Time Buries All Things

Time is the most relentless force, capable of wearing down all things, burying joys and sorrows alike, erasing every trace of form and memory until nothing remains.

The Ancestral Dragon Ship, once the most sacred vessel, was now riddled with holes like a honeycomb. The planks of the World Tree had rotted into mud, as if about to turn to dust. The first divine ship that could cross the barriers between worlds had decayed utterly, its interior hollow and empty. No one knew where the bodies of its passengers had been interred.

Xiao Chen stood there for a long time, then lightly swept his sleeve. The desolate mountains and ancient ridges collapsed with a thunderous roar, sending up a haze of dust that buried the Ancestral Dragon Ship forever.

Thus the ship that had borne the hopes of the Nine Provinces returned to the yellow earth, becoming history. The Nine Provinces' great tragedy. The legends of its peerless heroes—all faded into the mist of time.

The imposing War God Xing Tian, the resolute Chi You, the ancestors of the Nine Provinces—their heroic silhouettes still burned vividly in his memory. Had they not fallen, what incomparable brilliance would they have displayed upon returning thirty thousand years later?

This late autumn was especially bleak. Ten thousand trees withered, falling leaves like tears. An autumn wind swept by, sending dead leaves rustling, dancing in wild disarray.

Withered flowers, decaying grass—the plants themselves seemed to weep for the Nine Provinces' wound. After a long while, Xiao Chen strode away with heavy steps.

Time was a knife that would slowly sever everything behind him.

Shaking off the gloom, Xiao Chen pressed forward. Occasionally he would look back and let out a soft sigh. Dust to dust, earth to earth. All things were one; the supreme sage and the ant differed in nothing.

Leaving that oppressive land, he traveled again through the World of Immortality, watching clouds unfurl and roll, watching the sun sink in the west, watching the stars blaze in the night sky—as if he had never left. The sky was still the sky, the earth still the earth.

The World of Immortality had undergone a new cycle of divine civilization. Half-ancestors had already been born, but even the strongest among them was still some distance from the Ancestral God realm.

This was a new cycle. Xiao Chen watched quietly, neither interfering nor offering guidance, like a passing traveler.

Sometimes he wondered if, beyond the greater heavens, someone was watching him and the heroes of the Nine Provinces just the same.

Walking from the west to the east, he gazed across the mainland until the vast, misty Eastern Sea appeared before him.

He trod across the waves. He was not wandering aimlessly. The natives of the World of Immortality said that strange corpse-like shadows appeared and disappeared here. Hearing this, his heart stirred, and he came to investigate.

Waves surged; enormous fish leaped, stirring up a thousand layers of water. As Xiao Chen passed an island, he felt an oppressive aura of death. After searching the island, he discovered it was a zombie island—in the distant past, when the Otherworld had butchered countless cultivators of the World of Immortality, their bodies had been buried en masse on this island. Over the endless years, the corpses had risen, crawling out of underground chambers to create havoc in the surrounding seas.

“Woo—woo—”

A mournful wailing filled the air. Those ghostly creatures whose intellect had not yet fully awakened, but whose bodies were exceptionally powerful, all howled as they erupted from the underground chambers, spewing black clouds of deathly energy, surrounding Xiao Chen to kill him.

Xiao Chen frowned. He had not wanted to interfere with the affairs of the World of Immortality, but now he had no choice. If he allowed these ghosts to grow, they would threaten the living beings of this realm.

He saw several powerful figures among them, some even familiar. Looking more closely, he recognized one or two he had met once in passing.

“Ah…”

Then Xiao Chen’s pupils contracted. The autumn wind felt especially bitter, and a chill settled in his heart. The last three figures to emerge were ones he had crossed paths with many times. They were a woman and two beasts.

The woman’s form was elegant and graceful, her beauty peerless—it was the Third Princess of Great Shang, Ying Ying, from the ancient days of the World of Immortality. But now she was dead, her face pale, her eyes vacant, her nails curved and sharp like ten iron hooks.

A beauty of her generation, dead and turned into a zombie, dwelling among ghosts and rotting corpses. It was a sight that wrung the heart. Xiao Chen’s chest ached—not only for Ying Ying, but for the thought of all his old acquaintances of the past.

The two divine beasts were the Peacock King, its five-colored tail feathers shimmering with faint multi-colored light amidst a sea of yin energy, and the golden ape named Jinzi, who had once contended with Keke. Now they were both shrouded in ghostly vapors, their eyes vacant and lifeless.

Xiao Chen said nothing. Compared to these, the fate of many other enemies was surely to have been utterly destroyed, body and soul, leaving nothing behind.

The swarm of zombies wailed and surged forward in a tide of yin fog, the stench of death pressing in. The entire island was shrouded in gloom.

Xiao Chen sighed. How could he bring himself to annihilate them? In the end, he sat cross-legged on a mountain peak in the center of the island. Rays of divine light radiated from his body, countless beams of auspicious splendor enveloping the entire island.

He used his supreme power to purify the island of ghosts, dispelling all the yin energy, refining the corpse aura of the undead, transforming their yin bodies into yang bodies. As for the newly awakened intelligence, he let it grow, not erasing it.

When he was done, Xiao Chen left and walked again into the waves of the Eastern Sea. Seeing one former acquaintance in such a state, he already knew the fate of all the others. There was no need to ask.

The sea ahead was calm, but Xiao Chen sensed something wrong. He focused his mind and scanned the four directions. Suddenly, his heart leaped. A hundred miles away, a gaunt figure had nearly escaped his divine sense.

A powerful Ancestral God—perhaps even a Superior Ancestral God. Could the current World of Immortality have produced an Ancestral God? That seemed unlikely.

This person gave off an unfathomably deep impression, far more powerful than an ordinary Superior Ancestral God.

But Xiao Chen was not afraid. The Five Emperor Tower hung suspended above his head, slowly rotating—the most powerful stone artifact past and present, guarding him. Even if he encountered a Stone Man King, he could retreat safely.

His Truth-Seeking Eyes pierced the mist and saw the true form of that figure. Xiao Chen’s heart shook violently. He transformed into a beam of light and arrived in an instant.

The Buddha! He had seen the Buddha! The Buddha had once boarded the Ancestral Dragon Ship with the heroes of the Nine Provinces—could he have escaped disaster?

When he was a hundred zhang from that gaunt figure, Xiao Chen’s heart sank. His divine sense could easily probe into the Buddha’s fleshly body. There, he found nothing but a vast emptiness—like an endless void. He could grasp nothing.

No soul. The Buddha had lost his soul in the vast waves of the Eastern Sea. His head was smooth and bald, his eyes tightly shut, his skin a pale gold, quite unlike an ordinary corpse. There was no hint of deathly yin energy about him. It was an indestructible golden body.

Yes, a true Buddhist indestructible body, harder than ordinary stone bodies, perhaps even comparable to a Stone Man King’s body. In ancient times, the Buddha had been on the verge of reaching the Ancestral God realm. Thirty thousand years had passed—such progress was not surprising. Given time, he undoubtedly had the foundation to become a Stone Man King.

In the past, another great Buddhist master, Shenxiu, had lost his soul in the Forbidden Sea, dying because of the Dead City. Later, when the Otherworld invaded, he had utterly vanished.

What had happened? Why had the Buddha also lost his soul? How had he ended up here?

Xiao Chen followed the Buddha’s indestructible body as it drifted across the calm sea. His powerful divine sense continued to probe into the Buddha’s body. He refused to believe that such a figure had left nothing behind.

Within the Buddha’s indestructible golden body was a vast emptiness, like a primordial universe—no stars, no nebulae, only pitch-black darkness and endless deathly stillness.

The Buddha should have left at least a clue.

Xiao Chen persisted, using the Five Emperor Tower to protect his divine sense as he plunged deep into this pitch-black void, finally reaching its deepest region—the end of the Buddha’s dead sea of consciousness.

“Shua!”

Suddenly, a massive radiance bloomed ahead. At the end of the eternal dark void, roaring flames blazed up, their blazing brilliance so intense that it nearly ‘burned’ Xiao Chen’s divine sense. Had it not been for the Five Emperor Tower shielding him, he would have been gravely wounded. The sacred fire was unimaginably bright, and its source almost ignited the entire dark, dead sea of consciousness in an instant.

In just one breath, the Buddha’s empty, indestructible golden body was filled with blazing divine light. It was no longer dark and empty.

“Buddha…”

Xiao Chen cried out in alarm. He saw that at the most primal source, a tiny golden Buddha body no larger than a thumb was sitting cross-legged in meditation, completely motionless.

“Heh heh heh… ha ha ha…”

Suddenly, a wild, arrogant laugh rang out, rumbling through the immortal body like thirty-three heavens quaking together.

“You are not the Buddha! Who are you?” Xiao Chen was shocked. This could not be the Buddha. Such unbridled laughter was astonishing, unrestrained, and utterly reckless—a swaggering, world-dominating arrogance that made one deeply uncomfortable, as if everyone else were tiny and insignificant before him.

“Five Emperors, do you not recognize me?” The arrogant, savage words were unspeakably cold. Then the voice suddenly shifted tone. “Eh? Not the Five Emperors—just the Five Emperor Tower. Heh heh heh… Never mind. I have finally found the correct coordinates, not lost in the void. Five Emperors, your calculations were wrong! I will surely return! Just you wait!”

Xiao Chen’s heart turned cold. This seemed to be a terrifying figure from before the Primordial Age, one with ties to the Five Emperors.

“Just what are you?”

“You little whelp! How dare you speak to me like that?!” Endless golden light surged, and the tiny Buddha body shrank and withered. All that golden light belonged to this mysterious figure, not to the Buddha.

“Was it you who killed the people on the Ancestral Dragon Ship?”

“Of course! Such a puny insect-ridden vessel, and yet it carried a pack of descendants of the Five Emperors. If I did not kill them, what justice would there be under heaven?”

“You…”

“Though I was exiled through the void, my form and spirit nearly destroyed, dealing with ants like you costs me no effort. A few slightly stronger ones on that crawling ship tried to escape, so I followed their plans—split off dozens of strands of my divine sense, trailed after them, and finally found my way back. The Five Emperors thought they could destroy me forever, but that is impossible! Now that I have the coordinates, I will return!”

This savage figure seemed to have an immensely terrifying origin, but the so-called Five Emperors were already long gone. If he returned, the consequences would be unimaginable.

“Eh—the Five Emperors seem to have already fallen. Heh heh heh… Then once I am back, I will have nothing left to fear!”

Xiao Chen sneered and said, “You yourself said you were nearly destroyed, body and spirit. Better you dig yourself a grave now. What’s the hurry to come back and die?”

“Even if I die, I will die in this world! Heh heh heh… Descendants of the Five Emperors, look out for yourselves!” The ferocious voice was wild and arrogant, dripping with sinister intent. “You awakened me from slumber with the Five Emperor Tower. This strand of my origin has obtained this world’s coordinates, and my return begins now!”

All this burning golden light was merely wisp of the killer’s divine sense, yet it was already so powerful. His true origin must be terrifying beyond measure—only the peerless Little Stone Emperor could match it.