Chapter 388 - 312: The World’s Gift
The gray clouds scattered.
Li Xing floated in mid-air, looking down at the crumbling mountain range below.
Huge chunks of rock rolled down, smashing onto the ground and sending up towering plumes of dust.
The purple liquid that had flowed for over three hundred years finally dried up, leaving scorched black marks on the rock.
A gentle breeze blew past, carrying the earthy scent of the soil.
The long-lost scent of soil, free from the stench of rot.
He raised his head and looked at the sky. The gray clouds were rapidly thinning and dispersing.
It was as if something was being drawn out from within, causing them to break apart in large swathes.
Sunlight poured down through the cracks, casting pillar after pillar of light.
It fell upon the cracked earth, upon the stones that had not seen sunlight for over three hundred years.
The first ray of sunlight landed on Li Xing. He opened his palm, feeling a familiar warmth.
He squinted, savoring the warmth.
Three hundred and sixty-seven years. This land was finally seeing the sun again.
The skeletons buried in the crevices, the people who had died in the corruption—their bones could finally be touched by the sun.
He took a deep breath. The air was so clean it felt almost unfamiliar.
There was no cloying sweetness of decay, no choking smell of sulfur.
Only the wind, and the refreshing scent it carried.
Suddenly... the clouds in the sky froze.
The wind stopped, too.
The drifting motes of dust hung in mid-air, motionless.
A great boulder, rolling down in the distance, stopped halfway down the mountain, as if someone had pressed pause.
Even the sunlight seemed to congeal, the particles of dust within its beams frozen in place.
They were like countless tiny diamonds embedded in the air.
Li Xing’s pupils contracted. He pushed his Starlight Perception to its absolute limit.
Something was descending from the highest, highest heavens.
Formless and substanceless.
"This... What kind of existence is this!!!"
It was too vast to describe.
It felt as if the weight of the entire world was slowly settling onto his shoulders.
In his Sea of Spirit, the panel was trembling as it never had before.
’The panel... seems excited?’
The illusory panel materialized without a sound, characters flickering crazily across it like a flooded screen.
They moved too fast to be read. Finally, they all vanished, leaving only a single line of text.
[Descent of the World Will detected...]
The line of text had barely appeared before it faded away.
The panel gave no further prompts, as if it, too, were waiting for something.
Li Xing looked up at the sky, his heart reeling with shock once more.
The sky... had cracked open.
A gaze descended from the depths of the highest, highest firmament, from a place above even the gray clouds, from the very origin of this heaven and earth.
And then, he saw It.
Not with his eyes, but with his Soul.
It had no shape, no color, no boundaries.
Its gaze held neither kindness nor malice.
Only a more primal, fundamental message.
Li Xing understood in an instant.
’This is the World Will’s... acknowledgment.’
Like a tree acknowledging its fallen leaves as its own, like a river acknowledging that the droplets flowing into it will eventually return.
Like this world, acknowledging the person standing here as Its child.
Li Xing stood there, stunned. He didn’t know how to describe the feeling.
It was like a blind man who had lived in darkness for as long as he could remember.
He had grown accustomed to the darkness, believing the world was meant to be black. Then one day, someone removed the cloth from his eyes.
He saw color—red like fire, blue like the sky, green like leaves swaying in the wind.
The colors flooded his eyes, his mind, the deepest part of his Soul.
He didn’t know the names of those colors, but he knew... so this was what the world was truly like.
’So, this is the real world.’
Li Xing’s eyes suddenly stung. He didn’t know why.
He stood there, bathed in that light, like a child who had been lost for a very long time and was finally found.
Like a man who had walked alone in the Wilderness for three hundred years and finally heard someone call his name.
The light shining on him was incredibly warm.
It seeped through his skin, into his flesh and blood, into his bones, into his Sea of Spirit.
Every speck of light trembled gently when It touched them, like a seed being watered, like parched earth finally receiving rain.
As it entered his Sea of Spirit, a single, extremely fine thread of light suddenly appeared.
It was a filament It had separated from the radiance, as thin as a strand of hair and as long as his little finger.
Li Xing closed his eyes.
He felt something pouring into his Soul.
The moment the fine thread appeared, his entire Sea of Spirit began to tremble.
Every speck of light, every Star Orbit in this Sea of Spirit, drew closer to it.
The thread of light began to move, swimming slowly through the Sea of Spirit like a golden fish.
It swam past the Gravity Star Orbit, and every speck of light in the Gravity Star Orbit brightened simultaneously, ten times more brilliant than before.
The starlight seemed to come alive. It began to move along new, more complex and intricate trajectories.
It swam past the Purification Star Orbit, and the orbit’s silver light became tinged with a faint gold.
It swam past the Time Star Orbit, and every pulse of the orbit stirred up golden ripples.
The ripples spread out, touching every speck of light and causing them to flicker in unison, as if the entire starry sky was breathing.
Wherever the faint gold passed, minute impurities deep within the Sea of Spirit, which even Li Xing himself had not noticed, silently dissolved.
’This is... the Rule of the world!’
Not a Rule he had to painstakingly pursue and comprehend, but one that was branded directly into the depths of his Soul.
The essence of Time is the breath of the world.
One inhale and one exhale is a moment; three hundred breaths is an hour; three million breaths is a year.
And this world had been breathing for hundreds of millions of years.
Every breath left a trace, and those traces are the Rules.
The extension of space is the skeleton of the world.
A skeleton supports the body; space supports all things. Skeletons can break, and space can tear.
This world was now healing its wounds.
The Corrupt Monarch was dead, the Abyss’s Anchor Point had been removed, and the world’s skeleton was mending.
The circulation of elements is the lifeblood of the world.
Water, fire, earth, and wind flow through the world’s veins. They had been polluted for over three hundred years, but now, they were finally clean.
The whispers of countless Rules flooded into Li Xing’s consciousness at once.
The things he once had to desperately comprehend and painstakingly seek were now as clear as the pages of an open book.
He saw how Time flowed—not as an abstract concept, but as a concrete image.
A drop of water fell from a great height, froze in mid-air, then accelerated, then slowed, then reversed its course, then returned to normal.
He saw how space bent. A massive boulder hung in the air, and the light around it flowed past, like a river around a reef.
He saw how life was born and how it faded away.
A blade of grass sprouted from the soil, grew tall, flowered, seeded, withered, and then another blade of grass grew from its seed.
He saw how the elements circulated endlessly.
Water became clouds, clouds became rain, rain fell into the soil, was absorbed by grass, the grass was eaten by an animal, the animal died, and the water in its body returned to the soil.
These images flowed through his consciousness, as fast as lightning yet as slow as if they were frozen in time.
He couldn’t grasp it all, but he knew that it had been left in the depths of his Soul, waiting to be digested, understood, and mastered.
The cycle of life is the world’s memory.
Every time a life ends, the world remembers.
The people who died in the corruption.
For three hundred and sixty-seven years, countless people had died.
The old, the young, men, women... in their final moments, they all looked to the north.
They looked toward the gray clouds, toward the place that devoured everything.
When they died, their eyes remained open. Now, those eyes were slowly closing.
Li Xing saw them. He saw their faces.
The woman and child from the early days in Maple City, the ones hiding in the basement... they were slowly waving to him.
The young man who had charged at the very front during the first beast tide at Starlight City, who had looked back at him once before being torn to shreds by a Corrupted Beast.
And there were so many other faces he didn’t recognize.
Thousands upon thousands, dense as the stars in the sky.
Their eyes were slowly closing.
Li Xing felt a tightness in his chest, as if something was blocking it.
The light on him was warm, so very warm.
Then, he heard a voice.
No, not a voice, but something imprinted directly upon his Soul.
"My child... thank you."
Li Xing’s eyes flew open.
The sky... was empty. The radiance had faded.
Only a tiny thread of light remained in his Sea of Spirit, swimming slowly.
He looked down at his hands. There were droplets of water on their backs.
He raised a hand to touch his face.
It was cold and damp.
Without realizing it, his face had become streaked with tears.
The tears were scalding hot. They slid down his cheeks, dripping onto the back of his hand, onto his collar.
They dripped onto this land, polluted for over three hundred years, and now finally clean.
Li Xing stood there, stunned.
’How long... has it been since I last cried?’
’Thirty years? Or longer?’
He couldn’t remember.
He only remembered that the tightness in his chest right now hurt more than any wound.
But within that pain, something else was stirring.
Something scalding, fresh, like a spring that had just thawed.
He looked up again, toward the direction where the light had vanished.
There was nothing there anymore.
Only the dissipating gray clouds, the sunlight beginning to flow once more, and the still-crumbling mountains in the distance.
But he knew It was always there.
This world would always be watching over them.
Li Xing took a deep breath and gently wiped the tears from his face.
He still had many things to do.
His figure shot into the sky, then turned and flew in another direction.
He didn’t immediately return to Starlight Holy City. He wanted to go check on Xuri City.
A month ago, Xuri City had sent an envoy to offer congratulations, but there had been no word from them since.
Li Xing flew for two hours.
As the sun began to set in the west, a massive silhouette appeared on the horizon.
The city walls were tall and thick, built entirely of black megaliths and carved with defensive Runes.
The Runes were still active, circulating a faint golden light and enveloping the entire city in a translucent barrier of light.
This was Xuri City, the first city of the Human Race.
Li Xing slowed down, gradually approaching.
He stopped thirty li from the city walls.
’Something’s wrong. There are signs of a battle outside the city.’
The areas that should have been farmland were now a complete mess.
The ground was trampled, crops were flattened, and black smoke was still rising from some spots.
A few farmhouses had collapsed, their ruined walls showing traces of fire.
On the ridges between the fields, bodies lay scattered about—some human, some Corrupted Beast.
People were clearing the bodies, carrying away the human corpses one by one and piling the Corrupted Beasts together for burning.
Li Xing’s Spiritual Power swept over the area.
The people clearing the bodies wore the armor of the City Guard Army, stained with blood and grime.
Their movements were slow, their spirits exhausted. Their faces were blank as they mechanically repeated the motions of lifting, carrying, and burning.
At the foot of the city wall, even more people were busy.
The wounded were being carried into the city on stretchers. Some were still groaning; others were already silent.
A group of Medical Masters in white robes had set up temporary tents inside the city gate’s archway.
They were busy dressing wounds, stopping bleeding, and administering medicine... Agonized screams constantly echoed from the tents, only to be followed by silence.
Li Xing looked up and over the city wall.
The streets inside the city were filled with people sitting and lying everywhere.
Old people held children who were crying for food, and women were giving water to the wounded.
Men were distributing food—a small piece of black bread for each person. Those who received it ate in silence, then went back to sitting in a daze.
Soldiers patrolled the main streets, their steps heavy, their armor covered in cracks.
Some had their heads wrapped in bandages, others limped along using their spears as crutches, but none of them stopped.
The battle here had just ended.
’But Xuri City... don’t they have a True Form Venerable?’
How could it have been so brutal?