Chapter 430: Galaxy
The Dao Artifact flying vessel that carried Yaoguang and his people was, strictly speaking, closer to a flagship, one that combined speed, defense, and living quarters in a single hull.
And since the warship would be regularly traveling back and forth between Cangwu and the North Sea in the years ahead, after Yaoguang refined and improved it, it was christened the Cangbei, after the two worlds it would ferry between.[1]
The Cangbei was not just fast; it possessed formidable defenses of its own. Violent astral winds and ice storms raged across the surface and outer reaches of the North Sea Star, but such natural hazards posed no real threat, whether to the Dao Artifact itself or to Li Hanqiu at its helm.
The warship climbed steadily, and before long the view ahead became clear. A vast, boundless darkness, deep beyond measure, spread out before everyone aboard. It was the starry sky beyond.
The moment they began to pull free of the North Sea Star, everyone aboard, including Li Qingshan, Lou Yuyu, Liang Qiu, Xu Qiexing, and the others who had come with Li Hanqiu, felt their bodies abruptly lighten.
It was like shedding every ounce of a heavy training load at once; a floating, almost ethereal lightness welled up through them. And with that lightness came something more: a sense of tremendous power coiled in their every movement, as if the slightest gesture could reduce everything around them to ruin.
"We've left the North Sea Star," Li Hanqiu couldn't help but say.
As a Void-Piercing battle immortal who regularly traveled between the North Sea Star and the battlefields beyond it, Wan Liugui was long used to the change.
He glanced at the enormous North Sea Star below them. "The gravity and environment of the North Sea Star are unnaturally punishing. Any living being that leaves it feels as though the sky is the limit."
He smiled. "On the North Sea Star, a Void-Piercing cultivator detonating the grotto-heaven inside his body would annihilate everything within one or two thousand kilometers at most, and even someone as strong as a Void-Shattering cultivator would find it hard to level an area spanning over ten thousand kilometers. But out here in the starry expanse, crushing a star more than a million kilometers across takes little more than a casual flick of the hand."
"The North Sea Star is different from other worlds. Its abnormality doesn't come from gravity or environment, but from the level of its laws," Yaoguang explained. As a Void-Shattering cultivator, and one who stood at the very peak of the North Sea Star at that, he had access to far more information and knowledge than the others.
He too gazed at the enormous planet as he went on, "Deep within the North Sea Star's core lies a Gate of the Immortal Realm. The gate is closed, but the Three Thousand Great Dao seeping out of it have quietly reshaped the star's structure, shifting its environment toward that of the Immortal Realm itself. That is why the laws are wound so tightly on and around the North Sea Star, and why cultivators who venture deep into it feel so bound and constrained."
"The laws coming from the Gate of the Immortal Realm..." Li Hanqiu and Wan Liugui had heard something regarding that theory, just never in as much detail as Yaoguang had just explained.
Beside them, Li Qingshan couldn't help speaking up. "No wonder we felt such a strong sense of oppression when we first arrived on the North Sea Star, and didn't even know how to shake the feeling off. The constraint was at the level of the laws..."
"Constraining, yes, but cultivating within it is incomparably more efficient," Yaoguang said with a smile. "It's like the great cities of the Great Cangwu World. They're packed with experts, so an ordinary cultivator naturally feels restricted in there. But an environment crowded with the strong also offers better resources and better opportunities, the kind that let a person shoot up overnight. Otherwise, why not simply stay in some poor backwater for comfort's sake and be done with it?"
"A poor backwater may be comfortable, but it isn't necessarily a pleasant place to live," Wan Liugui said. "When I was born, Cangwu hadn't yet gone through its upheaval. Back then a farmer in the countryside could hardly save a single tael of silver[2]">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/ChinesischeSilberbarren.jpg[/ref] from a year in the fields, while anyone able-bodied who went to the capital could earn a dozen or more taels a year doing almost anything. Then again, an income of a dozen taels would have made a man rich in my hometown, but in that city it was barely enough to scrape by. And once people have seen the splendor of the wider world, few ever feel like returning to the countryside. You could see as much from how our villages kept emptying out, year after year."
Li Hanqiu, Li Qingshan, and the others nodded along. As hard as life on the North Sea Star was compared with the Great Cangwu World, they had to admit that only here could they hope for a better future.
Had they stayed in the Great Cangwu World, keeping company with Golden Core battle immortals, the peak of their achievement would likely have been the Golden Core Realm and nothing more.
The boundless longevity of the Void-Piercing Realm? Not a chance.
To say nothing of ever standing before Dao Lords whose lifespans reached 129,600 years, or the Gate of the Immortal Realm, which was said to grant eternal life to any who passed through.
"First a creature seeks a full belly, then enough safety, and after that it pursues health, longevity, evolution... That is the road every living being must walk," Yaoguang said, turning his gaze back out toward the stars.
Freed from the constraints of the North Sea Star's environment, he could perceive with perfect clarity just how fragile space here truly was.
He was like a creature raised under crushing gravity set loose in a low-gravity land, suddenly able to easily leap into the sky.
In such a place, matter and life alike tended to be brittle. To say a wave of his hand could split mountains might be an exaggeration, but shattering rock with a casual gesture was trivial. That was how Yaoguang now felt and understood space.
His psychic thought spread outward. With no external laws to bind or interfere with it, it ran like a horse free from its reins, quickly reaching what had been its limit on the North Sea Star, fifty thousand kilometers, then bursting through that shackle with ease, sweeping out to five hundred thousand kilometers, five million, fifty million, five hundred million...
By drawing on his comprehension of the Great Dao of space, he could extend his psychic thought as far as five billion kilometers.
Five billion kilometers. Yaoguang's psychic mind stirred, and in the next instant his figure vanished using Void Flicker.
In a heartbeat, Yaoguang stood five billion kilometers away, the entire crossing meeting almost no resistance at all.
He paused briefly, then cast the Void Flicker again. Another five billion kilometers, gone in an instant. Then a third time, a fourth, a fifth...
Within a single breath, he had crossed fifty billion kilometers of starry space.
Too easy. The strain each Void Flicker puts on my grotto-heaven, the casting speed... All of it is lighter by a wide margin. On the North Sea Star, a hundred or so full-power Void Flickers, fifty million kilometers in one stretch, would leave my grotto-heaven shuddering and spent. Now? Never mind a hundred casts. A thousand, several thousand, won't be a problem. Yaoguang thought.
In other words, at his limit he could sustain a pace of fifty billion kilometers per breath for several hundred breaths. More than ten trillion kilometers.
So at my level, my maximum combat radius has reached a full light-year. Yaoguang calculated.
One light-year. What a staggering distance! Yet he could now cross it in almost no time. That was his true strength as he stood today.
And that was without counting the countless spatial nodes scattered through the cosmos, nodes that functioned much like wormholes. Traveling through them, crossing hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of light-years at once was no great feat.
Even without the nodes, with his speed and a lifespan running to more than ten thousand years, he could easily tour an entire galaxy.
So calling the Void-Piercing, Void-Refining, and Void-Shattering cultivators the overlords of a galaxy is no empty title. A combat radius measured in light-years, plus spatial nodes to reach any other destination... Ruling a galaxy would be almost effortless.
And ruling didn't mean destroying. In a city of a hundred thousand, whoever possessed the strength to fight a hundred single-handedly could use the threat of that strength to raise a ruling class of a thousand, and that thousand would naturally keep the remaining ninety-eight thousand nine hundred obediently in line for him.
After verifying his range, Yaoguang used Void Flicker once more and returned to the Cangbei warship.
"Alright. Locate the spatial nodes and accelerate at full power toward the Great Cangwu World," Yaoguang said.
"Yes." Li Hanqiu steered the Cangbei warship straight for the nearest spatial node.
Along the way they encountered several warships prowling the dark. None of them reached the level of a Dao Artifact, but every one was incredibly fast, and their purpose in loitering beyond the North Sea Star was plain enough: to plunder anyone attempting to enter it.
Yet the moment those ships noticed the level of the vessel carrying Yaoguang's party, and the Heavenly Dao Sect emblem it bore, they all fled into the distance, not daring so much as to cross its path.
At one point, the Cangbei even passed a raid in progress, and its mere passage sent the raiders abandoning their prey and scattering in a panic.
The scene left Yaoguang feeling almost nostalgic.
However, once the warship entered a spatial node, leaping several hundred light-years at once, their surroundings grew noticeably quiet, and the Cangbei warship cruised on toward the next spatial node in untroubled calm.
The ship could perform void leaps of its own, but only across a few light-years to a dozen or so at a time, and each leap required a cooldown.
Fortunately, spatial nodes were hardly rare in the vast cosmos; a leap or two of the Cangbei warship's own was usually enough to bring the next usable node within reach.
At that pace, in under half a month, the Great Cangwu World lay close at hand.
"We're finally here."
Aboard the Cangbei, the company of more than a hundred emerged almost as one, gazing out at a planet hanging in the emptiness of space, right in front of their eyes.
"The Great Cangwu World..." Li Qingshan and the others felt a tangle of emotions.
"We could never quite make out the structure of the Great Cangwu World before. Now it's clear. This place is one enormous spatial node, a derelict one. Its internal space collapsed, and it drew in all the matter within several light-years to fill the collapsed node, which in the end produced this peculiar structure," Li Hanqiu said with some emotion.
𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞
"Rare as that structure is, it's not unheard of in the starry sky... Ours is simply a particularly large one," Lou Yuyu said, a shade of desolation in his expression. "So Cangwu was never special after all."
The group watched for a long while, and eventually many of them turned their gazes beyond the Great Cangwu World, to where the Heavenly Palaces hung one after another.
Looking at them, Murong Hui, once hall master of the Nine Cauldrons Sect's Heavenly Palace Hall, couldn't hold back a murmur. "So... decades have passed, and the Great Cangwu World hasn't changed at all."
"Alright. Let's go home," Yaoguang ordered.
The Cangbei accelerated once more, and soon arrived in the skies above the Great Cangwu World.
***
Just as Yaoguang reached the Great Cangwu World, Zong Wenxian, still locked in his endless struggle with the Light Divine Race, at last received word from the Heavenly Dao Sect.
1. Cangbei is made up of two words: "Cang" and "bei". Cang represents Cangwu, and bei also means "north," referring to the North Sea. ☜
2. Editor's note: One tael should be a small silver ingot around 37.5 grams on average, in the shape of a small boat, according to what I found. Picture for reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/ChinesischeSilberbarren.jpg