Endless cinnabar sand poured forth. It swallowed rivers, crushed forests, and buried mountains.

Empires vanished beneath its tide. Cities and villages were entombed. All life, human and spirit beast alike, was eradicated. Four hundred billion souls, dead in a matter of days. A world once green and alive became a vast, dead desert. Chen Sha spared only a few thousand mortals, scattered across the land. He watched them survive. He watched them rebuild. Watched them love, hate, war, and prosper. Cities rose atop the dunes. Nomadic tribes wandered between oasis kingdoms.

Cultivators and immortals emerged once again. He watched, for a thousand years, never interfering. Then he uncorked the gourd again. The sand came once more, this time to bury the desert itself. Nomadic cities, desert empires, oasis metropolises; all swallowed whole. For an entire year, the cinnabar storm swept the land, entombing the world in silence once more. Again, Chen Sha spared a few thousand. Again, he watched.

A god uncaring; a scholar obsessed; a madman taking notes while sand castles crumble under his gaze. This cycle has repeated six times. Every thousand years, life blooms, only to be smothered beneath golden sand. Chen Sha watches and waits, seeking understanding; of sorrow, of love, of struggle, of death. Through them, he seeks understanding of the divine treasure in his hands. He seeks the path to ascension, and he will not stop until he finds it. Now, even ghosts avoid the Sandy Mausoleum.

It once had another name, but no one remembers it. Not even Chen Sha. Gao Yan leaned back from the surface of the Imp Reflecting Mirror, letting the images of the Sandy Mausoleum and the madman Chen Sha dissolve into flickering strands of light. A dull ache throbbed behind her temples, but she ignored it. The pain had become a familiar companion after so many months of using the mirror. That had been… disturbing. Gao Yan had long understood that not all men were sane.

Cultivators, in particular, were prone to obsession; power magnified desire as often as it refined it. Yet to witness a being slaughter hundreds of billions, to reduce a thriving world to a graveyard for the sake of his own obsession, shook her deeply. She, too, was the bearer of a divine treasure. While the Imp Reflecting Mirror possessed no direct destructive power, it granted her insights beyond comprehension.

A divine treasure was still divine; an artifact cast down from the realm of gods, peerless beneath the heavens. And yet… even so, to go that far? Like every day she had done since she awakened the shen of the Imp Reflecting Mirror in her soul and glimpsed the calamity that loomed ahead, Gao Yan was searching for allies.

The Imp Reflecting Mirror, perhaps the most formidable investigative treasure in existence, could see through all illusions, pierce all deceptions, and reflect not just the past, but ten thousand years of potential futures. By that logic, she should have already found a perfect path. She should have devised a plan to protect her world from devastation. The truth was far crueler. How many futures were there? Infinite.

How many variations of the coming war, rolling toward her like an inexorable tide, had she sifted through? More than she could name. For over a year she had done little else, combing through possibility after possibility in search of a single thread of certainty; a future in which her people might survive the War for the Heavenly Register unscathed. And yet, armed with knowledge beyond the dreams of most immortals, she felt no closer to salvation. If anything, she felt blind.

In one future, Li Erlang cut her down and offered the Mirror to Yue Lingxian as a token of devotion. In another, Yue Lingxian herself struck the killing blow after uncovering the treasure's true potential, intending to secure her own supremacy. In dozens more, her small world of Jingjie, sun and all, was shattered into drifting fragments, scattered across ninety trillion li of the primordial sea, all because Ye Feng had taken offense at words she had never spoken. Those were the kinder outcomes.

Immortality, she had come to realize, often meant little more than a longer span of time in which to be hunted. Still, it was better than being mortal; those were ants, fated to be crushed underfoot without ever understanding why. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it She didn't know what to do. She knew too much, had too many choices. Yet, somehow, it all left her paralyzed.

Part of it was the overwhelming weight of responsibility; she had not even been immortal for a decade, and yet the survival of an entire world rested on her shoulders. Part of it was the crushing realization that there were no good options. All because of the Mirror. She remembered how proud she'd been when she had first discovered the shen. A divine treasure, something spoken of only in myths, revealing itself in her own hands. In Jingjie, even with many powerful immortals, none had ever wielded such an artifact.

She had been the first. She had felt chosen. Now, that pride felt like a cruel joke. The gods had placed a treasure in her grasp, and in exchange they had shown her the end of the world. Gao Yan had seen too many futures. She had watched entire realms fall, watched friends betray each other, seen beasts born from chaos itself consume suns and scatter souls. Worst of all were the futures in which she survived; left alone amid ruin, hollowed by loss and burdened by knowledge no one else could share.

This was not going to be a war. It was going to be the end of the world, which was why Jingjie needed allies – real allies. If she could find enough immortals, ones with divine treasures, ones she could trust, then perhaps they could withstand the coming storm together. Perhaps unity could accomplish what foresight alone could not. So far, she had only secured one: Wen Shoucheng, the old man with the Iron Cover. His strength was formidable, his experience invaluable.

His agreement to stand with her was a cornerstone upon which she dared to build hope. But two immortals, no matter how capable, could not defy the tide alone. The gaze of the Buzhou Sect would soon turn toward her. Worse still, so would Yue Lingxian's. Gao Yan had seen a future where she had bought herself time by directing suspicion toward Ye Feng and the Plantain Fan he wielded, which was a convenient distraction, and nothing more. It had worked for a while. But such diversions never endured.

Eventually, the strongest would set their sights upon her. She needed to be ready. That was why she was scouring the Three Thousand Worlds, looking for powerful but relatively obscure immortals, those who might be swayed before the bigger players made their move. However, the deeper she looked, the more disillusioned she became. Not all were monsters like Chen Sha. Still, most were indifferent or selfish.

Many would leap at the chance to ally with the bearer of the Imp Reflecting Mirror, but few would risk their lives to protect her. She understood that, even empathized with it. She simply could not accept it. She needed allies she could trust absolutely. Not power-hungry opportunists, but those who feared the future as much as she did. Those willing to survive not alone, but together. Their time was running out, and now, Gao Yan was running out of names.

Sighing, she pressed her hands against her temples, and looked up at the ceiling, mind elsewhere. Almost without meaning to, her thoughts turned to that ridiculous future she had seen. She had dismissed it the moment the vision faded. In an infinity of branching possibilities, even the most remote eventuality would, somewhere, someday, solidify into certainty. That did not make every future worth contemplation. Some were too tenuous, too irrational to waste thought upon. This one, especially, bordered on delusion.

And yet, the image refused to leave her. A girl, barely a few decades old, with dark hair and violet eyes, defeating Yue Lingxian and wresting the Diamond Snare from her grasp. Even the Imp Reflecting Mirror had rendered the scene blurry and indistinct, uncertain of the method by which such a feat had been achieved. That alone should have been enough to disregard it. Instead, Gao Yan had looked closer. The girl, Bai Ning, was not even an immortal yet.

She was just a newly advanced Core Formation cultivator, tucked away in a minor world. The only remarkable detail was that her world, Tianxia, had been severed from the Three Thousand Worlds system. That anomaly had piqued Gao Yan's interest enough to investigate further, replaying the scene of its origin – what the locals called the Shattering – across the Mirror's surface. She had felt little surprise at the rise of yet another madman like the Immortal of Slaughter. Such figures were inevitable.

No, what had stung was the death of the Immortal of Wisdom, precisely the sort of ally she would have needed for the war looming on the horizon. As for the girl herself… she was promising. Her talent was undeniable. Though the Imp Reflecting Mirror could not reveal whether a person possessed a shen, Gao Yan suspected Bai Ning did. The intuition was difficult to ignore. But what of that? If the vision held true, the Immortal of Slaughter would soon break free of his imprisonment.

When he did, this fragile possibility would shatter like thin glass. It was exceedingly unlikely that Bai Ning would have mastered her treasure in time to abandon Tianxia. And even if she had, Tianxia drifted unmoored in the primordial sea. How would she navigate that chaos to reach another world? In theory, any divine treasure could be used to traverse between worlds. Mastery was only strictly required for ascension into the heavens, and even then, only through a shen.

In practice, however, the matter was far more complex. A divine treasure was but a reflection of a deity's natal treasure, so it could be used to tap into the powers and abilities of a wandering immortal. However, to wield it for interworld travel demanded not merely ownership, but an intimate bond and consummate skill with the treasure. Only treasures aligned with movement, those attuned to wind, void, or spatial law, could accomplish such feats with reliability. Even Gao Yan could not step easily between worlds.

The Imp Reflecting Mirror had never been meant for passage. With sufficient growth, she might force it to serve that function, but it would never grant the effortless traversal of something like the Golden Shuttle or the Futon of Wind and Fire. That was simply the nature of divine treasures.

So, for Bai Ning to matter, she would need to ascend to immortality, awaken whatever shen she possessed (if she possessed one at all), defeat or reimprison the Immortal of Slaughter, master her treasure to brave the primordial sea, and then fling herself into that maelstrom of chaos in pursuit of a distant world she might not even be able to reach. Impossible hardly began to cover it. No wonder the future had been so blurred. And yet…

it remained the only strand Gao Yan had ever witnessed in which Yue Lingxian fell. So, despite knowing it was folly, she had peered deeper, and in doing so, she had uncovered something even more unsettling. Behind Bai Ning stood another figure, one more impossible still: Mo Jian. The Imp Reflecting Mirror had resisted showing him. Where Bai Ning appeared faint yet discernible, Mo Jian was elusive, his presence sliding away from the Mirror's sight like an eel through murky water.

Each attempt to focus on him had been met with distortion, as though his very presence recoiled from scrutiny. Gao Yan knew almost nothing about him, and that ignorance was precisely what disturbed her. Bai Ning was an impossibility because Gao Yan could not fathom how she might accomplish what that lone, fragile strand of future depicted. Mo Jian was impossible for the opposite reason: the future refused to depict him at all. He was absent, and yet he was not.

Though no clear image formed, events bent subtly where he should have stood. His presence was like a shadow cast across the tapestry of the future: formless, indirect, but undeniably there. And then there was the final image she had forced the Mirror to maintain, just for a heartbeat before it shattered into light- Mo Jian, standing calmly with a gourd in hand, as a tiny humanoid shadow began to emerge from its mouth. Even now, recalling it made her frown.

It was every bit as absurd as Bai Ning defeating Yue Lingxian, perhaps more so. After all, the last owner of the Immortal Slaying Flying Knife had already ascended to Heaven. There was no possible reason for it to appear again. Shaking her head, Gao Yan forced the thoughts of Bai Ning and Mo Jian from her mind. Why was she squandering time on such tenuous futures? So what if there was something anomalous about them? Her task was not to chase phantoms, it was to gather immortals to her banner before the coming war.

When the Heavenly Register descended, the true bloodbath would begin. She could not afford distraction. Chen Sha had already proven a waste of effort. The two mortals she had glimpsed, Bai Ning and Mo Jian, were even less worthy of attention. It would take a chain of miracles for them to matter in the approaching storm. They had not even escaped the confines of their own world, let alone ascended to immortality. Resolute, Gao Yan summoned the Imp Reflecting Mirror once more.

She had already scoured Shifting Sands and several of its subsidiary realms. Perhaps it was time to turn her attention to Tianzhu. It housed one of the largest Buddhist sects in the entire Three Thousand World System, and where great sects flourished, so too did hidden talents. Beyond that, she still had not located the Golden Rice Bowl. She strongly suspected its wielder hailed from somewhere within that region. In many futures she had examined, that shen had played a decisive role in shaping the war's outcome.

If she could secure its bearer… Suppressing the throb building behind her eyes, Gao Yan cast aside the blurred, impossible futures and refocused on the tangible present. The search for allies was tedious and thankless, but it was necessary. The great war in Heaven had ended nearly eighty thousand years ago. The mortal planes were still scarred by its aftermath, recovering in fractured, uneven ways. Yet the second reckoning was only years away. The war would begin again.

Not in Heaven, she believed, but here, within the Three Thousand World System. The deities would not intervene. They had sworn to a hands-off approach after the last cataclysm. The descent of the Heavenly Register's gui was not unprecedented; it did not constitute divine interference. The Thunder Agency would remain still. Which meant the mortal realms were about to be threshed. Others must have sensed it, just as she had.

But Gao Yan doubted any had seen as far, or as clearly, as she had through the Imp Reflecting Mirror. The burden of foresight was hers alone, and she intended to make it count. She would survive; her world would survive; and if she had her way, the damned Heavenly Register would be destroyed once and for all, so this endless cycle would never repeat again. Until that day came, she had work to do. …………………………….. End of Book 1