Chapter 169: CH. 169 | Lin Tian’s Meaning to the World
Lin Tian released his primordial transformation, his form settling back into his usual self.
He walked toward one of the nearby buildings that seemed safe to enter, no guarding array sealing its door the way the golden palace had.
He pushed the door open and took in the sight before him, wooden shelves lined with row upon row of scrolls. His curiosity only deepened.
He approached one of the shelves and picked up a scroll. Nothing about it looked special, no trace of spiritual qi stirred within it either.
The moment he unrolled it, Lin Tian already had his answer. This wasn’t a technique or a formation array. Just an ordinary scroll of recorded information.
Nearly every scroll in this place shares the same color, the same shape.
Could it be... they’re all just information, nothing more?
Even so, not being a technique didn’t make it worthless, not to him. He genuinely needed information right now.
He needed to understand where he’d ended up, and what tied this Golden Palace to his Primordial Grand Heaven Transformation.
He unrolled the scroll and began reading. He didn’t need his Absolute Dao Emperor Comprehension to grasp the core of what the scroll laid out before him.
Hundreds of scrolls filled this room, and Lin Tian had no way of knowing whether they all held the same knowledge or something different entirely.
Still, he chose to make the most of it. As soon as he finished one scroll, he reached for the next.
Lin Tian drew on his qi to gather every scroll of information in the room, laying them out before him one after another, unrolling each in turn to reveal what it held.
Slowly, understanding began to take shape in his mind. The scrolls in this place laid out detailed accounts of history, chronicling the existence of ancient entities scattered across the Star Universe.
He sat in silence, working through what each passage meant, weaving it together with fragments of knowledge he’d already pieced together before.
Among their many records, they spoke of a realm of absolute void, and of a bloodline belonging to something called the Youdu Demon.
What I’m starting to understand... is that the star I’m standing on isn’t even the center of this universe.
Lin Tian let out a short breath, rolling up the scroll before him and returning it to the shelf where it belonged.
He didn’t stop there. He reached for another scroll and read on, working through it carefully, tying every new fragment of knowledge to everything he’d already gathered from the records in that room.
Working through the hundreds of records stored in that building took him a considerable amount of time, though nowhere near as long as mastering a technique would have taken.
He let out a long breath, setting down the final scroll he’d read, marking the end of every record in that room.
He rose from his cross legged seat on the wooden altar and walked out of the building, tilting his head up toward the sky.
The sky above the golden palace stretched clear and bright, not a single cloud in sight, no night ever fell here, only endless day. But that wasn’t what drew his gaze upward.
He looked to the heavens because he understood now that other star realms existed far beyond this place, realms so distant they could only be reached through solid, mastered primordial power.
Three great star realms stood out among them: the Sacred Blue Azure Star Realm, the Realm of a Thousand Glittering Stars, and the Realm of the Heavenly Sword Sovereign.
But among these three great realms that ruled the universe, only one threat truly mattered: the Realm of Absolute Void.
The Youdu Demon... his power must be something no cultivator could ever hope to imagine, let alone measure by ordinary standards.
Lin Tian came to understand that he now stood within the Heavenly Golden Jade Palace, home to the Ancient Emperor and the clan sworn to serve him.
Yet based on the records he’d read, certain passages spoke of an Imperial Golden Age and things of that nature.
That alone hinted the palace and its people had stood here for thousands upon thousands of years.
As far as I knew... this was supposed to be the game world I woke up in after dying such a pathetic death in my previous life.
So why does this game world hold something this vast, this expansive?
Could it be... this world inside the game had been growing and evolving on its own, long before I ever arrived?
So many questions swirled through his mind, confusing and unanswered, about this place, about the cultivation game world itself, about why it had grown so impossibly vast, and about his own existence within it.
No protagonist could have ever imagined a game world stretching this far, this wide.
With everything unfolding before him, Lin Tian now understood clearly that he no longer stood within a mere game world. This was a vast parallel world, one that simply happened to synchronize with a game’s backdrop.
In short, he really had been thrown into a xianxia world, just not one bound entirely by game logic.
The game’s setting and framework had only ever served to make things feel familiar to him. A world like this had no scripted ending, no final boss to defeat and walk away from.
What mattered most now was the immense power that had pulled Lin Tian into this dimension to begin with.
What purpose lay behind it? Why did the setting need to mirror a game so closely? Why had he been blessed with power belonging to heaven and earth itself?
Those questions kept surfacing in his mind as he worked through everything the Heavenly Golden Jade Palace’s records had revealed to him.
Lin Tian exhaled slowly, trying to settle his restless mind, crowded as it was with unanswered questions, and turned instead to cultivation.
Better to cultivate now and recover my strength. That teleportation earlier cut short what I still needed to finish.
He walked off in another direction and came upon a wide altar surrounded by immortal peach trees, bearing fruit endlessly without ever running dry, each peach of the highest quality, able to restore one’s condition, nourish the meridians, and extend one’s very lifespan.
He settled at the altar and sat cross legged, focusing his mind and easing into flawless, undisturbed cultivation.
Unlike ordinary spiritual energy, the golden spiritual qi flowing through this palace restored him far faster than anything he’d known before, though even this wasn’t enough to fully mend his wounded nascent soul.
"For thousands of years, I have waited for you."
Lin Tian jolted, his eyes snapping open, cultivation forgotten in an instant at the sound of that mysterious voice, deep, commanding, unmistakably a man’s voice.
"I am certain you are the one fit to inherit what I leave behind."
"Who’s there?" Lin Tian demanded, already moving, alert.
As his eyes swept the space around him, a massive surge of spiritual qi gathered before him, slowly taking full shape.
A man with long golden hair stood upon the altar floor, draped in a long white robe patterned with golden dragons, a halo ring resting behind his back, qi aura blazing powerfully from every inch of him.
Lin Tian froze for a moment, then took a wary step back, every sense on alert.
"You... who are you?!"
"No need for such caution, Fellow Daoist."
"You may call me... Yun Feng."